It’s the age old story of subscriber meets email campaign. Sometimes it’s love at first sight. Sometimes the relationship takes a little warming up first. And sometimes, it’s just one relationship buzzkill after another. Is your campaign irritating subscribers more than connecting with them? It could be if you’re making any of these mistakes. It’s [...]

At the end of 2011, we talked about reasons subscriber preferences should be top priority and asked if you’re marketing to the right audience. The reason for this was simple: you should deliver the most relevant content possible in order to get the best results. If you’re curious what other email marketers feel about this, [...]

While you’re pushing forward with your head down, trying to build and market your business, time is flying. Things are changing. If you’re marketing with email, the industry is shifting. What worked last year may not work this year. So what better way to find out how to move forward than asking experts in the [...]

Small- and midsized-business marketers recognize the importance of helping prospects solve problems. And they know that quality content leads to more sales. But when you’re wearing a half-dozen hats, as many SMB execs and marketers do, disseminating that content can be as challenging as developing it. Fortunately, more marketers are rising to the occasion, according [...]

The summer of 2011 ended on a string of serious notes for those of us in the Eastern United States: an unusual series of natural disasters, followed by the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. For email marketers, this has raised the question, “If you’re sending email into this region, how should you adjust your marketing?” A [...]

How do you think your subscribers would describe your emails? Do your emails focus on getting sales? Or do you make more of an effort to encourage loyalty to your company?

The key is balancing the two. You can personalize your email newsletters in order to build relationships, and this leads to developing a loyal subscriber base who are happy to hear what you have to offer.

Easier said than done, right? I found emails in my inbox that range from going for a hard sell to ones I love reading and interacting with. These examples contain valuable lessons that you can use for your own campaign to create messages subscribers love.

Mountz Jewelers: The Useless Announcement

This is a promotional email from Mountz Jewelers announcing a grand opening for one of their stores:

The problem with this email is that I have no use for it. This mistake could easily be avoided by segmenting based on the subscribers’ location. Announcing a grand opening in your email works only if the subscribers can easily get to that store.

Alfred Angelo Bridal: The Targeted Sales Pitch

This is a promotional email from Alfred Angelo about a bridal accessories sale:

Although still clearly a sales email, this one does a much better job:

• They are using the information I provided at sign up to send me information on accessories for brides, as opposed to something other wedding party members would need.
• They include a “Find a store” tool which is very helpful.

Neither Mountz Jewelers or Alfred Angelo do that much to get me to be a loyal customer. I don’t look forward to their emails nearly as much as the next two businesses that do make it more personal.

Active.com: Sharing Their Knowledge

This is a newsletter from Active.com:

Active.com makes it more personal by:

• Noting I’m interested in running and making sure that I get all running related information.
• Providing links to a wide variety of topics that could help me.

The only downside to their emails is their “Featured Events” section, which doesn’t have events near me. I use Active.com to register for all my races, so having upcoming ones near me would make a big difference.

TheKnot: Personal, Sharing, Selling…AWesome

This is a newsletter from TheKnot:

TheKnot newsletters I’m always excited to see. Why?

• They make it personal to me and what I’m doing.
• They use my name and wedding date, my location, and where I am in the planning process to deliver content that’s relevant to me.
• They make sure to include links to products and sponsored vendors in every newsletter, but the focus is on the personal content, which is a smart move.

How Can You Make Your Emails the Ones Subscribers Love?

1. Use subscribers’ information- You should only ask for information you plan on using. If you’re only asking for name and email, you can still target subscribers in a specific area using their IP address.

Continue to learn about your subscribers so you can provide them with more personalized emails. You can set up new custom fields, or start off with looking at their click through history.

2. Provide useful information for the subscriber- Don’t be like Mountz Jewelers and send your emails to those that can’t use it. Build loyalty by making sure subscribers receiving your message have something to gain by reading it.

3. Don’t just go for the hard sell- Both Mountz Jewelers and Alfred Angelo could add more to their emails. For example, Mountz Jewelers could link up some good examples of coordinating Pandora charms and popular combinations. Try and include something fun and interesting that is relevant to what you’re selling.

4. Ask for more information for further personalization- While it’s nice that Active.com has a bunch of resources to share, I’m most interested in information that deals with marathon training. Active.com could ask subscribers why they are interested in a particular sport to narrow those resources down.

How Are You Personalizing Your Emails?

What have you done to make your messages more personal?

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After 4 months, the average click rate from the average subscriber drops to less than 1%.

