

















Table of Content

       Introduction
1. Email Marketing: An Overview
2. Grow and Organize your email lists
3. Autoresponders and email apps every marketer should know
4. Email Designing & Copywriting Strategies
5. Email Deliverability Strategies
a. How to keep your email out of the spam box?
b. Top delivery Tools for Internet Marketers
6. The Art of Targeting & Segmentation
7. Email Program Management & Optimization Strategies
a. Planning email marketing calendar
b. Common email marketing mistakes to avoid
c. Determining the optimal email frequency
d. How to use Split Testing/AB testing to create results? 
8. Funnel Creation & Drip Marketing
9. Transactional Emails: The 7 Best Services
10. 10 email styles to boost your profits
11. Case Studies 
   Conclusion





Introduction

Since email was first created in 1978, it has evolved to meet the non-stop demand for mass communication. Originally, it was fascinating that a message could be relayed from one point to another instantly. 
Now it’s the centerpiece of modern day communication, commerce and innovation.

Email is used by roughly three billion people. With all of those messages zooming around the Internet, it can be difficult to understand the technology and methodology used to generate opens, clicks, and customers buying. 
You already know that sending email is one of the most cost-effective ways to build a relationship with your market. In fact, when done right, email marketing can produce lasting relationships with your list better than any other marketing avenue. According to the Direct Marketing Association, Email Marketing can produce an ROI of 4,300%!
Over the next several sections we unveil the interior workings of email and how you can harness best practices to establish a profitable online presence.
Whether you’re building your first campaign or you’re a seasoned pro, the ideas, tips and strategies in this guide will boost the ROI of your email marketing. Throughout this guide you’ll uncover new opportunities to spur more engagement with your emails - from design to delivery.







Chapter 1
Email Marketing: An Overview

Email Concepts that You Need to Know as an Email Marketing Beginner
To the naked eye, it may seem that an email has only the subject line and body. However, it’s important to know that there are actually many other parts both right in front of you — and behind the scenes — that affect your open rates. Everything from “From Name” and “Reply To Address” to hidden email headers play a huge role in your deliverability rates. After all, if your email can’t make it to the inbox — it’s definitely not going to be opened!
If you've decided to implement an email marketing program or are ready to talk to your marketing team or a consultant about email marketing, this article will introduce you to the important email concepts, terminology and metrics that you'll need to understand. Once you have a basic grip on those email concepts, you'll be able to properly evaluate the success of an email campaign or the knowledge of any consultants you may be interviewing.

1. Headers
Nearly everyone knows the basic parts of an email: The “From” information such as name and email address, the subject line and the body, but there is also hidden information in the email that your email service provider (ESP) takes care of for you — the header. Email headers are comprised of information regarding routing, authentication such as SPF/DKIM/DMARC keys, unique identifiers, unsubscribe messages and sometimes more depending on the mailer.

2. HTML and Text
A great way to make sure that your customers can view your email is to insert a “View this email online” link right at the top of your message.
This allows readers to follow the link and view the email as a webpage — just in case your email doesn’t display correctly in their inbox. Another great way to make sure your customers and prospects are getting the most out of your email messages is to include a permission reminder — adding a note near the beginning about why they are receiving emails from you (bonus points for including an unsubscribe link that’s easy to find near the top!).
3. Open Rate
Email open rate means, quite simply, how many people (in percentage form) opened the email that you sent. This metric, however, is becoming less important in anything other than a relative way. Email open rates are tracked using a small graphic in the email. Many email providers block graphics. Because of this graphic blocking, a client may open an email and have it not register as being opened unless the client actively turns on graphics. Some reports suggest that standard open rate reporting can be off by as much as 35%, depending on your email list.
4. Click-Through Rate
Email click-through rate compared to the number of opened emails (NOT to the entire send). Different companies measure this in different ways. Unfortunately, there isn't a standard answer for the question: "Is it all clicks or does only one click count per open?" This measurement is important because the entire purpose of your email is to drive traffic to your landing page or website.
5.  Deliverability
Email Deliverability means the number of emails from your send that actually made it to the inbox (as opposed to the junk folder or the black hole of "unknown address"). 
6.  Personalization
Personalization is when you use a client's user name, first name or other unique information in the email that you send. To do this, your database needs to capture that information, and your email service provider needs to accept and include data fields that match. Be careful using personalization. It's not appropriate for every industry. However, in the right context, it can improve email conversions dramatically.
7.  List Cleaning/List Scrubbing/List Pruning
Keeping your email list "clean" is important. The more bad email addresses (typos, defunct accounts, etc.) that you have on a list, the more likely you are to get flagged as potential spam. Also, your reporting metrics won't reflect your email's true performance. Many email providers automatically prune lists of bad names as you go along. Explore your options with your email provider.
8.  CAN-SPAM
CAN-SPAM is a piece of U.S. federal legislation that was passed in 2003. It's a set of rules that you MUST follow when sending email if you want to not be classified as spam and potentially face federal fines and penalties. 
9.  Opt-In/Double Opt-In
There are three kinds of email lists. "Opt-In" means that your users have "opted into" your email list and given you permission to email them. "Double Opt-In" means that users have given you permission twice (usually via a confirmation link in an email). All other lists are considered cold lists or prospect lists (usually bought or rented). There are different benefits to each kind of list. See our full article to figure out which is best for you!
10.  Unsubscribe/Opt-Out
Quite simply, "Unsubscribe" / "Opt-Out" is the ability of users to unsubscribe from your email list. There are two types: Universal Unsubs and List Specific Unsubs. Universal Unsubs are users who unsubscribe from all future emails of any kind from you. List Specific Unsubs will unsubscribe from just a portion of your list. For example, they don't want special offers but do want weekly newsletters.
11.  HTML Email/Plain Text Email
These are the two types of email that you can send. An html email includes colors, tables and graphics. A plain text email includes only text. In truth, you should send both formats because not all email clients (and particularly some phones) accept html email. However, figuring out what balance works for you may be trial and error.
12.  Bounce Back
Bounce back is the number of names on a list that get returned to you as "undeliverable". This could be because the email address was mis-typed, the email address doesn't exist any more, the email address has a full inbox, or any other number of reasons. This metric is most important when you're using a bought or rented list because it shows you how many bad email addresses you purchased.
Email marketing is obviously more complicated than these email concepts! But this will get you started.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Why does email marketing present such a benefit over other more traditional forms of marketing? Why does it drive better returns on investment and customer engagement metrics than other marketing techniques? Why would you invest the time and resources to develop an email marketing program at all? In this article, you will find out the top email marketing benefits to your business compared to other forms of marketing, including:
1. Reduced Time & Effort
Take a moment to think about the time and effort involved in structuring a direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business campaign using one of the two most common offline direct marketing communications techniques:
* Print Postal Mailings: You'll need to allow time for a designer to create the mailing, typically through several lengthy revisions. Then you'll need to allow time for the print mailing to be printed, cut and, if necessary, stuffed into envelopes. 
* Telesales Campaigns: In addition to having to construct a telesales script, you'll have to wait the time out while your sales agents dial through cycled call attempts to all of the sales leads or customers on your target list.
With email marketing, however, you can turn a marketing communications piece out in typically less than two hours. 
2.   Personalize Messages
Not only can you send personalized email with your user's name or login name, but many email marketing solutions offer the ability to feed in personalized information such as sales or purchase history. With email marketing and communications, you can easily speak to your customers in a very personalized and intimate way that is not possible with other marketing channels and avenues.
3.  Segment User and Customer Database Information
As noted above, because you can segment your database of customers or users with email, you can send extremely targeted marketing campaigns that will result in increased sales conversions simply because they are so specific. For example, if you sell flowers, you can find everybody in your database who ever bought daffodils and then send them an email in April when the first daffodil shipments come in. You're then using your customer database to put the most relevant message in front of the customers who are most likely to respond to it, and that's what good marketing is all about.
4.  More Frequent Communications
Because email takes less time to create and send than other marketing and advertising channels do, you can communicate with your customers more frequently. Instead of only being able to send them a flyer or catalog once a month or once a quarter, you can easily send them offers once a week. 
5. Reduce Overhead Costs
Email marketing can be done at a very low overhead cost! You don't need a ton of employees, designers, or marketing analysts. You don't need to pay for printing, postal mailing costs, phone lines, or advertising rates. In fact, there are services that allow you to host your email marketing using professionally-designed templates that you can then just alter to your own needs. 
6. Exponentially Better Ability to Track Sales and User Engagement
Well-developed email marketing platforms can provide tracking information on how many people opened an email, how many people clicked a link in an email, which specific link within the email was clicked, how many people complained that an email was spam or unsubscribed and, of course, whether your email even made it into your recipient's inbox. Combine that with a business's ability to track sales back to a source and you can identity customer engagement and response through an entire cycle with clear, easy-to-understand metrics.
7.  Save the Planet with Email Marketing!
It may seem like a minor part of the big picture, but we're all trying to be more environmentally friendly these days! When you optimize email marketing as your primary customer communication and direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business marketing method, you'll help save the planet by reducing the number of trees killed for print marketing pieces. We all want to help save the planet, and making a responsible decision about your marketing tools can help you to do just that while also improving your business's success.
Those are a lot of measurable benefits of email marketing over other marketing channels! Of course, we recommend that email marketing be an important part of your marketing mix – not the only ingredient in it. However, as you can see, if you're not incorporating email into your marketing plan, then you're missing out on a number of benefits that can improve your overall sales and user engagement for a very low overhead cost and, in many cases, a very limited amount of time and effort.






