Learn How These 3 Businesses Get Their Emails Read

>If you aren't asking the question "How can I get more people to read my messages?" about your email marketing campaign, it's time to start thinking about it! Even if you're happy with your response rates, there is always room for improvement.

First off, it's important to think about what influences a subscriber's decision to read your message or not. Whether your end goal is a click or a sell, the subscriber won't be taking any action until they actually open your email.

We'll be looking at three different email newsletters that did a good job getting people to read the message, bringing in a unique open rate of over 50%, and then you can apply their strategies to your messages.

How the Messages Appear in an Inbox

These are what our examples look like in a GMail inbox:

These three businesses have some different and some similar methods for getting subscribers to read their messages. We're going to take a look at how they approach the subject line and how they make the from line something the subscriber will recognize:

• Lawrence Chan's Tofurious mentions a new product that the subscriber gets for opening the message.
• This type of approach is great if you have a free report to share, a sample page from a new report or ebook, if you have a coupons, or if you are promoting a new product.
• Lawrence takes a personal approach on his site by signing his blogs and including detailed personal information. People like to hear from people, and signing his emails with his name will carry over that personal touch.

• Gary Rosenzweig's Macmost has a different approach for their subject, and it's very straight-forward: it's the new MacMost newsletter and it even gives the issue number.
• This is good for businesses that send out newsletters that are meant to be more informative than promotional.
• Gary from MacMost doesn't have his name come up a lot on his site, so if he used his name in the from line then subscribers may not recognize who it's from. This is why it's good he used his company name.

• Frederick van Johnson's This Week in Photo uses the subject to pose a question. This can make the subscriber interested in knowing what the answer will be. Is it the end of medium format cameras? If so, why? They'll have to open the message to find out!
• Asking a question will make your subscriber curious, so try and find what question your message answers.
• Frederick has others contributing material on his site, so his name is not the only name there. Recognizing he name would depend on what pages the subscriber has seen on the site. His from line should be his company name since it's on all pages.

Branding In the Subject Line

You want to use your brand as much as possible so that when a subscriber looks at your message in their inbox they immediately know who you are and what to expect from you. All three businesses included their company name in the subject line. Might seem redundant, but it's working!

Other Tests for Increasing Opens

The best thing you can do is split test your broadcasts to find out what gets the best results. Besides what we talked about here, you many also want to consider:

• Time and day the message is being sent: There is no universally agreed upon day or time to send your message, so your best bet is test. For a look at your own stats, you can go to the Reports page and look at the "Opens over time" graphs.
• Snippets: certain email clients show a snippet of text from the beginning of your newsletter. You can use this to your advantage by putting catchy text at the top so they'll open it or mark it to read later.
• Preview panes: certain email clients will also show preview panes that displays part of the entire message. You can test this out by putting catchy text in the upper part of your email, or moving images around if it was initially top heavy with images, and see if this changes your open rates.

How Do You Get Subscribers to Read Your Messages?

Of course there are still even more factors that will determine whether or not your message gets reads. For example, setting expectations plays a big part in your ongoing subscriber response right.

So what do you do to ensure your subscribers keep coming back for more? Share your thoughts!

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Hat Tip To: Inbox Ideas

Create Surveys to Segment Your Subscribers: 5 Steps

It's every email marketer's challenge: creating just the kind of messages that subscribers will enjoy and respond to.

The straightforward solution is simply asking each subscriber what they'd like to receive.

Asking at sign up can make your form too long and off-putting. So ask for preferences in an email survey instead.

You've seen how surveys can help you deliver more targeted email campaigns, now here's a nuts-and-bolts look at how to set it up.

Free Downloadable Email Marketing Guides for Your Industry

New email marketers need direction. And maybe a friendly voice to guide them.

That's why you can download the Getting Started Guide (pdf), and why Jay will talk you through campaign basics in the How To Get Started webinar.

But so far, you've been on your own for the next step: figuring out how to adjust those directions for your specific business.

We want to help. So we wrote up some guides to email marketing for a few different industries. And yes, they're free.

AWeber’s API and Forms on Facebook

A few months ago, we made a post announcing our API and Wordpress app. Last week, we put the spotlight on Unbounce and the app they created to work with our service.

Our API is continuing to evolve, and the number of apps that are available to AWeber users is growing. This week, we'd like to take a moment to highlight several new apps designed to make using AWeber with other services even easier.

Most recently, we're thrilled to announce the AWeber Facebook app!

Magically Change Your Email Post-Send

When you send out your marketing emails, you probably have some hopes for response. You may also have a few thin-lipped expectations. And there's always that fond dream of your content going viral.

