From time to time, people come to us and ask if we offer a “full service” version of AWeber, where we do things for you like set up your account, design a custom email just for you, create and schedule your messages for you and perform other tasks that most of you are probably doing [...]

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for two more browsers.

You can now access and manage your AWeber account using Google Chrome or Safari for both Windows and Mac.

You can also manage your AWeber account using a variety of other browser and operating system combinations:

Browsers AWeber Supports

For Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7:

• 

  Internet Explorer 7.0+
  Internet Explorer 8.0+

• 

  Mozilla Firefox 2.0+
  Mozilla Firefox 3.0+

• 

  Google Chrome

• 

  Safari 4.0+

For Mac OS X:

• 

  Mozilla Firefox 2.0+
  Mozilla Firefox 3.0+

• 

  Google Chrome

• 

  Safari 4.0+

For Linux/Ubuntu:

• 

  Mozilla Firefox 2.0+
  Mozilla Firefox 3.0+

Happy browsing!

You may remember Mr. Manyhats, a busy man who suffers subscriber fatigue. His wife, Mrs. Manyhats, has the same problem. She has so many emails, she doesn’t know what to do.

But she likes that the emails provide her with suggestions and offers that match her interests. One of her interests is craft projects, so she goes to Michael’s Arts & Crafts website to sign up for their emails.

But when she gets there, she changes her mind.

Would You Fill Out This Signup Form?

There are thirty-eight fields on this form. Thirty-eight actions to take or decisions to make. Thirty-eight chances to decide enough is enough and quit.

Mrs. Manyhats is not going to fill out thirty-eight fields. She does not have that kind of time. And is she really going to provide her phone number and street address for a craft store’s emails?

Lesson Learned

When creating your web form, think about the sign-up experience. You can add up to 25 fields with the new web form generator, but consider each addition carefully.

What stats might you want to segment by? What sets the right expectations for your readers? And what information might subscribers balk at providing?

Keeping some fields optional and only requiring a few is one move subscribers may appreciate. Leaving unnecessary fields out is another. When in doubt, run a split test.

Michael’s Arts & Crafts is a successful business, but their overwhelming opt-in form may hinder the success of their email campaign.

Avoid overcomplicating your forms and keep them simple, and fewer would-be subscribers will abandon them.

Tweet This

Sometimes it’s good to step back from discussions like what’s new at Gmail and how to add an opt-in form to Facebook and just talk email marketing basics for a bit.

Today, let’s talk about email design. Specifically, plain text email design.

While creating plain text emails seems easy (and it is) there are things you can do to make your plain text emails more reader-friendly.

A recent email I received illustrates this well:

Evernote’s Plain Text Update

Here’s an email I received from the makers of software program Evernote:

(Click image to see full-size)

Now, we could take the easy way out and say that Evernote should be sending HTML emails instead of plain text – so they could more easily present this information in the excellent way they do on their website and blog.

Instead, let’s focus instead on how Evernote could make it easier for subscribers to get the information they want out of this email.

For the record, I don’t think this is a bad email overall. It has a great tone and a lot of good content in it. I just think that the format makes it hard for subscribers to use and appreciate that content.

Making This Plain Text Email Usable

While this email isn’t just one big continuous block of text, it does leave a few things to be desired…

No Maximum Character Width

Notice how long the lines are in this email?

(Click to see full-size)

Those are being cut off by my Gmail account when it runs out of room at around 133 characters – about twice what we recommend as a maximum line length. And if Gmail had let the, the lines would have run even longer than that!

Keeping the lines shorter would mean subscribers don’t have to move their eyes so far across the page and back to read the email, making scanning faster and easier.

Headers Aren’t Easily Visible and Scannable

If you’re going to have an email with separate topics/sections, it’s best to use headers (just like you would on a web page) to make those sections easy to find as subscribers scan your email.

This email has headers, but fails to separate them from the corresponding paragraphs.

At the very least there should be another line break between the header and paragraph; I’d probably also try making the header stand out a little more with some hyphens or asterisks.

No Separation of Content Within Paragraphs

Each section of this email has a header and then a single large paragraph of text.

Even at the long line lengths shown here, each paragraph is several lines long. If you were to shorten the lines to 60-70 characters, these would be really long.

This email could be far more readable if you broke the paragraphs apart, maybe used some bulleted lists… you don’t have to follow the old “5-sentence paragraph” structure when writing an email!

No Conclusion or Signoff

This email just abruptly ends after the last content section:

What’s strange about this is that the rest of the email actually has a great friendly, personal tone to it… so a signature or conclusion of some sort seems like a no-brainer.

Leaving the signature off makes it feel less like an email you’re receiving from an actual person at Evernote, and more like a machine-written news summary.

Your conclusion and/or signature need not be elaborate (for example, look at the one in Kayak’s email newsletters) but it should be there to bring everything else in your emails back together.

Just For Fun: My Rewrite Of This Email

Here’s that same email content, with ~3 minutes’ work to format it differently:

(Click image for full-size)

It’s longer since I shortened the lines and broke up the text a bit, but I think it reads a lot more smoothly than the previous version.

I’m of course biased since this rewrite is my creation, so I’ll ask you:

Would you agree that the simple layout changes in this version make the email much easier to scan and read?

