Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

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…)

The Online Marketing Summit (OMS) has created a truly unique event for marketers – The Online Marketing Virtual Summit.  This is your chance to learn actionable strategies and best practices from the experts all in the comfort of your home or office – for free. Like all OMS events, The Virtual Summit provides countless options to learn with zero distractions – no vendor sales pitches or the stress of attending a live event.

The Virtual Summit has 8 tracks – Social Media, Search Marketing, Web Analytics, Integrated Marketing, Online Advertising/Mobile, Website Content, Email Marketing, and Demand Generation – with content for all skill levels. I have the honor of presenting in the email marketing track: Connecting the Dots: Integrating Emerging Channels into your Email Program.

The event takes place on Thursday May 27th and registration is free. What do you have to lose?

Follow @AlexCWilliams on Twitter

Here it is, your April Email Marketing Calendar. April is an interesting month. From April Fools to Tax Day to Earth Day, the emotions run the gamut.

Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in April and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.

Thursday April 1st – April Fool’s Day

April Fool’s Day is the one day of the year you have free reign to play practical jokes and pranks on family, friends, coworkers, and most importantly your email subscribers. I will warn you, this is very dependent on your product or service. If your content is heavy and serious, you will want to consider whether a joke is appropriate. On the other hand, it may be the perfect opportunity for you to loosen up your tie and connect with subscribers on a different level.

Sunday, April 4th – Easter Sunday

The nice thing about Easter is that you have multiple angles you can work from a marketing standpoint. Easter bunny, Easter eggs, Easter basket, etc… One idea to consider is to add a hidden element to your email layout, which is essentially a hidden item that is only accessible by discovering a hidden link (known as an “Easter Egg”). Since users don’t typically spend a great deal of time with an email, you need to make sure the hover isn’t to difficult to locate – think 20x by 20x pixels instead of 5px by 5px.

Wednesday, April 7th – No Housework Day

Think of all the great products, services and locations that can be enjoyed instead of housework. Procrastinators world-wide will rejoice with your No Housework Day special!

Monday, April 12th – Walk On Your Wild Side Day

Push your edgy content on Walk On Your Wild Side Day. Some fun creative of your staff or some of your more eccentric content will do the trick. Lou Reed approves.

Thursday, April 15th – Tax Day

For the procrastinators out there, April 15th might not be the day. It might be the 16th, after a good night of sleep and dreams of refund or less worry about payment just paid. If you want your subscribers to blow off some steam and celebrate, it might be interesting to A/B split the 15th & 16th and see what works best for future campaigns. Stay away from politics and focus on the value your content of offer provides.

Friday, April 16th – High Five Day

National High Five Day originated at the University of Virginia in 2002, and has since spread across the globe. Anything and everything can be high-fived, and gives a perfect opportunity to focus on the social/viral side. The official website gives some great ideas. Can you adapt them to your email?

Monday, April 19th – National Hanging Out Day

The goal of this holiday is not to sit on a couch, it’s to educate communities about energy consumption. National Hanging Out Day was created to demonstrate how it is possible to save money and energy by using a clothesline. Can you come up with a list of ways to save energy with your product or service? If not, maybe just in general?

Thursday, April 22nd – Earth Day

This year is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, and a chance to provide the tools and structure for individuals and organizations to organize around environmental issues. The official website offers ideas and tips to take action.

Wednesday, April 21st – Administrative Professionals Day

We all know how important the administrative professional is, don’t we?  Celebrate them, empower them, reward them, or spoof them (in a fun way). Think about your list…how many of them consider themselves “Administrative Professionals”?

Last Friday in April - National Arbor Day

You can find the official date for your state here. Continuing on the environmental kick in April, how do you reward your subscribers for planting a tree?  How can we prove that they did it?  Easy: through user-generated content on Flickr, Twitpic, YouTube, etc. Sounds like a perfect chance to seed a social campaign through email!

See you next month for the May Email Marketing Calendar… in April.

Professional email marketers know the ugly truth: 9.5 out of 10 website visitors aren’t actively looking to opt-in to your email list. We need to sell it. A simple “Email Newsletter Sign-Up” call out isn’t enough any more.  We have to put on our ‘Billy Mays’ hats and sell it to users.  We can give them discounts to sign up, or promise them the world with a opt-in.  Or, we can just be more aggressive in getting the option in front of them.

When laying out website strategy, we preach that you need to have the opt-in box in the UI of a website – on every page. That might not be enough anymore.  A lot of sites are being more aggressive and pushing a modal window with an opt-in – on entry, mid-visit, or exit – to get you to sign up for those great emails you’re missing out on. In this post I want to highlight this modal window opt-in technique so you can test this out and see if it increases new email sign-ups and/or engagement.

