Welcome to Blog number 14  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows.

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• Boosting relevance: why you should learn more about your subscribers.
• Risks and downsides: why you should think twice about custom fields.
• Alternatives to custom fields.
• Custom field usage.
  • Planning.
  • Collection.
  • Reporting.
  • Personalization.
  • Segmentation.
• Thinking outside the demographic box.
• A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Why learn more about your subscribers

The ability to customize your mailings to subscribers (and, via segmentation, which subscribers you mail in the first place), is a more advanced part of email marketing than most casual bloggers will typically reach.

That said, the more you know about your subscribers, the more you can tune your interactions with them, and so the better your results will be. Think for a moment how you might be able to improve your interactions with your readership if you knew more than their email address:

• If you knew buying history you can offer you best / newest customers early bird discounts or special packages;
• If you knew location you could invite people to your next training course, tweet up or conference in that city;
• If you knew their names you could make your mailings more personal;
• If you knew their gender or age range you could write more articles that appealed to that group;
• If you knew their Twitter account you can follow them in social media.

It’s possible to do all of this without having this extra data – typically known as custom fields – but when you can’t target content to the right people at the right time then you’re losing relevance. Relevance is the core benefit to using custom fields: it allows you to really get very focused with your content (especially non-automated delivery), which means greater relevance to your target audience. That in turn leads to better response rates.

Risks and downsides

Before diving into custom fields, however, my advice to bloggers is to think twice about it. As bloggers we’re typically content marketers, and our focus is that content and our audience. One of the benefits of using email marketing (and, specifically, fully automated email marketing like FeedBlitz delivers) is that it’s easy. You can do a really good job with some up-front work and let the automation take care of getting your word out.

This is less true with custom fields. Custom fields take work; it’s going to take more time from you to set up, use and manage them. You need to determine whether that time’s worth it.

Secondly, collecting that data from subscribers when they sign up will reduce your list growth rate, simply because any extra friction in the process reduces your growth rate. Even asking for basics such as a first name or the recipient’s gender will increase the bounce rate from the form. The more you ask for, the greater the hit. Again, up to you if that hit is worthwhile (you can test it, of course!).

Also bear in mind that, unless the extra data is coming from you (e.g. purchase history), user entered data can be unreliable. People lie. They type badly. There may be several ways to enter the same information e.g. in the US, they might report their state as “MA”, “Mass” or “Massachusetts”! That makes extra work (yet again) for you in terms of trying to prevent that or bearing it in mind when you come to use your custom fields.

Finally, various jurisdictions have laws about user data and privacy. If you collect custom data and the user demands you change it, you pretty much have to change it. More work there as well.

So it’s perfectly OK to say, like the idea, I have better things to do and my results are great as is. That said, the larger your list becomes, the harder it is to back fill custom field data if you have a change of heart or hire someone (e.g. a VA) to help you with your blog or list.

Custom field alternatives: Multiple Lists

If you want to segment your audience, bear in mind that there are simpler alternatives to using custom fields on a single list. Use multiple lists! Have one list for group A, another for group B etc., and power both from the same blog using tag filters. Easy to set up, the subscribers self-select into the right list at subscription time, much less work all around for you. For basic segmentation I would recommend this approach for bloggers instead of custom fields.

Basic custom field usage

A primer on jargon

• Custom fields – Data you associate with a subscriber, such as their name, location or birthday.
• Personalization – Using that data to modify the content of your mailing.
• Segmentation – Using the data to select individuals from a list for a mailing instead of mailing the whole list.

Planning

So you’re ready to take the plunge? OK, first you need to do a little planning. Think about:

• What do you want to do with the extra data?
• Where is the data coming from?
• What about existing list members where you didn’t collect the data?
• Is all the data going to be required or optional?
• What data will the user add, and what will you add yourself?

Say you’re running a mommy blog. Most of your readers are going to be, by definition, women. It makes little sense to use gender as a custom field. So don’t ask for it. Make a “Just For Dads” list instead.
You may also have data that you want to associate with a subscriber instead of having them add it themselves. Say you’re a gym and you want to give everyone a special offer on the anniversary of their membership – you can add their “Member since” or “Month Joined” data yourself. You don’t want to ask subscribers when they joined on the subscription form, since they might not be members (yet!) or they might not remember. If subscribers have to start thinking as they subscribe then they’ll lose momentum, and list growth will suffer.

This is also an example of data you might want to hide from a user. Others might include whether the user is a prospect, customer or partner – data you might use to tune a mailing later.

Decide, too, which data is essential to your plans. Name? Gender? Location? Job title? Experience level? Make essential data required, and the rest optional. But be really brutal on prioritization; remember that the more friction you add (required fields) the lower your growth rate will be. On the other hand, the more friction you add, the more committed the subscribers are who join your list. If you’re getting a lot of “tire-kickers” adding themselves, extra friction might very well be a Good Thing. Extra friction (in the form of extensive required fields) is also very useful if your list is being used as a lead generation tool for your business. You want the leads to be as pre-qualified as possible.

Some of the biggest challenges with custom fields, though, come from back filling data from existing subscribers, and what to do when that data (or optional fields) isn’t there. There’s nothing worse than a mailing that starts “Dear Valued Customer” since that actually shows the very opposite. What are you going to do if you don’t have the subscriber’s first name? Can you find a decent default? Can you conditionally exclude personalization elements if there’s no data? Is there a form or link you can mail out to have the older subscribers add their data? Think, too, about segmentation. If you’re going to segment by state, say, what do you do with users for whom you have no state data? Always mail them, just in case? Or never mail them?

Planning is essential. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step.

Collection

For new subscribers, this is pretty easy: ask for the data they can supply at subscription time. If you want to restrict choices to a few, make the field a choice field (such as a list box or radio buttons) to avoid the MA / Mass / Massachusetts issue.

For data, you provide, e.g. a link to your contact management or CRM system, you’re going to have to sync the email database with your CRM’s data. That requires manual or automated import / export – more work.

For the old list, you’re going to have to ask them to add the data. You’ll need a link to your form from your provider and you’re going to have to send them to your readers. Since there’s no real incentive to having existing subscribers tell you more about themselves (they’re already on the list; they’ve done the hard part), don’t expect great results from this. You can offer incentives and prizes to help, but be prepared to live with data gaps. Since you’ve done your planning up front, this won’t be an issue, right? Right! But you can add a link to the form in your template, so you can give readers a chance to provide or update their data with every email.

Reporting

One use of custom fields is not to use them in your outbound mailing at all. You can think of them as simply a one-time survey. Looking at the data can be interesting, though, so don’t neglect reporting once you’ve set up your custom fields. You may well be surprised at what you learn, and that in turn can lead you to produce better, more relevant content, or enable you to reach out to your subscribers in other ways.

Personalization

Not just “Dear Jane” instead of “Dear jane@example.com” (although that’s good too). You can personalize based content based on customer status (regular / preferred), gender and more. So with FeedBlitz, for example, you could conditionally include (or exclude) content from a different feed in your mailings based on the subscriber’s status.

Also understand that “content” isn’t just what’s in your post. It can also mean the HTML you format the post with. So you can change, for example, an image or color scheme based on custom demographic data.
There are dangers here, though. Beware customizing the subject line, as that looks really spammy. Test for cases where the data is missing or defaulted, so that the email still looks good. If you use conditional substitution, test again. If you want to test design changes “safely”, clone your list, place test addresses in there with the test cases you want to use, and test using that list before moving your design into production.

Did I mention this was work?

Segmentation

A great example for segmentation is going local. Say your blog is really focused on events in your area. You can collect the ZIP code from subscribers, and then mail only people in the relevant zip code for info on that area. From a monetization perspective, you can start to sell sponsorships and advertising into your segments once your list gets big enough (but keep the messages relevant else you’ll lose people). Once you get good with targeting and customization you can really make every email work much harder for you.

Again, however, there are traps for the unwary. Segmented mailings are typically slower than “all readers” mailings simply because your email service has to figure out whether each subscriber qualifies; personalization (if you’re using it) adds to the load too. It may not be significant but you should test using a non-time critical mailing to understand the difference.

Secondly, a botched segment mailing can be downright embarrassing. Make sure you have tested / evaluated the segment before you use it with the tools your email service provides; you don’t want to send a blast about an upgrade discount to people who’ve already paid full freight. And it doesn’t take much imagination to envisage even worse scenarios.

If you have a segment you like, save it if you can to make it easy to reuse in the future; it’s both a real time-saver and SNAFU risk reducer.

Thinking outside the demographic box

Demographics – broadly speaking: name, gender, location – are the typical use for custom fields, especially for personalization and segmentation. But you can do more than this. I’ve talked about using internal data (customer class or purchase history, for example) as one type of data. You can use activity stream information (did they click or open an email recently) as another. If you collect twitter, facebook or web site links, you can use that too. In fact, simply knowing a subscriber has a website or twitter account may be enough to work with - you may not need to know the details to get a good segment going.

You can also get completely obsessive about this stuff too, so beware the law of diminishing returns. For example, you can make smaller and smaller segments to get more precise, but if you get to the point where it would be faster to use your personal email app to do the mailing, you’ve gone too far. As with most things in marketing, your mileage may vary. Test, measure and update.

Ultimately, remember that custom fields and the benefits they bring are only really good at optimizing your existing list. If you’re not getting the basics right – subscription form positioning; compelling and relevant content; gripping subject lines; effective calls to action – then you’re missing a bigger opportunity. Plan for custom fields up front if you have the luxury to do so, but I’d recommend that you make sure you’re well past square one with your blog and basic email marketing before you start digging into custom fields and the work they add. Your time is limited and precious; be sure you’re spending it wisely.

A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users

Custom fields are a lot of work, but they can be excellent tools for making better use of your list. The features are complex and can be found under the Newsletters tab at FeedBlitz; click the “Custom Fields” button in the left side bar. Since there’s a lot of ground to cover, there is also a sequence of FeedBlitz-specific tutorial posts on using custom fields and entries in the FeedBlitz knowledge base – click here to start.

Next week we will have  Blog 15 – HTML Email Design Tips

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 13  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 12 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

How to Increase Engagement with a Multi-List Strategy for Your Blog

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• How multiple lists can help you attract and retain subscribers;
• The benefits of multiple delivery schedules;
• Content focus;
• A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the twelfth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Multiple lists from a single blog? You bet! It’s a great idea, and if you’re using automation to send your mailings it won’t cost you any more time and effort to manage once you’re set up.

There are two core ways you can use multiple lists to increase engagement in your readership. These ways are:

• Different mailing schedules;
• Focused content.

Both will help you grow your and retain your audience, but they address different needs.