That’s pretty low. But you can avoid such an extreme click-through crash, if you know how.

You see, your 4 month-old subscribers probably get the same emails as your newest readers. But 4 months in, they’re at a different stage in their relationship with your brand. So are readers-turned-customers. So are those who’ve stopped reading.

So send different versions of your emails (and maybe even entirely different emails!) to subscribers at each stage. Here are four easy ways to send stage-sensitive emails.

Feed the Babies With Follow Ups

New subscribers are excited about your brand. They’re anticipating good things. So make sure you have good things waiting: set up a few follow up messages to meet them.

Introduce them to your business and get them used to your emails. You can even set a message schedule to ease them in gently.

For example:

Yolanda wants subscribers to her yoga studio’s emails to get familiar with the studio so they’ll feel comfortable coming in for classes. So she sets three follow up messages. The first explains the studio’s philosophies and type of practice, the second introduces each instructor and the third has photos of the studio, including changing areas and storage spaces.

For Yolanda’s readers, signing up for a class is naturally the next step to take.

To send follow ups with AWeber, follow these instructions.

Upsell and Cross-Sell As They Get Older

First, make sure you’re tracking who’s purchased from you and who’s downloaded files you’ve sent. This helps you keep your offers relevant.

When it’s time to send a product offer, exclude the subscribers who have already purchased it (unless it’s something they’ll need on a recurring basis). Then, follow up on those past purchases with offers for related products or accessories.

For example:

Wright the writer just released version 2 of his e-book on wicker working. may want to announce a new advanced-level supplement to his previously released ebook. He could offer the supplement to people who’ve already downloaded the original. To everyone else, he could send an offer for his the first book, with a little paragraph at the bottom inviting them to purchase the supplement if they want that, too.

To segment based on downloads in AWeber, follow these instructions, searching by “web page visited” and entering the URL of your download page.

Show Respect for Age With A Survey

The longer a subscriber stays on your list, the more time and interest they’ve invested in your brand. Show them you appreciate their loyalty and respect their opinion by asking for their feedback.

For example:

Ricky’s Restaurant wants to expand its menu. Ricky sends pictures of a few potential new dishes to his long-time readers, asking them to vote on their favorites. He keeps track of the votes, and lets his readers know which dishes won. He even segments by “links clicked” to send a coupon to those who voters!

To send a survey in AWeber, follow these instructions.

Segment By Subscriber Age

Veteran subscribers are probably pretty familiar with your brand and your more basic products. Newbies won’t be. So when you send out information or announcements, send two versions. make sure to choose the most appropriate audience – segment who you send to by the date they signed up.

For example:

The Midtow Middle School sends out an announcement about their Christmas pageant. They send two emails: one to long-time parents and another to new parents. The email to new parents contains parking information and directions to the auditorium, while the other parents receive a simpler announcement with a request to help out with refreshments.

To segment by sign up date in AWeber, follow these instructions, searching by “date added” to create your subscriber groups.

Do You Consider Subscriber Lifecycle?

Adjusting your messages for the various stages of the sender-subscriber relationship is a form of lifecycle marketing, where the marketer adjusts their tactics to the recipient’s position in the traditional sales cycle.

Do you consider lifecycle in your marketing? Do you think it’s necessary?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

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When you send out your marketing emails, you probably have some hopes for response. You may also have a few thin-lipped expectations. And there’s always that fond dream of your content going viral.

All of which means you probably use the urgency tactic once in awhile. You know, the “six hours only!!” sale or the announcement of “just three copies left!!”

And this can certainly work. But if anyone opens your message too late, it thuds like a drop in a hollow bucket. Worse, if they try to click through to purchase, they could be cranky when they realize they’re too late.

What if you could magically make the email content adjust itself to the situation so when latecomers open it after the fact, they see a completely different message?

The “Oops! It’s Over” Announcement

First of all, keeping your message current like this is just good customer service.

Secondly, it shows you’re on top of things, which can only benefit your reputation.

And finally, it shows that the urgency of your offer is for real – if subscribers want your deals, they’d better open faster next time.

If you’re a product shown in your email sells out, create an image that reflects this and swap it with the previous image. Like in this email from women’s retailer Chadwick’s.

When your sale is over, replace your sale announcement with a notice that they missed it, but you’ll have others soon! And in the meantime, give them something else to do, like Home Depot did in this email.

And you don’t have to be a giant chain store to do it…you can just be one guy in front of a computer, or the tiny cafe down the street. It just requi

res?

