Back when I was editing a B2B magazine I had a publisher tell me that one reason print wasn’t threatened by digital media was the fact that you couldn’t read an email in the washroom. I replied that wasn’t true if you had a laptop!

I can still see the befuddled look on his face as he considered the possibility of taking one’s computer (no matter how portable) into the bathroom. I can’t help but wonder how he feels today considering the popularity of tablets and their enhanced portability.

Email goes where we go

Recently George Bilbrey of Return Path, collected some interesting stats about email and compiled them into a post.  Among the more fascinating facts was that according to one study, 59% of people have checked email while in the bathroom. As George pointed out, this may explain why half of all water damage to cell phones results from them being dropped in the toilet.

From churches to our kid’s Christmas recital, we sneak peeks at our smartphones to access information or find a momentary distraction.There seems to be no place or situation where people won’t at least attempt to use them.

168 million emails sent in 60 seconds

A primary delivery channel providing that information we sometimes seek surreptitiously is email. Consider that in just 60 seconds 168 million emails are sent! That according to a post at Business Insider is 240 times the number of Facebook updates in the same minute.

Even if you allow for a percentage of that to be spam, that still sets email above all other channels for digital communication today. It’s that important to us and we are that connected with it.

Smartphones are not going to weaken that connection. On the contrary, they will strengthen the relationship we have with email. Technology gave smartphones brains, but email gave them something to think about. Email has made them the kind of devices many of us can no longer live without.

Email interactions are changing

How people interact with email is changing and how you reach out to them must evolve as well. You not only have to consider what device they may be using, but you also have to think how that device changes the ways people interact with email. Now your messages have to be even more relevant by being better timed to catch people not only at the right time, but in the right place.

As people become more mobile, there are more factors to consider when crafting and delivering your message. It’s no longer just day of week or even time of day. It’s also about what people may be doing on that day or at that time.

Moving forward, email marketers must test every aspect of their email marketing campaigns on a regular basis and must be willing to try new approaches.

Get smart with GetResponse Email Intelligence

This is why GetResponse has developed Email Intelligence – so that you can optimize your campaigns, make them more effective and reap a better ROI.

Even without factoring in the smartphone, to stand out in a crowded email inbox, you have to have the kind of intelligence which allows you to optimize your email marketing to provide people the most relevant and engaging content possible. You just can’t afford to make educated guesses.

What are you doing to challenge assumptions?

Assumptions such as that one my former publisher was willing to make about email are becoming more and more deadly as the inbox becomes more of a moving target.

What are you doing in your organization to challenge assumptions and serve your subscribers with more relevant and engaging content? Tell us how you are putting our new Email Intelligence tool to work for your success!

Email on the Move is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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According to a new report by Return Path (reported at eMarketer.com) webmail still leads the pack when it comes to how people access their email. The data puts webmail in the lead with 44%, followed by desktop email at 33% with 23% for mobile email access.

Return Path analyzed email data from April to September 2011 and found that mobile email views were up a healthy 34% from their study last year. Webmail was down by 11% and desktop clients dropped by 9.5%. But it’s not smartphones that seemingly took the biggest bite here, it was the iPad. Tablet usage leapt up by 73% for the April to September time period.

There’s more than one factor which influences how people will access their email and that’s why you should be testing constantly so you can optimize your email marketing campaigns. That’s why we released our new integrated email analytics tool.

Factors such as time of day and day of week influence where consumers will read their email. On weekdays, desktops provide the majority of email usage, but interestingly, the mobile views go up on weekends. The tendency to see smartphones as primarily a tool for business is changing. Unless you spend a lot of time on the road or traveling, at work you are probably more likely to view email on your desktop. On the weekend you may be highly mobile, but even if you aren’t, if you have a smartphone, reading your email on the patio, enjoying a little sunshine is very appealing.

So what does all this mean? It means that in today’s changing marketing reality, marketers must test every aspect of their campaigns in order to deliver the best possible experience to their customers. That’s why GetResponse is developing integrated analytical and testing tools such as our new free Inbox Preview tool, so you can:

• Send newsletters that look great in 20 major email clients
• Get to know your subscribers better
• Be more relevant
• Be more engaging
• Be more successful

Oh, and we also created a really cool iPhone app because we understand email marketers like to hang out on the patio too.

