2009 was the year of social network integration, testing send windows and organic list growth. While 2010 will bring its own trends, these changes aren’t going away.

Here’s a quick refresher of things that went down in email marketing last year.

These posts highlight some new AWeber features, a few colorful examples and the soundest advice we can offer.

2009: The Year of Posts in Brief

Using Email to Grow a Community: AWeber Talks to User Ramit Sethi
On his personal finance site, Sethi teaches his readers to be rich. Here, he gives a bonus lesson in email marketing success. His tips on building an email community are as valuable as gold.

How To Add an Opt-In Form to Your Facebook Page
Adopting social media techniques was a major move that many email marketers made in 2009. This post teaches you how to add an opt-in form to your Facebook profile, directing new contacts straight to your email list.

And since Facebook has more than 350 million active users, and over 700,000 local business accounts, it may be just the place to expand your online presence.

Design Inspiration From Fellow AWeber Customers
Three cameos of customer newsletters show what’s possible for small-time email marketers. Their clean design and quality content offer inspiration far into the future.

Have a Look At the New Web Form Generator
By far our biggest release of the year, the new web form generator was welcomed with open arms! Gone are the days of manually editing HTML; our web form tool helps you create professional and aesthetically pleasing web forms with absolutely zero HTML knowledge.

Test Results: How Long Should Your From Line Be?
“From” line length can largely impact the open rate of an email, yet it’s easy to overlook in the design process. Review what lengths are ideal in the major email clients.
This type of analysis should also be applied to subject line length. Make sure your subscribers can read the reason they should open each email!

{!firstname}, Think Before You Personalize
Personalization can be powerfully effective when used in the right ways. It can also be easily misused. Learn how to avoid the mistake of assuming that a string variable makes a message personalized, targeted or relevant.

“Do Not Reply” Address? Don’t Bother.
This post examines the trend of using an an unattended email address that discourages replies to emails, and explains why you should never do that with your own campaigns.

Deliver Smarter Autoresponders With Send Windows
Sometimes, certain days or times are ideal for subscribers to receive your emails. Find out why, and then learn how to increase your follow-up messages’ effectiveness by setting up send windows.

2010: Use It Wisely

Email marketing, with the biggest ROI of any marketing channel, is a path that can lead you to success. We hope these posts serve as stepping stones on your journey.

For more inspiration, read through the other email marketing tips that 2009 brought.

What would you like us to talk about in 2010? What steps are you planning to take in the new year? Let us know!

Tweet This

If you’ve been subscribing to email marketing campaigns for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced personalization several times.

How much of it impresses you? How much of it makes the email feel “personal?”

Yeah… me too.

Lately, I’m wondering whether as email marketers, we’ve allowed ourselves to get lazy with personalization, and whether we can do better.

I can hear some of you thinking,

“But personalization gets more opens and clicks!”

But Does It?

I’ve heard numerous marketers say it does. And it’s entirely possible – if not likely – that at least some of them regularly test this and continue to find it to be true.

But when’s the last time you tested it?

I’ll be honest here and say I haven’t tested it in quite a while – partly because other tests are more interesting or exciting (like testing what happens when you add social networking links to your emails).

Besides… Is The Click All That Matters?

A recent pair of articles has me thinking about what it means, in practical terms, to take a long-term approach to email.

I’m subscribed, as I’m sure you are, to many email lists. Many of the campaigns I receive have subject lines like:

• Justin, Do You Have a Minute?
• Exclusive Savings for Justin
• Justin – Good news and bad news
• Hi Justin
• JUSTIN, Save 30% For Two Days Only!

Now, let’s face it: a lot of these emails would get the average person to open them. I opened them.

But does that mean they’re a good idea? What do you think of someone when they send you an email with those subjects?

• Justin, Do You Have a Minute? – I did. And I just spent it on your email. Was it worth it?
• Exclusive Savings for Justin – Is it for all people with my name? Is this National Justin Day? Why not just say “Exclusive Saving for You?”

  Personalization here, while it might get more opens, makes no sense when you read it.

• Justin – Good news and bad news – Good/bad news for whom? This one isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but if the news isn’t really good or bad from the subscribers’ point of view, then you’re taking a very “me-centric” approach to your relationship with subscribers. Not good.
• Hi Justin – this screams “I’m spam!”

