Archive for the ‘How to’ Category

How to combine and empower twitter with email marketing

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

During the last couple of moths it looks like in every conversation that involves internet, marketing or both, there is always a common denominator, something everybody is talking about, that has become the hottest thing: twitter. It is almost impossible that a day passes without me reading a story or post talking about a new feature of twitter, new desktop application for twitter, a new iPhone app for twitter, some curious story about twitter, etc.

For me, twitter is a new way of communication, therefore, a new marketing channel through which I can engage with my customers and give them extra value. The fact that is new doesn’t mean that it replaces established marketing channels. That is the reason I wanted to write this post, and explain different ways to combine twitter and email marketing, and how they are more powerful together:

1. Add a link to your company twitter account in every email communication

Add a link in the footer of your newsletter or autorresponder to let your subscribers know that they can follow your company in twitter. You can also add a link to your company twitter account in your signature for transactional emails.

2. Link to your newsletter subscription landing page from your twitter account

It is also important that all your twitter followers know that they can subscribe to your newsletter to receive more quality content from you. So, from time to time, add links to your newsletter subscription form landing page. This way you are converting your twitter followers in your opted-in email subscribers.

3. Post links to your newsletter articles in twitter

Instead of only including one twtit that says: “Check out the latest newsletter”, try to send links to the individual articles of your newsletter over a period of time (a week for example). With a tool like Hootsuite you can schedule all the twits in advanced. This way you give more importance to each article.

4. Add a link in your newsletter articles so that your subscribers can easily “tweet” about them

The same way is important that you add a link in your newsletter to make easy for your readers to forward your message and increase virality, you should add a link that makes easy to your subscribers to twit about the articles in your newsletter. You just have to add a link like this one http://twitter.com/home?status=, and after the “=” you write your under 140 characters message. For example: http://twitter.com/home?status=How to combine and empower twitter with email marketing  http://ow.ly/5nOJ

5. Use twitter as a source of information to write better articles in your newsletter

Twitter is a great way to know in real time what your clients or subscribers think about your product or service, and also a channel to solve different problems and questions. Use this information to write articles in your newsletter with better information to solve those problems and questions and therefore giving more value to your subscribers with your newsletter.

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Posted in How to, Newsletter, email marketing, social media | 1 Comment »

How to improve your subject lines for email marketing campaigns

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Everyday you receive a lot of emails that we don’t care about or even that are spam. That is the reason why you usually don’t read every email you get, and the reason why you delete most of them without even open them or you mark them as spam. The only information you have to decide it, are the sender and the subject line, which shows us the importance of these two elements in the success of an email marketing campaign.

Your subscribers will look at the “Form” field when they receive the campaign or newsletter to be sure they recognize the sender name or email address, and only if they recognize it they open the email. That is why I recommend you to use the name of the company as the sender of the campaign, or a very well known person in the company, whose name will be recognizable by all of your subscribers.

I think that a good strategy to write the subject line of your campaign or newsletter is keeping one part consistent in every email and  a variable part that changes every campaign. This way your subscribers will recognize your newsletter, and at the same time get a little taste of what they will find in the content.

Here you have some examples of bad subject lines:

  • This is the permission based Email Marketing Monthly Newsletter for May, 1 2009 by Pixelnews

This subject line is very long. My recommendation is to keep the subject line between 20 and 50 characters. This one above has 80 characters and most of the email clients will cut it off and the chances of getting blocked as spam by the filters are higher.

  • (COMPANY NAME)’S NEWSLETTER FOR MAY 2009

In this case the subject is in all caps, which increases the chances of getting blocked as spam by the filters.

  • Cooking tips

This subject gives too little information about the content

  • Special offer – save 80$ buying now!!!

This subject line contains both exclamation points and a dollar sign ($), which also increases the chances of been blocked as Spam. If the message gets through, it is also very probable that the subscriber consider it as Spam anyways.

Here you have a revised version of the subject lines analyzed before:

  • Permission based Email Marketing Newsletter for May
  • (Company Name)’s Newsletter for May 2009
  • Monthly cooking tips – How to bake the best Brownie
  • Special offer – 20% off today

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Posted in How to, Newsletter, Subject Lines, email marketing | 3 Comments »

How to build a successful newsletter

Friday, February 27th, 2009

In the last post I gave you 5 reasons to start building a newsletter. As a continuation of that post, now, I’m going to give you the basic points to make your newsletter a successful one:

Define your goals

The first and most important thing to do before you start the newsletter is setting up your goals for the newsletter. The rest flows from this. What do you want to achieve with your newsletter?

  • Drive traffic to your web or blog?
  • Create a community among your readers?
  • Build a list to “sell” to?
  • Create brand equity?
  • Make money through advertising?

The content of the newsletter will vary depending on your goal. If you want to develop a community, you should provide some special and exclusive content to your subscribers, different from the content you publish in your blog, to make them fell special and showing them that been part of your newsletter gives them some extra value. I just want to increase the traffic of our blog, knowing that most of our readers don’t know about rss feeds, send a summary of your posts of the month.

Make clear what the newsletter is about

It is important to make very clear to the subscribers what is your newsletter about, in order to create the right expectations about what they are going to receive. If your newsletter is a summary of your blog posts, don’t be afraid and say it clearly. It is better to have less subscribers that now exactly the information they are going to get,. This is not a game of quantity of contacts, it is a game of quality of contacts.

Always use double opt-in subscription

It is very important that once you have started your newsletter, you use the double opt-in subscription technique to gather new subscribers. This way the subscribers have to confirm the subscription from an email sent to them, increasing the quality of the contacts of your list. Once again, you could get less contacts but higher quality contacts.

Add Value

The people wont stay subscribed to the newsletter if they don’t find any value or any need met. You can add this kind of value with exclusive content that you don’t publish in your blog, special offers and discounts only to your newsletter subscribers, and a lot of other ways depending on your audience.

Work your subject line

The subject line of your newsletter is the first thing that your subscribers will see, and in most of the cases what will make your subscriber open or not open your newsletter. We recommend:

  • Not very long. Try to keep it between 20 and 50 characters.
  • Never use all Caps. It will look spammy
  • Give information about what the newsletter is about
  • Never use multiple exclamation symbols !!!! or $$$

Track and analyze the results

Using a tool like Pixelnews will make very easy to get a lot of information about how your subscriber interact with your newsletters. Knowing who is opening your newsletter will allow you to test different subject lines with the subscribers that are not opening. Tracking the links in your newsletter will tell you which are the topics that interest the most to your readers and to which readers, helping you to segment your list, and sending more targeted and personalized messages the next time.

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Posted in How to, Newsletter, email marketing | 1 Comment »