Tomorrow’s Friday the 13th – a notoriously unlucky day when it’s wise to avoid black cats and walking under ladders. While AWeber can’t ward off any personal bad luck, we have some precautions you can take to make sure that no misfortunes befall your email marketing campaign. Direct from our Customer Solutions team, here are [...]

Don’t you dare click that “queue” button.

I see you sitting there, with your AWeber account open, itching to get your next email newsletter out the door.

Yes, you’ve thought up some pretty interesting content, you’ve checked your spelling and you’ve aligned your images properly. You can’t wait to see what kind of response this one gets. I know.

But just hold on a tic. You’ve got one thing left to do. You’ve got to…

Get Your Email Past the Gatekeeper

You see, every email campaign has a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper keeps an eye on the quality of the emails going out, making sure subscribers see what the sender intends them to.

Usually, marketers have to serve as their own gatekeepers. But occasionally, they get lucky enough for someone or something else to play that role for them.

Today, you’re that lucky.

This Checklist Will Do It For You

We’ve put together a checklist you can run each new email past. (And yes, it’s free.) It will catch and correct any errors. It won’t let you get away with a single mishap or slip-up.

You see, this new gatekeeper subscribes to a fairly strict philosophy:

“Just because no one is perfect doesn’t mean your emails can’t be!”

So move your cursor off the “queue” button. Click to download this checklist instead. Run your new message past the 20 questions you’ll find inside.

Then when you’re satisfied that your email passes the test, go back to that queue button. This time, you can push it with the assurance that the message you’re sending is exactly as it should be.

Download Your Free Email Checklist

Tweet This

Everyone makes mistakes – even email marketing geniuses (hard to imagine, we know ).

Yet with so many things to double and triple-check before sending a campaign, it’s easy for important components to slip the minds of seasoned pros and newbies alike.

In fact, The Retail Email Blog regularly posts about the mistakes and “oopsies” of big email marketers on their blog, so if in fact you do mess up from time to time, you are still in good company!

All joking aside, it’s always best to avoid a mistake before it happens. Here’s a list of things to steer clear of in order to make your campaigns run more smoothly than you ever thought possible.

1. Buying Email Lists

Effective email campaigns cater to specific demographics, tastes and interests. Using confirmed opt-in to obtain the proper permission from people who are truly interested in your targeted emails ensures that they really want to hear from you.

When you buy an email list, there’s no way to guarantee that those people are really interested in your messages, so you must avoid purchased lists at all costs. You can never assume anything about the addresses of random people that are not given to you directly by their owners.

2. Hard to Recognize “From” Names and Subject Lines

Once subscribers are on your list, you want to make sure that they open your messages regularly. Your subject line and from name/address are your only chance to grab subscribers attention in their jam-packed inboxes.

To help jog their memory, always use the same email address and contact name so that there is no confusion when your messages arrive. Your subject lines must clearly present the value of the emails while staying consistent with your past subject lines to evoke recognition and familiarity.

3. Avoiding CAN-SPAM Compliance

The Can-Spam Act requires that all messages contain the sender’s valid physical postal address, but some home-based and international businesses are hesitant to include this information in their campaigns.

Aside from the legal obligation, putting your contact address in your emails is the best way to show subscribers that you have a legitimate identity and that you won’t run for the hills as soon as they make a purchase from you.

4. Irrelevant and Infrequent Emails

Sending emails that don’t relate back to their original request for info irritates readers and is a guaranteed way to rack up a high number of unsubscribes. Add an infrequent schedule to the previous scenario and you have a recipe for email disaster.

As a rule of thumb, if you haven’t contacted subscribers in 6 months, delete them from your list. Revisit your landing page from time to time to assess your email content and make sure it matches up with your original offer. Set expectations so that subscribers know what to expect from you, and when to expect it.

Expectations are easiest to address in three stages:

1. Create Subscriber Expectations Before The Opt-In
2. Create and Reinforce Expectations Right After The Opt-In
3. Create Subscriber Expectations Over Time

5. No Call to Action

With all of the emphasis placed on quality content and sharp design, it’s understandable that marketers sometimes miss the obvious. When a reader opens a message and they’re interested in learning more, don’t forget they will be thinking, “What do I do next?”

Give them a way to move forward easily. Include multiple calls to action and links back to your site so you don’t lose them. Set up your products favorably, and remember when creating your messages that there must be a logical sequence of events – you want readers to open, read, click-through and ultimately buy.

6. Not Testing Before Sending

With all of the time spent prepping marketing emails, typos can easily go unnoticed. Testing your messages before sending them only takes a minute or two and can help you pinpoint problems before they materialize.

Send test copies to test accounts at several different email services to ensure that the message is readable, the images are viewable and the links are functional.

Are You Making These Mistakes?

We know email marketing isn’t always easy. Like we’ve said from the get-go, everyone makes mistakes.

If any of the situations on the list above hit close to home, try changing your approach; you’ll be amazed at the impact a few simple changes can have on your campaign.

