Tag Archive for 'newsletter'

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Designing a Call To Action That Customers Can’t Resist

Published on July 25, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: call to action, email marketing, newsletter.

By the time you have designed your email template, filled it with quality content, and crafted an intriguing subject line, you may be running out of fresh ideas. Perhaps that explains why so many email marketers fall back on a boring “click here” button as their call to action. It’s easily understood, but it’s not inspiring.

Prominent Placement
Your call to action must be easy to locate. Don’t tuck it away at the end of paragraphs of text. Place it in the top half of your email where it will catch the reader’s eye.

Design Matters
The shape and color of your call to action button can influence the number of click-throughs you receive. Tailor the design to the action required. Red is a useful color if you want to establish a sense of urgency. BMI, a leading UK airline, increased their conversion rate by 2.5 percent by adding a red background behind their message “Hurry! Only XX seats left”.

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Creating Effective Welcome Emails

Published on July 21, 2011 in Best Practices. 1 Comment Tags: email marketing, newsletter, welcome emails.

It’s been known for a while that there’s one kind of email that always produces a higher response rate than any other: the first one. It’s the beginning of a new relationship, subscribers are happy to learn more about the company that’s contacting them, and they’ve yet to be burned by offers they don’t want.

They’re willing to read the welcome message, and they’re willing to click on it too.

According to one recent survey by Experian, a research firm, open rates of welcome emails are typically around 57.8 percent with clickthrough rates of 14.4 percent. Other messages sent by the same company can expect open rates as low as 14.6 percent and clickthroughs of 2.7 percent.

That makes that first email vital. Get it right, and you can convert the interest that led someone to subscribe into an immediate purchase. Get it wrong, and you’ll waste an opportunity, and have to fall back on that one-in-40-odd reader to turn your list into revenue.

Trust Me, I’m an Email Marketer
And companies often get it wrong. Instead of pulling subscribers back towards the business, they keep them at arm’s length. So the first email that subscribers receive might be just a summary of their registration details, with no offer, no call to action, and no next step except to wait for the next message — which most will ignore. Or worse, it will be about the sender and not about the recipient. It will explain that the company is wonderful, that its products are fantastic and that the subscriber made a great choice by signing up. But it won’t actually show the subscriber any of those things.

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JDate: a Simple Model for an Email Newsletter

Published on June 24, 2011 in Best Practices and General. 0 Comments Tags: engagement, newsletter.

Maintaining an email newsletter can be a challenge. Month after month, you have to come up with ideas for content, conduct the research, write the articles, paste them into the template, send them out to your list and monitor the results. It’s one reason that so many firms choose to outsource their newsletters. But the biggest challenge comes before you even begin writing – when you have to produce a structure for the newsletter that can function as the template. It has to be both flexible enough to work over the long term and simple enough to fit into an email’s restricted space.

One solution is to look at how other newsletters are laid out — even those in a different industry — and see what they have to offer you.

JDate, for example, is a niche dating site targeted towards the Jewish community. Each month the site issues an email newsletter that is both simple and effective.

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5 Things to Do Soon After Sending your Newletter

Published on May 25, 2011 in Tips & tricks. 1 Comment Tags: bounces, newsletter, smtp, spam folders.

…so you have just hit the “send” button. It may take a few minutes or even hours to send out your newsletter to your mailing list. Here is what you can do while waiting:

1. Check your email addresses
If you have added one or more email addresses that you own to your list (that’s a good practice!), verify what your emails look like on both webmail and email clients. Check junk/spam folders to make sure your emails do not end up in those folders. It may sound obvious but…be sure also to check your email subject line!

2. Inform your colleagues
It might also be useful to send your newsletter or DEM to team members, or to other company departments, in order to keep your colleagues updated on the campaign’s marketing activities.
This may avoid the risk of two or more corporate functions providing clients with different information.

3. Start monitoring bounces
Make sure bounces are limited (or, even better, that there are none) and that they represent a small percentage of the emails sent up to that point. This check may be very useful, since if the percentage of bounces is very high, clearly something is wrong.

4. Check delivery stats
If you have a dedicated smtp service, or any other service allowing you to monitor sent emails, you may want to check delivery status and speed. Some services will even alert you in real time when an email is opened.

5. Take a break
In all likelihood, the tension, stress, or fear of making mistakes you have accumulated in the past 5 minutes may overshadow the next 5 months…Well, it’s time to leave your desk and go look for that well-deserved cup of coffee. Or maybe this is the point where you realize you’ve made some awful blunder – in that case, the break will have to wait…

Related post: Stop and think before you hit “send”

Email Marketing Software: How to Create a Newsletter in 3 Minutes

Published on April 18, 2011 in Sendblaster. 0 Comments Tags: newsletter, Sendblaster, video tutorial.

In this short video we show you how to create and send a newsletter with SendBlaster PRO 2 … in less than 3 minutes. You will realize that there’s no programming required to create engaging professional-looking newsletters. Check it out!

3 Ways to Deepen Your Reader Relationship

Published on March 22, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, newsletter, social media.

The effectiveness of an email campaign is usually measured in open rates, click rates, and eventually, sales numbers. But there’s one factor that affects those rates more than any other. It’s not shown on any stats page and it can’t be represented in numbers. But the depth of your relationship with your subscribers has a direct influence on their willingness to read your messages, click your links and buy your products.

Here are three ways to encourage your subscribers to welcome your emails:

Social Media/Email Interaction

Social media marketing and email marketing tend to be seen as two separate sales channels. The first is for brand-building and occasional link promotions. The second gives regular bursts of sales to carefully-maintained lists of leads.

But the two are connected. The friends and followers reading your tweets and Facebook posts are also the subscribers reading your emails.

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