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July 2, 2012
GetResponse Offers $1000 1st Prize for Email Template Contest
Update: Help us choose the Winners
We've had a great response with over 600 entries! The GetResponse team has selected 15 Finalists. To get inspiration from our finalist designs - click "view entries" at our special Facebook page. You can Vote your favourite and win as well:
My wife is really into scrapbooking and she creates the most amazing cards and scrapbooks. However, no amount of encouragement on my part can convince her of her talent. She believes it’s not her talent, but the plethora of powerful tools and templates available to her which allows her to create the wonderful things she comes up with. Yet, she has the will to be creative and the drive to use those tools effectively. I believe we are all creative geniuses. It’s just that…
Establishing familiarity, transparency and accountability
People with pollen allergies are 23% less likely to click on yellow links.
Amazing, no?
Well, it would be if I hadn't just made it up.
But you might have believed me, given the stat is published at a site that enjoys a trustworthy reputation.
The role of trust in evaluating and responding to advice, information and offers can only grow as online choice becomes overwhelming.
So how do you build trust through your email program?
Wearing my consumer hat, I can pick out three groups of basic tactics that influence my perception of an email and its sender:
Build and exploit familiarity
Establish transparency and accountability
Demonstrate "quality" and consistency
I'll review the first two areas in this article, the third in Part 2.
Build and exploit familiarity
One of the things we do when reviewing email is to identify who each message comes from.
A clear sender identity is itself a contributor to trust, but by ensuring you're quickly recognized,…
Ideas to improve email marketing response rates by NOT following subject line "best practices"
I've found through testing that in some cases, click rates can be doubled by creating the right subject line. More typical click rate uplifts through use of better subject lines are still a very welcome 25%. So it's well worth being creative to get a better response to your campaigns.
What you want to avoid is bland, repetitive email subject lines like these called out by James Hart in his post showing these Email subject line examples.
But with so many myths around do’s and don’ts in subject lines, your creativity can be limited, so here I'll reveal some common myths that will help you create more engaging subject lines.
Myth #1 Don’t use CAPITALs in subject lines
I believe this myth stems from the idea that capitals are shouting…
New infographic shows what your email must deliver to keep subscribers
All email marketers are keen to keep their unsubscribe rate a minimum, although it will never be zero.
Here's interesting new data on the reasons why unsubscribes happen in this infographic from Litmus. It's down to Relevance and Frequency as you'd expect. The main learning for me, is suggesting how you should go beyond the email broadcast stats and finding what your audience want from your content and their preferred frequency. That means asking them through focus groups or additional
I always think "spam is in the eye of the beholder (ouch)" - if you're not relevant, then a subscriber will think you're a spammer, even if you're an established brand.
The infographic also takes a look at engagement filtering behaviors for Gmail and Hotmail which is increasingly an issue for getting your emails in front of your audience…
New survey reveals swing in attitudes among marketers
Most proponents of email marketing have the letters R-O-I tattooed provocatively across their foreheads.
Email's remarkable return on investment has always been the key defence used by industry voices against suggestions that social media marketing or other channels have relegated email marketing to a dusty corner of the Museum of Internet History.
This ROI argument has its downsides, though.
In particular, the associated tendency to focus entirely on immediate, direct response can cause marketers to neglect the many other roles email might play in achieving marketing goals such as brand-building, relationship-building and encouraging advocacy.
A new survey of marketers from the UK's DMA and sponsor Alchemy Worx on the performance, value and use of email marketing suggests attitudes are changing though.
Throughout the whole DMA National Client Email Report 2012 is the sense of a channel that has settled into a strong and mature marketing role. For example:
Over…
Kath Pay interviews Dela Quist about why he thinks "more is more"
Hands up those who have always been told that “less is more” when it comes to sending emails? Well I had the opportunity to interview the often-controversial Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx to ask his thoughts on the “how much is too much?” question that vexes email marketing, or, as he sees it, “how little is too little”?
Of course, this advice comes with a disclaimer – commonsense needs to be used and as Dela puts it ‘Muppets’ shouldn’t be following this advice dogmatically without the input of logic and commonsense. But none of us are Muppets are we?
It’s a matter of applying Dela’s advice to your database, watching the results and determining the correct frequency based on the response of your database – Have conversions increased? Has it helped you to meet your KPI’s?…
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May 9, 2012
What is the key to relevance in email marketing?
The answer to this question is simple… relevance is driven by knowledge of what each customer is interested in.
While this may seem a prosaic statement, it is true that email marketing is all about the pursuit of relevance.
Relevant emails are read and make money. Irrelevant emails end up in ‘junk’ or, worse still, lead to unsubscribes and loss of lifetime value.
The art of good email is knowing what someone is interested in and then applying this knowledge to all future email communications.
The search for relevance is as old as marketing itself
Back the late 1930s, radio programmes called ‘dramatic serials’ were soon renamed ‘soap operas’ because their main sponsors were washing powder advertisers. The soap advertisers, including such illustrious brands as P&G and Unilever, realised the ‘dramatic serials’ provided them with the…
7 Tips for more effective mobile emails
Email and mobile together are already functioning as a team, whether we as marketers want them to or not. The customers and consumers have voted with their usage. They’re not sitting around waiting for marketers to get their act together, but as I write this between 20-60% of your database will be reading your marketing emails on their mobile device.
If designed and planned well, email and mobile together, will, in the forthcoming years, form a formidable marketing force. So marketers, a question: Will you be leading the way and profiting from your competitors lack of preparedness? Or will your competitors be profiting from yours?
Challenges
Many marketers get stuck here and go no further. In no way am I trying to minimize the challenges that lay ahead for a marketer to optimise the mobile email journey – however they are certainly not as insurmountable as they…
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April 23, 2012
A golden rule to rule them all
I grew up being taught the golden rule that one should always do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
It’s thought which is beautiful in its simplistic wisdom. We've all thought about how much better and brighter this world would be if we all followed this golden rule.
I suppose this could be a problem if you’re masochistic, but let’s assume most of us aren’t...
Email Onto Others as You Would Have Them Email Onto You
It’s not stretch at all to revise this rule to:
"email onto others as you would have them email onto you"
Isn’t that the best place to start? Let’ s put aside all the rocket science and just think of how much better and more effective email marketing would be if we all kept that golden rule front of mind.
Email…
Practical ideas for converting more visitors to subscribers
Bloggers use it, online retailers use it, and social media marketers practically make their living from it.
And email marketers?
Maybe they should use it more.
To quote the ultimate authority on human behavior (er, Wikipedia):
"When a person is in a situation where they are unsure of the correct way to behave, they will often look to others for cues concerning the correct behaviour"
This is the concept of social proof. It underpins the use of such elements as bestseller lists, product ratings and those blog feed & Twitter icons that give prominence to the number of existing feed subscriptions and Twitter followers.
All serve to convince or reassure the observer that "buying that product" or "following that Twitter account" is worth doing. Social proof (or the lack of it) is why we tend to avoid restaurants that are empty.
So might you use the concept when growing your…