Once you put the changes into practice, come back and leave a comment to let us know how they have worked for you!

Tweet This

Most of us glance into the mirror before stepping out the door each morning. What if there is food in our hair or our clothes are on backwards? The mirror-test saves us from potentially horrifying embarrassment.

Our emails deserve that same opportunity. Since they can’t check the mirror themselves (due to their unfortunate lack of eyeballs), we must do it for them through testing. Trust me, this is a step you do not want to skip.

You and your email marketing campaign will both be relieved if your test turns up a mistake that would have resulted in mismatched e-shoes.

Why To Test

You’ve probably had this experience: you open an email, you get interested, you click on a link, and:

You’re done. You can’t go any further, so you delete the email and move on to other important things, like checking the mirror for smudged mascara.

And you do not want that to happen with your emails.

So. Two or three minutes of clicking about in exchange for peace of mind? Good, I’m glad you agree!

Let’s look at how to keep your reputation as a flawless and stunning emailer.

Where To Test

Different email clients render HTML in different ways, so you’ll need to check for design flaws.

You want to test in at least the top few webmail providers, since you are most likely to have subscribers using them. (You may need to set up accounts if you don’t already have them, but it’s free to do so.)

• Yahoo
• Windows Live Hotmail
• Gmail
• AOL

If you can, you’ll also want to test in Outlook (there are several versions of Outlook – if you have Outlook 2007, test in that one first) and possibly Mac Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird.

What To Test

• In HTML messages, double check the design. Do your images display in all accounts? Do special effects show up as jargon? Do the fonts look right? Now you can see if your style is universally acceptable.
• Scan for typos. You may see mistakes you missed before while working in your account.
• Check your from line and subject line. Each email provider limits to a different number of characters, so make sure enough information is visible in the inbox.
• Click your links – every one. Our Link Checker will make sure the page is found and exists, but it’s up to you to make sure that each link actually goes to the right page where you want your readers to journey.

How To Test

After creating a message and before you queue it up, you’ll see the option to test it. Click on that “Test” link and fill out the form. If you’re using personalization in your message, this will test those fields as well.

Go through the process for every email service you’re testing in. If you see a problem, do your best to tweak until it’s fixed.

When you are assured your message is presentable, you can send it out to deliver your words far and wide.

Tell Your Story

Have you ever stopped a flawed email just in the nick of time by testing it?

Have you ever skipped testing only to regret it later?

Share your stories below!

Tweet This

The recent release of a new subscriber count chicklet met a mixed response.

We’ve read plenty of positive comments on the blogs who covered this feature.

But there were definitely others (both in the release post’s comments and on other blogs) who doubted the usefulness of such a feature.

Of course, this is one of those cases where you should apply the best lesson in marketing — Test!

Personal trainer and AWeber user Carl Juneau did just that, setting up a split test on his landing page to see if the presence of the subscriber count chicklet affected opt-in rates.

He swung by our blog the other day to share his results.

Adding The Chicklet Increased His Opt-In Rate By 32.4%

In a comment, Carl shared his results:

Justin, Mark, other readers:

I implemented the the readers widget on my landing page the day it came out in an A/B split using Google Optimizer (services.google.com/websiteoptimizer).

Here are the results:

OVERALL
Visitors: 552
Conversions: 140
Conversion rate: 25.36%

PAGE A: NO WIDGET
59 conversions / 271 visitors
21.8% ± 3.5% conversion rate

PAGE B: WITH WIDGET
81 conversions / 281 visitors
28.8% ± 3.7% conversion rate

Page B chance to beat Page A: 97.2%
Improvement: 32.4%

Results impressed me and are significant at the a=5% level. I only have 2300 readers, so even (relatively) low numbers benefit conversion.

Key Takeaways

• You don’t have to have a huge list for this to work.

I think a lot of people believe social proof is only effective when you’re talking about huge numbers of people, like the McDonald’s “Billions and Billions Served” signs.

Carl doesn’t have billions of subscribers. He has just over two thousand. And yet, the chicklet still made a big impact on his landing page conversions. Why?

Here’s what I think: the more homogeneous your audience is, the more powerful social proof is.

If McDonald’s said “2300 Served,” well… who cares? There are millions (billions?) of people who eat hamburgers. 2300 isn’t that many in the grand scheme of things.

But narrow your audience down to people actively interested in getting six-pack abs, and suddenly 2300 readers is a helpful cue that Carl knows what he’s talking about.¹

• Test. Then, test some more.

Carl’s not haphazardly adding and removing stuff from his page.

He’s using Google’s Website Optimizer to test and track, and he’s making sure to get statistically significant results.

As we’ve discussed before, split testing is a crucial element of a successful marketing campaign.

So start today! To help, here are some split test ideas you can use for your email campaigns.

More Split Test Results To Come Soon

I’m in touch with Carl directly to discuss some other possible tests we can do to raise his opt-in rates further (and share the results with you, of course!).

Want To Get The Results In Your Inbox?

Join our blog newsletter and we’ll email them to you when they come out.