Chapter 2
Grow and Oranize your email lists
Email matters. 
"People don’t change their email addresses," notes New York Times best-selling author Jon Acuff. "Facebook, Twitter, Google+, people join and drop that pretty often. But changing your email address is a hassle. That’s why you still have friends with AOL and Hotmail accounts." 
That's why you need to start an email list, grow it, and optimize it for your needs. Here's everything you need to get started. 
A. 12 Ways to Rapidly Grow Your Email List 
Now that you know how to start gathering email addresses and the laws you need to be following with your new powers, let's look at some more creative and advanced ways you can boost those numbers. 
1. Add More Signup Forms 
We covered the basic method for embedding a signup form in your site, so now the question is where else can you embed signup forms that would make sense? You want to have them appear on your site frequent enough that they’re hard to miss accidentally, but not so frequent that your readers are annoyed by them. 
Here are a seven places you could add a signup form: 
* The end of every blog post as a final call to action  
* Page footer so that it’s at the very bottom of every page, as well 
* Page header so that there’s a call to action at the top of post as well Sidebar 
* About page 
* Contact Us page 
* Feature box or welcome bar at the top of every page or post 
Another option is to use app integration tool like Zapier to start pulling in email addresses from other forms you already have set up. For example, you could add people who complete your “Contact Us” or “Sign Up” forms and also opt-in to receiving your marketing emails as part of that form. Just be sure you have a check box in that form to signup for your newsletters, or use double opt-in. 
2. Add a Pop-Up Signup Form 
The jury is still out on if pop-up forms are worth the annoyance or not, but it's clear they effectively yield signups. One way to get started with pop-ups is to install a tool from AppSumo called SumoMe, which will let you quickly add three different types of popups to your site. 
Getting started with pop-ups, whether your site is uses Word-Press or is custom built, is a quick process using SumoMe's tools. 
* If You’re Using WordPress -This only takes a minute. Log-in to your WordPress Admin, go to “Plu-gins” and then click “Add new.” Search for “SumoMe,” then install and active it. 
* If You’re Using Anything Besides WordPress -First, go to SumoMe’s Instructions Page and grab the code for putting in the of your HTML. Then either paste it into the section of your page yourself, or ask one of the developers on your team to do it for you. Once it’s installed, go to your site’s homepage and click on the badge in the upper right. This will let you manage SumoMe on top of your site, without  having to log in elsewhere. 
You have three options for adding list building popups: 
* List Builder -The typical email signup prompt that you’re used to 
* Scroll Box - Creates a more subtle pop-up as you scroll down the page 
* Smart Bar -Small call to action that stays at the very top of your page 
3. Catch Visitors on the Way Out 
When I visit a website that has a pop-up asking me to signup for their email list is, my first thought is "How do I know I want to sign up? You won't let me read your content." What if instead of immediately showing someone a pop-up asking for their email, you did it on the way out? Services like Exit Monitor will watch your readers' mouse movements and when they get too close to that "X" at the top of the screen, Exit Monitor will bring up a call to action to sign up for your mailing list. Alternately, you can use the first tip and put a signup box at the bottom of your posts for a similar effect. 
4. Show a Subscribe Page Before You Show Content 
If you go to the blogs of Noah Kagan or Andrew Chen, you’ll notice something different. Instead of immediately taking you to their blog content, you’re greeted with a picture of them and a reason you should sign up for their mailing list. According to Kagan, his signup rate increased to 14% on his homepage once he implemented that big call to action. 
If you’re dedicated to building your list quickly and you have something compelling to offer to visitors, then you might consider changing your blog index page into a giant call to action. If you’re on WordPress, there’s a simple plugin that lets you do it. If you’re not, then you’ll have to custom build it. 
5. Get Email Subscribers With Your By-Line 
One option that can have a smaller but meaningful impact on your signups is to add a call to action directly to your author byline. Your byline is the small line of text at the top of every post that tells the reader whose writing they’re reading. It’s going to be on all of your posts, so you may as well optimize it. 
6. Lead Magnets: Use Incentives to Capture Email Addresses 
Better than just asking someone to sign up is giving them a reason to do so. With so many sites asking for peoples’ email addresses today, many of us are protective of giving out our email address since we’re worried about getting spammed. 
To reassure your readers that you’re providing high quality content in return for signing up, you can provide a “lead magnet” for their email address, which is just any bonus that they get in return for joining your email address. 
Here are some commons examples of lead magnets: 
* Create an Email Course 
* Embed a Video 
* Another incentive you could give to your readers downloadable documents that expand on what you discussed in the post. 
* Supply Coupon Codes 
7. Host a Giveaway 
Giveaways have become easier and more popular recently thanks to the WordPress plugin KingSumo by Noah Kagan and the others at AppSumo. KingSumo incentivizes people who join the giveaway to share it with their friends by giving you two or more extra entries (usually three) per referral you get to the giveaway. 
Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income did a giveaway when KingSumo was in its early days and he grew his email list by 200,000  people! And that was for a prize only worth $60. 
So far we've offered ideas for ways you can collect email addresses on your site, but why stop there? These ideas will help you get started collecting email addresses from other sites as well. 
8. Get Signups from a Tweet 
The idea is simple. When someone shares your content on Twitter, you follow up with them immediately suggesting they sign up for your email list. 
9. Guest Post and Offer a Bonus 
Guest posting is one of the best way to drive traffic back to your blog, but why stop with traffic? The marketing tactic can also be an effective way to generate new sign ups on other peoples’ sites, without readers having to come back to yours. 
Bryan Harris demonstrates this in “A Tale of Two Launches: One Made $43,380 and the Other -$1,385” on the company blog of LeadPages. In the piece, he explains why email list building is important, then at the end he has a call to action telling you that he’ll send you a video on how he grows his email list if you sign up for updates. 
When you click it that button, instead of taking you to his site it just gives you a popup right on the site so you don’t have to go anywhere, which LeadPages would appreciate since they don’t want to drive traffic away from their site. 
10. Publish Slideshares 
Presentations that speak for themselves are a fantastic way to convey large amounts of information, especially when it benefits from visual supplementation. 
Once you've created a great looking presentation (or "deck") you can upload it to SlideShare and share it with the world. But that’s not enough—you also need the Slideshare to convert. 
You can include hyperlinks in your presentation and SlideShare retains them. That means that you can include a call to action with a link to your site where they can subscribe; a great way to convert readers at the end of looking through your presentation when they’re already primed and appreciative of you. 
11. Subscribe Your Buyers 
If you sell digital or physical goods with the help of a service like PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, or Bigcommerce, you want to make sure that your customers' email addresses are making their way onto your list so you can let them know about future products, sales, or info related to what they just purchased. 
12. Your Email Signature 
Last but not least, you can add a very simple call to action to your email signature that tells people in one line why they should sign up for your list, and is then hyperlinked to where they can sign up. 
To do this in Gmail, go into your settings by clicking on the gear in the upper right. 
Then scroll down to the signature section, type in what you want it to say, then add a hyperlink to your blog or signup form.  
Conclusion
Your email list members have the potential to be your biggest fans, your most loyal buyers, and your most reliable sources of feedback and traffic. But you have to start collecting them now. 
If you haven’t started building your email list, go back to the beginning of the chapter and follow the steps to get set up collecting email addresses. If you’ve done the basics but aren’t using as many strategies as you could be, start incorporating some of the ones we talked about later in the article and see how they boost your sign-up rates.