How are People Viewing Email Today? is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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One look at my inbox proves one undeniable truth: Christmas is coming! And since we’re all busy with hectic preparations, it’s the perfect time to review this year’s Christmas hits and flops and provide a handful of last-minute tips and ideas (also useful for preparing your next year winter campaign).

1. The sooner, the better?

For some, Christmas season starts before Thanksgiving.

If you don’t like such early mentions of Christmas, there are other ways to mark the opening of the season. Why not schedule a drip campaign that starts on Black Friday (or Cyber Monday) and guide your subscribers with consistent offers and creatives throughout December? Make this your hallmark, for emails that are memorable, recognizable and eagerly anticipated.

2. 100 days of Christmas?

A countdown to Christmas is the perfect way to keep your customers engaged. What’s more – a carefully designed follow-up campaign can help you take pressure off the hottest period, closest to Christmas. Just don’t overdo it. The ultimate number of days? Keep it low: 12 is a nice, traditional number. That way, they don’t get bored halfway through.

My pick is the 12 days of Christmas by ModCloth, who make every day look special and carefully planned.

3. What you give is what you get.

Can you imagine a Christmas offer without a discount, freebie, incentive, free shipping, or special packaging? Incentives are an absolute essential, and a failure to make your email offers truly special could distinguish you in a negative way. Leave xx% off subject lines for your January sales. During the Christmas season, offer gifts and extra help – a token of your gratitude and good will. Just to emphasize the spirit of these special days.

4. Come in handy.

Providing detailed information on shipping/mailing times and deadlines, longer opening hours, extended return policies and offering more support and savings throughout the hottest selling period will help you gain advantage over your competition.

And being the kindest, most helpful, and most professional service provider will enhance your brand reputation long after Christmas – like Brooks Brothers with their ultimate gift guide.

5. I’ll have what she’s having.

People love checking out the picks and preferences of others – especially if they’re hot, hip and famous. When you create a gift guide or bestsellers list, provide recommendations – “social proof” for the undecided. Whether from Facebook fans or top supermodels – recommendations are proof of good quality and taste, and encourage customers to make the same selections.

6. Go social.

Being by definition leisure time, Christmas is the perfect time for your brand to go viral: e.g. to collect fans and get more social buzz.

Provide content that’s attractive to share. Center your contests and events around Christmas – to inspire the spirit of connectedness, community and sharing, and to enable email-to-social integration.

7. Watch your language.

Try to sound kind and inviting. For a moment, replace aggressive CTAs such as Shop now, and Buy now with invitations that offer more than just value-for-money.

How about: Get Giving, Get Insipired, Make wishes come true, etc. Best subject-line keywords for Christmas 2011: perfect gift, gift under, gift list, and gift guide. Surprisingly, the least popular themes are: Santa, Christmas, celebration; perhaps they sound a bit cliché. Christmas templates and creatives are more tasteful and unpretentious this year… for the most part. My suggestion: unless you’re Victoria’s Secret – avoid a motif of a half-naked Santa’s little helper. After all, kids might be watching:)

8. Help them do good.

Offer people an effortless way to join a charitable effort. It can enhance your brand image as a socially responsible company, stimulate social buzz and increase your ROI – such a little thing that can do so much.

9. Provide more than value-for-money.

Use the holiday season to build relationships and strengthen brand image. Aside from standard Christmas super-offers, it’s worthwhile to send Christmas wishes and e-cards, just to emphasize how much you value your customers.

It gives you no immediate ROI but certainly will pay off throughout the coming year.

10. It’s never too late.

If you get an order on Friday, you won’t be able to ship it to arrive in time for Christmas. But you can prepare special offers of downloadable and digital products and services for last-minute shoppers: printable gift vouchers, e-books, online memberships and subscriptions. Then simply remind people that there’s at least one more name not yet crossed off their shopping list.

More ideas for amazing campaigns.

To make your Christmas campaign really amazing, you can mix and match ideas and creatives. Get even more tips from other GetResponse authors. One helpful suggestion is to stick to the rule: less is more. It always works, even during the Christmas season.

And since tips from actual email marketing practitioners always work best, we’re curious to know: What are your tried-and-true Christmas strategies?