Multiple Mailing Schedules

When and how often to mail your readership can be the source of much angst in the email marketing community. Many people spend (and maybe waste) a lot of time and energy trying to find the right date and time to send out a blast to get the best results.

For content marketers (i.e. us, bloggers), I say that the best approach is not to get down to this level of detail. There are much more important and valuable things that you can do with your blog and your time. You will be more productive creating great content on your blog, building your community, doing some SEO, guest posting etc. rather than spending hours in reports worrying whether it’s better to mail out Tuesdays at 10am or Friday evenings after work. Focus instead on getting better results from your mailings by writing better headlines, compelling calls to actions, or adding an autoresponder.

That said, though, what you can do (and should definitely consider) is have your subscribers tell you how often they want to be emailed. That way your mailing schedule best matches their expectations and you’re more likely to keep them for longer. Corollary: you’re also much less likely to lose them because they feel swamped by too many emails from your blog or updates that are too slow.

This is where having multiple lists, each with a different delivery schedule, comes in really handy. You can offer a “Fast” subscription, which sends out a mail every time you post. For some people that will be great. For others, though, this will be way too much information and aggravating. Enter the next list, powered by the same blog: A daily digest. Same content, just delivered once a day. You might even offer a weekly wrap as well for those who want to stay in touch but for whom even a daily missive would be burdensome. You could perhaps adjust the slower lists to use abridged content if you typically have a lot of posts each week, just to keep the email down to a reasonable size.

All you have to do is offer the subscriber the choice at sign up time. They self-select into the appropriate list and they’re done. They get what they want when they want it; you get happy subscribers who don’t become frustrated by too many updates, or news that isn’t timely enough for them.

Focused Content

The other core use of multiple lists is to focus the content so that every mailing is relevant to the subscribers. Most blogging systems these days will offer category pages, where all the posts sharing the same category or tag can be viewed at once; it’s great for search and its great for visitors to see all the related posts in a single place.

You can do the same with your mailing lists too. For example, Elise at Simply Recipes has a “recipes only” email list accessible here, as opposed to her main list which is all the posts – not just recipes – on her food blog. Like Elise, you can offer focused content based on what your readers want. There may be fewer updates going out to a more focused list, but you’ll get better engagement with its subscribers with each mailing.

On the other end of the spectrum, Money Saving Mom has over a hundred lists. The site uses both content and scheduling differences. They’re all powered by the same blog, but she gives her visitors a lot of choice in terms of choosing when they want an update and what they want to get. Result? Stellar list growth. See her subscription form page here; it’s really quite the marvel.

Best Practice in Action

Since I’m drawing attention to Money Saving Mom, her site uses a combination of techniques to grow her mailing lists. It’s a fantastic example of how to quickly fire up subscriber acquisition. Use it as inspiration for your list growth, no matter what field you’re working in or how large (or small) your lists are now.

Let’s take a look:

• There’s a financial incentive (sweepstakes) above the main banner for the main mailing list;
• “Subscribe for free updates” call to action in the right side bar for a menu of all lists;
• Autoresponders and custom landing pages driving traffic back to the site.

Dynamic and User Generated Lists

The challenge with offering different content lists have one disadvantage: They require you, the blogger, to know (or to make intelligent decisions about) the different content you should be offering. Sometimes that’s hard to do, and as your site grows you may forget to update the mailing lists to include your new posts. What to do?

Well, with luck, your email service has an API that you can use to let the users create their own lists on the fly. You can then, with a little back end or client side scripting, have the subscription form on any one page offer an automatic subscription to that page’s tags. You can do the same for search functions too. That way you can ensure that the content is always relevant – the subscriber picked it themselves!

For FeedBlitz Users

FeedBlitz makes creating additional mailing lists from a single source easy, so if you’re also a FeedBlitz user read on to see how to set up multiple lists for your blog in just a few steps.

The easiest way to create multiple mailing lists is to start with your main list that you’re happy with. Then go to Newsletters – Settings – Advanced Template Editor and make that template your Master Template. That means that all other lists you then make will use the same design as your main list by default, which gives you great brand consistency and saves a whole boat-load of time.

Then clone the list via Newsletters – Settings – Clone. It creates a copy of the list and its settings, but does not copy subscribers. If you’re creating a new delivery schedule, pick the new schedule you want as part of the cloning process. It’s that easy.

If you want to create focused content specific lists, again clone the mailing. Then go to Newsletters – Settings – Content Settings for your new clone, and either:

a) Add tag filters to include / exclude categories from the mailing; or

b) Change the article source URL to be the category RSS feed for the content.

Don’t forget to change the title of the mailing to match the content, and you’re done.

If you want to get all techie and use the API, head over here to the Knowledge Base for the documentation – you need to use the publisher ID parameter to link the subscription to your account.

Finally, freshly minted mailing lists in hand, you need to update your forms to offer your new alternatives. Since most sites are not offering hundreds of different choices, FeedBlitz can create a form for you that automatically updates itself as you add new lists. Go to Newsletters – Forms – Subscription Forms and, from the right hand side of options, choose “all public” as the lists to include. Update your site with the code and that’s that. (If you want to exclude a list from the automatic form, mark it as private at Newsletters – Settings – Content Settings – The Basics).

Next week we will have  Blog 14 – The Prizes and Pitfalls of Personalization

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 12  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 11 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn the content triggers that can lead to your mail being junked, even when you’re using a high-reputation mailing service like FeedBlitz, and what to do about it.

[This is the eleventh article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Blogs are Email Marketing Accidents Waiting to Happen

When you blog and send your words of wisdom out to your subscribers, you are not only a blogger but also a marketer. You may not like to think of yourself that way, but it’s basically true.

The thing is, of course, is that most bloggers are untrained as marketers. Specifically, we’re largely not trained as email marketers. We put up our subscription forms and hope for the best. Usually, that’s fine.

But sometimes that lack of expertise can hurt, because it can lead us to create content that ends up setting off content filters. It’s actually all too easy to do, in fact, because in social media we can easily add widgets and plugins that are designed for the web, but which can completely foul up your feed and eviscerate your mailings. Blogging and social media enable us to make the kind of “rookie” error that a professional, corporate email marketer would never let see the light of day.

There are also problems that can creep in because of design decisions that may render your email unreadable and therefore useless; although I’ve touched on these before I’ll go over this ground again in a little more detail.

Hold On – Isn’t Reputation King?

Ah yes, indeed it is (You have been paying attention! Thanks!). You’re not going to get your blog’s mailings anywhere without using an email provider like FeedBlitz with excellent sender reputation and low complaint rates. Having a good sender, especially one that’s on white lists and feedback loops (again, you-know-who), does a lot to eliminate the risk of content rules routing the email to junk.

A lot, but not necessarily everything. Basically, when your email is run through the inbound ISP’s content filters, a score of some sort is applied to it. Let’s say that having a high score is a bad thing, and the higher your score the more likely your email is going to be flagged as junk. Worse, if your subscriber uses a separate email app (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird etc.) to read her email, that app knows absolutely nothing about sender reputation. Your email is downloaded to your email app, and the only tool it can basically apply to that inbound mail to stop spam is content filtering. So it refilters your messages again, but this time you don’t benefit from the trusted sender advantage.

How Content Filters Work

When your email arrives at the ISP from a sender with a great reputation, it benefits by having its score reduced somewhat from the get go. It might benefit a little; it might benefit a lot. Unsurprisingly, ISPs don’t share their rules, but open source projects like Spam Assassin work this way. Anyway, using a service like FeedBlitz enables you to start with a reduced baseline spamminess score before the content filters go to work. They raise your score and finally, based on that score, your email is sent to the inbox – or to The Other Place.

Usually, reputation trumps content (i.e. your baseline benefit of using a reputable sender massively outweighs content analysis) unless you are, in fact, writing something spammy. Our experience is that, even for our frugal deal bloggers, who are always talking about free this, 20% off that and sample the other (generally spammy content phrases), their email usually gets straight to the inbox, no problem.

So why fret about content then? Well, some kinds of content will greatly raise your spamminess score. Another is that the ISP’s content filters aren’t the only ones your email has to pass before it gets to the inbox; you need your email to be able to get past the desktop software filters I mentioned above too. Since trusted sender doesn’t apply here, it’s possible to lose the battle for the inbox at this very last stage.

To avoid that you need to steer clear of the Three Danger Zones of Spamminess. Grab your online GPS and read on! We have a map…

Danger Zone 1: The Subject Line

The first thing to realize is that your subject line will be scanned by content filters as well as the body of the email itself. A truly spammy subject line will get your mail junked just as much as talking about dodgy pills or offshore banking accounts where you can net bajillions o’ bucks in the body of your email.

So as well as following the tips in an earlier LBB about keeping subject lines short, imperative and attention-grabbing, avoid these errors:

• DON’T SHOUT.
• Especially don’t shout FREE, SAMPLE and % OFF.
• Don’t over use exclamation points!!!!
• Don’t over-use other symbols $$ #!% in your subject line either.
• Phil, don’t personalize the subject line with the recipient’s name.

The last one may seem counter-intuitive; after all personalization typically increases open and response rates. But mail whose subject line starts with “Yourname, blah blah blah” is almost always spam and will be treated as such by the filters. By all means personalize the subject if you can, e.g. “We recommend this zoom lens for your Nikon D40 camera” if your recipient bought a D40 from your store recently. Just don’t use their name in the subject line.

Danger Zone 2: Accidentally Spammy Content

Here it gets more complicated. Not only are content filters (and I’m including your computer’s anti-virus software in this category) looking for keywords, they’re also looking to see whether your message might be malware (a virus). Sometimes the most innocent things can trigger alarms, leading to the junk folder or scary security alerts. (I’m not intending to cover all the ins and outs of content filters here – life’s too short! Just the pertinent parts a blogger can easily foul up on).

A quick technical detour is in order for a moment. The vast majority of email today is HTML email; mini web pages, in effect. HTML is made up of tags that produce your text, break it into paragraphs etc. All handled by your blog automatically and then converted to email by services like FeedBlitz.

But some tags have been abused by viruses and other villainy to the point that email apps won’t display them (see this knowledge base article on why video typically won’t work in email, for example, and how FeedBlitz saves the day for video posts). This especially applies to tags for JavaScript, forms and what are called IFrames.

The reason why you need to care about this is that the vast majority of blogging widgets use – guess what! JavaScript, forms and IFrames. If those widgets live on your blog’s sidebar and not in the post then you’re fine. But if you do have these tags in your post (or they’re added to the feed by a “helpful” plugin or widget on your blog) then they won’t work in your email and they probably won’t work for your RSS readers either. This is why blogs and bloggers are so much more likely to fall afoul of content rules than professional email marketers: it’s simply too easy to break them with all the cool toys social media let’s us add to our sites!

