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Using Email to Grow a Community: AWeber Talks to User Ramit Sethi

Dawson Barber — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:04:41 +0000

Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with AWeber customer Ramit Sethi and talk about how he’s using email marketing to market his business.

Ramit writes about personal finance at iwillteachyoutoberich.com and uses email to market that site, his book, and other products.

We talked at length about topics that many of you may have questions about when creating, managing and optimizing an email campaign. Today, with a little help from AWeber’s YouTube channel, we’re going to share those with you.

Using Email Marketing to Grow a Community

In this video, Ramit shares how he:

Uses email to grow/nurture his community
Measures success
Values feedback
Handles the volume of incoming email and why he believes in being accessible (and doesn’t use a do not reply address)

Starting an Email Marketing Campaign

In this video, Ramit shares:

How he started email marketing
How often he sent emails to subscribers
What he put in his emails
How many autoresponders he’s sending

For a couple more clips from AWeber’s interview with Ramit, head over to AWeber’s YouTube channel.

There, you’ll find videos on:

How he increased his open rate by 50% in 7 days
How he got traffic to his site before email (what he did to get people there in the first place so he could start building his list)

Go to AWeber’s YouTube Channel

AWeber will be publishing more clips from this interview there soon, so be sure to subscribe to our channel to get notified about new videos!

Posted by Justin Premick, AWeber

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Subscriber Fatigue: 7 Steps To Kick It

Dawson Barber — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:51:58 +0000

Mr. Manyhats has much to do – and a cluttered inbox.

When he checks his email, he clears out all but the most pressing messages. Many of them don’t look particularly interesting or helpful anyway, and he can’t afford to waste his time.

Like a lot of people, he is suffering from a case of subscriber fatigue.

In the current economy, many companies are email marketing especially aggressively. Some 247 billion emails are sent every day. In the melee, subscribers often choose one or two emails to open, and delete the rest.

Your goal? Get Mr. Manyhats to choose your email. But how?

Make ‘em Love You

Establish brand loyalty.

Your sender name is one of the first things subscribers see. If they already like you, you have a much better shot at that email being opened.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich author Ramit Sethi touts building relationships through personal response. Invite feedback and respond to it, promptly and specifically.

Check out more of Sethi’s thoughts on building an email community.

Command Their Attention

The subject line is where many subscribers make the decision to investigate further or toss out the case.

Go for something catchy but not cutesy; something surprising but not sensational. Try asking a question you know your demographic wants the answer to.

Hooking your audience is much easier with an appropriate subject.

Keep It Real

Reading plain English is more enjoyable than slogging through a formal missive or techno-garble.

Write friendly. Write real. Write effectively. Then send it to yourself. Do you want to open it?

Get Relevant

Make sure your emails are as relevant as possible to your subscribers’ interests.

According to The Social and Portable Inbox by Jupiter Research (2008), 50% of email users and 60% of frequent buyers (4+ purchases per year) said that if they did not find emails relevant, they would unsubscribe.

Try segmenting your subscriber list into categories. Alter your subjects and content to be most relevant to each category. If the subscriber is getting information they value, they’ll stick with you.

Balance the Scales

Promotions directly lead subscribers to buy or participate. Too many, though, may alienate subscribers.

Make sure you balance your content to provide enough helpful information that the subscriber experiences a true give-and-take. Try an 80:20 ratio of information versus promotions, and follow these tips for even better balance.

Dam the Floodwaters

The more emails you send, the more effective your marketing is, correct?

Actually, that’s dead wrong. Subscribers may feel like they are drowning in too many emails and choose to turn off the faucet altogether.

Pay attention to your frequency and how changing it affects your unsubscribes. Keep your subscribers swimming in your pond without sweeping them away.

Skip the Mourning Period

You are going to lose some readers in any case. People lose interest, they get busy and they move on.

Keep your subscriptions high by offering them everywhere you can. Keep enrolling new subscribers, and then do your best to create a positive experience for the demographic that is right for you.

Remember, though, that adding subscribers does no good if you don’t keep them. After all, a subscriber saved is a subscriber earned.

Posted by Amanda Gagnon, AWeber

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How To Build Relationships Via Email: We Talk To Chris Guillebeau

Dawson Barber — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:38:24 +0000

As you probably know, too few businesses use email marketing to build relationships with subscribers. Instead, they focus on getting as many sales as they can before recipients scramble to the unsubscribe link.

While that model might work for a few businesses, it’s certainly not for everyone (nor is it in line with most of the email marketing tips you’ll find on this and other blogs).

Of course, it’s all well and good to talk about the theoretical value of building relationships via email… but is anyone doing it? And if so, how?

Recently, I talked with AWeber customer Chris Guillebeau, who uses email to connect with subscribers, build relationships – and, oh yeah, grow his business while traveling the world.

Watch These Videos From Our Interview

Chris and I talked for a while about:

How he “does” email
What he’s learned about email marketing
What mistakes he’s made (and how he recovered from them)
How much (if at all) other businesses “get” relationship building
How he sells products without making subscribers feel he’s being “pushy”
… and a number of other topics

We talked for about an hour, but that would be one loooong video… so we broke our discussion up into a handful of shorter videos.

You can watch them here:

Video 1 – What Can Small Businesses Learn about Relationship Marketing?

Video 2 – Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Recover

Video 3 – RSS vs. Email vs. Other Media; Surveying Readers

Video 4 – Building Relationships via Email Marketing

Video 5 – “Anti-Marketing:” Transparency in Your Email Marketing

Video 6 – How to Use Autoresponders

What About You?

How do you build relationships via email? What have you learned along the way?

Share your thoughts below!

Author: Justin Premick, AWeber

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8 Email Deliverability Best Practices

Dawson Barber — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:08:49 +0000

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that he or she is, indeed, the same person who owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in, ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw-away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%.

If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL
Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send Spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:
Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam-like.

Images:
Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open-rate-tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open-rate-tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:
With viruses running rampant and spreading through the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all.

Several reputation services are:

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered, each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Author: Tom Kulzer, CEO AWeber

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