Did you know you can embed video in email newsletters? It’s not a fully functional video player but the appearance of one can increase your click thru rates up to 3x.
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email marketing
If you are a visitor to this website you likely noticed an experiment I was running throughout the month of November – aWeber popups asking you to subscribe to the GetANewBrowser email newsletter…
Why did I implement this? Well when we added the email newsletter feature I wanted to test some opt-in internet marketing tactics. Rather than writing a post about the email newsletter I went with a delayed modal popup asking the readers to subscribe. I did this for a couple reasons. I wanted to see the effectiveness of this method without broadcasting it – so that the numbers would not be skewed by visitors from the RSS feed.
Secondly, I wanted to verify the effectiveness of popover requests… And guess what – it works as advertised. aWeber featured a post stating a 1000% increase in subscriptions using this method. ProBlogger wrote a post regarding the ridiculous increase in subscribers to his photography blog using this method.
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Last week Kramer’s veterinarian sent me an email newsletter…
Can you point out all the problems with this? If your email marketing campaigns look like this – you need to talk to me. This is completely ineffective… as effective as not using email marketing at all…
So what’s wrong with this email? Let’s dive in…
Let’s start with the subject… They used the horribly generic “Newsletter” in their subject. What most people don’t realize is the easiest way to fail at email marketing is to use generic, non-descriptive subjects in their emails. A subject must be compelling, brief, and indicate the content of the message. This fails at all three and it doesn’t even indicate a brand. This will be passed up in most users’ inbox.
Secondly, let’s look at the reply-to address (aka the “from” address). Proper, branded email addresses can do wonders in many aspects of your web strategy. First off – you HAVE to use your brand (your domain) in your email address. This is a huge FAIL. First off – it in no way extends or relays your brand. Secondly, and most importantly, this gets lost in an inbox because the receiver cannot clearly tell who this is from.
And last – no message body. This is a HUGE mistake. I, personally, would never send my newsletter in PDF form. But if I did – I would definitely include a message explaining what was in them to entice the reader to open them. In this format I bet 90% of receivers do not open these PDF attachments. Lesson for them: take the content out of the PDF and put it in the message body in a nice template.
If you use aWeber – they’ll help you take care of all this. If you still don’t get it – come talk to us. We can help.
Do you have examples of good or bad email marketing? Have email marketing tips? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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I am an early adopter and I often sign up for alpha/beta/etc invites to try out your web service. Sometimes you take these requests months in advance of launch and I’m fine with that. But if you finally decide to give me an invite by emailing me back, please remind me of what your service does.
Unless I am really excited about it – I’ll forget about you within a week at least. I’ve seen far too many examples where I receive the “Hey we’re open now” email only to have completely forgotten what the service does – and you don’t remind me. This is often followed by “Move To Trash” button clicking.
Here’s an example I just received from Kindling – a web service I had completely forgotten about and signed up many months ago for.
Dear Beta Users,
The time has come for Kindling’s public launch! We wanted you to be the first to know about the upcoming launch of Kindling 1.0 on November 19, 2008.
New and Improved Features
We have had an extremely successful Beta period and are thrilled to see so many people using Kindling. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for all of your valuable feedback. We take each and every suggestion into consideration and have added some of the most popular suggestions to Kindling’s 1.0 features.….[yada, yada, yada]….
We’re excited to move to this next phase of Kindling and are proud to count you among our first official Kindling users! As always, we are happy to answer questions about the transition for Beta users and more
After reading this, I have no idea what your service does.
Here’s a better email…
“Dear Beta Users,
Hey, Remember Us? You signed up for our beta period and we just want to inform you that we are getting ready to officially launch our idea management and collaboration tool to the public. This great new tool allows you to submit, collaborate, comment, and vote on ideas within a team and with your users. Check out our video here.
Here are some great new features that will be available when we launch…
[proceed with your marketing jargon]“
Now isn’t that much more clear? Email marketing appears to be a lost art – especially for web application developers. Email marketing is a cornerstone of an effective web strategy, and if you are going to do it – please do it right. Good email marketing provides a clear but concise message with the goal of spreading information and sending the reader to a target. You have about two or three sentences to convince your reader to continue and not delete. Remind them right away why they should continue reading your pitch.
Do you have good/bad examples of email marketing? Share your thoughts in comments or on your blog.
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