email marketing – Page 2

Keeping Up with the Community

[This is a guest post from Amy G. Howard, Founder of Raleigh Special Tonight. Follow her at @amgenove.]

Running a hyper-local website about daily specials can be quite grueling. In order to keep readers, you need to update at least once a day, or people will stop visiting your site. Raleigh Specials Tonight averages about 600-800 hits per week and 50% of that traffic is returning. I have very loyal readers and I am grateful for that, but I know I need to keep coming with the content if I want it to stay that way.

Where do I find daily content for my site every day? When I first started the site about a year ago, it was tough. I had to seek the information myself by going to individual restaurant websites. I still do that occasionally, but here are some tools I use to keep up with my community so I always have fresh content:

4 Tips for a Successful Email Newsletter

Through LinkedIn (find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/ddavila) and Twitter (@idaconcpts), I receive a lot of questions about marketing and web analytics.

By far, most business owners and marketing consultants have questions regarding how to get started with an email newsletter.

Often I direct them to these 4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing. Once email marketing practitioners have a solid foundation and have mastered the basics, then we can start talking about content creation.

Here are 4 tips on content creation for a succesful email newsletter and how 4 companies (Facebook, Shutterfly, Bing and Evernote) implement these tips.

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e-Mail Marketing: Template vs Plain Text

[This is a guest post from Zachary Zawarski of Zadling, a Google Apps Consultant]

Two email newsletters that I signed up for were Mike Michalowicz and Brian Tracy’s newsletters. Most of you probably know Brian Tracy, a self-help author who mostly helps salespeople. Mike Michalowicz, who might be slightly less known than Brian Tracy, but still immensely popular as you may have seen him on MSNBC or CNBC, is the man behind The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur myself, I set out to gain some resources that would help me increase my own sales, so I subscribed to each of their newsletters.Like I discussed in my last guest blog, email marketing is all about constantly providing your subscribers with value and not constantly bombarding them with your sales message because they’ll quickly unsubscribe if all they’re seeing is sales copy rehashed week after week.

Both Mike and Brian have very different email styles. Brian Tracy has a template design. The email is formatted nicely with various images and colors and with a footer full of resources such as links to his website and links to his Facebook and Twitter pages. Mike, on the other hand, uses no images or color at all — just plain text.

So who do you think has a better and more effective email marketing campaign?

e-Mail Marketing the Right Way: Provide Value

[This is a guest contribution by Zachary Zawarski of Zadling]

I don’t subcribe to many e-mail newsletters, but if I do choose to opt into your e-mail list, you better make sure that you’re doing one thing: providing me with value.

We all know that e-mail marketing is a great way to produce sales for your website, but many business owners make the mistake of using mailing lists purely to push their products and services. That is the wrong way to conduct e-mail marketing.

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Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

Given that E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!, at idaconcpts, we’ve discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need some email marketing benchmarks by industry to be able to properly evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

On July 2009, eMarketer provided a list of e-mail marketing open and click-through rates worldwide by industry and list size. Here’s an important update to these e-mail stats via Mailchimp.

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Good and Bad Birthday Emails

happy birthday email Yesterday was my birthday.

Yay!

I received gifts!

Yay!

I received one great birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nom nom nom”.

I received one terrible birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nooo it are my birthday”.

Here’s the story of one company that sucks at doing birthday themed e-mails, and another company that got its stuff together.

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How Shutterfly Does Email Newsletters

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Playing Scrabble online?

There’s an app for that.

Finding great local concerts?

There’s an app for that.

Writing great e-mail newsletters?

Sorry, there’s no app for that.

Actually, if you or your company thinks that there is an automatic way to do e-mail newsletters, there’s none.

That is why we need to learn from the pros and if there is one organization that is doing e-mail marketing right, it is the Shutterfly’s Wink team.

Continue reading “How Shutterfly Does Email Newsletters”

How Facebook Does E-mail Newsletters II

In October 2009, we analyzed an e-mail newsletter from Facebook titled Ads Manager Announcement that was directed to the Facebook Ads users. This newsletter is a great example of how to implement permission marketing, how to avoid the brochure mentality, and how to do seamless product placement.

Below is a snapshot of another newsletter release for Facebook Ads users on January 19, 2010:

Continue reading “How Facebook Does E-mail Newsletters II”