Email Subject line Myths?
If that got you confused after having read all the usual posts on how email subject line is the most important thing in email marketing, then I can definitely relate to you.
“Email subject lines best practices”, is one of the most talked about topics in email marketing. In fact there is a lot that is said to rely on your email subject lines; open rates, engagement rates, ROI and what not.
It is hence that this post title caught my attention – “6 Shocking Myths about Subject Lines”. And in fact there were some myths that were busted in the post.
And hence that is where we are starting this weeks links roundup on Email Marketing.
Email Subject Line Myths, Some Analysis and Some Tools
What if you were told that your email subject line is not the only thing that impact open rates?
If I were you, I would be a little surprised. Because there is nothing else that a subscriber who receives an email from me, will see before he opens the email. Then what else could impact the open rates?
We will look at some simple analysis on how you could improve your open rates as well in a nicely detailed post from the Mailchimp team. And then we will close with a post that has a detailed review of almost all the email autoresponder companies.
Though we prefer and recommend Aweber as an autoresponder because we simply love them, we might want you to take a decision of your own depending upon a detailed review. And we felt, rather than writing a review of our own (which we might do some time later), why not let somebody who does it well, do the job for us.
6 Shocking Myths About Subject Lines
That was a shocking headline in itself, not just for me but for a lot of you as well. A Subject line is one of the most important aspect of an email. In fact the first thing that you would see when you receive an email is the email subject line.
Should you open the email or, not depends upon what is there in the email subject line. And we always thought that this was the sole factor that impacted email open rates, until we read this post.
There are many more such shocking myths that you will be able to read in this post at Litmus.
Subject lines are the most written about email marketing element-and they’re the most misunderstood as well. The internet is full of bad subject line advice that gets endlessly echoed until it has the ring of truth to it.
After reading this post you will agree to that part which says that the internet is full of bad email subject line advice. And to start of busting the myths, did you know that the sender name is a very important aspect that impacts the email open rates?
Or, so statistics say!
Subject lines seem like the equivalent of the headline for an ad. And David Ogilvy tells us, “Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
However, emails aren’t ads. They’re permission-based relationships. So who is sending the message will always be more important than what the subject line is. That’s why more people look at the sender name first when they receive an email.
Image Credit : litmus.com
The Value of a Resend Campaign, By the Numbers
How many times have you segmented your unopens and sent them the same email again?
If you haven’t, then start doing it. Because this can help you improve your open rates by almost 8%.
Some of this stats anaylzed by the Mailchimp folks prove this. In fact that they even recommend sending the same email with the same subject line to see your open rates go up by 8% without an negative impacting metrics.
Open rates on resend campaigns don’t perform as well as they do on the first send, but they’re not terrible, either. We looked at 1,300 instances where the user sent a campaign and then re-sent it shortly after. The average open rate on the original campaign was 26.7%. That’s not bad, but these users knew they could do better, so they re-sent the campaign and got enough new opens to increase the original open rate by 8.7 points. That’s a significant-enough chunk of your list seeing a promotion that could make or break your quarter.
Mailchimp found that changing subject lines in your resend or, even the FROM names in the resend campaigns negatively impacted credibility and increased spam complaints.
Now if you combine this study with the email subject line myths that we saw in the post above, you will realize that this 8% increase has to be purely from people who missed opening the email in the first send.
Why?
Because they opened the same email coming from the same person and with the same subject line.
So, assuming that these are the things that normally impact open rates, we can deduce that the increase in open rates were not influenced by any of these and hence came from people who missed your email in the first send.
People who used a different subject line for their resend campaign saw fewer opens and more abuse complaints than people who kept the same subject line. The difference in click rates and unsubscribe rates was minimal, so this one is a slam dunk. It’s better to keep the subject line you used the first time.
Image Credit : blog.mailchimp.com
Read more at blog.mailchimp.com
Viral List Building Case Study: 3,200 Subscribers in 7 Days
This is a case study and I really love case studies. Case studies inspire me more than anything else and hence I felt this could be a nice inspiration to you all as well.
This is very similar to a case study that was published on the Smart Passive Income Blog about 2 years back. Since then I and a lot of people have implemented this strategy and built huge lists.
But this post has some additional tips in the form of promoting your giveaways. So it is definitely worth a read. Combine it with the one in Pat Flynn’s blog and you have a powerhouse of knowledge.
We set up and promoted a product giveaway. People could enter the raffle by submitting their email address, and they could get more entries by referring people using their unique URL.
(Almost like an affiliate link.)
Contestants could share it on social media, email it to friends, promote it in online communities — anywhere on the Internet.
And that they did!
Image Credit : copytactics.com
10 Best Free Email Marketing Plugins for WordPress
List building is not easy. It requires careful planning and a lot of time and effort. It also requires some specialized tools like an optin form builder, landing page creator, autoresponder etc.
Though I recommend that you invest in a long term solution and in some of the best tools that are available, I do realize the fact that you will be tight on budget when you are starting off. And at that point it is good if you have some FREE yet effective tools.
This post has a nice list of email marketing plugins for WordPress that are all free but very effective in email marketing.
However, purchasing a premium list building plugin may not be feasible for everyone. So, just to bridge that gap we have collected some of the best free email marketing plugins in this collection and I hope this list will help you to grow your online business.
Image Credit: sourcewp.com
Guide to Email Marketing Software Providers by Crazy Egg
Email Marketing is become an industry that is full of choices and options. Take for example, email marketing autoresponder service providers!
There used to be a time when we had a couple of autoresponders in the market and today we have a ton of them, each with excellent quality and service.
We wanted to do a detailed review of all these autoresponders but then we stumbled upon this post from Crazy Egg. This is an update to a post that they had published some time back, but has a few more newer services added to it now.
We recommend Aweber, but you can make a decision after reading this review.
We published a post reviewing 6 Email Service Providers (ESPs) back in 2012. Since then, a lot has changed in the world of email marketing.
Many of the ESPs we reviewed back then have changed significantly, and based on the feedback we received in the 200+ comments on our original post, we recognized the need to add a few more providers to our list!
This time around, we asked four additional email marketing experts to contribute reviews of the ESPs they have in-depth experience using.
Read on for comprehensive reviews of MailChimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Emma, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, IBM Marketing Cloud, and Adobe Campaign Enterprise Solution.
Image Courtesy: blog.crazyegg.com
Read more at blog.crazyegg.com
Content Curation for Effective Social Media and Email Marketing
Content curation is one of the least used method of content generation. I love content curation because it gives a new perspective to your content strategy and your readers will love it if you know how to write engaging commentary.
Content curation is an effective method not only if you blogging, but also in email marketing and this post nicely details it out for you.
You can check out my course on Blog content Curation here.
Most marketers spend a mind-numbing amount of time creating content when they don’t have to. Over 3 million blog posts are published each day. Most content you wish to create and share with your audience already exists in some form. You could save hours of your content marketing effort and time by effective content curation.
For social media and email marketing to work well, you require a certain frequency of content sharing. Regular contact is necessary to drive a meaningful impact and keep leads warm and prospects interested. Effective content curation can help you meet content demand and deliver value to your audience.
Read more at searchenginejournal.com
Over to You Now
So which post out of these did you like the most?
I guess it should be the one about email subject lines. If it is not, then let us know which one and why you liked this post.
Keep in mind that your email marketing strategy decides how effective your email marketing would be. Simple tweaks in your strategy can also improve the performance of your email marketing and get your better ROI.
I hope you liked this week’s link roundup.
Do share it with your social media circles by hitting your favorite button below. We love Facebook and would hence love to see a share on Facebook.