Chapter 3
Autoresponders and email apps every marketer should know
A.  Autoresponders 
Trying to juggle those emails while you take care of regular business can take a toll on your productivity - according to the University of Michigan, your ability to get work done drops as much as 40% when you try to do two or more things at once! Not only is all that juggling time-consuming, it can also lead to inconsistent follow-up and a poor customer experience. What happens to the lead whose email you forget to answer? In all likelihood, they are not going to become a customer. 
You can take care of your follow-up problem for good by setting up a system that responds to basic events automatically with an autoresponder. A system such as this is one of the most valuable tools you can add to your business arsenal. 
An AUTORESPONDER is a system that automatically sends a reply email when a specific trigger occurs, such as a contact opting in to a list or sending an email to a specific address.
For New Leads
When someone new visits your website and tells you they’re interested, you know how important it is to get back to them right away with more information. It can make or break their decision to eventually become one of your customers!
Instead of having you or your assistant respond to them one by one, write an awesome welcome email that answers all their basic questions and tells them what to expect next. Set up a system that sends them your email automatically when they fill out your “Contact Us” form or send an email to your info@yourbusiness.com address.
Make sure to include:
• An Introduction
Tell your new contacts a little about who you are. Even if they’ve opted in from your website, take the opportunity to sum up what makes your business special, remind them what you do and get them more familiar with your unique brand.
• A Thank You  
Your new contacts have given you their email address, arguably one of the most personal ways to get in touch with them. Do the polite thing, and thank them for their interest, for engaging with your content or for signing up to receive updates.
• Validation
Make your new contacts feel good about their decision to give you their email address! Add some social proof about the number of customers for whom you’ve made a difference, awards you’ve won or testimonials from happy customers.
• Information About What to Expect Next
A surefire way to strike out with a new opt-in is to leave them in the dark about what’s going to happen next. If they requested info from you, make sure you indicate that someone will be in touch soon. If they opted in for drip content you’ll be sending them over time, let them know when they’ll hear from you again.
• More Ways to Get in Touch
If there are other channels where your contact can connect with you, let them know. Give them your phone number if you want them to call your physical location with questions, or invite them to connect with you on social media to stay on top of all your helpful content!
Sales Autoresponders
When you’re automatically collecting leads online, it’s important to fit your autoresponder messages into your sales process. Failing to follow up with leads who fill out a form on your site is the number one biggest mistake businesses make!
Although autoresponders eliminate the burden of manually responding to new leads and decrease the risk of follow-up failure, a recent study revealed that only 37% of companies use autoresponders to follow up with contacts who fill out a form on their site. (Source) That’s a huge missed opportunity - one that you can take advantage of with a few simple autoresponders.
Here’s a few out-of-the box examples:
1. Automate Email Follow-up After Sales Calls
It’s a good practice to have your sales reps send a follow-up email to a lead after speaking with them over the phone to recap the conversation, provide more info and outline next steps. Although following up after every call is a smart sales tactic, it can be very time-consuming to repeat this task every time you make a call.
You can use an internal form that you or your reps fill out during or after the call to trigger an autoresponder email. Use merge fields pulled from the internal form to add the customer’s name, the products or services you spoke about or the points you covered on the call to personalize each email. If a contact doesn’t pick up the phone, you or your reps can also note that on the internal form to trigger an email that lets them know you tried to call and shares the relevant info. 
2. Follow Up With Your Audience Via Email After a Speaking Engagement
Another great way to follow up with contacts (and also to help you get more contacts quickly) is to use autoresponders to stay in touch with people who are in the audience at your next speaking engagement.
Give the audience a link to a landing page with a form where they can share their info with you (Offering a free piece of content will really motivate them to visit the page and share their email address.) Have the form trigger an autoresponder email with more information about your business so you can leave a lasting impression and leverage your opportunity to gain new customers.
3. Follow Up Flawlessly After Networking Events
Say that you and your team attend an event where you meet lots of potential customers with whom you’ll need to follow up. Have them fill out a form to add them to your list (Bring a tablet or laptop to have your contacts add themselves or to make it easy for your team to add in their info). Then, send everyone an autoresponder email telling them how great it was to meet them at the event.
For all three of these unique autoresponder tactics, it’s also a great idea to follow up over time with a targeted series of emails that continue to nurture them through the sales cycle by offering more information, sharing content and offering special promotions.
Autoresponders For Existing Customers
Research consistently shows that repeat customers spend more than new customers, are less price sensitive and more likely to become your brand advocates.
They are also much easier to market to! Marketing Metrics reports that you have a 60-70% chance of selling your product to a repeat customer, compared to a 5-20% chance for a brand new customer.
Since existing customers are so much more likely to make a purchase than new leads, why not leverage your relationship with them to increase your revenue? You have an easy opportunity to up-sell, cross-sell, or encourage referrals — so make the most of it with autoresponders.
Here are three easy types of autoresponder emails that build relationships with existing customers:
1. Thank-You Emails
When someone buys your product, have your system send them a message to thank them. You can use a thank-you email as an opportunity to ask them to share their purchase on social media, to cross-sell another product or to give them more information about how their product will be delivered. 
2. Support Response
It’s important to make sure that customers who need help or have an issue receive a prompt response letting them know you’re aware and you’ll be contacting them in person as soon as possible. Let them know how long they can expect to wait for an answer and maybe even include a link to your FAQs!
3. Appointment Reminders
If your business involves meeting customers in person or scheduling time on the phone, it can be a major time-saver to automatically send them a confirmation when the appointment is booked as well as a reminder email the day of that includes all the relevant info. Re-cap the time, place, phone number, what they need to bring, etc.
B.  13 Best Email Marketing and Newsletter Apps 
Why Do I Need an Email Marketing App? 
You probably send and receive emails every day using an app like Gmail or Outlook. Those tools work great for sending one-off messages to individuals and groups—and if you abuse the BCC field, you might be able to send an email to 100 people without annoying everyone. But for larger groups and scheduled sends, you'll need another option—something that makes it as easy to send an email to everyone as it is to send a message to one person. 
That's where email newsletter apps come in. They're the tools that power the bulk emails you receive every day, and they're a great way to share news, announce new promotions, or send out an annual email update to all of your friends and family. 
Every app lets you organize your contacts into lists, add new contacts easily via a signup form or integrations with other apps, send beautifully formatted messages in a half-dozen clicks, and analyze how your email performed. Plus, we found mobile apps that send messages on the go, tools to manage your events, and integrations to import your customers. 
So without further ado, here are the best apps that send email newsletters (ordered alphabetically). For each app you'll find a brief summary, and pricing information. — 
1. ActiveCampaign 
Emails that are just about the latest happenings at your company can get boring. To really capture your customers' attention, you should write emails that are focused on their interests. ActiveCampaign makes it possible by including a full CRM and marketing automation suite along with its email newsletter tool. It'll help you gather detailed info about each of your customers, then divide them into lists based on interests, locations, and more. 
Then, unlike most CRM apps that let you send emails, Active-Campign includes a full-featured email editor. You can drag-anddrop email elements, design them the way you want, and quickly send your finished newsletters off to your customers. And if you also need to manage sales prospects, you can upgrade to ActiveCampaign's Plus or Enterprise plans to unlock useful features beyond email marketing. 
ActiveCampaign Pricing: From $9/month for email marketing to up to 500 contacts; from $49/month for full email marketing and CRM suite 