All of which means you probably use the urgency tactic once in awhile. You know, the "six hours only!!" sale or the announcement of "just three copies left!!"

And this can certainly work. But if anyone opens your message too late, it thuds like a drop in a hollow bucket. Worse, if they try to click through to purchase, they could be cranky when they realize they're too late.

What if you could magically make the email content adjust itself to the situation so when latecomers open it after the fact, they see a completely different message?

The "Oops! It's Over" Announcement

First of all, keeping your message current like this is just good customer service.

Secondly, it shows you're on top of things, which can only benefit your reputation.

And finally, it shows that the urgency of your offer is for real - if subscribers want your deals, they'd better open faster next time.

If you're a product shown in your email sells out, create an image that reflects this and swap it with the previous image. Like in this email from women's retailer Chadwick's.

or

When your sale is over, replace your sale announcement with a notice that they missed it, but you'll have others soon! And in the meantime, give them something else to do, like Home Depot did in this email.

And you don't have to be a giant chain store to do it...you can just be one guy in front of a computer, or the tiny cafe down the street. It just requi

res?

Swapping Out An Image

You can update any information in your email, as long as it's in the form of an image.

Why? Because images don't actually live in your message. They live on the web page you uploaded them to.

Think of that page's URL as the image's address. When someone opens your email, it displays whatever image it finds at that URL. So all you need to do to update your email post-send is change the image that lives on that URL.

To make the magic happen, you'll need to be hosting your images on your own site manually, or via a content management software like WordPress. (This doesn't work on public image hosting sites.)

If You Host Images Manually

This is an easy fix: after the sale or other event is over, use your FTP client or other file management software to upload the new image.

The advantage to this method is that you have complete control over the file's URL; the catch is that it does require you to be familiar with using an FTP client or other file management soft

ware.

If you're not familiar with FTP, here's an article and a video on using it.

Here are a couple of FTP clients that you can use for this:

• FireFTP (a plugin for the Firefox browser that works on Windows or Mac)
• Cyberduck (software for Mac or PC)

If you don't want to manage the file upload yourself, have a developer handle it for you, or try using a content management system like WordPress.

If You Use WordPress

Note: before you use WordPress to manage this, check to see if you're organizing your uploads into folders based on the year and month you upload them. You can do this at the "Settings" > "Media" page in your WordPress admin area. If you are doing so, it may be better to not use WordPress for this, because in some cases you won't be able to overwrite the original image properly from within WordPress.

1. Upload your original image into your media gallery. Use the URL assigned to that image to place it in your email, as usual.
2. When your sale is over or your product sold out, prepare for the switch. Important: give the replacement image (the one that says "sold out!" or something similar) the same name as the original.
3. In your media gallery, delete the original image. Immediately upload the new image with the same name. Now when someone opens your email, it will follow the URL you've put into place and display the updated image.

Something to Consider

Remember, this method is only good for images. But if you make the entire email one big image, it might trip a spam filter. So only use images for the parts you'll want to update later.

Just make sure the rest of your email looks good around both the original content and the update, and you're good to go!

What Else Could You Swap?

Once you get this process down, you can get creative with how you use it. Announce the end of sales and sold out products. Change your price if something's not selling (or selling too much at too low a price!)

Would you ever make these updates by swapping out the images? What other changes might you make?

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Hat Tip To: Inbox Ideas

Core Values: Our Blueprint for Success

Since Sean last posted about our Core Values on AWeber's ten year anniversary, a lot has changed.

Among other things, we moved into a brand new office, hired even more talented individuals, focused on giving back and worked hard to foster a sense of true community at work through various events and opportunities for recognition of jobs well done.

Yet even though AWeber is constantly evolving, one thing remains the same: our Core Values define the AWeber family. Only they've changed a little too, so we want to share them with you and give AWeber employees the chance to explain why they really sum up what makes AWeber an awesome place to work.

Images Disabled? No Problem!

We've all experienced it at some point or another. That moment when we casually open our inbox, click on an interesting subject line, then poof - there's nothing there but some illegible text and tiny outlines of where shiny pictures should be.

This is an instant turn-off, regardless of whether it's as simple as clicking one button to enable images for the message. It's a hassle; a helpful decision maker for a subscriber on the fence as to whether or not they care to remain on your email list.

If you're wondering how many subscribers stand to see your blank, poorly formatted message, you'll be surprised to learn that MarketingSherpa found only 33% of those surveyed have images turned on by default in their email client. That means 67% are likely to see the mess of text and boxes you thought only a handful might see.

Here are some tips for creating messages that perform well with or without images enabled.