[Insert clever first paragraph here.]

OK, so that one was on purpose, but we all make mistakes at one point or another, like leaving some text only we were supposed to see. Even Seth Godin does.

No matter how experienced we are with something (or sometimes because we are so experienced with it), mistakes happen.

A mistake here and there is not a big deal! But one repeated over and over is. It’s how we learn from them, and what we do to prevent them from happening that separates the careful, successful newsletter publishers from the error-prone who see inconsistent results.

What To Do to Prevent Mistakes

We can stop mistakes before they happen in our email campaigns by taking a couple of simple steps.

Use a Pre-Send checklist

When you get started with your first email marketing campaign, you really shouldn’t rack your brain with much more than adding some compelling content to your messages and adding an effective subject… just like we do when we send messages to friends.

However, once we’ve got that down, we’ll start trying some different things to optimize our messages. Sometimes we try so many different things that we lose track of the basics.

A good way to make sure we don’t miss the forest for the trees is to use a quality pre-send checklist.

Start with ours and add to it as you see fit.

Test Messages Before Sending

Mom always told you to brush your teeth before bed. Here’s another important habit to learn.

Test your messages before sending them. It’s the best way to put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes to see messages much like they will.

What To Do When Accidents Happen

Sometimes we do our best to run our campaigns through quality assurance, and still we get caught a bit red in the face when a subscriber replies saying something like “Hey, this link doesn’t work”.

Don’t worry. For one, your subscribers can’t see how embarrassed you look. Also, provided these mistakes are an exception to the rule, it won’t make or break your campaign.

The “Ouch” Email. To Send or Not to Send?

In yesterday’s post on Seth’s blog, he apologized to his readers for a mistake he (or more accurately, an associate of his) made.

This is something many email marketers feel tempted to do when a message gets dropped in the mailbox before it should have.

This type of message can be useful, or it can make matters worse, so be careful here. Seth’s post had a moral to it that went beyond just apologizing for the mishap, so it had added value.

Along those same lines, you might add a brief message to the next message you send to subscribers, but generally speaking, emails sent just to apologize are a bad idea.

Most Importantly: Follow Email Best Practices

Again, minor mistakes here and there aren’t the end of the world. But major mistakes could spell the death of the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

For instance, using permission standards with as many holes as swiss cheese (e.g. opt-out emailing, purchased lists) will land you on blacklists. And sending messages that are unrelated to what someone signed up for will severely reduce your deliverability.

The foundation of your campaign should be firmly rooted in the core email marketing best practices. Follow them to make sure your email gets delivered, whether they have a few mistakes here and there or not.

Ironically enough, after reading Seth’s post, I caught an error in one of my own campaigns. Apparently, I put a line break in the middle of a personalization field, causing it to break and show “{!global …” to subscribers.

What small gaffes have you made, and how did you and your subscribers react? Please share and join the discussion.

After ripping apart some poor email examples, I think it’s high time we point out someone who’s doing an email newsletter right.

I’ve been getting emails from travel planning site Kayak.com for a couple weeks. In each issue I’m impressed by their email savvy, from content to design to the little extras that make me so likely to use them to plan my trips.

Why do I like Kayak’s emails — both as an email marketing guy and as a subscriber — so much?

Examples of Kayak’s Emails

Before we go any further, take a look at 2 issues of their email newsletter that I’ve received:

(Click the above images for full-size versions.)

What do you think of them? Here’s my take:

They Build a Relationship, Rather Than Going For the Hard Sell

As a member of several frequent flyer programs, I get emails from a number of airlines. I also get emails from time to time from other travel sites where I’m a member.

I’ve never received an email campaign from any of them that tries to connect with me. They’re just so… all-sell, all-the-time, all about price.

Kayak, on the other hand, doesn’t scream at me about the latest deals.

Their emails sell the idea of traveling. Each section gets me excited about a destination, as if the emails were made up of postcards from friends who were visiting each place.

And even though I’m not usually looking to go anywhere, I often click through just to see what it might cost to take a trip. Just for fun (when was the last time your email campaign had subscribers going to your website just for fun? Try it.).

They’re Well-Designed and Easy To Read

This is exactly the kind of email that comes to mind (for me) when someone asks for an example of a “Light HTML” email message.

They cleverly separate each section with a header (the destination name).

They provide navigation at the top of the email to each section/destination, and each section has a link back to the top.

Navigation is text, not images, so it’s even useful with images disabled.

They distinguish their own content from sponsored content/ads by using lightly shaded backgrounds. Interspersing shaded sections with the main content also makes the email seem shorter than it actually is.

They put their logo in the upper left-hand corner of the email, so it appears in the preview pane, and they keep it small enough that it doesn’t get in the way of other content at the top of the email.

They’re Targeted To Me

And oh boy, is it easy to see what a trip might cost.

Did you see what they did in the sidebar? They put links to “cheap flights from Philadelphia.”

When I signed up they asked me what my home airport was, and they’re using that to get me from reading their email to making a purchase. The links even go to a flight search page that’s pre-filled with Philadelphia as the departing airport.

With what is really just basic segmentation and personalization — nothing difficult or complex — Kayak makes a smooth transition from inbox to web.