10 Power Tips For The Holiday Season is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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The evolution of the Internet is an ongoing process. Every year new trends emerge while others decline in strength. This year was no different. And since December is time for revisions and predictions, we’d like to analyze and review some of the most important ones.

Today we’re taking a closer look at the GlobalWebIndex report Wave 5 Trends, which summarizes the most important trends in the social media development, and at how they can be applied in email marketing.

1.    From prosumer to consumer

Facts:

• The growing use of micro-blogging and social networking has shifted the focus from creating valuable content to retransmitting it.
• The average user’s activities focus on consuming and redistributing.
• A huge share of what’s being shared and forwarded is professionally created content (video clips, films, TV shows, games, links etc).

Challenge:

Consumers expect brands to provide content that increases their knowledge about specific areas and is easy and exciting to share. A brands’ role will evolve from being a distributor of services and products to being a provider of content of genuine value, as this will become the best brand promotion tool.

Opportunity:

• Content remains the king. So start building your content strategies and invest in creating professional, highly relevant content that’s useful and fun to share.
• The future belongs to rich-content multimedia newsletter formats, such as video email marketing. Start using cost-effective tools such as GetResponse Multimedia Studio and Image Gallery to improve the impact of your emails (and brand.)

2.    A shift in the social media balance of power

Facts:

• LinkedIn advances to become the second-highest social power in the world after Facebook (excluding Asian neworks).
• Micro-blogging and social networking discourse limitations encourage compact and laconic but frequent updates of brand communications.

Challenge:

Brands will need to look for engaged recipients in their industry-related circles and address those narrow markets with customized offers. Staying close to recipients will require real-time responses and reactions and constant monitoring of the information flow.

Opportunity:

• Automating updates and the flow of information will help save time and money. Tools such as automatic RSS feeds for blogs and newsletter updates at FB and Twitter are a must.
• Integration with various contact databases (such as social media and CRM platforms) will facilitate the import of contacts, and source-based segmentation and can increase the quality of your contact list.

3.    Social brand

Facts:

• Impact on brands responding to actual needs that consumers express in one-to-one discourse increases.
• The consumers look amongst fellow users on micro-blogs, forums, viral content, etc. for feedback and opinions on products and services.

Challenge:

 Consumers are not bothered by engaging with brands in two-way conversations. What they want is simply to be listened to when they feel it necessary to express their opinions.

Opportunities:

• Enable the feedback option in your email; monitor and respond to it.
• Listen to what your customers have to say via social networks and community forums.
• People love complaining to the public, so stay alert, as it’s the negative feedback that creates the most buzz. Respond to it and provide immediate compensation to control the damage it can do.

4.    Mobile revolution

Facts:

• Mobile Internet usage is growing globally. It is predicted that, a year from now, the number of mobile device users will equal the number of PC/laptop users.
• The Internet has become an integral part of people’s lives, due to the fact that it is available anywhere, anytime.

Challenge:

Mobile screens impose limitations on content; therefore they are used predominately for practical purposes. People search for relevant information on the spot or want to save time managing their business activities while they’re on the go. This stimulates faster email consumption and immediate decisions.

Opportunity:

• To win customers, brands will need a multi-platform strategy: website, mobile site and applications.
• Mobile newsletters, adjusted to the limitations of the phone screen, will get immediate attention. Their content will need to be practical, and “phone-handy”: offer apps, downloads for mobiles, location directions, Vcards, event alerts, etc.
• The golden rule – less is more – will dominate the newsletter creation processes.

5.    Global network of local network

Facts:

Despite the predicted unification of the online environment, the Internet instead stimulates cultural fragmentation and divergence of online attitudes and behaviors across the world. Different groups use the Internet for different activities and in different ways. Some examples:

• Some markets (e.g. Brazil, Turkey) are experiencing peak engagement in social commerce markets; in others, such as Germany, participation in social networks is still mostly passive.
• The older generation is less likely to pay for content and shop online.
• For young adults, the Internet (not TV) is the first source of news.

Challenge:

The batch-and-blast strategy is slowly fading into history. Segmentation will have to reflect online attitudes. Target groups will be defined based on a growing number of conditions.

