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Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

How 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.

Continue reading “How to Survey Your Customers and Prospects”

Comments: 53

Tags: recommendations, relevance

Another Holiday Tip: Geo-Targeting To Boost Relevance

by Justin Premick on December 14th, 2007

Quick 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):

I received an Inbox full of “Happy Thanksgiving” emails on or about the 4th Thursday of November. That would have been nice except for the fact that I live in Canada and we celebrate Thanksgiving on the 2nd Monday in October… so those greetings came about 6 weeks late.

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.

Continue reading “Another Holiday Tip: Geo-Targeting To Boost Relevance”

Comments: 13

Tags: relevance, targeting

Holiday 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?

Continue reading “Holiday Marketing Tip: Don’t Send Pointless Greetings!”

Comments: 32

Tags: holiday marketing, marketing calendar, relevance, strategy

Six Ways To Screw Up A Customer Email

by Justin Premick on October 4th, 2007

Bad Email 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.

Continue reading “Six Ways To Screw Up A Customer Email”

Comments: 66

Tags: Email Deliverability, examples, relevance

Don’t Leave Out the What and the Why

by Justin Premick on September 11th, 2007

Plucked this gem out of my subscriptions recently: Tell Customers What They Are Missing.

Strictly speaking, the article talks about selling a product and explaining the benefits of that product, but I see at least two instances where being specific leads to better email marketing:

Continue reading “Don’t Leave Out the What and the Why”

Comments: 7

Tags: content ideas, list building, relevance, strategy

3 Ideas for Surviving Email Bankruptcy

by Justin Premick on September 6th, 2007

Full Inbox After being out of the office for a particularly long weekend, I came back this morning, flipped on my computer and opened Thunderbird.

And boy, did the floodgates open. Internal messages from other AWeber team members, follow ups to conversations with live webinar attendees, web analytics reports… plus the usual complement of spam. All in all, some 1600+ email messages were vying for my attention.

So what do people do when they experience this?

Continue reading “3 Ideas for Surviving Email Bankruptcy”

Comments: 14

Tags: relevance, strategy

Permission Is a Good Start…

by Justin Premick on July 19th, 2007

Almost There... …but there’s more to good email deliverability than permission alone.

Much goes into getting email delivered, and fortunately your email service provider (such as *ahem* AWeber ;)) takes care of a lot.

However, you hold some of the keys to good deliverability in your hands, too. But if you don’t use them, you’ll have to confront declining delivery and response rates.

Continue reading “Permission Is a Good Start…”

Comments: 13

Tags: email authentication, Email Deliverability, relevance

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