They Encourage Communication

Look at the footer of the email.

Rather than hiding behind a “do not reply” type of address and using email as a way to talk at me, they tell me they want to hear from me!

What’s especially great about this is they give me multiple ways to contact them:

The link in their email goes to a feedback form on their site.

Unlike the company in our email footer example a while back, they send from an email address that forwards to their help desk, so even if I reply instead of using their feedback form, I can still get in touch with them.

Anything Else?

I feel like I’m rambling a bit here, so I’ll turn it over to you.

What did you like about these emails?

Or didn’t you like them (and if so, why not)?

How do you feel you can apply these tactics to your own email marketing campaigns?

Share your thoughts on the blog!

MarketingSherpa announced their 2008 Email Award winners recently.

These are always a great place to look for innovative ideas as well as proven/tested tactics that you can use to improve your own email marketing campaigns.

Out of all the award-winning emails they present (and there are a lot!), I was particularly drawn to the best automated/autoresponder series category.

Let’s take a look at what’s working well for companies running autoresponder series…

Successful Autoresponder Campaign Trends

In reading through MarketingSherpa’s writeup of each winner and looking at the included samples, I noticed a few patterns among the successful campaigns:

Simple Design

Simplicity was a recurring theme in many of the successful campaigns Sherpa profiled, whether on landing pages or in the emails themselves.

GMAC Mortgage had a particularly compelling design that, while simple (it looked to me like a personal letter sent by postal mail on company stationery) incorporated some nice, simple design elements such as their logo and a picture of the mortgage agent. A great example of “Light HTML.”

Short or Long Copy Can Work

Sherpa’s winners included both shorter, more image-heavy emails and longer, text-focused ones.

It seemed to me that short copy with more imagery worked especially well for direct promotions, while longer, text-heavy emails were more suited to educating and nurturing leads.

Freebies

Giving something away is still a great way to attract and engage subscribers.

Examples of winning uses of freebies included:

“Starter kit” with a series of whitepapers and a case study

Free trial/demo of a software

Sweepstakes entry in exchange for customer feedback on a recent purchase

Include Site Navigation In Emails

Many, if not most, of the winners included some sort of site navigation in the emails, such as links to a homepage, “My Account”/login page or useful tools on their sites.

This can help to raise response because even if someone isn’t interested in your primary call to action, s/he may still be interested in visiting your site for something else (example: I may not want to purchase a product yet, but I might want to read your blog or use your pricing calculator).

It also can help to build recognition of your emails by including design elements that readers will remember from your website.

Try Using Buttons For Your Calls To Action

Several of the winners used image-based “buttons” for their calls to action.

Those with longer, more text-heavy emails also included text links to supplement the button, rather than taking an “either/or” approach to their calls to action.

Preview Panes: Give People Something To Do

As Sherpa’s winners showed us, putting some kind of action near the top of your emails can yield positive results.

Examples of this include:

Site navigation links

Link to an online version of your email

Your primary call to action

A secondary call to action, such as driving the user to a helpful resource on your site.

See the Winning Campaigns For Yourself

To see all the results, head over to MarketingSherpa’s site.

It’s been a while since we’ve picked apart an email campaign.

I’m not really a fan of being negative, but a great example of what not to do came across my desk the other day, and I can’t help but share it with you.

Please don’t make the same mistakes with your email footer that these guys did.

The Offending Email

Ethan, one of our web developers here at AWeber, was puzzled at an email he recently received from a ticket sales website. He had absolutely no idea who this company was. He couldn’t remember ever doing business with them.

He eventually figured out (after going to their site and trying a login/password combination he rarely used) that he had purchased tickets to an event through them — over a year ago.

As we often remind people looking to collect subscribers offline, permission isn’t indefinite – it expires, and if you email subscribers out of the blue after a long time, they lodge spam complaints because they don’t remember you.

That’s not what caught my attention about this email, though. What I found especially appalling was their email footer:

(Click image above to magnify)

Three things about it made my slap my forehead:

1. Vague Opt-In Reminder

Remember: this company hasn’t emailed Ethan at all since he made his purchase a year ago. So they should have known he wouldn’t expect an email from them.

While they did at least attempt to put a permission reminder in this footer, they failed to actually remind him of anything.

Their reminder text:

Great. Very helpful. “Oh, they say I’m opted-in. Well, I must be.” Right?

When you create a permission reminder, especially if you don’t email often, make sure you tell people:

Where and/or how they signed up

When they signed up

You could also put the subscriber’s email address in the footer (as this company did), although I would say that’s less important than where, how and when they signed up (after all, they already know what email address you’re emailing them at, right?).

A much better permission reminder:

Now, at least the subscriber can check out the web page where s/he signed up and hopefully recall signing up there a few months (a year?) ago.

2. No Replies Allowed

Nothing says “you’re just a number to us, buddy” than an email campaign that tells you not to bother replying.

Yes, there’s a link to their Help Desk in the footer. But what about people who don’t read down to the footer?

Is it really so hard to send from an address whose inbox forwards directly to the Help Desk?