  There’s technically nothing deceiving about saying Hi to someone in the subject line, but… it just feels wrong. It feels like a subject line that a long-lost friend or relative would use to reopen communication with you after disappearing for years.

  Wouldn’t you be mad to get an email with that subject, open it, and find it was an email campaign?

• JUSTIN, Save 30% For Two Days Only! – Quick personalization tip: Don’t put my name in ALL CAPS, even if that’s how it is in your database.

  This is why in AWeber, you can use the “fix” version of several variables (example: {!firstname_fix}) to correct any incorrect capitalization.

How much more likely are you going to be to unsubscribe if you get an email with a subject like these? How much more likely to click “Spam?” How much less likely to open other emails later, or recommend that company to someone else?

Isn’t There More To A Truly “Personal” Email Than A Name?

Personalization isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. But when it gets misused for the sake of an extra open or click, it becomes a bad thing. It also becomes less effective over time. And it allows us to think that we’re creating “personal” emails just by merging a name into the message.

A truly personal email addresses the subscriber’s needs, desires, fears, preferences and other aspects of their personality.

Truly personal emails look at things like:

• Which emails an individual subscriber has opened and clicked through from in the past
• Where on your site s/he visits
• How s/he originally found you and what inspired him/her to sign up to your list
• And a lot more things that aren’t coming to mind at the moment

A lot of this isn’t typically considered personalization – it falls more under discussions of segmentation and targeting. But I think it’s worth considering that relevance and personalization are somewhat interchangeable when we think about it from the subscriber’s perspective, and not our own. A relevant email is personal, and a personal email is relevant.

Making truly personal emails isn’t easy. And I don’t profess to be the example to follow; I’m going to be re-examining a lot of the emails I send here at AWeber as a result of this discussion.

Care to do the same?

We recently set up an easy-to-remember phone number for you to contact us: 1-877-AWEBER-1

In addition to making remembering how to get in touch with our Customer Solutions Team easier, this presents an opportunity to answer a question that I never really was able to demonstrate very well when customers asked:

What good are Global Fields? How would I use them?

In this instance, using Global Fields saved me a lot of time updating our various customer, affiliate and prospect newsletters. Here’s how:

What Global Fields Do

Global fields are kind of like personalization variables that store and display information about you instead of information about your subscribers.

For example, you can insert your signature file into any message using the {!signature} variable. This variable pulls information that you enter into your account at the Global Fields page.

If you ever wanted to change your signature, you would simply update it at the Global Fields page, instead of editing each of your messages individually.

How Global Fields Minimize Tedious Cutting-and-Pasting

If you’re subscribed to our Test Drive, or this blog’s newsletter, or our customer newsletter, you know that you can find our support contact information (phone numbers and hours of operation) near the end of any of the messages we send you.

Between all of our various lists, there are probably close to 100 follow up messages that display our phone number. You’d think changing it would be a lot of cutting and pasting.

The thing is, we don’t actually type the phone number into the emails. We created global fields for US Phone, International Phone, and Support Hours, and we inserted the appropriate variables into our emails:

So, instead of having to cut and paste 1-877-AWEBER-1 a hundred-plus times, I only had to do it once per list, at the Global Fields page:

Before

After

That’s it! One change per list, which took a fraction of the time it would have if I’d had to edit 100+ messages individually.

What Else Can You Use Global Fields For?

Use them to insert any information about you or your business that might change periodically:

Store Hours

Contact Email Address

Mottos or Slogans

…and much more! You’re only limited by your imagination.

Oh, and About That Phone Number…

Just a reminder: the new toll-free phone number is 1-877-AWEBER-1.

AND, this toll-free number works from Canada, too! Those of you in the Great White North can get your questions answered toll-free, just like our users in the States.

The old 800-531-5065 number will continue to work for now, but we’ll probably phase it out eventually. If/when we do, we’ll let you know.

One of the most-used email marketing “tricks” out there is personalization.

Used sparingly and in the right context, personalization can significantly boost your response. But as personalization shows up in more email marketing campaigns, used in the same ways by so many businesses, its effects can diminish.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t still use personalization to write more effective email campaigns! You just need to use it creatively.

Here’s one personalization trick that might not have occurred to you.