2. AWeber 
An email list is nothing without subscribers. You have customers and people who are interested in your products, so AWeber focuses on making sure those people will get added to your email lists. It natively integrates with WordPress, PayPal and Facebook so you can add people from the places where they already interact with your company. 
AWeber also lets you create advanced subscriber forms with up to 25 fields and import contacts from a variety of list formats. Once your lists are built, it has the tools you need to make your emails look great, putting hundreds of free templates and stock photos at your disposal. 
AWeber Pricing: From $19/month for unlimited emails to up to 500 contacts 
3. Benchmark Email 
Email needs to look great everywhere. Benchmark Email aims to make this easy in two ways: with an internationalized app that's easy to use anywhere, and email templates that look great on mobile and desktop. 
Benchmark's cleanly designed email editor lets you pick from a variety of layouts for your text and multimedia components, then accents them with color schemes for emails that look beautiful everywhere—not just on a large desktop monitor. It lets you store your images and videos in the app to easily reuse them in future messages. Then, the entire app's interface is equally at home in English, Chinese, Spanish, and more, and its team works with the standard email sending coalitions as well as China's ICP to make sure your emails will be delivered everywhere. It's an email app for global teams. 
Benchmark Pricing: Free for sending up to 14k emails to 2,000 contacts; plans from $9.95/month for sending up to 600 emails 
4. Campaign Monitor 
Your emails need to stand out, and using a tweaked standard email template likely won't be enough. That's why Campaign Monitor tries to make it as easy as possible to code your own email templates, then gives you the tools to customize standard email templates far beyond the basics. 
There's a drag-and-drop email template editor with pre-made templates that show you variants of the templates that other teams are using to inspire you to make it your own. Or, you can hand-code your own template using Campaign Monitor's simple email code snippets, and host your CSS and assets on Campaign Monitor's server. And if you run a design agency, it even lets you make your own templates, white-label the app and resale it to your clients with your own custom designs. 
Campaign Monitor Pricing: From $9/month for sending up to 2,500 emails to 500 contacts 
5. Constant Contact 
If you run a brick-and-mortar business, you're likely sending emails about your events, discounts, and more. Constant Contact is an email app that's also great at managing all of those other things you do, so you can create events and promotions, send them out to your existing contacts, and gather new contacts—all from one app. 
Constant Contact's EventSpot tool lets you schedule your upcoming events, create a registration page, and spread the word via email and social networks. Then, its Social Campaigns tool helps you create coupons or downloadable resources for social networks to gain new follows and keep your existing followers excited about your products. Tying it all together is Constant Contact's email tools that'll let you share these events and more with your contacts and easily add new subscribers to your lists whenever you run an event or promotion. 
Constant Contact Pricing: From $15/month for up to 500 subscribers; 60 day free trial 
6. EmailDirect 
Every email app has a list of your contacts, and many let you filter your contacts and sort them into specific lists and more. EmailDirect takes it a bit further by letting you interact with your entire contact list as a relational database. You can use it to store anything you want about your contacts, then slice-and-dice them up into the lists that make the most sense for them. 
To give the database as much info as you need, you can use EmailDirect's API to tie it into your eCommerce store, or you can list your own products directly in EmailDirect and track which ones customers have purchased. You can then make as many lists as you need, and let subscribers manage which email lists they receive. That way, they don't have to unsubscribe from all of your emails—they just can quit receiving emails about the products they're not interested in. 
EmailDirect Pricing: From $40/month for sending up to 2,000 emails 
7. FreshMail 
Picture a nicely designed email in your mind, and it likely includes—at most—a small header photo at the top, a background color, and formatted text and images below that. At best, most emails look like nice blog posts. And that's good. But if you want more, FreshMail's templates can make your emails look like beautiful product demo pages, complete with full-sized images, beautiful Google Fonts-powered text, and detailed layouts that go far beyond your standard email. 
Creating your own design from FreshMail's templates is easy, with rich content blocks that you can drag-and-drop into the editor, and a simple editing screen that lets you change the style of your text headers and body. Then, you can add your content and send it to your contacts with all the standard email sending features you'd expect from any other app. 
FreshMail Pricing: Free for sending up to 2,000 emails to 500 contacts; from $17/month for unlimited emails to 1,000 contacts. 
8. GetResponse 
Ever wondered how your emails look on smartphones? With GetResponse, you won't have to send your email to your phone to find out. Its email designer lets you preview how your message will look on computers and phones while you're laying out your design and adding in your text. 
Then, you can add more to your emails with GetResponse, as well. It'll let you import images from Flickr, Facebook, and iStock, sell products directly in your emails with PayPal buttons, and even bring in text from previous emails with its snippets feature. 
Then, you can schedule your emails in advance by dragging them to the correct date on a calendar. And if you're promoting your products online, GetResponse has you covered with tools to import contacts from Facebook forms and Twitter ads. 
GetResponse Pricing: From $15/month for unlimited emails to 1,000 contacts 
9. iContact 
Your business likely already uses a number of apps to manage your contacts, get interest in your new products, and more. iContact's designed to make it easy to add those contacts to your email lists and automatically get new contacts subscribed. It's deeply integrated with everything from Salesforce to Drupal so it can import contacts and use their data to segment your lists. 
Beyond sending emails, iContact also includes social networking tools so you can draft and schedule Twitter and Facebook status updates right alongside your email updates. iContact can even help you get started, with design services to make a custom email template for your brand and advisory services to help you setup your email campaigns and get the most out of your marketing efforts. 
iContact Pricing: From $10/month for up to 250 contacts 
10. MailChimp 
MailChimp may be the first email newsletter app you think of it you spend any time listening to podcasts—or have ever seen any of its monkey-themed shirts and hats. But beyond the swag, MailChimp is an app that's serious about helping you send better emails. You'll find everything here from a drag-and-drop email editor to rich subscriber profiles that track your contacts' interactions with your emails, and more. 
The best part is the extra apps and tools that come along with MailChimp. There are nine mobile apps that come along with MailChimp, letting you do everything from send emails and check your stats to sending email newsletters based on pictures you snapped on your phone and signing up new contacts to your lists from a tablet. You'll also come to love its smarts that'll automatically find the best time to send your emails based on its data from everyone else's campaigns, and recommend smart lists from your contacts based on other email newsletters they're subscribed to. 
MailChimp Pricing: Free for sending 12,000 emails to 2,000 contacts; from $10/month for unlimited emails to 500 contacts 
11. Mailigen 
Email's important, but so is mobile messaging. If anything, mobile messaging may be more important today than email. After all, your phone's always with you, and while you might ignore your email, you're unlikely to turn off your SMS notifications. So Mailigen lets you combine your email and mobile marketing, so you can target your audience wherever they're most likely to check their messages. 
On the email side, you'll have all the features you'd expect, with a familiar, Office-style editor that makes it easy for anyone on your team to edit your email campaigns. Then, you can further your email marketing by sending out SMS messages with your latest announcements and deals, with all the same tools to gather contacts and segment them into lists that you're already using with your emails. 
Mailigen Pricing: From $10/month for up to 500 contacts 
12. Mailjet 
If you're looking for a service to send emails directly from your app's code, Mailjet's a transactional email service that's ready to deliver as many emails as you need. But if you'd rather something simpler, with an interface to lay out your emails and manage your contacts, Mailjet's ready for you as well. 
In addition to its send API, Mailjet includes a graphical template designer where you can customize its built-in themes and use them to send email newsletters to your customers. There's deep list segmentation built-in, along with A/X tests with up to 10 versions to test anything about your marketing that you want. You can have it automatically send your app's notification emails, then use the graphical editor to simply update your users about your news and more, all from one service. 
Mailjet Pricing: Free for sending up to 6,000 email per month; from $7.49/month for sending up to 30,000 emails 
13. MailUp 
There are plenty of email apps that'll work great for small lists, but what if you're sending millions of emails a month to tens of thousands of recipients? MailUp is an email app designed exactly for that. It's priced to make sending millions of emails affordable —as long as you're not in a rush to send your messages. You'll select how many messages you need to send each month, then choose how soon your emails need to be sent—the slower, the cheaper. That'll way, you can send millions of messages a month without breaking the bank. 
And, of course, there's a rich email editor, tools to organize your contacts, and even SMS and social network marketing to reach your audience on the go. It's an email app designed to send your marketing messages even to the largest audiences. 
MailUp Pricing: From $49/month for up to 1,641,600 emails per month to unlimited contacts 
Conclusion 
From simple ways to send email updates to advanced marketing tools that'll manage your contacts, automate marketing, and send email updates, there's email newsletter apps of all shapes and sizes. Hopefully this list has helped you find a few that look like they'll work for your business. Give them a try, then pick the one that ends up fitting your needs the best and start sending the email updates you've been waiting for.