Opportunity:

Email marketing solutions with integrated, advanced segmentation options will raise the bar. The more segmentation models you can apply in your email marketing, the better:

• Start your adventure with custom fields
• Stay tuned for action-based campaigns
• Use the subscription origin and time field as a criterion for gauging loyalty and engagement
• Don’t give up on groups that are reluctant to buy online; integrate your newsletters with offline offers (coupons redeemed in-store, event updates and alerts, etc.)
• Don’t rely on your intuition – get detailed stats and use one-click segmentation to reward or encourage engagement

The Internet is a constantly evolving structure. For email marketers, every trend fluctuation should be an opportunity, not a threat. Anticipate and stay ahead of the emerging tendencies and you’ll always be on the right track.

We’re curious to know which trends are the most significant and influential for you. Share your opinion, and be the email marketing trend setter.

Internet Trends: “Wave 5” Research on 27 Markets is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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Even if a PC is a shared device, it’s not often that you have a whole group of people crowded around it all reading email at one time. After all, PC stands for “Personal Computer” and even in an office environment, most people consider their desktop to be personal space. Try reading over someone’s shoulder sometime if you don’t believe me.

Even though the perception of personal space is often influenced heavily by culture, I would argue that most people are naturally very territorial about their desktop and by association, their inbox. As well, I think I can make the argument that in most cultures where people can afford their own PC, that perception of a personal space boundary is reasonably consistent.

I often compare the inbox to the front door of a person’s home. Not everyone in the email marketing business agrees completely with this analogy, but I think at the very least we would all do well to keep it in mind. No one likes to have a salesperson show up at their home and knock on their door during dinner to sell them aluminum siding. People don’t appreciate having their personal territory and privacy encroached on by salespeople who are uninvited.

Just as with someone’s front door, email marketing professionals must respect the personal space of the inbox and demonstrate that with permission based marketing which is relevant, engaging and timely. Knocking on someone’s front door at the wrong time or with an offer which is not relevant to the person’s needs assures you will not make a sale and may result in the door being slammed on your foot (spam button clicked). Permission based email marketing means you have an invitation and will not have a door slammed on you.

Smartphones take this personal space perception to all new levels. While some surveys have found that people are more likely to open an email marketing message on their smartphone, how the device is employed makes it even more personal than a desktop computer. The very fact that these devices travel with us make them that much more a part of our personal lives. The smartphone is not just our communicator, but also our tool for documenting our lives, connecting with our friends and family and our personal information resource.

The coming of the smartphone means subscribers will become more and more demanding of email marketers where timing and relevance are concerned. That timing margin of error will become much smaller – don’t send me an email to my phone about a breakfast special at lunch.

While we are on the subject of smartphones, have you downloaded our new iPhone app? Get the details here!

Respecting the inbox is as important as respecting a person’s property and front door. Don’t go where you are not invited and you’ll get warmer welcomes.

Thoughts?

Email Marketing Inbox R-E-S-P-E-C-T is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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Knowing your open and click rates can give you valuable insights into your subscribers’ genuine interests and needs. But it simply isn’t enough. You need to know whether (and how many) subscribers actually completed the purchase. The real “must have” tool for measuring email effectiveness and ROI is the conversion tracking tool now available in your GetResponse Analytics panel.

How to measure conversions

Conversions can only be measured if you track the page that loads automatically after the goal action is performed. Typically, it can be any type of confirmation screen, such as a “Thank you” page.

That’s why, (learning from the experience of our most successful users) we’ve decided to equip our new version of Email Analytics with a tool that automatically measures whether and how many of your emails reach their goals.

To gain a completely new type of insight, simply follow our guidelines to set up goal tracking, now available from the Email Analytics panel.

How to set up tracking

Go to Goals: Manage Goals, and find out how quickly you can set up new goals and watch your ROI grow.

1. First create a profile for your website.

Generate a tracking code and paste it onto every page you want to track. Alternatively, click the link just below the code box to email the code to your webmaster.

Once your code status is authorized you can start creating new goals.

2. Now define goals for your campaigns

• Go to Goals: Manage Goals again, and enter the domain’s profile name that you’ve just created. This is where you define parameters for your conversion goals.