But script doesn’t work in email, so ad networks and other active content won’t work. A preponderance of script will damage your spamminess score badly. If you do insert a script-based object into your post (e.g. a survey), make sure that it has a noscript tag that will offer email and feed readers a useful alternative. FeedBlitz will help here – it strips script from your content before it mails it out in an effort to increase deliverability and reduce risk for the reader.

IFrames can show up with some affiliate programs and other add ins. While they’ll probably pass muster with a content filter, your reader’s security software will probably be very unhappy seeing an iframe in your email if that iframe references a page that isn’t on your web site. Some Amazon affiliate links for specific books are iframes and can fall into this category, leading to scary, scary security alerts (almost always false alarms, but that’s life) when your email is scanned by the subscriber’s anti-virus app. Use images or static inline code instead; just say “no” to iframes in your posts.

Then there’s forms. Don’t put whole forms in your email. They’re unlikely to work in many email systems (but will probably display just fine, creating much subscriber frustration when they fail to work). If you want a subscriber to fill out a form, use the mail with a compelling call to action to drive them back to your site instead.

Remember: You’re fine if your gidgets, gadgets and doohickeys are in side bars etc. It’s when they get into the actual post content itself that you have to be careful.

Finally, there are bad neighborhoods. If you link to a bad neighborhood (or what the content filter thinks looks like it’s going to be a bad place to send a reader), your email is going to be junked. This did, in fact, happen to one of our clients; Yahoo was sending their email to junk consistently whereas none of our other clients was having the same problem. The issue boiled down to exactly one link in their email. Sent without the link, the email landed in the inbox perfectly, every time. With the link, away to junk it went, every time. There was nothing wrong with the link (or the site it linked to) per se; it just happened to push Yahoo’s content filter over the edge.

So sometimes you can simply be unlucky; it happens. But if you’re using an ESP their support function or professional services group may be able to help.

Danger Zone 3: Graphic Design SNAFUs

Speaking too Softly and Shouting Too Loudly

Content filters look to see if they think you’re trying to hide content from the user, because doing so is inherently suspect. So very small fonts, colors that are the same as – or very similar to – background colors are all flags on the play. Don’t do it.

Ditto for very, very large fonts and over use of bright, attention grabbing colors are also flags. Anything SCREAMING FOR ATTENTION is going to bump your spamminess score heavily in the wrong direction, so nix the 72 point bold red font with the yellow background, OK? Keep the graphic design tone in a normal voice and everything in plain sight and you’ll be fine.

Unfortunately, there are other ways graphic design can mess things up just by accidentally crippling readability, especially for older email clients and many webmail readers.

Dark Backgrounds

Some email apps won’t display backgrounds, especially if the background is an image and not a solid background color. Since you have a dark background and therefore light text on it, without a dark background your light text is now displayed on a white background. It’s illegible now! We recommend using a light background and dark fonts for your copy all the time; you can surround them with images and backgrounds that won’t affect readability if they’re not displayed, but will still look right when thy are.

Using Styles that Aren’t There

Styles and stylesheets, a.k.a. CSS, allow graphic designers great control over how web pages display online. In email, though, not every email app supports all the CSS your designer puts in. Worse, if your post uses styles that are only mentioned in the web site but not defined in the post itself, your feed and emails are not going to render the way you intended at all. This is why, for example, may WordPress blogs specify floating images online, but in feeds and emails they don’t wrap properly; the stylesheets aren’t there to tell the subscriber’s app how to display the image, so it uses the default. (That’s why FeedBlitz has a set of template tags to force images to wrap the way you want, even if they don’t start out that way.)

And that’s the best that can happen. If your post inadvertently uses a style that’s used by your subscriber’s webmail or feed reader, your post is going to use that style. Results: who the heck knows! Probably something that will make your subscriber very unhappy. Ask your graphic designer not to use obvious CSS class names like “header”, “footer” or “style1″, “style2″ etc. – they’re much more likely to conflict with a webmail reader’s CSS namespace if you do. Make class names more specific to your site and you’ll avoid this kind of naming collision.

Too Complex HTML and CSS

Finally, don’t use overly complex HTML and CSS positioning within the post to manage your content. Keep post HTML really, really simple. The more complex it is, the less likely it will be faithfully rendered on subscriber email apps. Gmail, for example, is simply awful IMHO at rendering anything beyond trivial HTML content even with styles.

KISS, though, and you’ll be fine!

The Good News on Graphic Design

Once you have a graphic design in place, test it. If problems occur, fix them before you go live with the design. When you have the design working and rendering acceptably across the board, the good news is that you’ll have avoided the majority of graphic design risks mentioned above, permanently.

Whitelists Solve (Almost) Everything

If you are white listed in your subscriber’s email systems (ISP and desktop app, if applicable) then you are going to pretty much avoid all of content filtering problems. Always ask to be whitelisted when your subscribers join your list or interact with a landing page.

Next week we will have  Blog 13 – One Blog, Many Lists, Much Success

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 11  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 10 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In lieu of this week’s scheduled List Building for Bloggers post, I want to instead focus – yet again – on permission and why, in particular, simple CAN-SPAM compliance is not a defence against being labeled a spammer.

The background is this. FeedBlitz‘s quality monitors suspended a new account yesterday for complaint rate issues. We engaged with the list owner who complained that this was unfair, how could we, in all the years they’d been emailing they’d never had more than a few complaints a week etc. etc. And, besides which their mailings were legal so we should not suspend the list.

They then quoted an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on CAN-SPAM, thus:

There are no restrictions against a company emailing its existing customers or anyone who has inquired about its products or services, even if these individuals have not given permission, as these messages are classified as “relationship” messages under CAN-SPAM

And I agree – their mailings were legal. The complaint rates showed, however, that too many of their “subscribers” felt their mailing was spam. Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right.

As it turns out, some members of the list were acquired from people who’d bought products from this publisher, as well as online subscribers. Much as being in a social network doesn’t give you permission to mail someone, nor does their buying a product and parting with an email address as part of the process give you permission either.

Permission must be explicitly given to you by your subscriber for your marketing mailings to be successful and minimize complaints. Now, you can use the purchaser’s email address without that permission for what are called transactional mailings (e.g. “Your order just shipped” or “How well did we take care of you?”), because they are relevant to that specific business transaction between you and the purchaser. You just shouldn’t add them to your email marketing database and start hitting them up without permission, and you shouldn’t use that email address outside the context of that transaction.

Legality is necessary, but not sufficient

But why?

That’s a fair question.

The answer is because the receiving ISPs don’t care about legality as a deliverability criteria. What they ultimately care about is customer retention, and one of the things that turns into in practice is trying to stop spam from reaching their users’ inboxes. Less spam = happy subscriber = recurring revenue for the ISP.

And how do they stop spam? By applying filters based on sender reputation and, after that, content and subscriber preferences. What determines reputation is a while laundry list of factors such as complaint rates (which are driven by permission, relevance and timeliness), bounce rates, how often a sender mails an address that they’ve been told is dead, sending volume, spam trap hit rates, email header and content structure, authentication and more. We at FeedBlitz take care of all this so you don’t have to. It’s what we do.

Critically, note that not one, not one of these factors is affected by CAN-SPAM compliance and legality. See? Having your email be legal is pretty much irrelevant to the receiving ISP. Legality is simply not a criteria they apply to determine whether your email is accepted, routed to junk, or (ideally) sent to the inbox.

In other words, your deliverability is not affected by what CAN-SPAM says you can legally do. CAN-SPAM compliance means that you aren’t violating the law; that’s all.

Compliance does not mean your email will be delivered. It does not mean that your email isn’t spam. It does not mean that an ESP has an obligation to send it. It does not mean that an ISP has an obligation to deliver it.

What matters is whether you are following email marketing best practice so that the metrics the ISPs care about are good enough to get your message to your subscriber’s inbox.

Which is why FeedBlitz – and other high quality email senders – coerce you as far as we can into following best practice because of the way we do business, and why we at FeedBlitz monitor metrics and enforce them for everyone daily. As a blogger, you want that from your email service, because (a) you want your own emails to have the best chance of getting through, and (b) you don’t want a rogue mailer on the service wrecking deliverability for everyone else (specifically, of course, you). Quality counts.

Seeing the invisible complaints

So, then, what about the publisher’s assertion that they didn’t get many complaints before? Well, that’s because what an ESP (email service provider, like FeedBlitz) and ISPs call a complaint is someone hitting the “spam” button in their email app. When this happens, messages are passed from the ISP to the ESP via what’s called a feedback loop, telling the ESP to drop the subscriber from the list. When we get a complaint like this, we remove the subscriber from the list and send you this message.

The crucial part to understand is that the feedback loop mechanism does not extend to individual bloggers and publishers. You, as an individual, will not be notified by a receiving ISP that the subscriber has hit the “spam” button (gmail is an exception to this rule if you structure your emails correctly, which you’re almost certainly not doing since it’s a function of the SMTP header).

A feedback loop is a service to service communication only. Moreover, accessing a feedback loop as an email service is a privilege, not a right. ESPs have to earn their way onto feedback loops by having a track record of good sending behavior (we’re on them of course!). So what we call “complaints” are feedback loop notifications, which are very real and are, yes, complaints. But they are invisible to you, the blogger, until you use an ESP like FeedBlitz to run your mailings. Unfair? Maybe. The way it is? Yes.

So, to be clear, what we report to you as a complaint is NOT a subscriber hitting “reply” and saying “that mail stank, remove me from your list” – you’ll get very few of those, I expect, just like the publisher of the list we suspended. Remember that what we’re reporting are feedback loop metrics (“spam” button hits). You’ll never know about these “spam” complaints until you use a reputable email service like FeedBlitz which will track those metrics for you. When you do switch to a quality, supported email service like FeedBlitz – and you will eventually because you want high quality automated email production and sending with great deliverability – you may be in for a rude awakening if you don’t have a properly permissioned list, which is what happened here. The publisher simply had no idea of the true complaint rate because they didn’t have access to the same level of data that we do.

Should you get that rude awakening, for crying out loud don’t shoot the messenger! Don’t blame the ESP for revealing the ugly truth about your mailings because they actually care about quality and have taken steps to inform you of the fact. Bear in mind the reason you selected that ESP in the first place (it’s a little like the old joke: Don’t complain about your wife’s judgement, look who she married). If you want great deliverability (and who doesn’t?), you have to play by the rules.

So if you end up with a quality notification, change how you acquire subscribers, ask for help and take your ESP’s advice. Your ESP will probably help you because they want to keep your business if your mailings can be brought quickly into line. But they can only help you if you’re prepared to listen to the metrics, the advice and lose your sense of entitlement simply because your mailing is merely legal.