Chapter 4
Email Designing & Writing Strategies

Do you ever worry that your contacts don’t actually read your emails? Getting an ROI you can be proud of from your email marketing efforts hinges on sending messages that your recipients find engaging — and strong copy is the key. 

According to expert copywriter Liston Witherill, “Copy can boost your sales by almost 20 times on the same offer.” Great inbox placement and a beautiful template will take you far, but great email copy will grab hold of your readers’ attention and pull them all the way through your message, compelling them to respond to your call to action.

In this section, you’ll learn the basic principles of powerful copywriting, including how to write from your customers’ perspective, build trust, and craft a strong call to action. 


1. Make It About Them

Writing great copy really isn’t about talking about you, your product, or your business. Copywriting is about getting into your customers’ minds, figuring out what matters to them, and bridging the gap between their pain points and the solution your product provides. Here’s how to write copy that speaks loudly and clearly to your ideal customer.
* Put yourself in the customers’ shoes. Try to look at the world from your customers’ perspective. What do they want more than anything? What is their life like on an average day? What are the biggest problems and pain points they are dealing with?
* Give them the perfect solution to their problem. Once you have a sense of your customers’ biggest problems, make the bridge to your product or service as the solution. Show them exactly how it would get rid of their pain point for good. Focus on benefits - instead of telling them all about the features and expecting them to understand how it would solve their problem, tell them how it is going to impact their everyday experiences.

* Tell them exactly what they have to do. Even after you’ve successfully made the connection between their problem and your solution, you need to tell them exactly what is necessary for them to reap the benefits you spelled out. Keep it as simple as possible - what is the next step you want them to take? Maybe you want them to click a link to view a product. Maybe you want them to register for a webinar. Isolate one single action you want them to take after reading your email. This is your call to action. Everything in the body of the email should be moving the reader toward responding to the call to action.

2. Build Rapport

One of the most useful tips for writing copy that makes your message recipients happy
to receive emails from you is to write the way you talk. Even better? Write the way they talk. Aim to create a conversational tone that makes your audience feel as though they are reading a personal email from a good friend. You can amplify this effect by personalizing your message with merge fields. Include your reader’s name, a reference to an event they attended, a product they purchased or any other relevant information you have.


3. Keep it Brief

Don’t count on holding your readers’ attention for too long, even if your copy hits the nail on the head. There are likely dozens of other emails sitting there waiting for them to read, so make sure not to beat around the bush. Don’t make your emails any longer than they need to be to convey the information or offer you’re sending.

4. Craft Effective Subject Lines

No matter how amazing your email’s body copy is, your recipients may never see it if your email subject line doesn’t compel them to open it! Here are a few tips for writing subject lines that will spark readers’ curiosity and make them want to click.

a. Offer a Reward

Give the reader a reason to click. Are you offering valuable info, a special offer or a unique opportunity? Let them know what they stand to gain.
Examples:
We’ll teach you to do search marketing in your sleep! - MarketingProfs
A Gift for Dad, a Bonus for You - Birchbox
What’s free and saves you money? - zulily

b. Be Honest & Straightforward

You had better believe that your readers can sniff out deceptive headlines. Don’t promise them something you can’t deliver on! You’re better off telling them exactly what your email is about while also showcasing the value it offers them.
Examples:
Three Simple Steps to Striking Design - Canva
SEO at a price you can afford! - Bluehost

c. Create a Sense of Urgency

Everyone suffers from F.O.M.O. - aka Fear of Missing Out. If your offer expires in a limited time or has limited availability, mention it in the subject line, but don’t create fake scarcity that doesn’t accurately reflect your offer — it could cause your readers’ spam radars to go off!
Examples:
Eek — something you like is almost sold out! - ModCloth
Just Hours Left to Win $5k! - Weebly
Time is running out to claim your $50 - Lyft

d. Trigger Emotion

Use your audience’s emotional reactions to grab their attention quickly. Instead of framing the value of your message in a purely logical way, try framing it in a way that shows them what they’d gain on a personal level from opening it. Think about what your audience values, what they hold dear and what they desire most.
Examples:
Cute Things for Free. Take Your Pick! - Birchbox
Make Yourself a Hot Tech Commodity with UX Design Skills
- General Assembly
You’re so close to riding in style - Uber

e. Use Unique & Intriguing Language

Another great way to arouse your readers’ curiosity is to use words that they wouldn’t expect to see in their inbox. Don’t be silly or outrageous, but do choose words and phrases that are colorful and descriptive, with a bit of mystery.

Examples:
Fireworks and Darts and Models and Swim Trunks - UrbanDaddy
chocolate dipper + pretzel = nom - Graze
For hustlers only - AppSumo

5. Create a Strong Call to Action

It doesn’t matter if you’re as good at copywriting as Mozart was at composing, if you don’t spell out a single, clear call to action you won’t be satisfied with your email marketing ROI. Remember the reason you’re writing email copy: to get readers to take action. Do you want them to download a piece of content? Do you want them to respond to a specific offer? Do you want them to sign up for your free webinar? No matter what action you want your readers to take, you have to make it crystal clear. Then tell them to do it. Don’t ask too politely; don’t beat around the bush. Spell it out in black and white, and tell them exactly what will happen when they take the action.

6. Optimize Your Sign-up Process 

The first element of your email marketing strategy is to make sure you always deliver on that value proposition. 
After they’ve signed up, make sure to be clear about what they can expect to see from you, such as how often you’ll be sending emails and on which specific days. Also, propose the idea of adding your email address to their address book so that your messages don’t end up in the spam folder. 
Once you’ve made sure your sign-up process is optimized to give your emails the best chance of being opened, you can move on to the next step of analyzing your audience — thankfully this is a lot easier to do than it sounds. 

7.  Consider Your Audience 

It’s a mistake to make your pitch right away. Remember that we’re writing emails to real people with busy lives and careers and not just to a list of nameless, faceless email addresses. 
The first and most important part of crafting an email is considering who will be reading it: 
* Who is your customer base? 
* What is their gender, location, job, goal, business challenge, etc.? 
* Where do they go for information? 
* What are their shopping preferences? 
* What’s their average day like? 
* When would it be best to send them an email? 
* What are their pain points or frustrations that you can solve? 

Knowing why your lead — or customer — is reading your email, and what challenges they want solved is key. Once you know why they’re reading your emails, you can craft your content to address these pain points. 
Insider Tip: 
If you haven’t created buyer personas, customer avatars or fictionalized representations of your customer segments, we suggest you do so immediately. If you cannot solve a frustration or pain point for the recipient of the email, you’re likely sending to the wrong crowd.