• Activate your goal by clicking the Goal Status switch to On. Decide whether you require exact match or head URL match, (see the pop-up help screen if you don’t know the difference) and type the URL of the site confirmation page you want to track.
• Specify the exact value of reaching the goal, e.g. $50, (but leave out the currency symbol).
• Don’t forget to click the Save Goal button
• For each website profile, you can create multiple goals to track various customer actions, e.g. a separate goal for each product.
• eCommerce sites and more advanced users can benefit from the multiple goal parameters section. (This is especially helpful for tracking multiple sales, but requires that your in-house programmers update and monitor the code.)

What can you measure?

What you decide to measure depends on what your needs are. The data produced can help you visualize the effectiveness of your emails, based on the goals you decide to track.

Picture the possible conversion paths and verify whether your scenarios are possible by defining your goals and checking the results. Adjust your campaigns to extend your reach, minimize conversion time, and calculate real email ROI:

• Measure particular page views, downloads, signups, orders and sales generated by your email campaign.
• Find out the number of products sold, profit margin, discount values, abandoned sales ratio and many other stats.
• Segment your lists based on the conversion goals, e.g.: target only those that did not convert and send them a reminder; follow up with up-selling and cross-selling to those who convert, or add them to your loyalty program cycle.
• Compare clicks with conversions to check which links are the most effective and which are redundant.
• In advanced multiple-parameter scenarios, track the most valuable customers and their conversion paths. Calculate the shipping costs, redeemed discounts and coupons, and many other operations originated in your email link.

Greater campaign effectiveness

The list of ideas of what you can do with the goals tool is limited only by your imagination and your needs. But it definitely opens a completely new way to view your email campaigns and, finally, provides sound data to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns and … your job.

Don’t wait any longer, measure your email success and document the undeniable facts – on paper!

“Must Have” Tool for Measuring Real Email ROI! is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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Do you ever review the effectiveness of the email marketing strategies and routines that you apply? Do your campaigns deliver the maximum ROI and conversion rates? Or do you feel that, despite your efforts, there’s still some room for improvement?

Now we provide a tool you can use to check and analyze your email marketing strategies and have some fun at the same time.

GetResponse Tips Blog presents Email Marketing Success Tester – a “five-minute questionnaire” that checks your proficiency in the use of advanced email marketing techniques.

The 25 simple questions are a checklist of the top email marketing must-do’s, covering areas such as: list building and management, segmentation, newsletter optimization and deliverability.

Once you get your score, show it off on your FB wall and Twitter posts. Next, use our tips section to get advice on how to improve your email campaigns and sign up for more email marketing tips and resources.

The Success Tester is also a survey that allows us to collect information about the major challenges in email marketing and draw up a report about the implementation and effectiveness of the most important email marketing strategies.

We hope your feedback will be a great addition to our Success Tester and will further help you fine-tune your procedures.

So, get ready, test yourself and show off your results to your friends, colleagues and business connections. And then challenge them to do the same.

What’s Your Email Marketing Success Score? is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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We’re pleased to announce that, thanks to the combined efforts of our team members, we’ve just launched our own apps library: GetResponse App Center to consolidate information about all the applications, systems, platforms, and software that now can connect directly with our email marketing platform.

GetResponse motto is: create excellent products and then raise the bar. That’s why we constantly develop new solutions to optimize your email campaigns’ impact, improve your list building mechanisms and make contact management and marketing data analysis even easier.

And to make integration with other systems and accounts seamless, we’ve collected all the available GetResponse integrations and applications at our new site and continuously work to update it with new ones.

We’ve got it all!

We’ve already made it possible to integrate your account with the CRM and CMS platforms: SalesForce, Joomla! and WordPress.

We’ve also equipped you with tools that facilitate the flow of information between GR and e-commerce systems such as PayPal, 1ShoppingCart and osCommerce.

Integrations recently added to our List Booster will enable seamless import of contacts between GetResponse and your accounts at: Zendesk, Google Contacts and Docs, Plaxo and LinkedIn, all the major email clients such as Apple Mail, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird and the most important web-based email services, e.g. MSN, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.

We also offer multi-dimensional integration with various social networks including the leading Twitter and Facebook.

To enable you to track the online behavior of your subscribers, we’ve enabled full integration with Google Analytics.

GetResponse App Center puts together information for all available integrations and applications, along with corresponding learning resources and links.

And more new ones are coming soon…

Add an Integration

We value interaction and cooperation with our creative users and developers and are always happy to reward good ideas, so we’re open to comments and tips.

