Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

In email marketing, if you aren’t planning a week or two ahead, you’re too late. To plan a timely and relevant campaign – and avoid “blasting” - you need to give yourself some time to let an idea “marinate”, create unique content, creative, landing pages and the like. We’re here to help jump-start that process.

Below is an Email Marketing Calendar of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in August and September that you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email campaigns

August 13th – International Left-Handers Day

If 7-10% of the world is left-handed, there’s a good chance your email list is the same way. Have you ever watched a left-hander use a pair of scissors? If you have, you know that the world is designed for us righties. Even if you don’t have any products for lefties, such as Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton, a simple shout-out would probably go a long way. If you do, that would be an amazing and rare segmentation opp.

August 15th – National Relaxation Day

Cue the massage music and fire up the black tea! It would be hard to make s case that reading email is relaxing. It’s more like the exact opposite – except for maybe Inbox Zero. Because the holiday is about unplugging and recharging, maybe you can leverage this before the 15th, and let your subscribers know they won’t be hearing from you that day, out of respect for National Relaxation Day.  Then go ahead and queue up a great email for the 16th or 17th. Namaste.

August 16th – Roller Coaster Day

The Roller coaster was patented on this day in 1898. See if you can beat this splash-worthy email from Beach Park in Brazil.  If ever an email embodied the spirit of the Email Marketing Calendar, this is it.

August 19th – National Aviation Day

There are less than 1 million pilots in the USA, but over 1.5 million people take a flight each day in America. If you ever had a chance to make a case that your products or content are worthy of those mostly miserable hours packing, traveling to, waiting for, flying on, waiting for, traveling to, unpacking…today might just be your day. (I personally couldn’t do without my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones, almonds, and an Esquire.) If you have some great advice on traveling, don’t be stingy!

August 21st - Wilt Chamberlain’s Birthday

There are 3 numbers that spring to mind here you may be able to tie to pricing or creative:

- 7′1″
- 100
- 20,000

August 26th - National Dog Day

“Spoil your dog on this day and always.” If there is no relation to dogs with your services, how about connecting with your audience on a more personal level?  Create a gallery on Facebook of all your employees dogs and ask your audience to head there and Become a “Like” (this “Like” thing is hard to work into a sentence, maybe stick with “Fan”).  A good opportunity for Email Marketing and Social Media collaboration.

August/September – Back to School!!!

Let’s be honest, there are very few “school kids” on your email list. You need to connect with parents. You can do so in 2 ways – sell them on things for their kids, or sell them things to pamper themselves.

Things for the kids: You’re really going to have to connect with a budget-minded parent in this economy. A sale isn’t enough, you need to resonate with their state of mind.  Here’s an example: “The last calculator you will ever need to buy…for 30% off!”. A sale is not enough right now. Go deeper and connect with the emotional and long term side of buying. If the hand-me-downs are going to keep your audience from replacing or upgrading, you better change their mind. Or, go for retro/nostalgia connection and remind them of how much they loved their Trapper Keepers and new duds. Connecting with their memories might be a better approach.

Things for the Parents: I don’t have children, but those I work with are ready to get their kids back-to-school. A week night dinner or mid-day lunch might be the perfect gift offer right now. From a B2B perspective, late afternoon webinars and marketing events will see more attention. If you are doing heavy Back-to-school messaging, you may want to mix in an option in your preference center for a subscriber to specify if they have children or not. If they don’t, a nice offer for a non-parent would stand out with all of the other kid related messaging.

August/September – Labor Day (Sept. 7th)

With the lack of economic growth, it looks like another Staycation weekend for Labor Day. Anything that can be used for fun at the house or at a park is good to promote, make sure the shipping options are clear and the items will arrive on time. Sometimes, people need more than a product, they need a reason to use it. Give them a reason, then sell them your product. This weekend also marks the beginning of the holiday email marketing season, and competition is going to be fierce. As I said with Back-to-school, discounts aren’t going to be enough. Your going to need to do better. Stay tuned for next months Email Marketing Calendar where we’ll talk about how you can cut through the noise this holiday season with your subscribers.

Wondering how to get more Facebook Fans? How about some good old fashioned bribery?

Everyone has a price – make them an offer they can’t refuse.