8.  Know Your Goals 

What do you hope to get from your emails? 
* Purchases 
* Information Capture 
* Education 
* Referrals 
* Invoices 

It’s important to know exactly why you’re writing the email so you can develop a clear call-to-action. 
By focusing on one call to action, you’ll direct all traffic and reader attention to your desired outcome. Now, figure out how to track your email’s effectiveness in achieving that goal. The ability to measure your emails’ effectiveness allows you to hone in your messaging style over time and make sure you’re getting the best return from your email efforts. For example, if your goal is to get users to sign up for your new online course, establish a tracking method specifically for users signing up via email. 
9. Punch-up Your Preheaders 
It often happens that email senders will have links to social media or hyperlinked banners at the top of their emails. This results in the URL of a link or image appearing in the preview line, leaving a jumbled combination of letters and numbers that are distracting to the reader. 
Another common issue is that the text in the beginning of an email is written to make sense in context, but can be confusing when it’s automatically added to preheaders. 
Not only is this type of preview line not compelling, it looks unprofessional. To make sure that you don’t run into this issue, it’s important to always utilize preheaders to give your Contacts a more in-depth idea of what your message is about. You can insert some fancy code into the backend of your email to help make sure your copy displays properly, or use a template to have it taken care of for you, but more on that later. 
10. Writing Body Copy 
Keep your emails brief and well spaced out to avoid overwhelm, and always use a conversational tone. If your email is longer than a few paragraphs, utilize a “read more” link that will allow the user to read the email on the web. Once you’ve delivered on the benefit pitched in the subject line, you’re ready to close out your email with a call to action that will guide your readers to the next desired step. 
11. Body Closing: The Key to Success 
Now it’s time to close out your email. It may seem like a couple of sentences at the end of your message won’t make much of a difference in your mailing success, but you’d be shocked at the impact it can have when sending mail at volume. You’ve spent most of the email previous to this point establishing trust and integrity with prospects or customers. Now it’s time to “cash in” on that trust, and move them along to the next step in their journey with your business. 
Conclusion
No matter what the next move is, you’ll want to clearly and concisely share your content with the reader. Let them know exactly what they should do next, the benefit of taking that course of action, and how long they have to take it. 
Chapter 5
Email Deliverability Strategies

A. How to keep your email out of the spam box?

Introduction
You may find yourself often fighting the frustration of having your business emails getting classified as spam in your customer email boxes. The fact is that about 80-90% of All email on the internet is spam. In spite of this, businesses anticipate increasing the number of email campaigns on the web.
To stop the bombardment, people and businesses are creating filters, or buying company services that filter email so that they receive only content that they deem relevant to them. 
So, whether or not your email is legitimate, if a receiving host or email spam program is aggressive or set a certain way, your emails could very easily get marked as spam. Unfortunately, this is not a server or hosting issue. This is a general issue with email that you will find no matter where you host your business emails. This article discusses what you can do from your end.
According to ReturnPath, only about 79% of permission-based emails sent by legitimate email marketers reach the inbox. Spam filters and ISPs are working harder than ever to reduce inbox irrelevance, so it’s important that you understand what spam is, how spam filters and firewalls work, and some of the steps you can take to avoid being flagged.
What is Spam?
There are a variety of definitions and interpretations of the word itself, but at its core, spam is unsolicited, irrelevant email, sent in bulk to a list of people. For example, let’s say you purchased a list of email addresses from a local business organization. On the surface, that list of addresses seems like it could contain some great prospects for your business, and you want to send them an email with a relevant offer they can’t refuse. But, since those people didn’t give you explicit permission to contact them, sending an email to that list would be considered spam.
Spam laws
As an ESP, it is required to enforce spam laws, not just because it's a legal obligation, and not just because it's the right thing to do. Spam negatively impacts deliverability rates, and they want to make sure their emails reach their recipients. If you have any questions regarding the details of the laws or any potential legal ramifications, we encourage to you to consult an attorney who is familiar with this topic.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 became law on January 1, 2004. According to the FTC, if you violate the law, you could be fined $11,000 for each offense—that’s $11,000 for each email address on your list. ISPs around the country have already successfully sued spammers for millions of dollars under this law. If you send commercial email (generally sales or promotional content), you should familiarize yourself with the requirements of CAN-SPAM. A few key points of the law include:

* Never use deceptive headers, From names, reply-to addresses, or subject lines.
* Always provide an unsubscribe link.
* The unsubscribe link must work for at least 30 days after sending.
* You must include your physical mailing address.
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) went into effect on July 1, 2014 and carries penalties of $1-10M per violation. CASL is very similar to the CAN-SPAM Act, but has some minor differences and covers all electronic messages, not just email. This article details the basics of CASL.
Spam Filters
Spam filters consider a long list of criteria when judging the spamminess of an email. They’ll weigh each factor and add them up to assign a spam score, which helps determine whether a campaign will pass through the filter. If the score exceeds a certain threshold, your email will get flagged as spam and go straight to the junk folder. Each spam filter functions a bit differently, though, and “passing” scores are typically determined by individual server administrators. This means that an email could pass through Spam Filter A without issue, but get flagged by Spam Filter B.
Email Firewalls
Firewalls are a lot like spam filters in that they are designed to regulate incoming email based on a set of rules that have been established by the email server. Think of them as gatekeepers. They’re used by ISPs, large corporations, and small businesses alike, and they all communicate with one another to help identify spam and stop spammers. But how does this server know what spam is? Your own recipients teach it. When you send an email to your list, and someone on your list thinks it’s spam—or doesn’t remember opting-in to your list, or if you never had permission in the first place—that recipient can report you to SenderBase, the world’s largest email monitoring network. Your ESP should be registered at SenderBase, so they can properly investigate every complaint generated in response to their users’ campaigns. Similarly, MailChimp’s staff receives copies of any complaints that come in, so they can disable the sender’s account and investigate immediately.
Firewalls rely on reputation scores to block emails before they even get to the content-based spam filters, and they all calculate sending reputation differently. Once you’ve been reported, you’ll remain on the radar of these firewalls; this helps prevent someone from switching between different email servers to send more junk after being reported. These gatekeepers will know to block all emails with your name in it from now on, no matter who sends it or where it comes from.
Accidental abuse reports
Since it’s almost inevitable that you’ll receive complaints every now and then, ESPs like MailChimp are constantly monitoring abuse reports from ISPs, blacklists, and anti-spam networks, so we can immediately pinpoint problems as they arise and investigate the account in question.
Every major ISP cares about reducing unwanted email for their customers, so when you receive an abuse report, there’s no negotiating; you’re guilty until proven innocent. As long as your email list has been collected legitimately and you are able to prove without a doubt that any complaint you received is a simple mistake, you’re in the clear. But if you’re ESP has reason to question your list collection practices, your account will be disabled—or shut down altogether.
Tips and Best Practices
In email marketing, it’s important to remember that permission is key. Without permission, you could be reported for abuse whether or not you’re a legitimate marketer. The following tips can help you prevent spam complaints as you start sending email to subscribers:
1. Choose your opt-in method wisely. 

Double opt-in is valuable because you’ll know (and have proof) that each and every recipient gave you permission to send them emails. But, there are a number of other popular signup methods (API, integrations, etc) that allow for single opt-in, and we certainly are not discounting the validity of those, either. Ultimately, the most important thing is that your recipients give you permission to email them. You’ll need to consider your audience and the applicable legal requirements in your area to determine which opt-in method is right for you.

2. Don’t use purchased, rented, or scraped lists. 

Not only are they against our Terms of Use and notorious for providing bad addresses that lead to high bounce rates and blacklisting, they don’t actually help you grow your business. Sending to a list that hasn’t given you express permission can impact your ability to market your business, potentially damage your brand, and even result in legal ramifications. Instead, allow your list to grow organically.