Swapping Out An Image

You can update any information in your email, as long as it’s in the form of an image.

Why? Because images don’t actually live in your message. They live on the web page you uploaded them to.

Think of that page’s URL as the image’s address. When someone opens your email, it displays whatever image it finds at that URL. So all you need to do to update your email post-send is change the image that lives on that URL.

To make the magic happen, you’ll need to be hosting your images on your own site manually, or via a content management software like WordPress. (This doesn’t work on public image hosting sites.)

If You Host Images Manually

This is an easy fix: after the sale or other event is over, use your FTP client or other file management software to upload the new image.

The advantage to this method is that you have complete control over the file’s URL; the catch is that it does require you to be familiar with using an FTP client or other file management soft

ware.

If you’re not familiar with FTP, here’s an article and a video on using it.

Here are a couple of FTP clients that you can use for this:

• FireFTP (a plugin for the Firefox browser that works on Windows or Mac)
• Cyberduck (software for Mac or PC)

If you don’t want to manage the file upload yourself, have a developer handle it for you, or try using a content management system like WordPress.

If You Use WordPress

Note: before you use WordPress to manage this, check to see if you’re organizing your uploads into folders based on the year and month you upload them. You can do this at the “Settings” > “Media” page in your WordPress admin area. If you are doing so, it may be better to not use WordPress for this, because in some cases you won’t be able to overwrite the original image properly from within WordPress.

1. Upload your original image into your media gallery. Use the URL assigned to that image to place it in your email, as usual.
2. When your sale is over or your product sold out, prepare for the switch. Important: give the replacement image (the one that says “sold out!” or something similar) the same name as the original.
3. In your media gallery, delete the original image. Immediately upload the new image with the same name. Now when someone opens your email, it will follow the URL you’ve put into place and display the updated image.

Something to Consider

Remember, this method is only good for images. But if you make the entire email one big image, it might trip a spam filter. So only use images for the parts you’ll want to update later.

Just make sure the rest of your email looks good around both the original content and the update, and you’re good to go!

What Else Could You Swap?

Once you get this process down, you can get creative with how you use it. Announce the end of sales and sold out products. Change your price if something’s not selling (or selling too much at too low a price!)

Would you ever make these updates by swapping out the images? What other changes might you make?

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Have you noticed that your subscriber engagement has decreased over time? Are you looking to get your online store more traffic from your email marketing campaign? With just a few changes you may be able to get back on track!

Inform Interiors is owned by Niels Bendtsen, and sells contemporary furniture online and in their Vancouver store. They have a fairly successful email campaign that they have managed with us for a couple years now. Even though their campaign has been a success overall, we couldn’t help but notice some small changes that could lead to even better results.

Read on to learn about how Inform Interiors use AWeber, what changes they made and the results they’ve seen.

Inform Interiors’ Email Campaign At A Glance

A page on the Inform Interiors site invites visitors to join the mailing list for invites to store and/or design events and information on sales and new product launches.

A few stats about their campaign:

• Their broadcasts average a 51% unique open rate.
• Their unique click through rate has averaged 18.5% this year, but this has been slowly decreasing over time.
• The current average from the last few months has been about 13%.

They also note that whenever a broadcast is sent they see an increase in sales.

While overall Inform Interiors was happy with how their campaign was performing, they recognized that there is always room for improvement. We offered some suggestions to help with these areas.

Welcome New Subscribers

At our suggestion, Inform Interiors created a welcome email for their campaign. It allows new subscribers to check out what the past newsletters have looked like, plus it invites the subscriber to follow them on Twitter, Facebook and/or YouTube right away.

Their new welcome message gets an 84% open rate, and an 18% click through rate. Inform Interiors reports that their fans on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube continue to grow because of including the social media links at the bottom of all their messages, which account for 20% of the clicks. They’re also happy with 27% of the clicks going to their products page.

Calls to action in your messages, especially one of your first points of contact like the welcome message, will have your subscribers interacting with your site while you’re on their mind.

Segment The List to Create More Relevant Emails

Segmenting is useful because it allows you to send more relevant messages to your subscribers, since you can base the message on similar behavior such as a link that was clicked. They mentioned that relating the most relevant and desired information to their subscribers has been a challenge, so we explained how sending to segments can help that.

AWeber’s QuickStats feature helps make segmenting even easier. There is a button right on the page that allows you to set up a segment to send to.

