Recently I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with AWeber user and affiliate marketer Andrew Wee at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas.

Andrew asked me to join him on his podcast to discuss AWeber and more affiliate email marketing ideas.

So this week, we chatted for an hour or so about email marketing, deliverability and how affiliate marketers can incorporate email into their marketing mix.

The audio from our discussion is now live on his site.

What You’ll Learn

Some of the questions Andrew asked me over the course of our 72-minute talk:

How Do You Build Trust and Credibility? (and why do you want to?)

How Do You Define “Value?” What Makes For a Valuable Email?

What Exactly Do Email Marketing Services Like AWeber Do?

What Does It Mean to Have a Good Email “Reputation?”

Does Sending HTML Get Your Emails Blocked?

How Can You Quickly Create Email Content?

Hear the Full Interview and Discussion

Listen to the talk directly on Andrew’s site.

You can also download the MP3 file there.

Sometimes when we work on our email newsletters, we’re distracted from actually writing content by the endless possibilities our imaginations present.

We wonder things like if one call to action might promote more clicks than another, or if a message with subject A might get more opens than one with subject B.

Well, what they say is true: you’ll never know until you try. And yet, split testing – the best way to experiment and obtain information that helps us to optimize our campaigns – is an underutilized tool in email marketing, especially by those relatively new to email marketing.

What Makes it So Scary?

I think people avoid split testing because it can sound complicated, like something that should be done in a lab, with results run through spreadsheets and statistics software.

The truth is, a split test trial is not hard to execute, the results are easy to read and understand, and they’re generally well worth your time.

After all, the more we understand about our website visitors and subscribers, the better we can target them. While surveying or soliciting feedback are ways to learn a bit about them, split testing provides a more objective, birds eye view.

Split Testing: A Practical Introduction

If you’ve ever wondered about split testing but aren’t sure where to start, there’s a solution approaching quickly on the horizon.

Join our Education Team for a live seminar on this topic. We’ll provide a quick step-by-step walk-through on how to test, along with some ideas you can try just as soon as you’re out the door:

Split Testing Emails and Web Forms

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

2:00 – 3:00PM ET

Convert to Your Time (New Window)

Register Now!

We’ll cover what, why, and when you should split test both sign up forms and email messages.

Other Split Testing Resources

If you can’t join us for the seminar, sign up anyway, and we’ll send you a video recording of the session afterwards.

Or, if you’d like to learn a little more now, you can start in our knowledge base.

Hope to see you on the call!

Just got back from Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas.

It was a great event, from all of the affiliate marketers and AWeber users we met to the keynote by Jason Calacanis about the need for affiliates to create additional value for visitors instead of simply replicating company-provided sites and resources.

I didn’t hear as much talk as I’d like about how affiliates can more successfully market by email. So let’s talk about it here!

Affiliate Bloggers: Syndicate Your Content By Email and RSS

Do you use a blog to deliver content and promote products as an affiliate?

Just like with any other site, most visitors aren’t going to make a purchase on their first visit to your blog.

By syndicating your blog’s content by RSS, and also using our Blog Broadcast tool to convert RSS to email, you can drive repeat traffic from your audience.

This not only increases the chances of converting affiliate sales, it’s more cost-effective than driving new traffic through pay-per-click and other advertising.

Add Affiliate Promotions Within an Existing Campaign

You may find it appropriate within email campaigns for your own products/services to discuss other tools or services that you have found helpful.

Provided you have gained the trust of your subscribers and positioned yourself as an expert in your field, you may find them happy to purchase products that come with your “seal of approval,” particularly if you can clearly demonstrate to them how those products have helped you and others to solve a problem.

For more on this tactic, read this post at Yaro Starak’s blog.

Offer Bonuses to Email Subscribers

One challenge for affiliate marketers is that many consumers are thrifty. They’re always looking for the best deal, and this can make them hesitate if they’re not 100% sure that the product you’re recommending to them is not only right for them, but is offered at the best value.

