Email Insider: A Few Pointers For Improving Survey Response
September 8, 2009 | Comments Off
It seems that the customer insights planets have aligned for me over the past fortnight, as I have received five different survey invitations in my inbox from various marketers. After looking at each, it quickly became apparent that marketers have a ways to go to create great surveys and drive responses to them via email. Here are three particular areas that should be addressed....
Email Insider: The Red Phone
September 8, 2009 | Comments Off
I'm sure all your email messages are important. But some -- conveying a deadline, a member benefit, urgent news or an important announcement that impacts your customers' relationship with you -- are more important than others. If you don't yet have a strategy for escalating your most important missives, it's time to build a Red Phone of your own. The original "Red Phone" connecting Washington and Moscow was built following the Cuban Missile Crisis, to avoid the delays in communication that had slowed U.S-Soviet negotiations.
Email Insider: If Someone Says ‘Buy’ A List One More Time…
September 8, 2009 | Comments Off
Time to update the list of "Killer Bs" I first wrote about here in 2007. We'll save the upcoming "ban the blast" initiative for another time, so the next "B" word I would like to excise from the email marketing lexicon is "buy," as in "Where can I buy a list of a million dentists/Democrats/dog owners?" Sorry if I sound like an email snob, but I cringe when I hear someone, usually (but not always) an email newbie, talking about buying lists.
Improvements to Make Your Thank You Pages More Dynamic
September 8, 2009 | Comments Off
There are a few reasons a website owner would want to have email subscriber form data (ie. what subscribers type into a form plus other info) passed to their thank you pages.
Examples:
Wanting to include some info about the subscriber, like their name and email, on the page they see after they submit the sign up form
Integration with a database for other, non-email related use (e.g. follow up by phone, any other CRM related tasks)
Integration with third party services (e.g. shopping carts, membership sites); note that many times this can also, or instead, be done with email parsers
If these possibilities sound interesting...
Good news! For a long time now, we've offered a feature that passes form data to the thank you page - the page subscribers see after successfully submitting a form - and turning on this feature is as easy as checking a box when creating your forms.
After that, get with your developer. Or, do it yourself, geeks! Either way, you just need a script written for your thank you page to do whatever it is you'd like to do with that form data.
Cool stuff, but what if you're using confirmed opt-in?
Err, hmph, actually that could be a problem. For example, maybe you don't want to do anything else with form submitters until they confirm and become active subscribers (ie. not dead weight).
In other words, in some cases it would be better if this form data was sent instead (or additionally) to the page subscribers see after they click on the confirmation link.
Ask, as some of you did, and ye shall receive. Well, not always, but you score this time...
Form data can now be passed to the "Confirmation Success" page, too!
Not only that, but if you or your developer have set things up for a thank you page, there's not much new to learn. You just have to setup your script on your confirmation success page and check a different box:
Bonus Points - How to put subscriber names, emails, and whatever else you want on your thank you pages:
At the top of this article, I mentioned this type of thing. Here's what it might look like:
Notice how it's taking the info our subscriber, Clark Griswold, submitted from the query string? To do this, even the non-geek may not need to get in touch with his/her developer.
There's just a block of code you need to copy and paste into the "head" section of your page. Then, you'll put a smaller block of code wherever you insert form data.
Sound like too much to handle? It should be easy for your developer, then. Otherwise, here's the code and instructions on how to do it.
Happy customizing!
Does Your Blog Content Wither and Die? Revive It!
September 8, 2009 | Comments Off
If you're one of the many smart bloggers who also build their email lists and deliver a blog newsletter, I bet you put a lot of effort into creating high-quality content.
Often, that valuable content is timeless, but only appears on the most-viewed part of your blog - the homepage - for a short time. Other posts push it off into your homepage and into oblivion.
This is frustrating - after all, other subscribers could benefit from this content, right? Even if they sign up days, weeks, months or years after you first published it?
Fortunately, with a simple email marketing tactic, you can resurrect your content from the depths of your blog and keep it in front of your ever-growing, ever-changing audience.
Turn Your Blog's Best Content Into an Automated Email Newsletter
There's no reason to put all that hard work into creating great content, then get just one round of clicks, comments and other actions from it. Why be satisfied with that?
Much of your blog's content isn't only relevant at one particular time. And to borrow from an old NBC slogan, if subscribers haven't seen an old post, it's new to them.
Get that old content out to them and make it fresh again!
Create an Autoresponder Campaign For Your Blog in 3 Easy Steps
1. Identify Your Best Content
Go through your old blog posts and figure out which ones are the truly high-quality ones that all subscribers need to see, even if they're years old.
2. Turn Each Post or Group of Posts Into an Email
There are a handful of ways to go about this:
- The fastest, simplest way is to just copy and paste your full post content into an email, style as you see fit (if necessary) and save. No introduction, no conclusion, just the post as a standalone.
I don't necessarily think this is the best solution for everyone, but it's far better than doing nothing - and if you're really too pressed for time to do more than that, then at least do that.
- Copy and paste a compelling excerpt from your article, add a link to read the full post, and then add a brief introduction and conclusion to the email.
I like this method because it encourages clickthroughs, but you may find that including the full post is better.
Either way, including an intro and conclusion is a good idea because it gives you a chance to build context and continuity into the series of emails you're sending.
- If you have two or more good posts on a topic, write an email that combines the ideas in those posts and links to them in context (this is something you might be doing with blog posts already).
The more posts you have on a topic, the less you need to write.
In fact, if you have say, 10 posts on a topic, you could write a simple introduction ("a lot of our readers want to learn about ______ because ______, so here are our most useful resources about that") and then just provide a list of links to those posts.
3. Add Your Emails To Your Follow Up Series
Once you have your emails together, create them as follow up messages.
As you create each one, think about how much time you want to pass between those messages and schedule accordingly.
Remember, new subscribers will also be getting your new posts (right?), so spacing the emails too close together could be overkill, especially if a subscriber gets your new posts and your old posts on the same day.
- One way to get around this: deliver your follow up messages only on a certain day of the week - a day when you don't send your regular blog newsletter - using Autoresponder Send Windows.
For example, if you normally email your latest post/s to subscribers on Tuesdays, you might tell us to only deliver your follow ups on Fridays.
That way, you could deliver these emails as automated weekly tips without sending subscribers 2 emails on the same day.
As you create more quality posts, you can either continue adding emails to your follow up series or edit your existing ones to work those posts into the emails you've already created.
Examples of Email Campaigns That Do This
- Darren Rowse shares how he did this for his site digital-photography-school.com.
- In our recent video interview with Ramit Sethi, he talks about doing this for his site iwillteachyoutoberich.com
- At AWeber, we do this in some of our own email campaigns.
For example, if you join AWeber and subscribe to our customer training series/newsletter, you'll see some emails that take posts from this blog and rework them into email messages designed to expose you to educational content that you might not have ever seen otherwise.
Do You Revive Your Blog's "Oldies But Goodies?"
What results have you seen from doing this? Any tips on this for the rest of your fellow readers?
Share your thoughts on this post!