Remember, flagging an email as spam is the subscriber’s call alone; your opinion doesn’t count. The ISPs are their gatekeepers. Use email marketing best practices and you’ll be successful with your campaigns, the ISPs and your ESP.

And if you don’t? Well, just don’t complain that it’s legal so that’s OK.

It isn’t.

Next week we will have  Blog 12 – Are you in the Three Danger Zones of Spamminess?

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 10  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 9 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

The Right Way and the Wrong Way to Integrate Social Media Messaging and Email Marketing

Or, to paraphrase the mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “just because you could doesn’t mean you should.”

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• The Wrong Way to integrate social media contacts
• The Right Way to integrate social media data with your blog’s email marketing

Yup: This one is that black and white.

[This is the tenth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

Integrating Social Media Messaging and Email: The Wrong Way

Permission and relevance are the keys to successful list building, with timeliness following closely behind.

Permission though, needs to be explicitly granted. I’ve covered this before in previous List Building for Bloggers posts. I emphasize it frequently because it is essential to your success as a blogger in building your list and getting your message delivered.

Social networks, increasingly used for commercial purposes, rely on email and other messaging to inform you of updates. They also can enable you to email your contacts / friends / fans / followers – and with that functionality comes the very strong temptation to cross the permission line. The social networks, after all, want you to connect with your contacts, and they have features that exist for expressly this purpose.

So let’s take your friends on Facebook. One of the things you’re probably able to see is your friend’s email addresses, unless they’ve been very restrictive in their privacy settings. So you can, in theory, harvest these addresses and add them to your mailing list. Because they’re your friends, it’s OK, right?

Wrong.

Just because someone has made you a friend doesn’t mean you have permission to add them to your list. A social media site isn’t a personal CRM (custom relationship management) database. Sure, mail them relevant social stuff -and encourage them to join your list – but use the social network itself to do the messaging. Anything that even smells of mass mailing outside of the network itself is spam, plain and simple.

Similarly with your fans – some may allow you (either by design or sloppy privacy settings) to see their email addresses. Again, don’t add these addresses to your mailing list. Even if they’ve become a fan of your business Page on Facebook, it is not permission to import them into your list. Pressing “like” for a page is nothing more than an electronic congratulatory pat on the back; don’t misinterpret it as a carte blanche to deluge them with email. You should do that with status updates and wall posts instead, which is the right way to keep them informed.

Another path to abuse with Facebook is the event. As others have noticed, messages from Facebook itself have excellent deliverability. If you can “hijack” that then you’re pretty sure your message is going to be read. The unethical have started to do this and I’ve seen training videos online on how to do it. Ugh.

By all means create legitimate events that are relevant to your Fans and promote them. Don’t fake it, and don’t (ab)use Fans from Page A to promote the unrelated business from Page B. Keep your messaging to what’s relevant.

Facebook also allows you to import addresses into events, up to 5,000 at a time. If you’re not already a fan, Facebook invites you to become one. I personally find this distasteful. Yes, I agreed to be on your list. But I don’t want to be a Fan of your Page. If I did, I’d have become a fan already, see? Trying to force me into it? Not cool.

If you want to promote your event to your mailing list, use your mailing list! And by all means have a call to action in your mailing to “Visit us on Facebook” to make it easy for subscribers to like the page. Link to the event on Facebook. But trying to coerce me into becoming a fan via import? From my perspective, it will have the opposite effect. I’ll be off your list ASAP, nor will I attend your event or like you page. It boils down to respect for your audience – if you don’t respect me and the permission I gave you, I’m out of here.

Same with LinkedIn. Agreeing to share professional contact information is not permission to add the contact to your mailing list. Don’t mass mail your LinkedIn contacts via your list – don’t add them to your list at all! But you can (and should) list your subscription page on your LinkedIn profile, and occasionally set your network update to invite your contacts to join the list. Just don’t overdo it.

Integrating Social Media and Email: The Right Way

Is all lost? Not at all. There are plenty of ways you can do this right.

You can use social network features to communicate properly, respectfully, with your network (and with those outside it) using those networks. We all know the rules of the road on each platform. Follow them and market / sell / promote away! Good luck! It’s worth it! You can (and should) use social media to encourage new subscriptions (read the earlier posts in this series!).

You can also use social networks to find out more about email addresses that you have properly acquired.

Let’s say I add myself – phil@feedblitz.com – to your mailing list. You don’t know too much about me. But if you can find my email address in your contacts at LinkedIn, or as a Facebook friend, you would know that I am male, my full name and other personal information. It is OK to grab that data – I have voluntarily made it available to you or to the world – and you can append it to your mailing list. Now you can personalize your mailings to me using my name. I’d probably like that. I’d much rather be greeted as “Dear Phil” than “Dear Customer.”

Why is this OK? Because the email address (and my permission to use it) came first. You’re backfilling with other data you also have permission to access. In other words, you’re not adding me to your mailing list; you’re just finding out more about me. No permissions about my mailing preferences have changed or been assumed or implied.

So you can use social networks and other public data to find out more about your list if you want to put the effort in. That’s OK, as long as you get explicit permission to mail first.

You should not start with demographic data (e.g. a name) and then find an email address and add it to your list. That’s spamming.

Or, let’s say Joe@MegaCorp.com was on your list, properly permissioned. You find out from Facebook that Joe has left MegaCorp and is now at AcmeWidgets. Should you update your email list to Joe@AcmeWidgets.com? No. You don’t have his permission unless you’ve heard from him that it’s OK to update your list.

What you should do instead is send him a message via Facebook and say “congrats on the new gig, may we update our mailing list with your new address?” It’s perfectly OK for you to solicit permission within the context of the social network as long as you’re being respectful and following the rules of the road.

Let’s say Joe says “Don’t add me to your list, I’m in a different area now, but feel free to contact my replacement, Mary@MegaCorp.com” you cannot add Mary to your mailing list. She needs to give you her permission to do that; a third party (Joe) cannot. So fire up the phones or a personal email to Mary, introduce yourself and start from there. You can’t assume implied permission simply because Mary replaced Joe functionally.

Next week we will have  Blog 11 – CAN-SPAM: Being Legal is Not Enough – A Rant

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 9  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 8 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• How list-building incentive programs can harm you
• How to make incentive programs work without complaints
• Six great ideas for your subscription activation landing page

As usual, at the end of the article is a set of action items for you to put into practice right now.

[This is the ninth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

Incentive Risk

In prior articles on List Building for Bloggers I’ve talked about using incentives to help accelerate list growth; they’re an easy way to get people to opt into your list.

The problem with incentives, however, is that you do get a certain proportion of “tire kickers” who’ll opt in to get the goodies and then opt out as soon as they can. Not especially ethical, somewhat frustrating, but it comes with the territory.

However, there’s a bigger risk when using incentives that can affect your deliverability and your relations with your email service provider (ESP). What you can see is higher complaint rates – sometimes significantly so – with subscribers properly opted in via incentive programs. ESPs and ISPs really, really don’t like high complaint rates, so reducing complaint rates is essential. And incentive programs can create complaint spikes that you want to minimize.

Why does this happen? Well, for several reasons:

1. If the opt in to your mailing list wasn’t explicit when the user signed up for the incentive, then any increase in complaint rates is justified: you don’t have permission. It doesn’t matter if “consent” is buried in the competition rules – if the user didn’t explicitly opt in, you’re spamming them.
2. If the content you’re sending them is unrelated to the incentive, then you’ll see high unsubscribe rates.
3. If your incentive program is run on your site by a third party service, which (for the sake of argument) properly dual opt-ins the contestants before giving them the reward, you will still get high complaint rates if the link between you, the service and your mailing list is unclear.
4. If you run the program through a well-run third party service and you delay importing the contestants, your import won’t be timely, and so many contestants may have forgotten that they got that coupon from you three weeks ago. Result: high complaint rates from the forgetful.
5. If you run your import from your contest provider and then immediately send out a mailing, you’re going to get high complaint rates because you haven’t given your entrants time to read your welcome message before you hit them up with your mailing. Again, this will raise complaint rates.
6. Your next mailing is too “salesy” and new recipients will perceive you as a spammer.

It’s all too easy to fall into some of these traps – it can happen to the best of us now and again. How, then, to manage this risk and stay on the good side of your ESP, ISP and protect your reputation?

1. Have your incentive program add entrants directly to the mailing list by incenting them to join the list in the first place. This way there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening, there’s no import process to run through, and you can deliver the reward via an autoresponder or custom landing page once the subscriber activates. This eliminates pretty much all the issues outlined above. Everything is timely and relevant. So, instead of “Enter your email address for a $5 discount” your incentive is “Subscribe to our mailing list for a $5 discount” – it makes a big difference!
2. For contest-specific forms, make the opt-in clear and explicit. Remember, you need to get permission. Whether you run your own form or out source to a third party contest management or fulfillment firm, you can easily add an opt-in checkbox to the form via APIs (FeedBlitz‘s APIs are here; this one easily adds an opt in checkbox to a form). Why? Because if there’s anything to take away from this series it’s that permission and relevance are key, and without them you’re getting a one-way ticket to Complaintville.
3. Be timely. If you have to import people into your list from your incentive campaign, do so as soon as is practicable after the entrant is validated. Ideally within minutes, and certainly that day. That way your entrant will still remember your promotion.
4. If you can tailor the opt in confirmation mailing for your properly run incentive program, have it make clear that signing up will add them to your mailing list. Setting expectations early and often is a great way to reduce complaints and unsubscribes.
5. Use your autoresponder and / or import message to remind them how they got into your list. So don’t make your note say “Welcome to the SuperWidgets Mailing List” – instead make it “Thank you for using our $5 coupon – Welcome!” (or whatever) and use the note to make it clear that they’re now on your list as they agreed to be when they signed up.
6. Use an autoresponder to follow up a few days later, perhaps for a survey (“Did you use that coupon?” or “Tell us how you liked our widget”) or something helpful (“Five online stores where you can spend redeem the voucher”) or another offer (“10% off if you buy from us with discount code PQRS”). If you respectfully keep in touch with useful, valuable information you will see much greater engagement, even if a “regular” mailing hasn’t gone out yet.
7. Don’t rush your next mailing. Autoresponders aside – which should be immediate – if you’ve imported a bunch of incentive program entrants don’t blast them five minutes after the import completes; it’s too spammy. You haven’t given them time to read your import message yet. Be patient and wait till tomorrow. It’s worth it.

Follow these tips and your incentives programs, whether you run them yourself or outsource, will rock your list with engaged, happy subscribers who won’t complain on the first mailing.

Six Top Landing Page Tips

The most import piece of online real estate in the email subscription process is the post-activation landing page - what a subscriber sees when they wrap up the dual opt in subscription process. At that point they’re excited about joining the list – they just went through dual-opt in for you – and are engaged with your content.

The activation landing page is your best chance to make the most of that excitement. While your mileage may vary, here are some thoughts for how you can direct that energy to benefit you:

• Deliver a reward. A PDF eBook, white paper, coupon, a discount on a product / service – whatever it is you can use the landing page to deliver it to your excited new follower.
• Offer more subscriptions. Got more niche lists or partner sites? Invite the reader to sign up for them. Running other programs? Ditto. Your landing page can also reduce any friction associated with these actions by auto-filling any applicable forms with information you know about the new subscriber (minimally, their email address).
• Ask for a referral. They like you; have them tell their friends! You can use a simple form for this.
• Leverage social media. Have a “tweet this” or Facebook status update form available where your new reader can say “I just joined the MegaCorp mailing list for the latest on antique flange sprocket hobbyists” in a tweet, Facebook status update or LinkedIn note. Spread the word.
• Build what @ProBlogger calls a sneeze page of popular posts and deliver it here. This keeps the new subscriber on your site while they’re excited about you and inclined to explore. Great if you monetize via ads.
• Don’t go overboard! Pick one, maybe two of these ideas and have clear, direct calls to action. Otherwise you’ll simply confuse the new subscriber and all their energy and excitement may dissipate in a cloud of confusion. You don’t want that.

Go ahead, optimize! You can also run different calls to action on your landing pages to see which work best. Test, measure, optimize; rinse and repeat.

Your Action Items

• If you’re running an incentive check that you’re compliant with the best practices outlined above.
• If you’re selecting a third party incentive or fulfillment service ensure that they use confirmed dual opt in and can get you your entrant data quickly if they can’t integrate via API.
• If you’re not incenting subscribers … why not? Fix that!
• Build your activation landing page using one of the top tips.

Next week we will have  Blog 10 – From Fan to Sp*m and Anti-Social Networking

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 8  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 7 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Autoresponders offer a different way of making your blog’s list more valuable. Autoresponders – mailings that send predefined content on a schedule – allow you to interact with your list beyond the traditional content-driven approach bloggers typically used. You end up with more opportunities to interact with, sell to and learn from your audience.

With a little imagination and a look through your archives, autoresponders are a great way to get closer to your subscribers and increase their financial value to you.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn

• What is an autoresponder
• How subscribers can join an autoresponder
• Planning your autoresponder content
• Delivering Incentives
• Multi-Step Autoresponders
• Using Autoresponders to Sell: Drip Marketing
• Serializing eBooks
• Testing

As usual, at the end of the article is a set of action items for you to put into practice right now.

[This is the eighth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

What is an Autoresponder?

As mentioned above, an autoresponder is merely a fixed sequence of one or more emails that is sent to a subscriber once she joins the autoresponder’s mailing list. Once the sequence has been sent to the recipient, they no longer receive further mailings from that list. There’s a detailed explanation, with examples, of how an autoresponder differs from a typical blog-powered mailing list here at the FeedBlitz Knowledge Base.

Autoresponders are called “autoresponders” because they’re most often started automatically in response to an event, such as a subscriber joining your main mailing list. In a sense, when an autoresponder starts up for a new subscriber, their single activation adds them to two distinct lists: the mailing list they’re opting in to, and the autoresponder that is spawned as a result of that activation.

Autoresponders can be single emails (e.g. “thank you for subscribing”) or complex multi-step sequences, such as email courses. They’re often used for what’s called “drip marketing.” No matter what you use an autoresponder for, you must treat it like your main blog’s mailings. Content should be relevant, calls to action direct, subject lines compelling etc. Having got your subscriber onto the autoresponder, don’t flub it!

How Subscribers Join an Autoresponder

The majority of autoresponders are event-based; subscribers are added to the responder after some other automated action takes place. These events could be:

• Activating a subscription
• Completing a registration form (e.g. for a product, site, webcast, contest, survey or download)
• Buying a product or service from you.

Don’t just think online: An “event” can also be a real-world event, such as attending a seminar, conference or course. As long as you have explicit permission from offline event attendees, an autoresponder is a great way to thank them for showing up.

More sophisticated marketers can also use the lack of an event to trigger targeted autoresponders. So the lack of the desired event taking place, such as abandoning a shopping cart, not completing a payment form, failing to download the software, not making that donation, can trigger an autoresponder to encourage the visitor to finish the play.

Finally, subscribers can join an autoresponder just like they do your mailing list: via an online form. This is ideal if you’re promoting a serialized email-based course, for example. The subscriber simply signs up and receives lesson one immediately!

Planning your Autoresponder Content

Since there are many different uses for autoresponders, the content can vary greatly. Remember, though, no matter what, each mailing should feature these two items:

• Relevant content
• Direct call to action

Even if your autoresponder is a simple, single “thank you for subscribing” message, make it work for you. Tell the recipient to visit your list of most popular posts, or follow you on Twitter, or friend you on Facebook. Got an app? Tell them to download it. You get the idea!

Delivering Incentives

In an earlier List Building for Bloggers article I discussed using incentives as a way to help grow your list faster. An autoresponder is the way to deliver that sign up reward to new subscribers. Place the incentive, such as your coupon, discount code or link to a download, into the autoresponder’s first article and you deliver instant gratification to your new subscriber, proving you can be trusted. Don’t forget to add a call to action!

Multi-Step Autoresponders

Autoresponders can have more than one email in their sequence. So once they start, they keep sending to the recipient until the sequence completes. As you plan your sequence, make sure that it matches your subscriber’s expectations. If they are signing up for a 13-week email course on (say) becoming a better photographer, send them their next lesson once a week. Daily would be overwhelming. On the other hand, if your pitch is “ten days to be a better rose gardener” then a daily mailing is clearly appropriate.

If your multi-step autoresponder isn’t directly signed up for but is instead triggered by an external event, a daily send might be too much (leading to higher than necessary unsubscribe rates) if you are also sending a more-or-less daily mailing from your blog. Pace the autoresponder appropriately based on the other mailings you’d typically expect to send during the autoresponder’s sequence.

For bloggers, a great way to set up a multi-step responder is to mix and match content once every 3-7 days as the sequence unfolds. You might, for example:

1. Start with a “thank you” and send the incentive to the new subscriber
2. Send a list of your most popular posts and invite them to browse
3. Send the outline of your eBook and invite them to download / buy the whole thing
4. Send a survey about your site and offerings – how can you improve?
5. Send a hints and tips article from the archives on a relevant subject
6. Got other sites or more than one mailing list? Invite them to take a look.
7. Any archived videos, webcasts? These are great for autoresponders
8. Send an affiliate link to a relevant product or vendor
9. Another survey – would they recommend you to a friend? Why? Why not?
10. Testimonials and recommendations
11. Useful third party resources
12. … etc.

If you have strong content (and you do – you’re a blogger), multi-step autoresponders are great ways to repurpose older editorial as long as it’s still relevant.

Finally, here’s a great multi-step tip: Reward someone for sticking with the sequence. So every mailing might have a post script hinting that there’s an even better reward for staying with the program – and then, in the last mailing in the sequence, you deliver it.

Using Autoresponders to Sell

In the above example sequence we presented two direct opportunities to sell directly from the autoresponder itself – an eBook and an affiliate link.

You can also use them for “Drip Marketing” – a term beloved by internet marketers everywhere. Basically, the idea is that it takes about 7 interactions (say 3 to 10) with a new contact before they’ll buy from you. So having got them onto a list, you can use your autoresponder to repeatedly market to them and ask them to buy.

Use your responder to displace competitors and promote your self with a buying tips guide, for example. If you’re more a consumer-based sale, consider offering an increasing discount the further into the sequence you get to see if you can push them over the edge and get them to buy. This last approach – increasingly powerful offers as time goes by, along with other incentives such as free shipping – works particularly well if your autoresponder is being initiated by an “event” such as shopping cart abandonment.

Ideal content for drip marketing autoresponders includes:

• Sample videos and other collateral
• Testimonials and case studies
• Getting started tips
• Links to user groups
• Sample products
• Increasing discounts
• Bundling products
• Price beaks on shipping etc.

The great thing about using drip marketing for sales is that your autoresponder can start to function as a mini-ATM machine, giving you cash 24×7 while all you do is blog. It’s doing the heavy lifting for you!

Author, Author!

Finally, a great use for autoresponders is content serialization. If you have an eBook –and they’re increasingly popular these days – deliver a section a day or a chapter a week (hmm, just like List Building for Bloggers!) – to reward new subscribers. Or, send the first three chapters as part of your drip marketing campaign to get the recipient to buy the whole book.

Testing the Results

Not sure what’s going to work best? Test. For incentive autoresponders, mix up your offer every week or every month and see what happens. For multi-step drip marketing autoresponders, try mixing up the order of your offers and see if that affects take up. Examine the results, optimize, and reap the rewards.

Your Action Items

• Establish a simple “Thank You Autoresponder” NOW
• Create a reward for subscribing and deliver it on your autoresponder
• Build a multi-step autoresponder from repurposed content / eBooks
• If you use a shopping cart see if you can implement abandonment mailings
• Measure, optimize, repeat!

Next week we will have  Blog 9 – Six Winning Ideas for your Landing Page (and How to Avoid Incentive Program Risks)

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 7  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 6 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Tips and Strategies for Bloggers for Mailing List Optimization

Make the most of your blog’s current mailing list by optimizing key elements of your posts and your emails to subscribers.

In this article you will learn about:

• Prioritizing your Optimization Efforts
• Subject Line Tips
  • The Short Attention-Span Inbox
  • Keeping It Short
  • Going Negative
  • The Benefits of Keywords
  • Numbers and Counts
  • Actionable Subjects
  • The Importance of Now
• Avoiding Attention Drains
• Your Email has been Opened – So What?
• Full or Partial Posts
• Measuring and Testing

At the end of the article is a set of action items for you to put into practice right now to improve your list’s performance.

[This is the seventh article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

On List Optimization: Priorities

The next few sections of our List Building for Bloggers series are about maximizing the value you get from your list. Optimizing can yield great benefits for you and your readers, and can greatly increase both the value of the list to you as well as the value of your mailings to your subscribers.

But First, Back to Basics

That said, it is largely futile to start optimizing a list if you don’t have the basics working properly. Or, more bluntly, there’s no point worrying about writing the right subject line if your site visitors can’t fund the subscription form on your site!

So if you’re just starting with the series, or haven’t yet take the actions recommended earlier in the series, please stop reading this article and get the basics in place first. These earlier articles in the List Building for Bloggers series are for you to read, mark and put into practice before you start an optimization effort:

1. Why aren’t Email Lists Dead in the Age of Social Media?
2. Lists, Email Marketing and Your Blog
3. Five Key Steps to Grow Your Blog’s Mailing List
4. Growing Your List: Accelerating Subscriber Growth
5. Growing Your List: Improving Engagement
6. Avoiding the Spam Trap

Again, if you haven’t got the basics in place any investment you’re making in optimization won’t yield the returns you want. It’s essential to get the fundamentals right before you invest time and energy in optimization, testing and analytics.