So, many affiliates try to position their products/promotions as the best value by offering extra incentives to buy through them.

While you might not always be able to compete on price, you can offer other incentives like a rebate (ebates is an example of a company doing this) or perhaps a bonus, such as a report/ebook/whitepaper you’ve created, or some other content that you no reserve for buyers.

To tie this into your email marketing campaigns, reserve those extras so that only your active email subscribers are eligible.

What Else Do You Do?

What other tactics have you used to successfully market affiliate products via email?

Share them here!

If you aren’t sending a continuous campaign of emails using the feature available to you, there certainly may be messages you should be sending to subscribers that you aren’t. So, we just recently posted on why email marketers nearly always should use both follow ups and newsletters for their campaigns.

What I’d like to point out today are some of the email messages you may be missing from your own inbox that should be there.

A Few Messages That Can Improve Your Marketing

Email is a technology that can help you to market better not only through what you send, but also what you receive.

Here are a few of the emails you might want to find in your own inbox:

Unsubscribe Comments

As Justin has said before, sometimes unsubscribes are good for our email campaigns, when we allow the subscriber to leave comments. They can provide feedback on ways we might not be engaging subscribers who have not unsubscribed yet — and who may not at all if we use the feedback others have provided.

Other Feedback from Your Subscribers

To improve your email, you don’t want to hear just from those who are on their way out the door. If you have the resources to answer some emails here and there, there are clear benefits to proactively soliciting feedback from your subscribers.

Email Reports

You’d love to know things like how many subscribers your engaging with your email and how well your messages are performing. But how often do you want to log into your account to check them? Take advantage of email reports if they’re available.

Tests of Your Own Email Newsletters

If you aren’t testing your messages to review them before sending, start a new habit today. It would be well worth your time because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Reminders from Your Calendar Software

Consistency is an important aspect of successful email marketing, and yet sometimes we get off track and neglect our subscribers with too many days between sendings.

Many of the calendars we use to keep up with meetings and deadlines have an option to send an email reminder some time before an event approaches. This may be a great tool for you to use to keep a regular sending schedule.

Am I Missing Any?

These are the ones I’ve thought of off the top of my head and by looking at my own inbox. Do any others come to your mind? Please share.

Around the web and in conversation with ambitious new email marketers, we often hear of our company cited as either an “autoresponder” or an “email newsletter” service.

You say “toe-may-toh” I say “toe-mah-toh”, right?

Well, we often describe our service as a “permission only email marketing solution”, because autoresponders and newsletters are only two of the many features we offer. With that said, we’re not overly concerned about how our service is referred to.

What we are concerned about is how this limited perception sometimes holds back many new and even some experienced email marketers from reaching their campaigns’ potential.

Starting on the Right Foot …

With an understanding of some of the benefits of email marketing, new customers often join us with a single, very focused goal. Often it is something like:

“I’d like to send an email newsletter for my website”

“I’d like to send an automatic series of messages to convert prospects into customers”

These are great ideas, and they describe perfect applications of both our broadcast feature (for newsletters) and follow up feature (for a series of messages) for helping a business to grow.

Not clear on exactly clear on what makes these features unique? Read more on the difference between follow up messages and broadcasts and how they can be used.

The problem is, once these ideas reach fruition and some success is evident, too many marketers stop there.

What Else Would They Do?

Whether an email campaign has series of follow ups with no broadcast messages — or vice versa — it is missing a critical piece for optimal success.

A while back, Justin published an article discussing why email newsletter publishers need autoresponders, meant to motivate senders who focus solely on newsletters (broadcasts) to also schedule a few follow up messages.

A new article in our Knowledge Base takes a slightly different approach, explaining why all email marketers should use both follow up and messages:

Read More About Why Email Campaigns Need Both Follow Up Messages and Broadcast Messages

This is also one of the many topics we cover with new email marketers in our weekly, free getting started live training seminar, along with others tips, like what to write in your messages as you get your campaign set up.