Inform Interiors has been sending to segments that have clicked on a specific link in a previous Broadcast.

These segments have averaged a 74% open rate, and they believe the segments also cause increased sales since they average a 24% click through rate.

These messages get more opens and click throughs than the more general broadcasts sent to all subscribers. Since they know subscribers are interested in a particular topic by what the subscriber clicked on, following up with more information lets the subscriber know you are paying attention to what they want.

How Else Can Inform Improve?

More web forms on their site should bring in more subscribers that they will interact with at the beginning with the welcome message, and continue to interact with through Broadcast messages relevant to subscriber behavior.

While Inform Interiors mainly segments based on links clicked, there are other options as well:

• track who makes a purchase. You can then send to a segment based on criteria such as amount spent, products bought, or simply if the order was placed online. Sending online coupons would encourage those outside of Vancouver to buy.

What suggestions do you have for Inform Interiors’ email marketing campaigns? What tactics do you employ in your own campaigns that could be adapted for their busines

s?

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As the self-proclaimed Carrie Bradshaw of email marketing, I’m constantly comparing the marketing endeavors of online and offline fashion retailers.

After all, somebody has to study their latest campaigns. It’s not my fault that I often always feel obliged to take certain senders up on their irresistible offers and free shipping.

I really consider myself lucky to enjoy all aspects of a good shopping experience. From the marketing messages to the markdowns, I love it all.

On a recent shopping trip, it dawned on me just how similar a good email marketing campaign is to a visit to a well-run boutique. There are several key factors that contribute to the success of both. Keep reading to see how your messages stack up to some of my favorite stores.

They Welcome You

The very first thing I notice when going in and out of my favorite small boutiques is the way that I am greeted by the shopgirls and business owners. Some might gather that this is because I spend the majority of my paycheck in these stores, but I promise that’s not true. (They say hi to everyone with the same amount of enthusiasm!)

If a shopkeeper approaches me, says hello and asks if they can help me find anything, I instantly feel good about potentially spending my money in their store. Your welcome message should have the same appeal to new subscribers.

According to a recent Epsilon survey of 200 retailers, fewer than 2/3 of retailers do not send a welcome message at all, even though the welcome messages tracked had an average open rate of 50-60%.

Offer your assistance and let your new subscribers know how happy you are to have them on your list. Welcome them warmly, just like you would if they walked through your shop door. This way, they’ll feel just as welcome as if they were physically in your store.

Nordstrom does an excellent job of welcoming new subscribers:

They Let You Browse

After I’ve been in a store for a few minutes, I like to look around without being hawked by the shop clerk. Nothing is more annoying than being followed around. It makes most people feel uneasy.

A big mistake that a lot of email marketers make is to push specific, “big” products on their email list right from the get-go. This doesn’t allow subscribers the chance to form an opinion about your company or connect to it emotionally.

Instead of sending only big ticket items, give new subscribers a chance to see all of your goods and to get to know your brand’s personality. Send follow up messages that encourage readers to “browse” your website and your products.

Serena and Lily suggest that you browse their entire collection:

They Tell You About Current Promotions

Once I’ve had a chance to get my bearings and assess the shopping situation, then I’m ok with someone helping me. Maybe I have a few pieces to try on, or a question about pricing.

It’s typical and expected for sales associates to approach shoppers after a few minutes of browsing to inform them of current or upcoming sales and limited time offers. After all, customer service is a huge factor in my decision to shop somewhere.

To create the same experience with your email campaign, you can send one time, time-sensitive broadcast messages to subscribers to keep them in the loop.

Barneys New York often sends emails that contain their latest promotions:

They Suggest Similar Items

In the event that I’ve found a few things to try on when I’m shopping, I am always impressed by a salesperson who can successfully pull similar or complimentary pieces from the racks and bring them to me in the dressing room.

This shows that they are paying attention, even while they are giving me space to browse around. You can do the very same thing with your email subscribers – as long as you have analytics in place on your website. Email analytics can help you understand the needs and wants of your subscribers so that you can tailor your messages accordingly to address them.

By installing a JavaScript snippet on your site, you’ll be able to see exactly which pages your subscribers are visiting. This way, you can segment your list based on subscriber behavior and suggest items that are more relevant for your subscribers.

How Does Your Campaign Measure Up?

Do you use any or all of these tactics? Do you find that the email marketing experience is similar to an in-person encounter in any way?

We’d love to hear what you think, and how you’re using these methods. Leave us a comment in the space below!

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