We’ll also periodically send you other email marketing tips we publish here. The newsletter goes out 1-2 times per week.

Naturally, as a permission-based email marketing company, we respect your privacy.

1. For more on social proof, I strongly recommend Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and his newer book Yes! 50 Scientifically Ways to Be Persuasive. Both give numerous examples of how social proof affects decision-making.

[Insert clever first paragraph here.]

OK, so that one was on purpose, but we all make mistakes at one point or another, like leaving some text only we were supposed to see. Even Seth Godin does.

No matter how experienced we are with something (or sometimes because we are so experienced with it), mistakes happen.

A mistake here and there is not a big deal! But one repeated over and over is. It’s how we learn from them, and what we do to prevent them from happening that separates the careful, successful newsletter publishers from the error-prone who see inconsistent results.

What To Do to Prevent Mistakes

We can stop mistakes before they happen in our email campaigns by taking a couple of simple steps.

Use a Pre-Send checklist

When you get started with your first email marketing campaign, you really shouldn’t rack your brain with much more than adding some compelling content to your messages and adding an effective subject… just like we do when we send messages to friends.

However, once we’ve got that down, we’ll start trying some different things to optimize our messages. Sometimes we try so many different things that we lose track of the basics.

A good way to make sure we don’t miss the forest for the trees is to use a quality pre-send checklist.

Start with ours and add to it as you see fit.

Test Messages Before Sending

Mom always told you to brush your teeth before bed. Here’s another important habit to learn.

Test your messages before sending them. It’s the best way to put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes to see messages much like they will.

What To Do When Accidents Happen

Sometimes we do our best to run our campaigns through quality assurance, and still we get caught a bit red in the face when a subscriber replies saying something like “Hey, this link doesn’t work”.

Don’t worry. For one, your subscribers can’t see how embarrassed you look. Also, provided these mistakes are an exception to the rule, it won’t make or break your campaign.

The “Ouch” Email. To Send or Not to Send?

In yesterday’s post on Seth’s blog, he apologized to his readers for a mistake he (or more accurately, an associate of his) made.

This is something many email marketers feel tempted to do when a message gets dropped in the mailbox before it should have.

This type of message can be useful, or it can make matters worse, so be careful here. Seth’s post had a moral to it that went beyond just apologizing for the mishap, so it had added value.

Along those same lines, you might add a brief message to the next message you send to subscribers, but generally speaking, emails sent just to apologize are a bad idea.

Most Importantly: Follow Email Best Practices

Again, minor mistakes here and there aren’t the end of the world. But major mistakes could spell the death of the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

For instance, using permission standards with as many holes as swiss cheese (e.g. opt-out emailing, purchased lists) will land you on blacklists. And sending messages that are unrelated to what someone signed up for will severely reduce your deliverability.

The foundation of your campaign should be firmly rooted in the core email marketing best practices. Follow them to make sure your email gets delivered, whether they have a few mistakes here and there or not.

Ironically enough, after reading Seth’s post, I caught an error in one of my own campaigns. Apparently, I put a line break in the middle of a personalization field, causing it to break and show “{!global …” to subscribers.

What small gaffes have you made, and how did you and your subscribers react? Please share and join the discussion.

April 15th, the tax deadline is sneaking up on millions of Americans. Many of us are paying meticulous attention to detail to avoid the dreaded tax audit.

While we have our brains working these analytical gears, why not review our email campaigns for ways we can improve them in measurable ways? Here are 10 things to review once you’ve caught your breath:

1. Does your reply address properly brand your business and make your messages recognizable to email subscribers?
2. Which email newsletters and follow ups have performed better than others in the last year? Why do you think that is?
3. Have you been sending to your list too infrequently? Too frequently?
4. Are there any new pages you’ve published on your site that could use a sign up form?
5. What kind of feedback have you received from your subscribers? What can you learn from it?
6. Is your email campaign using both follow up messages and newsletters to build relationships?
7. Have you noticed a spike in subscribes or unsubscribes during a certain period? Why do you think that is?
8. What kind of plans do you have for the upcoming days, weeks, and months for your campaign?
9. Is the call to action for your sign up form as generic as the word “Submit”? Have you considered split testing another?
10. How much money have you invested into email marketing this past year? What kind of returns have you seen? Do you have an analytics package to track these results?
11. What else should we review periodically? Please share your thoughts and join the discussion.

If we didn’t test our messages before sending them to our subscribers, I’d be in a lot of trouble! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had typos and broken links caught only by reviewing messages before sending.

Not only do we all make mistakes, but sometimes when we look at our work only from our own perspective, we don’t see the forest for the trees.

Testing can help with both problems. I’d like to briefly share a few ways successful email marketers test their messages, including benefits and limitations of each.

HTML messages offer several advantages to senders:

* they can be customized to include colors, formatted text and tables
* they enable the sender to track message open rates
* they allow the sender to hyperlink words and phrases rather than typing out full URLs

However, many email programs by default block HTML images from being displayed, including the following popular software and web-based email clients: