Amidst all the blather about blogs, there’s one e-marketing phenomenon that isn’t dead yet. Yup, it’s e-newsletters. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has just revisited a study he did two years ago and has this to say:
“The average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds. “Reading” is not even the right word, since participants fully read only 19% of newsletters.”
- Jakob Nielsen
Ouch. So how do you make your e-newsletter stand out and become a must-read for your audience? Great content, appealing design, the right frequency, etc. There are lots of moving parts. Take a look at my award-winning E-newsletter Starter Kit for dozens of specific tips.
It’s a 149-page guide packed with screenshots and examples. It’s still one of the best-selling items in my store. Download it instantly as a PDF or order it as a binder with accompanying Audio CD and CD-ROM.
See today’s issue of WordBiz Report, the first in a series of 5 Key Tips for corporate bloggers.
Hint: it’s not about your widgets
Unless you’re GM and sell cars, your widgets themselves are rarely a good topic for your blog.
* * * * 4 star review
Email marketing may be out of fashion with all the talk of RSS, IMing and text messaging, but it’s as powerful and effective as ever. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there are dozens of variables to consider now that email is a mature marketing technique.
So where do you start? With MarketingSherpa’s 2006 Email Marketing Guide, of course. This is a chart and stat-filled reference from which you can glean dozens of insights. More importantly, you can create an immediate To Do list to improve your results.
Why only four stars?
It’s almost too much to digest. The guide weighs in at 282 pages and includes 310 charts and maps. It’s based on data contributed by 1,927 email marketers as well as 25 additional studies. That said, this is a hugely useful guide. I recommend it highly.
Extracting 5 keys to success
1. Your most important metrics
2. What to test
3. Growing your list
4. Design & usability tips
5. Beyond email: what you need to know
Continue reading “5 keys to effective email marketing in 2006″
Great article by MarketingSherpa’s Anne Holland on why “exact verbiage” is so important online. I.e. the specific words you use on landing pages, in text ads, on your site, on (yes) your blog…
You need to be aware of what keyword phrases your customers search on. That translates into how you’ll be found in the search engines. And you need to be absolutely consistent in your use of words and phrases in order to get higher response rates (more click-throughs) from online readers.
People like consistency. Sounds boring. But it’s not. When the title of your sponsor text ad matches the headline on your landing page, visitors know they’re in the right place… and what to do next. Click & buy.
Cool… my article from six months ago is currently the “hottest” (i.e. most popular) article in today’s special year-end issue of MarketingProfs.com. I’m a huge fan of MProfs. If you’re not already a subscriber to their e-newsletter, I highly recommend it. Go here to sign up.
Useful article in MarketingSherpa about how to get the most out of the “Welcome” letter that your e-newsletter mailing service generates (or should be generating). Yes, it’s true. Your “Welcome” email to your new subscribers will most likely get the highest open rate of any message you ever send. Best practices for Welcome messages include: linking to your most recent issue, linking to a “complimentary” white paper, offering a $$-off discount coupon and beginning a sequence of email messages that build upon one another (aka an autoresponder series). You can download samples of the Welcome messages described. And here’s a 12-page how-to PDF on email autoresponders. (Note: free access to this article and, I assume, related links until Dec. 19th.)
These 5 tips are in this week’s issue of WordBiz Report. I wrote them with e-newsletters in mind. And they originally appeared in my column for Crain’s BtoB E-mail Marketer Insight. But they apply just as well to “what to blog about” this time of year. David Pankhurst picked up on the idea with a blog post titled Top 5 for 2005: What’s in Store for Blogging. Hey Dave, don’t forget…
Continue reading “Top 5 holiday publishing tips for your e-newsletter… or blog”
Here’s a great tip from Christoper Knight of Ezine-Tips on how to get maximum ROI out of the Welcome message you (should) send to new subscribers to your e-newsletter or ezine. He readily admits that it’s obvious: introduce yourself to your readers and then ask them to respond (by hitting Reply) to tell you a bit more about themselves. 42% of his new subscribers are writing him short notes, he says, to introduce themselves and say hi. Not bad for a quick route to the personal connection you’d like to make with each new prospect, huh?! (I’m going to add this to the WordBiz Report Welcome message.)
Chris Knight of Ezine-Tips is offering a free download of what he calls his “Top (70) One-Liners For Improving Your Email Deliverability.” They’re pretty straightforward but useful nonetheless. I don’t agree with every one of them. #37 is to publish “only” in ASCII plain text. Then he amends that in #38: if you publish in HTML keep the file size below 20K. 25K is a more reasonable number. He plans to sell this little PDF report for USD $47 beginning Nov. 16th. So hurry on over if you want to get it free. Sorry, as of Oct. 18th the PDF is no longer available free. The 70 tips are really a bribe to…
Continue reading “Chris Knight’s top 70 ways to improve email deliverability”
Looking for articles you can reprint in your e-newsletter or ezine? Ezine-Tips has cleverly created an articles archive by inviting writers to submit articles on a range of B2C and B2B topics. You can submit articles free until 9 AM Central Sept. 1, 2004. Browse EzineArticles.com.
Recent Comments