Start Here

Still with me? Good. You’re ready to take your list to the next level.

What you will NOT find out

The keys to successfully optimizing your mailing list (actually, pretty much optimizing anything) is to focus on the big wins first – the items that will give you the most bank for the buck. This means getting the basics right (see above) and then moving to the next level. At this point in the program, it does not mean worrying about what day or time your mailings go out, for example. You can optimize that too, to be sure – it’s just not as big a win as the items I’m covering in this post.

Subject Line Optimization

Obviously, your email is no good if it doesn’t get opened. So what you have to do is get the visitor to be so excited (or at least intrigued) by your email’s subject line that they have no choice but to open it and read.

How do you do that? Well, by following good email copywriting rules, that’s how. Here’s what works:

• Short subjects
• Controversial headlines
• Keywords
• Numbers and counts
• Actionable subjects
• Timely or urgent posts

So an email entitled “Three tips to fix your awful subject lines now” is a good one – short, contains a number, is actionable (“tips to fix”), is controversial (“your awful subject lines”), elicits a sense of urgency (“now”) and, for an email marketing blog, is keyword rich.

Since any decent blogger email system will automate the creation of your subject lines for you, and the subject line is likely to be your blog post’s title, what this basically implies is that you need to think much harder about post titles.

The good news is that, if you think about punching up your subject lines, this will benefit all your automated marketing and social media activities. Short is sweet for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn headings too, and the casual readers there have the same attention span within which you have to seize their attention. Keyword rich post headlines are also great for SEO, so it’s a discipline well worth building.

The Short Attention-Span Inbox

While I don’t think that attention spans are declining globally, clearly to what and to whom we give our attention is changing. In particular, deciding whether to read an email from your blog is decided in the time it takes to read and (mis)understand your headline. Use that time wisely to hook your reader. All you have is a second or two, tops. Make the most of it.

Given this constraint, let’s look at each of these subject line tips in a bit more detail.

Keep It Short

Not only do you have a short attention span reader, you have to contend with the width of the subject line in their inbox. If you “bury the lead” by having the meat of your subject line over at the far end then it is more likely not to fit in the column, which means that it is less likely your email will be read.

This is especially true if your readership is increasingly using mobile devices to read email first – and whose isn’t? You have even less space there for the subject. On my BlackBerry, for example, there are only about 35 characters visible when I’m holding it in portrait mode. That isn’t much. Get to the point quickly!

Go Negative: Embrace Controversy

Controversial or negative headlines do better than sweet happy subjects. It’s the way we’re wired. Like a newspaper, it’s excitement – and perhaps a little shock value – that sells. So don’t invite subscribers to improve or get better; that’s too soft. Tell them they’re failing and that you’re here to help. Or lead with a negative statistic.

I’m not necessarily advocating being all doom and gloom all the time; that can be tiresome. By all means throw in a little positive attitude in there from time to time to mix it up. But controversy, like sex, sells. Open up your headlines to your inner dark side and enjoy!

SEO your Subject Lines: Use Keywords

The title tag is the most important part of any web page as far as search engines are concerned. So invest a minute in making it count. If you build your headline with SEO in mind it should become both short and keyword rich, perfect for effective email subject lines. Better for the bots, better for your readership.

Get Attention: Numbers and Counts

People love lists. And you might have noticed that many of the top bloggers and tweeters (?) use lists a lot. Three tips for this. Top ten techniques for that. Five ways to the other.

It isn’t coincidence. Lists work. Especially short lists with a compelling result. Who wants to read 937 ways to improve their scrabble score? Nobody, that’s who. Three surefire tricks to doubling your scrabble tally? Sign me up!

Be Imperative: Actionable Subjects

Firstly, subject lines that clearly show how the reader can benefit with real results are great, especially in this DIY age if you can make it quick or easy.

Secondly, don’t ask for the order. Tell them to give it to you. So, although it may pain Ms. Manners, don’t say please. Don’t say if. Do not equivocate. Instead, tell the reader what you want them to do, and be assertive. So short verbs (“go”, “fix”, “click”, “make”, “find”) using the imperative work really well. Don’t be shy in your subject lines; compel the reader to open your email.

Avoid Procrastination: The Importance of Now

If you’re writing time sensitive email, or your linking to an event, make that clear. If there’s a deadline (e.g. “Ends tomorrow”, “only 24 hours left”) make it obvious.

If there isn’t, you can make the email more likely to be opened if you can help the reader not be lazy and get back to you later (because, more than likely, they won’t). So if you have tips, can they take your advice right now? Yes! Can opening this email make a difference immediately? Absolutely. Can you help them today? You bet!

Subject Line Attention Drains

On the other side of the equation, there are things that can easily drain attention, especially for bloggers using automated email subscription services like FeedBlitz. Some of these are the obvious opposites of the things you should be doing, such as:

• Write long, boring titles
• Bury the lead
• Always being nice
• Being too wordy
• Always asking (if at all) instead of telling
• Not being timely

There are other traps for the unwary, though. Here are some traps to avoid, especially for bloggers:

Don’t repeat your blog’s title or tagline in the subject line. Your readers know who you are and you don’t do this in your blog posts. Don’t do it to your email readership. Make sure the name the email is from identifies you instead and use your subject line more effectively.

Don’t get cute. Some bloggers take pride in their “cute” headlines. This may be great for your blog (especially if you’re less interested in SEO), but “cute” can easily be misinterpreted or ignored when your email is being scanned in the inbox. Unless your fans are so avid they open anything from you, try and keep your subject lines clear. If you really, really like cute but also want to goose your list’s response rate, write your blog post with a subject-line friendly title, mail it, then change the title back to “cute” once the mailing’s gone out.

Your Email’s Been Opened – So What?

Again, good copy writing guidelines apply here. You want your emails to be easily read, appropriate for the audience, and match the subject line. If you paid attention in high school English you’re probably going to do fine. Tune appropriately.

Three Times is The Charm

Your mailing should also be focused. The old presentation adage works fine here:

1. Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em
2. Tell ‘em
3. Tell ‘em what you just told ‘em.

Repetition works. Which is why, for example, most of the List Building for Bloggers #LBB posts have a “What you will learn” section at the top, and an “Action items” section at the bottom.

Don’t Overwhelm your Readers with Choices

In sales, too many choices can deter a result – buyers get confused and don’t know what to buy, so in the end they don’t. Back when I was a fledgling VP at a previous firm, my CEO would always say that I should pick the one to three things I wanted the Board members to take away from my presentation. It was – and is – good advice. The same is true for your blog posts and emails you send. Too many choices or calls to action can have the opposite effect to what you want and actively reduce engagement.

Make Sure you Have Compelling Calls to Action

Make your calls to action like your subject lines – short, imperative, timely. Like the different classes of reader discussed here, calls to action should also accommodate scanners, readers and the picture-centric. Try placing your call to action into a big graphic button, for example. And if you’re just writing editorial, at least ask them to retweet, like on Facebook or forward to a friend.

Don’t Put the Milk in the Back Corner of the Store

Obviously, don’t fib with your subject. But what I mean by this is that you shouldn’t make your subject all about X, and then make your readers read about A, B and C before they get to X. That’s like the grocery store which puts the milk at the back – they want you to pass all that yummy food on the way and make a couple of impulse purchases.

You don’t need to do that (remember, you’re limiting your calls to action); you’ll lose your readership en route. Having hooked the reader with your subject line, deliver the goods up front. It’s disrespectful to your readers to do anything else.

Full or Partial Posts

One way to increase engagement (at the risk of aggravating a portion of your readership) is to limit the content in your blog’s email updates to partial posts.

You should see an increase in click throughs. You may also see a rash of unsubscribes from those who will only tolerate full content. If you do choose partial posts, make sure that you do the following:

• Include enough post content in the email to hook the reader
• Use an email app like FeedBlitz that retains formatting, links and images in partial posts
• Use compelling calls to action to encourage click throughs

Measuring Results – Test, Baby, Test!

Rome wasn’t built in a day – and nor will your results be. Your audience’s interactions with your content will vary by season, the weather, holidays and – yes – by what you write. So collect engagement metrics – opens and click throughs, primarily – over several previous mailings. Try to get a baseline with at least 7 mailings; the more the better to reduce the effects of variations in any one mailing.

Then make ONE change (e.g. focusing on the subject line) – that way you isolate any effects to the change you’re testing. You may see a difference immediately, but you should look at the engagement trend over a series of posts. See how your audience is starting to react and tune. Rinse and repeat for other optimization steps as the hard data comes in.

As you improve, you should also see improvements in softer, more anecdotal metrics: Retweets of your posts, greater comment activity or more Facebook likes, for example. See what works for your audience and engage back!

Your Action Items

• Make sure you have the basics covered first
• Establish your current open and click through metrics baseline
• Change one factor at a time when testing
• Keep subject lines imperative, short, and to the point
• Keep your content focused
• Make compelling calls to action…
• … but not too many!

Next week we will have  Blog 8 – Autoresponders: What, Why and How

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

Bookmark It

Welcome to Blog number 6  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 5 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Learn how to avoid being labeled a spammer, plus tips and tricks on ensuring your mail is delivered to the inbox.
[This is the sixth article in the List Building for Bloggers #LBB series]

In this article you will learn about:

• What is spam
• What it takes to be labeled a spammer
• What happens if you are labeled a spammer
• Getting to the Inbox every time
  • Permission
  • Respect
  • Relevance
  • Compliance
• Improving the odds
  • White listing
  • Proactive subscriber management

What is Spam?

Spam. We all hate it. It is frustrating and wastes everybody’s time. As a result, the technologies that have evolved to try and stop spam from getting to the inbox are imperfect, causing desired emails to be misrouted to junk or simply deleted altogether.

As bloggers using trusted services and valuing our subscribers – they’re not just a “list” to be “blasted” – we know that our emails should reach the inbox. But sometimes they don’t, and this post is my attempt to help you understand why and how you can influence inbox placement.

What Happens if you are Labeled a Spammer?

The good news is that one person screaming “spam” when you mail them won’t affect anything. But the ISPs take note. If many people start screaming “spam,” however, or you do other bad things (like persistently sending email to deleted accounts), then your email will be routed to junk, or your email might not even be accepted by the recipient’s email servers at all. All of the recipient’s on that domain or domains will go dark for you. You might even be black listed, and it takes just one black list entry on a major black list provider to effectively shut down your entire list.