3. Don’t assume that you have permission. 
Even if your intended recipients are already your customers (or your colleagues, or people you met at a trade show, etc), do not send promotional email without getting permission first. Add a signup form to your website. Give customers the option to sign up for your list when they make a purchase from your store. Offer incentives—like discounts, coupons, or free downloads, for example—to encourage your customers or colleagues to become list subscribers.

4. Set expectations when people join your list. 

If your subscribers think they’re signing up for monthly newsletters and you start sending them weekly promotions, they might not be subscribers for much longer. Tell people what you’ll be sending and how often you’ll be sending it. If you want to send out different content (monthly newsletters, weekly special offers, etc), consider setting up groups in your list so subscribers can choose what content they want to receive from you.

5. Don’t wait too long before contacting your subscribers. 

Every mailing list can go stale if it’s not used regularly, even if subscribers were originally collected via double opt-in. Lists with a lot of stale addresses can lead to high rates of bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. In addition to keeping an up to date permission reminder in each campaign, consider setting up a process where new subscribers receive emails from you right away.
 
6. Treat your email campaigns as an extension of your website, store, or brand.

Your customers probably already have an idea of what type of content, imagery, and design elements to expect from you, so don’t stray too far and risk harming that recognition factor. If you have any questions about what content, designs, or subject lines your customers will respond to and engage with, don’t just leave it to chance.

7. Don’t hide the unsubscribe/opt-out link in your campaigns. 

The CAN-SPAM Act requires that an unsubscribe link be present in every campaign that you send. When the link is prominent, people who no longer wish to receive your emails will be able to quickly and easily remove themselves from your mailing list. When the link is hard to find, the recipient might be more inclined to mark your message as spam, resulting in an abuse complaint within your ESP account.

8. Send your customers a personal email message 

Requesting that they white-list your domain, so that your business emails don't get filtered into Spam. In this, I'm referring to a "personal" email as one that doesn't include your marketing links or business advertisements or enhancements that may flag the email as something other than a personal email.

9. Check to make sure that your Email Authentication is enabled. 

This helps stop spam coming from your email address (even if you're not sending any that you know of). One of the common tactics by spammers out there is to spoof email coming from your domain. This causes you to get blacklisted even though you're not sending emails. 


10.   Examine your email bounces. 

When an email bounces, it will tell you "why" it's being bounced and give you a source or reason for the bounce. If you're being listed on a service (that you may not be aware of), then you should investigate. In some cases, you can very easily remove yourself from a list simply contacting the authority who has blacklisted you. This may not always be the same person as the email administrator of that server. However, you can also send an email to an email administrator of the service to find out why your emails are being blocked. 

11. Build your own reputation 
Without a doubt, the best thing you can do for your long-term success with email is to get a private IP address. As long as you’re mailing from a shared IP address, part of your reputation is out of your hands… and your reputation determines how well you get delivered. 
If you’re mailing over 300,000 emails a month, it’s time to start thinking about striking out on your own IP. 
There’s one downside you should know about: in the email world, no reputation is a bad reputation. When you launch a new IP, you’re starting out with no reputation. Some ISPs will reject your messages without looking twice for the first several weeks. There are strategies for minimizing this problem that your email provider should know about and use. We call the process ‘warming up an IP’ and we have a guide on how to do that if you’re curious. Just ask. 
Once you’ve built your reputation on your new IP over the course of a few weeks, you’ll finally be in control of your own email delivery destiny: keep your list clean and your practices tight and you’ll enjoy the highest delivery rates available to any mailer anywhere. 
Roughly 18% of all commercial email in North America never reached the inbox in 3Q12: 5% landed in spam traps and 13% was blocked or went missing.
Return Path “The Email Intelligence Report Q3 2012” (2012)   

 CAN’T GET A PRIVATE IP? 
There are only two reasons not to get a private IP: your email service provider doesn’t offer it or you don’t mail enough to warrant getting one. 
The first is easy to fix and a no-brainer. If you are an even moderately heavy mailer, you should get on your own IP. Change to a service that offers them. Of course we do, but there are several other higher-end email service providers who offer the service. 
If you don’t mail enough to warrant getting a private IP, there are still some things you can do to make sure you’re getting the best delivery rates possible. 
* Check out your provider. Make sure the domains you’re sending from have valid SPF and DKIM records. 
* Send from your own domain. Often, especially with the lower-end email services, the email you send will show your name in the FROM: line of the email. It may even show your own URL. But look at the actual email headers (you may have to dig a little to find the code) and you’ll see that the email is actually coming from the address of the ESP. Something like noreply@ spcd1.myesp.com. The problem with this is that your ‘reputation’ is partially determined by that FROM: address and if you’re sharing it with thousands of other clients… well, it’s a lot like sharing a toothbrush. You could, but do you want to? Much better to send at least from a subdomain all your own (noreply@yourcompany.myesp.com) or better a URL all your own. This could be done in one of two ways: noreply@mail.yourdomain.com or noreply@yourdomainmail.com. There are benefits and drawbacks to either of these options, but both are MUCH BETTER than sending from a shared address. Your email service provider should be able to set something like this up for you. 
* Test delivery rates yourself. You should know: the ‘delivery rates’ that your email service provider gives you is not ‘how many emails reached the inbox’. It’s simply ‘total emails sent minus total bounced’. 

That number completely ignores how many actually make it to the inbox versus the spam folder. Why? Because there’s no way of knowing. The only way to know if your mail is making it to the inbox or not is to periodically test with a delivery monitoring service. You can use services like Email Reach or Delivery Watch to check your inbox delivery rates and get information about block lists your IP addresses may be on. These services aren’t free, but they’re both under a hundred bucks a month. Email Reach has a free trial (www. emailreach.com). 
12. Link Right 
Turns out that even the way you create links in your email affects your delivery rates, when you’re using an email service provider that tracks click-through rates for you. Let’s say you write a link like this: http://www.mysite.com. The email service provider has to add their tracking code to track the click, so the link actually points to http://www.mysite. com?id=1398vh981323890 
In this case, some ISPs and spam filters think you’re trying to pull a fast one, sending people to places other than advertised. Seems pretty dull on their part, and it is. But it’s the state of the union right now, so here’s how to avoid it: make your links have real anchor text that isn’t a URL. So, instead of linking a domain name like http:// www.mysite.com, use words like ‘Visit my site’ and link those. It looks less suspicious to filters AND it looks more pro to your recipients. A double whammy. 
13. Code right 
The first mortal sin of email coding is to copy and paste from Microsoft Word. Just don’t do it. 
There are two reasons. First, there are all kinds of special characters in Word that don’t exist in Internet Land such as the apostrophes that curve toward the center of the word they surround, ellipses (which are the three periods in a row… Word actually changes those three dots into one character), dashes and other characters. 
Some email editors, including our own, will actually show the Word characters properly. And some recipients will see it properly. BUT the majority of recipients will see all those unique-to-Word characters replaced with question marks and weird characters. 
Not very pro!
The other issue with Word is that when you copy and paste, you’re also copying and pasting a bunch of Word-code that makes no sense to email systems. 
In the worst case, that code can break your email completely. In the best case, it’s just a mess asking to get spam-filtered. 
Some email programs, like ours, have a ‘copy from Word’ feature that will handle the grossest parts of the problem. Still, it’s best to avoid Word all together. 
Write your emails directly in the email editor, or else in a simple text editor like Notepad. 
14. Affiliate Management 
What you don’t know can hurt you. Affiliates are a great way to grow your business, however they can also be a huge detriment to your deliverability rates. Did you know that the behavior of one rogue affiliate could cause ALL messages promoting your website to end up in the spam box? That’s the last thing you want to happen. 
People spend 13 hours per week reading their email - 28% of our workweek.
McKinsey Global Institute (2012)
To veer away from this dismal scenario, hand-pick your affiliates before you let them promote your goodies: put all incoming affiliates through a screening process. Confirm that they have an existing brand that stays consistent from time of opt in to the mail they send their customers. This is accomplished by having a basic affiliate sign-up form that asks for their website URL. Then when someone applies to be your affiliate it’s a cinch for you to go to their website, sign up to be on their list and see what types of messages they’re sending. Once you’re sure they’re an ethical marketer you can approve them with a clear mind.