Only Using One or the Other?

If you’re sending only follow up or broadcast messages and not both, don’t fret. Today you can use this opportunity to do something quite simple that will boost your results.

This is the second post in a series; you may want to read the first post on why email marketing calendars matter before reading this one.

Do you feel like you’re constantly working at the last minute to get an email out to your subscribers?

Many publishers just like you often fall behind on their email marketing campaigns. You’re focused on getting a new product ready to go to market, or improving an existing one, or working on any one of a mountain of other important areas of your business.

Your sending frequency falters, and when the realization sets in that you haven’t emailed your list in a while, you rush to get an email newsletter out to it.

Playing Catch-Up Is Exhausting

Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that… but yet you’re here reading, so maybe you’re not as on top of your email marketing campaigns as you’d like to be.

Maybe you’re looking for a way to relieve some of the burden of trying to publish a newsletter at the last minute.

Now, one of the topics we discuss in our email newsletter seminar is where to quickly find content that you can copy and paste into a future newsletter — places like your sent folder, your blog/forum/FAQ, and article sites like EzineArticles.com.

However, if you’re waiting until the last minute to go and find/create your email content, those content sources can only relieve so much pressure.

To stay in touch with your subscribers consistently, and not feel like you’re rushing at the last minute, it’s best to space out your writing/publishing duties over time. This is where an email marketing calendar can do you a world of good.

But before we can go plugging schedules and send dates into our calendar, we need to take a few minutes to think about how we’re going to improve our campaigns using that calendar.

We need a plan.

Planning, Step 1: What Do Your Readers Want to Know About?

This might seem like a pointless exercise — after all, isn’t it obvious what they want to know about? Just look at your business, your site and your signup form; what do they offer?

I think this is worth doing because you might find that what you actually send to your readers doesn’t necessarily match what they want to know about.

A couple common causes of this:

You’ve adapted your campaigns after getting feedback from readers.

You’re now talking to them about different topics than you did originally, or with a different focus, but you never updated your site or signup form to reflect the changes.

Now new subscribers, who didn’t see those changes as they took place, aren’t getting exactly what they bargained for when signing up.

You’ve changed your signup page/s or form/s, testing new headlines and incentives to get people to subscribe.

Like the last example, there’s now a difference between what subscribers expect to get, and what they actually get.

In your haste to "get something out" to your list, you’ve sent emails that didn’t deliver exactly what your readers came to you to get.

Go back and scan a few months’ worth of email campaigns — if you find you’ve rushed content out like this a lot, you may find that what you think you’re writing about, and what your readers are actually getting, are quite different.

To plan your email marketing campaigns, and put together a calendar, you first have to decide what exactly you’re going to write about — and what type of content, stuff you may have sent in the past just because "it was time to send," you’re not going to send anymore.

Look at your site and signup forms. What are your subscribers are signing up to your campaigns to get?

Now, based on that, write down what you’re going to email them to meet those expectations — what topics are you going to focus on? What not quite on-topic content are you going to stop sending them?

Once you’ve decided what to send (and what not to), you’re ready to start brainstorming content, and spreading it over the upcoming weeks and months.

Planning, Step 2: How Often Do You Plan to Email Them?

If you immediately said “daily” or “weekly” or “monthly,” hold on a second.

It’s good that you’re that confident and decisive about your campaigns. That instinct (hopefully) comes from the experience you’ve gained in past email marketing efforts. You know approximately what your audience feels is the right frequency to hear from you.

But remember, we just spent time deciding what we are and are not going to send out. And the #1 thing that can blow all that planning we just did sky-high is our choice of email frequency.

After all, if you decide to send weekly, but you don’t have enough of the right content one week, what do you do? Many publishers fall back into the habit of sending content that’s not in line with readers’ objectives and expectations.

A few things to consider when determining your email frequency:

How long will it take you to write an email of the quality your subscribers expect?