We’d like to know what other software you use to run your business and what other software integrations you would like to see. This can help us determine our future development priorities.

And if you are developing (or have developed) an app or an integration project involving our email marketing platform, please contact us, so we can help and even pay you! Your brand name and integration solution will be promoted on GetResponse App Center, so you can reach our enormous customer base.

If your objective is to extend your email marketing capabilities across other business platforms to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns, visit our new apps site now.

We look forward to your feedback and tips on other integrations you’d like to see.

GetResponse App Center Launched is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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The email inbox is a battlefield. Messages fight for our attention; only a few win. The rest fall victim to our impatience, annoyance or lack of interest when we click Bin or Spam. Even if we take prisoners (save emails for later) we usually let them die at the bottom of our inbox.

In email marketing, we use warfare terminology — campaign, strategy and tactics — for a reason. A successful email campaign needs to be planned like a battle campaign. It needs clear goals and objectives, a strategy, and resources. Otherwise, each newsletter becomes a shot in the dark, a shot that rarely hits its target.

A coherent email campaign program will help you:

• reach the right audience with the suitable offer and information
• avoid communication chaos and properly manage different types of communicates sent to your customers such as: notifications, sales offers, transactional letters, etc.
• measure and analyze results
• avoid making the same mistake twice
• define success factors for future implementation
• build a strong brand and win dedicated customers

If you still feel lost in the fog when it comes to your emailing policies, here’s a checklist of the essentials – 4 simple questions you need to answer before you can claim victory.

Why? Not just for the money

Email marketing’s ROI can be up to $41 for every buck you spend, so your motives are obvious. But, your campaign will give you no ROI whatsoever, if the sole reason is to make money.

If your messages arrive in my inbox looking like this:

…it’s unlikely to pique my interest and probably will become a casualty of my irritation.

To differentiate your brand in the ocean of services and products, you need to build relationships and create buzz for your brand. Let your objectives reach beyond making a sale.

Nevertheless, don’t let “building a brand” be a vague theory. Be concrete and set achievable goals. Do you want to:

• Increase site traffic?
• Foster brand loyalty?
• Build brand reputation?
• Create buzz?

You can do it all, just remember – one at a time.

An offer for everybody is an offer for nobody.

Who? Your subscriber is not an Everyman

Your list is made of various overlapping groups with different, sometimes contradictory needs. Realizing their expectations is the key to successful segmentation.

Here are a few subscriber variables that can help you determine who they are and what offers they’re likely to respond to:

• stage in the email cycle
• purchase history
• declared preferences
• subscription date and source (offline, blog form, FB form, import, etc.)
• social networks connections
• brand awareness/loyalty
• customer profile (B2B or B2C)
• demographics
• customer engagement

What? It’s all about being relevant

When you know your customer, it’s easier to decide what type of content they will respond to – so you can provide it.

Easier said than done. But certain message types, if managed properly, are proven winners:

• immediate welcome messages
• new product information
• special holiday deals
• premium offers for program participants
• thank-you emails
• customer appreciation offers
• loyalty programs
• up-sells and cross-sells
• educational/informative programs

“Email marketing campaign” doesn’t mean an occasional newsletter out of the blue. It means a coherent, logical combination of many email types. Your marketing should not stop at a completing a sale, or be reduced to the dull regularity of a monthly newsletter.

Define your objectives and understand your customers. This will help you create the perfect follow-up sequence, occasionally complemented with relevant add-ons such as seasonal offers, satisfaction surveys, etc.

How? Be consistent.

An email should have a very clear, practical purpose, with all its elements coordinated to achieve that purpose. Nothing can be accidental and everything should be tested.

That’s why you always need to consider:

Length

In email, less is more. People don’t scroll. Try to keep everything that’s important above the fold. Anything below is a waste of money – your money.

Timing

Your email needs to arrive at just the right time, to make the customer to want to open it. Don’t delay  for too long the action-based emails such as thank you messages, up-sells and cross-sells. Suppress lower-priority emails if they overlap, and don’t leave long gaps between emails. Never push it to extremes.

(4 messages in a single day)

(3 random messages in 5 months)

Subject line

Make it brief and gripping. Don’t raise expectations that you can’t meet. The newsletter content should reflect the subject line. I open, because I want to know more. If I have to scroll, or make guesses, I give it up instantly.