What is a Modal Window?

“In user interface design, a modal window is a child window that requires the user to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application, thus preventing the workflow on the application main window. Modal windows are often called heavy windows or modal dialogs because the window is often used to display a dialog box.

Modal windows are commonly used in GUI systems to command user awareness and to display emergency states. In the web, they are often used to show images in detail”
(Wikipedia)

Facebook has been a huge driver of the modal window on the web, forcing you to make a decision – yes or no – before moving forward. Developers may refer to the modal window as a LightBox, ColorBox, FaceBox, etc… commonly implemented with jQuery.

Will Users Revolt?

The honest answer is no, as long as you give a clear “No Thanks” or “Close” dialog.  They will choose yes or no to signing up and continue on their way.

A website that I feel does a great job of Forcing the Issue is Bleacher Report. They are serious about getting you to sign up for each team’s personalized email list. Take these examples below, if you don’t sign up for their email list, it wasn’t because you couldn’t find it:

Bleacher Report UI Header

Bleacher Report UI Sidebar

Modal Window Opt-In

Signing up for an email list on a website can be very disruptive to their original purpose of visiting your site. If they are taken to a thank you page and then asked to check their inbox for confirmation, you may traded one goal with another. The modal window opt-in can make things very quick and easy for them, allowing your user to quickly get back to the business of browsing, and hopefully converting.

Also adding pervasive call outs on every page of your website as Bleacher Report has done in their UI will only increase opportunities for new subscribers

Test it out and see if you can grow your email list!

Follow @AlexCWilliams on Twitter

Here it is, your March Email Marketing Calendar.

Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in March and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.

Tuesday, March 2nd: Read Across America Day – Dr. Seuss’ Birthday

It doesn’t have to be a book does it? How about blog posts, white papers, or customer reviews?

Thursday March 4th: March Forth – Do Something Day

I’m sure there quite a few things you have in mind for your subscribers to do, don’t you? This day is also used as a celebration of goal achievement.

Sunday March 7th: The Academy Awards aka The Oscars

Lots of folks getting together on this Sunday night, if your site or product or location can enhance their experience, get out in front of it.

Monday March 8-12: National Make a Referral Week

A perfect opportunity to ask and engage your loyal audience to refer you to their friends, write a review, or send a gift to a friend from your store or site. Make sure to make the process easy using forms or social sites. The official hashtag on Twitter for the week is #marw10.

Wednesday, March 17th: St. Patrick’s Day

Green Email. ‘Nuff said. (more…)

For the last Tip Jar Podcast of 2009, I had the pleasure of talking with Dave Delaney, Social Media Coordinator of Griffin Technology (the company that makes those killer gadgets your iPhone, iPod, Blackberry, Stereo, etc…).

I met Dave at SXSW last year and jumped on all of Griffin’s social media streams. I have been really impressed with how they run their Social Media efforts, so I thought having Dave on the Tip Jar would be a good opportunity to take a look inside how a Consumer Product company like Griffin got into Social Media and how Dave keeps up with and manages the community and voice of the company on the web. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Griffin is on the road to CES right now in a bright Orange VW bus for their CES Bound campaign. Keep an eye out!

You can follow Dave on Twitter at @griffintech

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I got together with Chad White who runs The Retail Email Blog, a tactical daily guide to what’s going on in the world of retail email marketing.

In this podcast, Chad & I discuss his annual “Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season” for 2009. Our goal is to give you the tools that will help your email marketing program end the year with a bang!  Even if you aren’t a retailer, this guide gives great information on planning, trends, strategies and more.

Listen: 

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Howdy folks, and welcome back.  Today we are going to attempt to increase the amount of people signing up for your email list through a little bit of testing using Google’s amazingly intuitive (and free) Website Optimizer. To execute this, you need a Google account, and you must be able to both make visual changes to your site and add code to your HTML. If you have an internal web team, work with an interactive agency (like us), or a freelancer, the changes shouldn’t be too difficult to for them to execute.

A/B Experiment Checklist

There are many elements of an opt-in form that can dramatically affect the conversion rate. For sake of this post, we will choose placement on the home page of the opt-in box. The theory is that if you give more promance to your email opt-in, you will get more sign ups. Following thse steps will allow you to find out if this is true for your audience.

• Choose the page you would like to test
• Create alternate versions of your test page
• Identify your conversion page

To test our thoery, create an alternate version of your exisiting home page, with the opt-in box in a different location. For the page variation, use a name like site.com/index2.html. The page will not be accessible to users unless it is served up by the page loader script.