So avoiding being called a spammer is very, very important.

What does it Take to be Labeled a Spammer?

Now you can’t stop complaints. People are lazy – they will hit spam sometimes instead of clicking unsubscribe. People are also error-prone – they might have your email selected when they click “spam” when they meant to flag the email just above it.

So the question is: What does it take to be labeled a spammer? For complaints, industry norms say well managed lists should well be under 0.3%. AOL takes notice at complaint rates over 0.1%. If your mailings consistently generate complaint rates greater than one in a thousand, you risk being labeled a spammer. This is why list quality is so very important.

Email service providers (ESPs) like FeedBlitz also monitor your complaint rates to ensure greatest deliverability. For example, FeedBlitz can and does automatically shut down any list that exceeds conservative industry norms for complaint rates for any single mailing – we’re that zealous about ensuing the best deliverability for our clients. So keeping complaint rates (i.e. people clicking “spam” in their email app) down is essential to getting your word into the subscriber’s inbox.

Getting to the Inbox Every Time

The keys to consistently landing in the inbox are pretty basic:

1. You must have the recipient’s permission to mail them
2. You must treat that permission with respect
3. Your mailings must be relevant
4. Your mailings must comply with ISP best practice and technical rules

Just because the keys are basic, though, doesn’t mean they are necessarily easy. And failing on any one of these will quickly get your emails routed to junk and dramatically increase the risk of your being labeled a spammer.

On the other hand, do all of these and your email will land in the inbox pretty much all the time.

It’s important to note one item that is not on this list: Legality.

While your emails should be legal (i.e. in the US, they should be CAN-SPAM compliant), simply being legal is not nearly enough (think about it – the law isn’t called CANT-SPAM). It’s also the case that many emails sent by reputable providers are, unfortunately, not compliant with CAN-SPAM, and will nonetheless make it to your inbox. Here’s an example from hot hyper-local news site patch.com, funded by AOL no less, and AOL has very stringent email policies. And yet, this:

It violates CAN-SPAM because there is no physical address to send written unsubscribe requests.

So even the big guys can make mistakes. Not that that excuses you, but it goes to show that compliance with the law is fundamentally irrelevant in determining whether or not an email is going to make it to the recipient’s inbox. Compliance is still required to avoid legal jeopardy of course.

Who Decides What is Spam?

Not you.

Got that?

I’ll say it again. Not you.

Ultimately, only the recipient of your emails gets to decide whether your email is spam or not. That said, however, the ISPs (internet service providers) also get in on the act. When enough of their customers declare your email to be spam (and also for other reasons; I’ll get to them later), they will decide that what you are sending is spam before it ever reaches the subscriber. Your email may not even make it onto their networks, let alone the recipient’s junk folder, and less likely their inbox.
To get to where you want your email to go, you have to get past various ISP filters, servers, blacklists and filtering technologies. And then you have to get through the recipient’s personal email app’s settings, filters and local security tools. It’s quite the gauntlet your blog’s message has to run through.

Most importantly, it does not matter AT ALL that you believe that you have permission to email the recipient and you believe that your message is not spam. Spam is the recipient’s call only.

So let’s look at the four keys to avoiding the spam trap and how you as a blogger can succeed with your mailings.

You Must Have the Recipient’s Permission to Email Them.

Always use confirmed dual opt in for new registrations where a recipient must click a link in an email to activate a subscription. Do not settle for less if you want to lower your risk of being junked.

Do not buy or rent lists. Permission must be granted to you directly and explicitly. Bought or rented lists often contain “spam trap” addresses which are, basically, fake addresses that have never been used by a real human being but are visible on the web to be “discovered” by spam bots. Mailing a trap proves that you have not got permission (because that address could never have given you permission) and that you’ve bought the list from a spambot source, which marks you out as a spammer by definition. Don’t take that risk with your blog.

Do not add subscribers to a list they didn’t sign up for. So if a subscriber signed up for your world-leading blog on widgets, don’t add them to your list about fine French wine simply because that’s what your other blog is about. You don’t have permission to mail them about your taste in claret.

Tip: Stay on topic and always, always use confirmed dual opt in.

You Must Treat Permission with Respect

When someone grants you permission to email them, they are effectively inviting you into their inbox. So be a good guest; don’t abuse the privilege and their attention.

For bloggers this is fairly easy to do; as long as we’re mailing posts out. Our subscribers know how often we post and therefore how often they should expect to get a mail from us (although it absolutely helps to tell them that they should expect to hear from you once a day or weekly or whatever is appropriate for you).

When you deviate from the norm – by increasing your mailing frequency, for example – then you risk upsetting your readers. The more upset they become, the more likely they’re going to complain (i.e. hit the spam button). This is also true if you start blasting them with less relevant content, so be careful with, say, dedicated sponsor mailings. If you do up your mailing rate, offer a “slower” alternative for those who feel overwhelmed, such as a weekly summary.

There is also great risk in mailing too little. If you start to collect subscribers for your blog, offer or whatever, but don’t start mailing them until weeks or months later, they will likely have forgotten they signed up or simply lost interest in the interim. Result: spam complaints. So if you don’t plan on mailing people for a while once they sign up, send an autoresponder and set their expectations. If you can, send a brief weekly update, even if it’s a variation on “hey, we’re making great progress, you’ll hear from us as soon as we’re ready.” It keeps you in their mind and doesn’t waste the attention and permission they granted you when they were excited enough to join your list.

Tip: Stay in front of your audience regularly.

Tip: Use guest posts if you can’t fill the content yourself at the expected rate.

Your Mailings must be Relevant

Permission and relevance are key to email list building success. Both are necessary; having only one is not enough.

So your emails must be relevant; again for bloggers that’s easy to do since we write about our passions. But if your blog changes course and goes from, say, widgets to French wine, by changing topic you’ve effectively transitioned them to a new list. You don’t have permission for that topic and so spam complaints will rise. This doesn’t mean that you can’t go off-topic for a post or two at times; after all, a blogger’s audience likes the blogger and is by definition interested in what she has to say. But say your piece and then return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Now there is some debate in some aspects of the email marketing industry about whether relevance trumps permission. And in the case of a personal email which you craft by hand to a specific individual addressing a specific need, I’d say ok, yes. As long as you’re timely, relevant and are responding to the recipient’s articulated need, then you can mail them. But it has to be a personal email from your email app, and not a bulk email or mail merge or similar – even if that mail merge runs through your desktop email software. It’s much like the approach I promote here, here and here for using Twitter to deliver real-time sales and customer service. And I think that’s OK.

But for bulk emailing – where you send email to multiple subscribers at once, automated or otherwise – the answer is emphatically NO. You MUST have permission to deliver automated mailings from a blog (or any other source) to a list.

Tip: By all means detour – it can keep things interesting – but be quick about it.

Your Mailings must Comply with ISP Best Practice and Technical Rules

Without going into too much technical detail here, the major ISPs (in most markets the cable, phone and satellite providers) and the major email account providers (e.g. gmail, hotmail, yahoo) all have very similar technical rules about bulk email (which is what you’re sending as you build your blog’s list).

ISPs track reputation, spam traps, sending behavior (e.g. persistently emailing accounts that bounce), complaint rates, email structure, black lists and more to determine whether your email should even be allowed onto their networks, and then whether the mail should be sent to junk or the inbox. If some of these terms are unclear, revisit the “terms and terminology” section on the second article in the List Building for Bloggers series “Lists, Email Marketing and your Blog” here http://blog.feedblitz.com/2010/11/lists-email-marketing-and-your-blog-lbb.html

How you send email from your blog to your subscribers can greatly affect how your emails are treated by the receiving ISP networks. In order of increasing risk (i.e. best to worst):

• Best: Use a reputable third party email service provider (ESP), such as FeedBlitz (of course!)
• Maybe: Using your own dedicated email server
• Worst: Using a shared email server or an email server on a shared web host

Reputable email service providers (ESPs) are the best solution unless you are a simply massive corporation with excess IT resources. Why? Because we structure the emails properly (e.g. adding authentication, text alternatives); we use a small number of high reputation IP addresses to send mail (using things like feedback loops and whitelisting to maintain that reputation); and we manage the lists in our charge properly (e.g. tracking metrics, logging subscriber activity, bounce rates and legal compliance) to comply with ISP policies. It’s best practice, and best practice gives the best results. Bloggers are typically not large corporations wth money to spare, so outsourcing to a dedicated expert service is absolutely the way to go.

For a dedicated email server on your own domain you can probably get access to feedback loop data as long as you own the public IP or the domain it’s on. So you can – with a lot of effort – get some of the quality data that ESPs do. Of course, you have to use that data, and have someone or something manage your lists and processes. Most bloggers don’t have the time or technical skills necessary, and failure to keep up can get your messages sent to the penalty box. Also, if you do get into trouble, it’s really hard to get out without an ESP’s resources to help. If you’re an email guru (or have one on staff) you can take this path. Since you’re a blogger, though, you aren’t and you don’t. Once your list gets to be any reasonable size this option gets to be a lot of work very quickly.

Email sent from a shared web server (or a shared email server) carries great risk. For starters, you can’t get at the quality or feedback loop data from the ISPs: It’s like driving in the dark wearing sunglasses with your eyes closed. As touched on in an earlier LBB post, just one badly behaved (or virus-infected) app using that web or email server will trash that machine’s reputation and get all your email blocked. You also risk incurring the wrath of your hosting service, which risks having your site taken down. Don’t do it.
Tip: Use a reputable provider for your bulk mailing, blog-driven or otherwise.

Content Filtering

If your email has been accepted by the ISP and is coming from a reputable source your message is really likely to end up in the inbox no matter what you write about. Reputation and trust trump the content filters the vast majority of the time.

That said, some links or behaviors can be picked up by content filters and skew your otherwise bon mots into junk despite everything. If that happens, figure out why (your email provider should be able to help you with this, but you may have to pay for the privilege).

In my experience, the only content that will consistently override a reputation filter is when there is a link in the mail to a site the receiving ISP feels can’t be trusted. So, for example, if you’re linking to a known source of stolen audio files (or a site that looks like it might be), expect to be junked. If you’re on a shared server and another site on that server is hosting “bad” content, expect to be junked. If you’re hosting “bad” content, well…. you get the idea.

True story. We (FeedBlitz) had a client whose emails were being consistently routed to an ISP’s junk folder despite our being on that ISP’s white list. It turned out to be the fault of one link in one part of the mail. It was a legitimate link, but the domain’s URL just fell the wrong side of the “this link looks spammy” filter it was enough to route the mail to junk.

Remember that the ISPs are doing this to prevent malware running on otherwise trusted sources from getting spam to their users. It’s their job. If it happens to you engage you’re your email service provider to find out why, and (crucial, this) for crying out loud take their advice. When you find the root cause it’s usually a simple matter for a blogger to overcome it, which it was in this case.