Call to action

An email needs a practical purpose, translated to a clear call to action that will be followed as a natural and logical consequence of opening the email. Which call to action do you think will work better?

An effective CTA should be snappy, clear and prominent, and offer more than a good deal. An aggressive, invisible, and verbose CTA has no power at all.

What’s next?

Your email campaign doesn’t stop at planning and implementing. It needs to include an analysis of results. Success means reaching your goals and being able to measure performance. This will allow you to define the success factors for future communications. Any worst-case scenarios can help you find the weak points and adjust your procedures.

So, how’s your email marketing program? Are you a true warlord, winning battles in every inbox?

We dare you! Plan, implement and analyze new strategies today and watch your results skyrocket.

And then share your success with us – leave your comments. We’re always interested in finding out how our tips are working for you.

Gear Up for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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Don’t you wish you could read minds?

If you could, you’d be able to craft the perfect offer for your customers. Their eyes would light up as soon as they saw it. They would immediately reach for their wallet.

Well, you can read minds . . . sort of.

Get Inside Your Customers’ Heads

Now is a perfect time to think deeply about what is happening in the lives of your customers: Vacations are ending, summer is drawing to a close, kids are going back to school, and parents are getting back into the groove of working life.

But dig deeper, with more fundamental questions. Who are your target customers? What do they want? More important, what do they need at this time of year?

Develop an in-depth profile of the kind of customer you serve best. Then gear all of your communications toward that specific customer profile. As you collect like-minded customers, they will be amazed at how much you know about them.

Get Your Mind Right

Once you have a detailed description of your perfect customer, it’s time to STOP thinking about what you want to sell them and START thinking about what they want to buy.

If you were your own customer, what is the one thing you’d like to buy? How can you ease their pain? How can you provide a little luxury to help brighten their outlook? Can you solve a problem for them? How can you make their lives just a little bit better in some way?

Ask for Opinions

Your best customers will enjoy being asked for their opinions. They may not be able to articulate exactly what they want, but their answers to surveys and opinion polls may prompt sales ideas.

The GetResponse survey tool makes it easy to set up surveys and fun to respond to them. By capturing bits of data about each customer, you’ll begin to understand them even better, so that you can address their needs more effectively.

Get Social

Too many marketers think of social media only as a way to broadcast. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are equally powerful for research.

Try the Advanced Search feature of Twitter. Enter keywords that are relevant to your business. Then scroll down to the box that reads “Question ?” and check the box beside it. The resulting query will lead you to online discussions about your industry that may help you uncover people with real issues you can solve.

Make Offers

Once you come up with a great idea, get it to your market as quickly as you can. Email marketing is the fastest, easiest, most cost-effective way to find out whether your idea is winner.

Invest a little time to learn all the features GetResponse includes to enhance your business image: hundreds of great-looking templates, all customizable with your favorite color combinations and choice of fonts, plus more than 1,000 free images from iStock.

Test Multiple Ideas

Did your mind-reading activities turn up more than one brilliant idea for offers? Great! Market segmenting tools can help you identify which customers would be most receptive to a particular offer.

Implement several of your ideas and monitor your test results closely. By sending highly-targeted offers, you demonstrate the scope of your business and your depth of expertise. You also build a history for next year, so you can repeat what works again and again.

Develop a Marketing Mindset

Great marketers know a great deal about their customers—their likes and dislikes, their preferences and buying habits, even how much they’re willing to spend. To those who are new to marketing, those experienced marketers appear to be mind readers.

Just remember, the truth is that successful marketers get most of their knowledge through trial and error. Before they were successful, they went through a period of time during which they were uncertain. They tested their ideas, tracked their results, and learned from their successes and failures.

In the process they became experts, not only in their products and services, but also in their knowing all about those in their target markets.

GetResponse is designed to give you the tools you need to be an expert marketer.

How about you? Can you read your customers’ minds? Sure you can—it just takes a little practice

Try it on me! What am I thinking right now?

That’s right! I’m thinking how nice it would be to hear from you. I’d love it if you’d leave a comment to let us know how you’re doing . . .

. . . and what you’re thinking

Mind Reading Tricks for Email Marketers is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse

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