Every marketing email must answer four questions instantly

Posted on January 21, 2013 by | 5 Comments


… if any of these questions remains unanswered, or if the tought sequence is ansticipated wrongly, recipients could break off their silent dialog with the sender at once. It’s also important that they can find answers immdediately during the orientation phase. It usually lasts no longer than three to five seconds according to neuroscience. That’s just as much as a single breath of air, so there is little time to convince. A good friendly name, subject line, pre-header, and preview pane area can make the difference.

I suggest you to perform a quick FiveSecondTest.com. (I love this service.) You will see, how difficult it really is, to provide the answers:
>>Do the 5-second-test <<

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#EmailRocks – 41 years old, 2.2 billion users worldwide, and growing!

Posted on January 18, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Two days ago, Pingdom published their latest “Internet in numbers” end-of-year review. It contains some very interesting facts & figures – lead by email: Continue reading →

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Outperforming your industry? Check out new email benchmark data from MailChimp

Posted on January 8, 2013 by | 3 Comments

Are you looking for your industry averages? Then have a look at MailChimp’s Email Marketing Benchmarks. They just updated their data.

The company is probably one of the most popular email service providers, serving more than two million users which range from startups to Fortune 500 companies. So the numbers are somewhat significant. A former study dates from 2010 – I mentioned it a while ago. The new one again pulls open rates, clicks, bounces, complaints, and unsubscribe rates. It includes 669 million sends, that’s 65,000 campaigns, which went at least to 1000 subscribers each.

However, if the table looks like a data cemetery to you, check out the following two figures. I condensed the numbers and put them into an interactive graph using the wonderful rgl. This way, you can better compare all the different industries.
Continue reading →

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Lead capturing with videos: two promising examples using Wistia

Posted on December 11, 2012 by | 5 Comments

The discussion on combining email with video normally focuses on how to play clips directly in newsletters. However, haven’t you ever wondered how you could use your video clips to build lists or capture leads more effectively? I just stumbled about “Wistia”. It seems to be a nice service for that purpose. They also offer a freemium plan: Upload up to three videos and use (most of) the features for free – forever. I couldn’t resist trying it… Continue reading →

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Two ways to embed dynamic countdowns in your newsletters

Posted on November 28, 2012 by | 6 Comments

I’m seeing more graphical countdowns in emails lately (e.g. TigerDirect’s Black Friday email). No wonder: They are great means to increase the pressure to act today, and not tomorrow (or never).

Marketers use such timers in flash sales and traditionally in their Christmas communication. Typically, around Christmas you see messages like “x days left until xmas” or “y days left until the last order date for punctual delivery”. On every email opening, the countdown image renders the actual time that is left until the offer runs out. Some images even come as animated gifs so that the user sees his time slipping away in realtime.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? So here are two ways, how you can incorporate such timers into your newsletters. Continue reading →

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Welcome to Absurdistan: Did a higher Regional Court just kill double opt-in in Germany?

Posted on November 21, 2012 by | 11 Comments

“There is the catastrophe: double opt-in legally inadmissible” (Dr. Schirmbacher), “one of the most serious und fatal failures of justice in the last 5 years” (Dr. Bahr). Those are just two out of many comments. In fact, I haven’t seen any positive ones among experts until now. And I don’t think there will be any.

What happened? Continue reading →

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358 symbols tested in subject lines – iPhone, Hotmail & more [incl. Cheat sheet]

Posted on November 19, 2012 by | 41 Comments

Many have been debating the use of symbols for months, now. To my knowledge however, one question remains: Which symbols are safe to use, and which ones trigger colorful emojis on iPhones/iPads and in Hotmail/Outlook.com? I put it to the test on emailmarketing.de last week. Here is a summary plus a little add-on. Continue reading →

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RFM for email senders – a step-by-step guide to a more strategic messaging approach

Posted on November 15, 2012 by | 3 Comments

RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value. It’s a simple and yet effective customer scoring algorithm that has been used for about a hundred years, now. Especially in catalogue marketing, because RFM saves costs: The method discriminates possible responders from non-responders before the send out. RFM scores correlate with the likelihoods of responding to the next offer.

Email marketers do also use RFM analysis. Less, to save costs (email is “for free”), but more to predict subscriber values and to: Continue reading →

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Multivariate tests in email marketing – a practical step-by-step guide to boost your response rates

Posted on October 10, 2012 by | 14 Comments

Multivariate testing is a bit underrated. Marketing weblogs mostly focus on A/B or A/B/n tests. Those are quickly set up. But they often provide only incremental gains. MVT are more promising with regards to the outcome. Let’s look at how they work. Continue reading →

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[Split-Test] Email signups doubled AND bounces reduced at the same time – see how

Posted on September 27, 2012 by | 10 Comments

I want to share some testing results with you. For a couple of weeks, I ran a split A/B/C/D test on this website. The goal was to see, if I could convert more visitors to email subscribers. “Which test won”… can you guess it? The results are quite interesting. Continue reading →

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