How many email messages do you intend to send in a week/month/year? Multiply this by how long you estimate it takes you to have a campaign ready to send to find out how much time you need to budget per week/month/year for composing emails.

Consider: If You Send 2 Emails per Week, That’s 104 Emails per Year (or About 9 per Month)

And that’s per campaign. What if you have multiple campaigns and you’re sending to each one twice per week?

I’m not trying to scare you away from sending that often. My point is this:

I sure don’t want to be stressed out unnecessarily, and certainly not for 100+ hours a year.

Wouldn’t it be easier to spend a little time each day planning your future campaigns, instead of the odd panicked hour here and there on the days you send?

Planning, Step 3: How Far In Advance Will You Create Your Content?

For many email newsletter publishers, this can be the hardest part of planning. They think:

I’ve promised my subscribers the latest news in my industry, so how can I possibly write my emails in advance? They wouldn’t contain the latest news!

Please don’t take this line of thinking. It’s a productivity-killer.

Consider the following:

News that is "old" to you typically isn’t old to your readers. You’re much more aware of the latest news in your industry than they are (after all, they’re waiting to hear it from you!)

Even major weekly news magazines like Time and The Economist contain news that’s a week old.

Not all readers are going to open/read your email the very day you send it… so even if you did wait until the last minute to get the latest news, by the time they read it, it’s a day or more old anyway.

So it pays to put our campaigns together in advance. But how far in advance?

For me, this depends on the frequency you choose for your messages, the amount of content you intend to put in them, and whether or not you’re sending a series of closely-related messages on a certain topic.

Frequency

The more often you intend to email your subscribers, the further in advance it pays to plan — if you think it’s bad trying to put one email together at the last minute, try doing it for two or three at the same time.

Amount of Content

The more you intend to put into your individual messages, the further out you should plan — instead of creating the email all at once the day you want to send it, try doing it in thirds, starting 2 weeks (or as far as you can) ahead.

By breaking up the amount of time you need to dedicate to that email, and giving yourself plenty of "buffer" in between when you create the email, and when it has to be sent, you take a lot of stress out of your email marketing.

Closely-Related Email Series

Think of these as mini-campaigns within your larger email marketing efforts, where you have so much to say on a topic that it can’t fit into one or two "normal-sized" (for you) messages.

You’ll want to plan these out furthest of all, to make sure that:

Content flows well from one message to the next

The size of each message in the series is appropriate and consistent with what your subscribers expect

The messages are spaced out at appropriate intervals

These "features" or mini-campaigns require a little more planning than your typical messaging not only because you have so much going into them, but also because your subscribers are going to realize that these are special (after all, you’re going to market it to them, aren’t you?) and may notice if the planning isn’t there.

Next Up: Content Ideas

Our series on email marketing calendars isn’t over yet — next time, I’ll give you ideas for content to send to your subscribers, and to work into your budding calendar.

Talk to you soon!

RSS Subscribers: Know Someone Else Who Would Benefit From This?

Share our RSS feed with them or encourage them to subscribe by email for the next part of this series along with other handy email marketing tips.

Miss the first part of this series? Learn why you need an email marketing calendar.

I’m sure that by now you’ve watched, read and heard a lot of people making the typical New Year’s resolutions — lose weight, read more books, learn a certain new skill, visit that vacation spot they’ve been talking about for 5 years now…

There’s one problem with these resolutions: the things we need to do to stick to them start taking up more and more of our time as we go… and most people eventually abandon their resolutions.

Today, I’d like to suggest a resolution that I think you can keep… because once you get going with it, it gets even easier over time, and it carries a few benefits that can significantly improve your email campaigns’ effectiveness and profitability.

Background: What Determines When We Send Email?

In my experience, most small businesses sending email campaigns decide to send based on one or both of of these factors:

Whether you have compelling content to send

Whether it’s “time to send”

For most people, this translates to the following maxim:

Is That All There Is To It?