Tip: Worry less about content, more about reputation, relevance and permission.

Avoiding the Spam Trap

So, let’s review. Permission, respect, relevance, compliance are key. You’re a blogger and are putting all of these into practice. Can you do more? You bet! Two key areas are:

• White listing
• Proactive subscriber management

Whitelisting

The #1 thing you can ask your subscribers to do is have them white list you when they subscribe. This not only guarantees that the email will get to their inbox if the mail is accepted for delivery by their service, it can also positively influence the ISP’s global filters.

When you ask your subscriber to add you to their white list they may have to remember there are two locations where they should update their white lists:

On their email service’s / ISP’s web mail portal.

Why: It ensures that the ISP knows the email is solicited and should go to your inbox at the ISP.

On their email app’s white list

Why: If the email is downloaded from the subscriber’s inbox at their email service to a dedicated email app (e.g. Outlook, Apple Mail, Entourage) then the email app will apply its filters too, (i.e. after the email service’s filters). Whitelisting here will ensure the proper routing of your mail to the inbox in the app once it gets there.
Your subscriber should add your and your service’s email addresses to both white lists for the best results.

Proactive List Management

Your email service will manage your subscribers as best it can, filtering out bounces and complaints. But you can help pre-empt complaints by proactively managing your list too. Some subscribers won’t hit unsubscribe or complain at first – they will reply to your mailing and say “remove” or “unsubscribe.” As and when you get that email, go to the list and remove the subscriber. If you don’t and your blog’s mailing system reaches out to them again that subscriber is likely to complain. So help yourself by acting promptly to remove folks who don’t want your mailings from your list if they contact you directly.

Next week we will have  Blog 7 – Mailing list under performing? Optimize it with These Tips

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 5  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 4 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Growing Your List: Improving Engagement

Make your blog’s mailing list more effective with this entry in the “List Building for Bloggers” series. See all the LBB posts here.

In this article you will learn about:

• Quality vs. quantity.
• Measuring engagement.
• The human and technical factors that affect engagement.
• The role of branding.
• Subject lines.
• Focusing your list.
• Custom fields, segmentation and personalization.

As always, there’s a set of action items at the end you can apply now to improve your next mailing’s effectiveness.

Quality and Quantity

In the prior article, while I focused on increasing your list’s subscriber count (quantity), I also wrote that quality beats quantity any day. It’s absolutely true – if your list has a bajillion subscribers but only your Mom reads what you send, what’s the point? All the extra readers don’t matter.

In other words, quality counts. And really what matters is engagement – how many readers are opening your mailings and, more importantly, how many are doing something you want them to based on that mailing.

Measuring Engagement

The basic metrics to use here are the open rate and the click through rate. While any one mailing will vary from the next, the overall trend over several mailings for these metrics should be flat or rising (flat is OK if you’re growing your list’s volume). If your engagement rate trends start to fall, try to figure out why and take corrective action. Bear in mind that some metrics may appear to be low, such as click through rate, if you send full posts. It is the trend that matters the most, not the absolute value.

The Human Factor

What you want your list to do is be engaged with you and your content, whether that content is editorial (most blog posts) or some kind of sales pitch (the dreaded “email blast”). The key content driver for engagement is relevance – writing to your list with what they expect to hear from you.

But there are also human factors – as described in a CopyBlogger post only this week – that can really help you drive engagement up.

In particular:

1. Have a call to action – Tell them what you want them to do (but don’t have 10 actions – just one, clearly articulated, is a Good Thing).
2. Be direct – Tell them (as opposed to asking them) what you want them to do.

Even if it’s just “Retweet this!” you should ask for the reader to engage. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

The other thing to bear in mind is that different people interact with posts in different ways. Some gravitate to images first. Some will skim first. Some will read your post line by line immediately. The detail readers are easy, because they’re going to read anyway. But to get the most engagement from the other types of subscriber you should:

• Have one or more images or illustrations in your post for the visual reader.
• Use short headlines and selective bolding to attract skimmers.

Appearance

An email that doesn’t appear correctly to a subscriber simply won’t drive engagement. If it doesn’t render properly or isn’t easily recognized then it is as if it was never sent in the first place.

Display problems can happen for these reasons:

• Inappropriate graphic design choices.
• Form factor and bandwidth problems.
• Videos and active content.
• No branding.

Inappropriate Graphic Design

One example and, frankly, a pet peeve: White text on a black background. It’s so dark and broody; beloved of Goth students and heavy metal bands everywhere. And it just stinks for email, because many email systems don’t display backgrounds (especially if your background is an image, not just a plain color). So if the background doesn’t display, your hapless reader is left with white text on a white background. In other words, it’s invisible.

There are other places where graphic designs that work great on the web can just go horribly, horribly wrong when used in email:

Excessive use of external CSS, floating content and scripts. Some email systems won’t pull in styles from your web server. So your font and color choices aren’t used, which can really foul up your email’s display.

Using div tags and CSS to lay out content. Your designer should be working this way for your web site, but the HTML capabilities of many popular email clients are just awful. For best coverage you should use tables to layout multi-column or more sophisticated designs. Your web designer will want to throw up all over this one, but persist. It’s the only way to get the most consistent renderings across the widest possible range of email platforms.

In fact, for the best appearance across the board, apply the KISS principle.

• Use simple dark colors on light background for your text.
• Stick with small image sizes, simple layouts, and very basic HTML.
• Always have alt or title tags for your images.

To see what I mean with the last bullet, try looking at one of your emails with images disabled. You’ll get the idea. Plus using alt tags is good for SEO too!

When Size Really Matters: Phones

Images are essential for readbility and more, but if your reader tries to download your multi-megabyte promotional image on their phone’s email app, the odds are they’ll give up waiting for it. It will be too slow to download and, again, you’ve wasted your time sending it.

Secondly, if the majority of your audience is on a mobile device, don’t send emails with wide pictures or other content that can’t easily fit on the phone’s display. You’re making extra work for them to read as they have to continually scroll or peer at teeny weeny text on their mobile device. The harder you make it to interact with – or simply read – your content, the less likely you’re going to get the engagement you’re looking for. If you have a mix of mobile and desktop subscribers, use an “auto-flow” layout (instead of a fixed-width one) that automatially fits to the size of the screen.

Videos and Active Content

Videos, scripts, flash, forms – none of these will work consistently in email. In fact, scripts and embedded video players will be regarded as hostile by a receiving email system and not shown, mangling your layout and eliminating the interactivity you were after. Now FeedBlitz can help compensate for some of these issues; for example we’ll create a thumbnail image of your video from your video service if we can. But if you’re relying on an embedded video to get your point across in your email, think again.

Easy Steps to Improve Engagement

Having focused on what can bring engagement down, let’s look at what can bring it up.

Branding

One aspect often neglected by bloggers is branding their emails – all that work on the site design and then no effort for the email subscriber. Such a wasted opportunity! Use your logo or masthead banner in your mailings. Make the effort and finish the play. Let readers who select your email in a preview pane know it’s from you in the first few seconds. It’s appalling, to be honest, how many bloggers offer email subscriptions but haven’t gone to the effort of doing something as basic as a logo into the email. What a waste.

Secondly, set the envelope settings to identify yourself or your company as the sender. Use the name that your reader would know you or your blog by. For example, use “Crochet Corner” instead of “Phyllis Q. Knitting-Needle” if your subscribers know they’re subscribing to the “Crochet Corner” blog.

Thirdly, make sure that the email address you use to send from and get replies sent to is real and read by a human. Yes, you will have to filter out of office replies that come in, but you are looking for engagement here. If someone replies to your email and it disappears into the ether what are they going to think of you? It’s not only a missed opportunity to start a conversation, they probably now think you’re kinda rude. Who wants that?

The Subject Line

A compelling subject line is invaluable. So don’t clutter it up with, for example, the name of your blog, especially if you’re using the name of the blog as the sender. They don’t need the redundancy and you’re wasting space. Your subject line – usually your blog post’s title – should be catchy and well under 100 characters if possible. Remember, you are not your audience, and your message has to stand out and hook the reader quickly. If the point of your email subject line is too wide for the inbox’s subject line column, it’s done you no good. Be brief and to the point in your blog post titles. If your mailing system can’t change subject lines, get that fixed.

Subscribe to your own mailings

I know you don’t want to read what you just wrote, but you should subscribe to your own mailings. That way you experience what your subscribers experience. If you don’t like it, dollars to donuts they won’t either. Fix it!

Focusing Your List

Custom Fields

Counter-intuitively, one of the ways to improve engagement is to reduce the size of your list. You can do this up front, by requiring extra data from the new subscriber, such as demographics (city, state, zip, gender, name etc). Most email services like FeedBlitz call this extra data “Custom fields.”

Requiring custom fields adds “friction” to the sign-up process, but it also means that those who complete it are more committed to you and your content. You sacrifice some list quantity growth for a more engaged audience that you know much more about.

Segmentation

When you mail, most automated mailings go to all the readers, and for bloggers that’s fine. But with demographics you can segment your list, targeting a subset of your readers for the offer or invitation. For example, suppose you’re speaking at an event in Texas. You want to invite folks who live in Texas and maybe Oklahoma, say, but there’s very little point inviting anyone from the north east. In fact, you’ll probably annoy them. Segmentation solves this problem, as long as you have the data.

Only mailing a small portion of the list, i.e. sending the email only to those for whom it might be relevant, is a great way to get increased engagement from that section of the audience. It will also reduce complaints and unsubscribes all around. If you have a CRM (customer relationship management) system you can import data from your CRM and link it to your mailing list, so you can tie data you already know about the user to your mailing system. For bloggers, you can automate this to a degree by offering multiple lists from your blog and applying tag filters.

Personalization

With data you know about the user comes the ability to turn a bland, cookie-cutter mailing into a special, personalized one. You could insert the recipient’s name, for example, or switch what you send them based on custom field data. This is pretty advanced for most bloggers, to be fair, and so if you’re interested in figuring this out in FeedBlitz terms, see this knowledge base article.

Your Action Items

• Subscribe to your own list.
• Check your sender name is appropriate.
• Make sure the sending / reply-to emails are real.
• Graphic design checks.
  • Verify your logo, banner and other branding are in the emails.
  • Ensure your email design works without images (foreground and background).
  • Determine whether your email template need simplifying.
• Post content changes.
  • Keep subject lines crisp.
  • Add direct calls to action in each post.
  • If you use video a lot, check how it appears in your emails.
  • Don’t use scripts or forms.
• Consider and plan any custom fields.

Next week we will have part one of Blog 6 – Are You Getting to the Inbox and Avoiding the Spam Trap?

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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