The conversion page is very important in the process, as this is the validation of a successful visitor. You want to make sure that your thank you page is strictly for your email marketing and not also used by other forms.  Also, if you have a double opt-in process, make sure that you idenitfy the first confirmation page as your conversion page, not the page a vistitor goes to from the confirmation link in an email.  Getting them to opt-in is the point, not email confirmation.

Installing and validating JavaScript tags

This is where things stop getting polite and start getting real technical.  If you are unsure about adding code to your website, forward this link to your web team and they should be able to do it in minutes.

There are 2 scripts, - a control script and a tracking script. The control script should appear immediately after the opening <head> tag of the original page.This is the script that communicates with Google’s servers to retrieve alternative page information, and ensures that individual users are tracked properly, by showing them the same variation each time, and by not double-counting their visits should they come back to the page at a later time.

The tracking script is pasted on all 3 pages directly before each page’s closing </body> tag.  This script sends pageview information to Google, so that visits will be recorded in your reports.  The nice thing about this tool is that it validate the scripts before activating the test and also gives you links to send instructions directly to your web team.

May the Most Conversions Win

One thing I love about testing is that no one is right or wrong until the results are in.  You can best practice and benchmark your site to death. But you will never innovate until you test your theories. If you have an idea and a web designer tells you it’s no good – Test it! If you think a different color button will get clicked on more – Test it!  It’s really fun to watch the results come rolling in. The Google Website Optimizer will declare a winner, but it needs at least 100 conversions, so if you don’t get a ton of traffic, you may need to leave it up for a few weeks.

Testing placement is just one area to test.  The goal here is for conversions.  Anything that relates to getting information or purchases from users is on the table.  Do you have any elements you have tested that provided big results?  Let’s hear about them in a comment below!

Follow @AlexCWilliams on Twitter

Nothing frustrates me more than getting sent irrelevant emails from clothing websites. For a store that sells to both men and women, you need gender to provide relevancy. Some stores have the data and don’t use it out of laziness, others don’t ask for the information or don’t have it.

I clicked on a link in a tweet recently that said “my favorite website of the moment” which led me to a clothing site called ASOS. They sell to both men and women and used a great segmentation technique I had never seen before. Instead of having a traditional submit/subscribe button, they had 2 buttons – women & men:

The best user experiences on the web are simple. This doesn’t take much thought and is perfectly intuitive.  If you rely on gender to provide relevancy to increase conversions, this is a great first step. I would give it a try – there is no wrong answer.

My only let down was that I didn’t receive a welcome email after opt-in.  This email could have really focused in on the male content and would most likely drive a lot of page views and conversions for ASOS. Maybe it is in the works…

Have you seen other uses of this opt-in technique on the web?  Let us know in a comment below.

I have been a loyal Gmail user for along time. Lately though I have been frustrated with Gmail, mainly due to the images in my HTML emails not displaying correctly. Well they have announced some changes that shed some light on the image issue.

From the Gmail Blog:

Now displaying images in messages from your contacts
Monday, July 20, 2009 5:58 PM
Posted by David de Kloet, Software Engineer

When an email references external images, Gmail usually doesn’t display them automatically. Instead we show placeholders and present you with the option to “Display images below” or “Always display images from” that sender.

We do this to help protect your privacy from spammers, who can use images and links to verify that your email address is real.

But often the messages you get with images are from friends or family and there’s no reason to worry about your privacy — you just want to see the photo of your newborn niece or the invitation design they’re sending you. So, in these cases, we’ve decided to start displaying images by default. Now, whenever someone you’ve emailed at least twice sends you a message containing images, you’ll see them right away. Note that we picked this threshold of two messages to start with, but we may tweak it if it doesn’t seem right going forward. And we only display images by default for authenticated messages (using SPF or DKIM). Gmail and other big mail providers usually authenticate their mail, but other services might not, so it’s possible you’ll get an email from one of your contacts where images aren’t displayed by default.

If you prefer to go back to the way things were, you can choose not to display images from certain senders or from anyone. To disable images from an individual sender, click “Don’t display from now on” under the “Show details” link of an email from them with images. To disable images from everybody, select “Ask before displaying external content” under “External content” on the general Settings tab.

What does this mean to Email Marketers?

Gmail will display images by defualt for emails from addresses that are in that person’s Contact’ list. It will also display images if you have sent that address at least 2 emails and that the address in question is authenticating using SPF or DKIM.

What Can I Do in My Email Marketing Program?

(more…)