I hope so.

Plain Text Doesn’t Have to Be Plain-Jane

It’s perfectly fine to send plain text emails; they might work better for you than HTML.

But if you do go the plain text route, don’t assume that means there’s zero design involved!

How do YOU lay out your plain text emails to make them easy to read?

Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments!

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One of the things we like to stress around here when it comes to building a subscriber list is that “simple signup forms are good, and that you shouldn’t make signing up hard because then people… don’t sign up.

But sometimes it helps to hear what others outside the email marketing world have to say.

Our Director of Technology, Andy, passed me a blog post a while back that talks about usable registration forms.

The name of the post — “User Registration Pages Suck.” — might sound harsh, but it’s a helpful view into what your visitors may be thinking when they’re asked to sign up for something.

Lesson #1: What’s In It For The Subscriber?

If you’re going to require the subscriber to fill out a signup form, it had better be for something valuable.

In the first example on Codeulate, a signup form was required to signal approval of an article with a “thumbs-up.” Who’s going to be willing to fill out a signup form just to vote on an article?

Lesson #2: Make It Easy To Sign Up

Q: What’s the goal of an email signup form?

A: To get opt-in email subscribers.

Q: Why?

Q: So I can send them email messages.

Q: What do you NEED to know about them to do that?

A: Their email address. Maybe a name so I can address them personally.

Seems simple enough, yes?

So why are so many signup forms a mile and a half long? Do we really need to know company name, position title, budget, etc?

I’m all for targeting and segmentation, but they serve a purpose: to reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

If you’re asking someone for all this information up front, before they even know you, let alone trust you, many otherwise good prospects aren’t going to sign up, and then it won’t matter how narrowly you segment and target your subscribers, because you won’t have subscribers to reach.

This is why forms like the first one Codeulate points out bug me so much.

It’s a registration form for a website. Not a medical history form. Not a mortgage application. Not a tax return.

Why would you want to mimic those things with a form that, when you get down to it, is there to help you build a community around your website?

Take A Look at Their Recommendations

I don’t agree with everything the author says, particularly about delaying the signup as long as possible.

As we discuss in our webinars and elsewhere, using a signup form and an email campaign to build a relationship with visitors and get them back to your site is essential to your success.

That said, there are some good lessons here. Have a look, especially at the five suggestions at the end of the post.

It’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.

The Offending Email

Ethan, one of our web developers here at AWeber, was puzzled at an email he recently received from a ticket sales website. He had absolutely no idea who this company was. He couldn’t remember ever doing business with them.

He eventually figured out (after going to their site and trying a login/password combination he rarely used) that he had purchased tickets to an event through them — over a year ago.

As we often remind people looking to collect subscribers offline, permission isn’t indefinite – it expires, and if you email subscribers out of the blue after a long time, they lodge spam complaints because they don’t remember you.

That’s not what caught my attention about this email, though. What I found especially appalling was their email footer:

(Click image above to magnify)

Three things about it made my slap my forehead:

1. Vague Opt-In Reminder

Remember: this company hasn’t emailed Ethan at all since he made his purchase a year ago. So they should have known he wouldn’t expect an email from them.

While they did at least attempt to put a permission reminder in this footer, they failed to actually remind him of anything.

Their reminder text:

Great. Very helpful. “Oh, they say I’m opted-in. Well, I must be.” Right?

When you create a permission reminder, especially if you don’t email often, make sure you tell people:

Where and/or how they signed up

When they signed up

You could also put the subscriber’s email address in the footer (as this company did), although I would say that’s less important than where, how and when they signed up (after all, they already know what email address you’re emailing them at, right?).

A much better permission reminder:

Now, at least the subscriber can check out the web page where s/he signed up and hopefully recall signing up there a few months (a year?) ago.

2. No Replies Allowed

Nothing says “you’re just a number to us, buddy” than an email campaign that tells you not to bother replying.

Yes, there’s a link to their Help Desk in the footer. But what about people who don’t read down to the footer?

Is it really so hard to send from an address whose inbox forwards directly to the Help Desk?

One of the advantages of email marketing over other mediums is that it lends itself to having a two-way conversation with your customers and prospects — why would you shut out subscriber interaction and feedback like that?

3. Difficult To Unsubscribe

To top it all off, in this example unsubscribing is a real challenge.

The company forces you to login to your account with them to unsubscribe:

People who want to stop receiving email from you are going to do it, one way or another. If you make it hard on them, if you put hurdles in the way of them opting out, they’ll simply mark your messages as spam.

Not only does the company in this example lose a chance to learn why people unsubscribe from their list, they put themselves at risk of blocking and filtering due to complaints.

Lessons Learned

Remind people why they’re getting your email. Be specific.

Be available. Avoid using “noreply” or unmonitored addresses in your “from” line.

Make it easy to unsubscribe.

What Do You Think Should Go In An Email Footer?

Do you do these things in your email footer? Can you think of other items that should go there?

Share your ideas below!

Just when you think a hotly-debated topic like whether to send messages in plain text or HTML has died down, along comes another angle to look at.

This time, the folks at MarketingSherpa bring us a case study from minor-league baseball where a combination of Text AND HTML messages boosted ticket sales over 260%.

So how do you incorporate this new data into your decision to use Text or HTML?