Create Relevant Emails, Step 1: What Are Your Subscribers Doing?
by Justin Premick on June 27th, 2008In a recent comparison of email campaigns at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I noted two key questions you need to ask in order to create more relevant emails:
- What Are My Subscribers Doing?
- What Do Those Actions Mean?
Simple, right?
And yet many businesses do not have any idea what their email subscribers’ wants, needs and interests really are. Of those who have an idea, most don’t know how those wants, needs and interests differ from subscriber to subscriber.
Comments: 4Do Readers Love Your Emails?
by Justin Premick on June 19th, 2008
Timing is a funny thing.
In last week’s email relevance webinar, I gave an example of a company that does quite well at using customer behavior to create more relevant emails: Amazon.
Then, this week I stumbled across this post by Jon Dale comparing Amazon’s email campaigns with those of another major bookseller, Barnes & Noble.
He makes a useful comparison of the two companies’ email practices that I’d like to expand on and share with you.
Comments: 13Email Marketing: Not Such a Blast?
by Justin Premick on June 4th, 2008
One of the great joys of participating in this blog is interacting with people who approach email marketing ethically.
I love not having to continually remind you that opt in email marketing campaigns is more effective and rewarding than sending spam. We share a common “opt in” mindset that lets us move on to more useful conversations about how to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Unfortunately, not everyone out there is as committed to that mindset, and it shows in the language they use when talking about email marketing.
When that language starts to creep into the vernacular of ethical marketers (as it sometimes does), otherwise good businesses sound like spammers.
It’s time we take a step back, look at some of the inappropriate email terms that are getting thrown around out there, and see if we can’t come up with some better lingo.
Let’s start with one of the most-abused terms…
Comments: 32Learn From a Great Email Newsletter Example: Kayak
by Justin Premick on April 2nd, 2008
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?
Comments: 27Why Do People Unsubscribe? An Audio Discussion
by Justin Premick on March 6th, 2008
I’m fond of telling people attending our webinars that “nobody wakes up in the morning and decides, ‘hey, I’d like to sign up and get some more email today,’” my point being that they have to give visitors a compelling reason to subscribe.
Unsubscribing, of course, doesn’t work the same way. Sometimes subscribers have a compelling reason to opt out of your email list, and sometimes it seems you haven’t really done anything to drive them away.
So why do they unsubscribe from your list?
Comments: 40Do You Make These Mistakes In Your Email Footer?
by Justin Premick on February 21st, 2008It’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.
Comments: 32How to Survey Your Customers and Prospects
by Justin Premick on February 12th, 2008
It’s tempting to ask your subscribers a laundry list of questions when they sign up to your list, isn’t it?
You want to know things like how they heard about you, what competitors they were looking at, what questions they have for you, do they want you to contact them by phone (and what’s their phone number?).
The trouble, as we’ve discussed before in several posts and in our web form webinar, is that the more information you ask for in a signup form, the fewer people fill it out.
So how do you learn more about your potential subscribers without driving them away?
Read on for ideas and a video.
Comments: 47Another Holiday Tip: Geo-Targeting To Boost Relevance
by Justin Premick on December 14th, 2007Quick thought and a how-to inspired by a reaction to our recent post on holiday greetings.
Over at her Net Profits Today blog, Rosalind Gardner made a great point about the lack of targeting that often plagues marketing campaigns (particularly those sent around this time of year):
Those marketers need to figure out how to parse their lists geographically and send their messages accordingly.
She’s absolutely right. Fortunately, it’s not hard for even the most basic email marketing campaign to do this.
Comments: 13Holiday Marketing Tip: Don’t Send Pointless Greetings!
by Justin Premick on November 28th, 2007
Can sending a “Happy New Year” or “Merry Christmas” greeting hurt your email deliverability?
Earlier this week, I was talking with Tom (our founder) about the holiday marketing tips we posted recently, and we got to talking about the email habits of both publishers and subscribers around this time of year.
There’s something that thousands of businesses (and in my experience, especially small businesses) do on holidays that brings you little benefit while making it harder to get your email through. Plus it potentially hurts other areas of your email marketing and your business as a whole.
So what is it?
Comments: 32Six Ways To Screw Up A Customer Email
by Justin Premick on October 4th, 2007
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.
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