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.

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

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.

If someone wants to unsubscribe, just let them unsubscribe.

Making the unsubscribe process difficult or confusing will just aggravate your (former) subscribers and cause real damage to their perception of your business or brand. Don’t make them log-in or make the text confusing. Your not only delaying the inevitable,  your making it worse. And why? If they can’t figure out how to unsubscribe, they might stay and turn into a more engaged subscriber?  Doubtful. The next time your name comes up, that bad experience will be their first memory. Just let them go, it will actually improve your program. (more…)

Gwyneth Paltrow, who you may know from such films as Shallow Hal and Duets, has recently launched a new website called Goop. The site might best be described as a Oprah-esque lifestyle/advice site. There is plenty of commentary about the site and the point of it all. I am here to talk about the email marketing aspect of it, which I like a lot better than the website.

Home Page Opt-In

First off, a great top left email opt-in form on the home page.  Any company that doesn’t include an highly visible Opt-In for/box on their home page is simply not focused on growing their email list. In this day and age you also have to sell it a little bit – “Get the Scoop from Goop”. (more…)

Below are 2 very similar emails I received that are worth taking a look at. It looks like the ESP (probably the same one) lost some data, to the extent

What I don’t understand is why the only thing to do in this email is unsubscribe or ignore. I think a “profile update” or “check your preferences” option should have been added as well.