For too many businesses, yes. Their strategy stops there. They don’t plan out what they want to say in advance, and when they want to say it.

Instead, they wait until it’s "about time to email subscribers" or until something exciting gets dropped in front of them.

The big problem with this is that many of us say, "Oh no! I need to get something out to my email list today!" and rush to put together a campaign.

Our haste shows to our subscribers:

Our writing isn’t as engaging as in early messages (such as our autoresponder and follow ups, which we planned out and edited over time)

We mis-type URLs and make formatting errors

Our emails lack continuity or transition — which indicates a lack of attention to subscribers’ needs/interests

Surely There’s a Better Way…

Wouldn’t it be easier on you — and better for your subscribers — if you had a plan that laid out, in advance, when you were going to email your subscribers and an idea of what you were going to say?

I sure think so.

In my next post, I’ll show you how with a little planning and an easy-to-use (and free!) tool, you can create better email campaigns, stress-free.

RSS Subscribers: know any business owners/partners who could benefit from this type of email marketing advice?

Encourage them to subscribe via RSS or email.

Thanks! -Justin

Hard as it is for many of us to believe, 2008 is right around the corner, and we may be thinking of some of those annual New Years resolutions we make and would like to keep.

These resolutions could provide a timely opportunity for our businesses — a kick in the butt to move some ideas sitting on the back burner up to the front where we can act on them.

This year, improving our email marketing campaigns could be one of the best things we can do for businesses, so let’s take a look at a few achievable goals we can work on.

Practical Goals for the New Year

Get Started!

Still sitting on the fence in 2007, procrastinating or waiting for the right time or circumstance to jump into email marketing or start a new campaign?

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It doesn’t take much to set up a campaign that clearly benefits the bottom line and the long term legacy of your business.

Hop off the fence and make new (or more) waves for your business in 2008.

Get Serious About Deliverability

We frequently see businesses making simple, preventable mistakes that knock their messages off course on their path to the inbox.

Start the new year with a brief review of email deliverability best practices and help ensure your messages are reaching your subscribers.

Stay on Schedule with Messages

Waiting too long between messages and erratic scheduling are two of the most common ways email marketers lose their subscribers’ attention and interest.

Review your message scheduling from 2007 and make sure it’s on par with what expectations you’ve set for yourself and subscribers moving forward.

Optimize Your Opt-In Forms

Is your email sign up accessible and clearly seen as a useful resources to visitors? Do you have your forms placed prominently on any of the pages visitors may land on?

Carefully review your website and forms and consider making some changes to see a boost in new subscribers.

Target Your Subscribers Better

The more we know about our subscribers, the better we can target them with information they will find valuable and timely.

Consider tactics like tracking clicks and opens, soliciting feedback, and integrating with a web analytics package to gather information. Then, form some conclusions and split test different strategies to see what works best.

My Resolution for this Year

One of the major goals I have for 2008 is to consider better ways to get the free resources we offer out there and used amongst customers and others interested in email marketing.

I’ve resolved to focus on exploring ways to integrate our email and other channels better to maximize the quality and number of touch points we have with people who are interested and could benefit from these resources.

What Do You Have Planned?

What are some of your resolutions for improving the marketing of your business next year? Please join the discussion in the comments.

Here’s wishing you a prosperous 2008!

Setting up your first email campaign and not sure what to do? Need a refresher course on how to put together a simple yet effective email marketing program to convert your website traffic into loyal customers?

Our own Sean Cohen turned up on the Recognized Expert Marketing Show last week with plenty of great advice for budding — and established — businesses.

Listen to Sean’s Email Marketing Advice

In this 34-minute interview, Sean talks to host Bob Sommers about:

Where to Get Message Ideas and Content

Keys to Getting More Subscribers Ethically

How Split-Testing Can Help You Grow Your List Faster

Text vs. HTML: Does It Really Affect Deliverability?

Listen To The Half-Hour Interview

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?