There’s a good chance a high percentage of your email subscribers are on Facebook.  Maybe you are currently promoting your fan page and social sharing in your email marketing, but haven’t had a big surge in fans.  In this post, I’ll show you a quick way to create a special offer that only your Facebook fans can access.

The image below shows what a facebook user who hasn’t “liked” your page sees, then shows what the user sees after “liking”.

Similar to the  Facebook opt-in form tutorial post, this technique also utilizes the Static FBML application. A quick refresher: (more…)

Here it is, the original Email Marketing Idea Calendar for June. We’ve had some copycats recently, but no fear, you are in the right place.

“Summertime, the livin’s easy.”
- George Gershwin

Yes, you read that right.

Britney wants more followers in her quest to the be the most followed person on Twitter. So instead of buying billboards or doing a PR blitz a la Asthon Kucher, she used her most effective channel: her email list. (Why am I on Britney Spears’ email list? We’ll save that for a different post.)

Here’s the creative (click to enlarge):

Why is this a great example of email driving social? Let’s break it down: (more…)

Email Marketing and Social Media have some inherent differences, namely the ability to provide unique content to each individual subscriber and track each activity of that individual. Will Social Media replace email down the road? The answer is no – not unless it can somehow provide that level of CRM, analytics, and personalization that email provides marketers. Can these 2 medium’s work together? Yes! But they need to be treated with an understanding of the content each user is receiving, and where this content is being shared and discussed. In this post, I’ll cover 5 ways each email marketer can make their email marketing campaigns more social – without devaluing the unique relationship you have already created with your subscribers.

1. Give Subscribers the Ability to Reply to your Email Marketing.

Something that is lost in the discussion of email marketing is that each email campaign comes from an email address. The ability to have a conversation is, and has been there all along. Somewhere along the way, Email Marketers pushed this away. “From” email addresses that start with “do_not_reply@” or some computer generated address that starts with something like “875QR00xza342@” are not the best way to start a conversation. They give the impression that not only will no one answer a return a reply to your campaign, but we don’t want to talk to you – we just want you to “Buy Now” or “Learn More”.

Obviously list size becomes a factor here, but isn’t answering an email from a subscriber a lot easier than handling requests on Twitter or the like? If you are trying to engage your audience, email is going to be the best method. You are not limited to constraints of 140 characters or privacy walls, and you can store this data and add information to subscriber profiles. “Do not reply” is the equivalent of “I’ll hang up an listen” in radio, except they never got a chance to call in. They’re just listening, and possibly tuning you out (changing the station).

How to change this is two-fold: use a real and friendly email address (ex. “feedback@”) and give copy in your emails to promote replies. Then designate your community manager or support teams to answer these requests. Once they believe you are listening, you will open up the doors to evangelists who will share content on other networks and provide positive word of mouth.

2. Avoid Redundant Content

You worked hard to get a user to subscribe to your email list and provide you with their information.  The last thing you want to do is give the impression that Tweets and Facebook Fan Page updates will lead them to the same messaging. Your ideal subscriber will be on your email list, a Twitter follower, as well as a Facebook fan – and have unqiue experiences with each. If your content strategy is to create one message and send it verbatim through each platform, they will turn at least 2, or maybe all – off. Use email for one-to-one marketing messages, Twitter for conversations and sharing, and Facebook for a light, personal, and friendly dialogue.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t market your product or service through each, just adjust the messaging and approach.

3. Stick to the Big 3: Twitter, Facebook, & LinkedIn

According to SmartBrief, MySpace is a “social-media ghetto”. From a business and consumer standpoint, it comes down to the big 3: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  Whether your B2B or B2C, look at the Social Networks that drive the most traffic to your site and match your social sharing links accordingly.   Tweet it, Facebook Share It, or LinkedIn News it, your analytics will tell you this is the right move. Having a bar with 30 random social networking icons is going to get a lot less click through than “Share this on Facebook“.

4. Is it Actionable? Or is it Shareable?

The age old question with email – if there is one thing you want them to do – what is it?  Is it to click and purchase? Is it to read and share?  9 times out of 10, it’s not both.

Pick one.

Follow @AlexCWilliams on Twitter

In this post I will show you how to add a custom tab to your Facebook Fan Page using the Facebook Static FBML application. The process isn’t terribly complex, so buckle down for a few minutes and we’ll bust this out. A few things you’re going to need to get started – a Facebook Fan Page and HTML opt-in form code from your ESP. (more…)