One of the advantages of email marketing over other mediums is that it lends itself to having a two-way conversation with your customers and prospects — why would you shut out subscriber interaction and feedback like that?

3. Difficult To Unsubscribe

To top it all off, in this example unsubscribing is a real challenge.

The company forces you to login to your account with them to unsubscribe:

People who want to stop receiving email from you are going to do it, one way or another. If you make it hard on them, if you put hurdles in the way of them opting out, they’ll simply mark your messages as spam.

Not only does the company in this example lose a chance to learn why people unsubscribe from their list, they put themselves at risk of blocking and filtering due to complaints.

Lessons Learned

Remind people why they’re getting your email. Be specific.

Be available. Avoid using “noreply” or unmonitored addresses in your “from” line.

Make it easy to unsubscribe.

What Do You Think Should Go In An Email Footer?

Do you do these things in your email footer? Can you think of other items that should go there?

Share your ideas below!

Our Education Team is here to provide free marketing resources such as this blog, our Knowledge Base, and our live seminars.

Besides us, here at AWeber’s offices there is also our Customer Solutions team, available to solve problems and offer advice, and our Development Team, the geeks (as we so affectionately call them) who power an evolving feature set and who we owe credit for keeping things running smoothly.

But isn’t there a piece missing? Where is the team of hawkish marketers sealing deals then taking names (and credit card numbers)?

Really? No Sales Team?

That’s right — we don’t have a sales team. OK, so if you dial us up on the phone, you will find an option to talk to “Sales”. But in doing so, you will be connected to the same people who provide solutions to our customers.

We put them on the phone because they know of the ins and outs of how to best use our service to engage and connect with subscribers. We think that because of that, they are most qualified to understand the position and needs of those new to email marketing and/or our service, and they don’t receive commissions or push sales for sake of sales.

We’re Not Bragging … and That’s the Point

Now, my point is not to say, “Our model is so lucrative and flawless that we attract business — it just comes to us!”.

By focusing our communications on educating and providing real solutions […] we think we’re establishing the types of mutually beneficial relationships that generate lifelong customers

In fact, we work hard to position our business online and encourage word of mouth marketing, including through our affiliate partnership, which our customers and others tend to market our service to other businesses who could use really use email marketing.

What I am saying is that by focusing our communications on educating and providing real solutions to our prospects and customers, rather than an endless onslaught of hype and product pitching with unrealistic claims, we think we’re establishing the types of mutually beneficial relationships that generate lifelong customers who tell their friends about our service.

And this is an equation for effective marketing that many businesses (but still too few) are using.

Preaching What We Practice

One thing that’s neat about my job is that I get to share with business owners tips and advice that we use for our own business, and we’re happy to include our marketing as an evolving case study, informing you of what works well and cautioning on what doesn’t.

We have seen success with focusing our communications (including email) on providing value to our audience, and frequently tell our readers, viewers, and listeners to do the same with their email campaigns.

Today, think of ways to emphasize providing value within your own marketing plan.

So, where are these free resources?

Well, you’re looking at one now on our blog, and you can sign up to get free advice straight to your inbox.

And don’t forget the other completely free resources available to you:

Receive Blog Updates by Email

Browse or Search Our Knowledge Base

Join Us For a Live Seminar

It happens all too frequently.

A business puts in the time and expense of getting a customer to their website or store, establishes trust and credibility, and gets that person to make a purchase. Which brings them to that critical first post-purchase contact.

Do they use it to provide more value? To reinforce the buying decision? Show the customer how the purchased product is even more valuable than they thought?

Nope.

As an individual? Probably not much. But as a marketing example, possibly quite a bit.

A couple months ago, we posted about a possible compromise in the Text vs. HTML debate.

Inspired by a MarketingExperiments study on formatting, we discussed the idea that not all HTML was created equal, and that you might improve response by using a “Lite” (or if you prefer, “Text-y”) HTML — taking some advantage of HTML’s formatting flexibility while preserving much of the overall simplicity of Text.

A great example of this just popped up on my radar.

Working with email as much as I do, I’m encouraged to see so many people doing the right things:

• Getting explicit permission
• Providing valuable, relevant communications
• Building trust; treating subscribers like people (and not like numbers)
• (the list goes on)

So when I get a marketing email from someone who isn’t doing these things, someone who’s doing all sorts of harm to their brand by breaking some of the “rules” (intentionally or not) of good email marketing, it hurts. As an email marketer, I find messages like this frustrating and offensive.

But rather than fume or shake my head about it, I figured it’d be helpful to show what they’ve done wrong, and how you can do better.

Just when you think a hotly-debated topic like whether to send messages in plain text or HTML has died down, along comes another angle to look at.

This time, the folks at MarketingSherpa bring us a case study from minor-league baseball where a combination of Text AND HTML messages boosted ticket sales over 260%.

So how do you incorporate this new data into your decision to use Text or HTML?

Our client EuroSciCon organizes events for life scientists where they can present and discuss cutting edge topics. Email marketing helps them to quickly and effectively promote meetings on cutting edge topics.

Today’s case study illustrates a real-life example of how email can be used to send information published to a blog or web page out to the subscribers when they need it.