CONCLUSION
Ultimately, you cannot force people to receive your emails or control how they perceive when an email is being labeled as spam or junk email. You can only control those factors that may lead your domain or email as being labeled as a spam by observing the reaction to the emails that you send out. 



B. 	Top delivery Tools for Internet Marketers

1. Senderscore.org: Where Do Your IPs Stand?

Senderscore is a great free tool released by Returnpath. To check an IPs senderscore, you’ll visit their site (you can get your mailing IP from your mailing provider, or if you’re self hosted you should already know this) and enter in your IP into the search box. After this, a score will pop up somewhere ranging from 0-100. The higher the score, the better. You should never be mailing on an IP that is 85 or lower. Find it at https://senderscore.org. 

2. Senderbase.org: Check Out Your Mailing Neighbors

Senderbase is another great, free utility for checking an IP’s reputation. Senderbase (made by Cisco and the Ironport network) is frequently overlooked in the deliverability community. However, don’t let its obscurity play down its importance and accuracy.

Senderbase uses a three-tiered scoring system of “good,” “neutral” and “bad.” While ideally you’ll be mailing from IPs that are listed as “good,” mailing from an IP that is “neutral” is not the end of the world. Stay away from any servers that are categorized as “bad.” A large benefit of using the senderbase ranking system is that it will tell you the reputations of IPs nearby. If a nearby IP has a ranking of “bad,” chances are its reputation is going to do some residual damage to your inbox placement, and you may want to find a different IP to use on a cleaner block. To check Senderbase, go to their site and paste your IP into the lookup box. After hitting enter, Senderbase will return with  our IP alongside a list of all of the nearby IPs that could be affecting your ability to reach the inbox. Try it at www.senderbase.org.

3. Blacklist Management Tools

Even the best of mailers will get blacklisted once or twice. Whether due to a rogue complaint or just a false positive, it’s bound to happen. This makes it even more important to have monitoring solutions in place and to take quick, appropriate action whenever listed.

4. MXToolbox: An Email Marketer’s Best Friend

MXToolbox is a great free tool for looking up more info on any mailing domain or IP. Visiting www.mxtoolbox.com will allow you to run a multitude of tests and pull information including:
• Blacklist check
• SMTP Tests
• MX Record
• A Records
• SPF
• TXT
...and many others that are a bit more technical.

5. URIBL

URIBL is a domain blacklisting service that lists domains belonging to and being used by spammers. These domains can be anything from the Return-Path on emails, the From or Reply To addresses, or even just a domain in the body of an email. Visit www.URIBL.com and sign up for a free account to see if your domain is listed.

6. SURBL

SURBL, like URIBL, is a domain blacklisting service. This service integrates with many other databases, and is a great free resource to check on the blacklisting status of domains you may be promoting. Visit www.SURBL.com to check your domains.

7. SpamCop: Putting Bad Messages in Email “Jail” Since 1998

SpamCop is one of the largest blacklist providers out there because anyone can sign up to report. SpamCop lists IPs based on feedback from their community. Most of this feedback is accurate and useful; SpamCop monitors the content and will typically ban users who post false positives. SpamCop’s weakness as a totally public forum is also its greatest strength. Those voluntarily reporting have nothing to gain by getting an IP or domain listed, so there is reason to believe it is generally reliable. SpamCop’s blocking list is open for free to anyone that wants to use it. Visit www.spamcop.net for more info.

8. Spamhaus

Spamhaus is an international nonprofit that tracks spam sources. It relays this information to networks to provide real-time spam protection, and to help law enforcement agencies identify and pursue spam crews worldwide. Like SpamCop, Spamhaus was founded in 1998. Its most recent appearance in the news came after the world’s largest DDOS (distributed denial of service) was launched against Spamhaus by a Dutch man going by “S.K.” Check it out at www. spamhaus.org.

9. Content Filters

Each ESP out there uses a different combination of content and reputation filters, which can make it difficult to have 100% compliant copy. However, utilizing each of the tools below will increase your likelihood of making it to the inbox unscathed.

10. Spam Assassin
SpamAssassin is the world’s largest open source spam analyzer available. It’s a very versatile tool that allows users to customize the checker to their liking. It also has many plugins available (such as domain blacklist checkers through SURBL and URIBL), which make it a must-have tool. Note that just because your email passes a Spam Assassin test, it doesn’t mean it will definitely reach the inbox (though it’s much more likely to). Visit http://spamassassin.apache.org/ to try it out.

11. Litmus

Litmus is powerful software for rendering and spam checking. Its powerful suite allows you to check numerous spam filters such as Positini, Outlook, and Barracuda, among many others. Additionally, it enables you to render multiple versions of your message so you can easily view what they will look like in different mailboxes/browsers. Find it at www.litmus.com.



















Chapter 6
The Art of Targeting & Segmentation

Understanding Your Target Market

Before you can start sending effective emails, you need to know your audience; who are you writing to?

Don't spend a dime on marketing until you can answer this question. Seriously, don’t.

Poorly targeted marketing is an expensive mistake and a massive waste of time. To see valuable returns on your campaigns, you need to know who your customers are, what they care about and what messages they'll respond to.
Companies that use email list segmentation see 39% higher open rates and 28% lower unsubscribe rates.

Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report

To send messages targeted as narrowly as possible to your customers’ wants, interests and behaviors, it’s crucial to divide your customer base into small, highly-targeted segments
Effective list segmentation can be a major win for your email marketing, but getting started is a daunting task. What used to be a single-list operation can quickly erode into a tangled mess of email campaigns if you don't have direction. 
If you aren't sure where to begin, think through these five steps and try to plan out a flow that would work for your segmented email marketing campaigns.
1. Define Your Data Points 

First thing's first: you can't build segments without data. The data that matters most to your company is going to depend on what kind of product you sell—for example, Target is more interested in whether or not you have children than Dropbox would be. 

So before you start segmenting, decide what customer data will help you sell more efficiently, how you're going to organize that data, and how you're going to collect the data that you don't have.  Here are three common sources of segmenting: 

* Stage of the Buying Cycle
Segmenting by where a customer is in a particular buying cycle helps you to provide highly-targeted content to improve your conversion rates. Are prospects visiting your website for the first time? Have they visited your website but didn’t convert? Did they leave items in their shopping cart? Do you want to sell them something else? Buyers in the early stage of research have different informational needs than those ready to purchase. Create and deliver content for each step in the buying cycle in order to ensure you’re not missing an opportunity at a sale.
* Customer Avatars
Segment customers by character types based on the traits, desires, goals, and attributes of each type of customer you have. You can easily create a “persona” and group together similar customers based on their character type. If you have two or more distinct demographics of people who buy from you, creating and segmenting your customers by avatars works amazingly well. Grouping like customers together allows you to craft specific marketing collateral designed to appeal to different character types so you can market more accurately and effectively. 
How to Create a Customer Avatar:
* Develop Persona Lifestyle Description

* Identify Pain Points and Possibilities

* Map the Buyer Journey

* Write Your Customer’s Biography

* Design the Campaign

If I wrote up a persona for someone who shops on high-end fashion and lifestyle site Gilt.com, it might look something like this: 

Nick is hitting his professional stride: at 30, he's a senior marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company in New York City, and he's finally pulling in enough money to enjoy some of the finer things. He likes to dress well, but that doesn't mean he's willing to blow a day's pay on new shoes—frugal habits die hard. Nick spends a lot of time working, but on the weekends he likes to play basketball and catch a movie with his friends; shopping isn't his idea of the perfect Saturday. 

This persona tells us demographic information about Nick (30year-old living in NYC), his career and seniority level (senior marketing manager at a large company), his motivation (dress well without breaking the bank), and his pain points (doesn't want to shop around or pay marked-up prices). 

We can see that Nick spends a lot of time working, so you might put him in a segment focused on office attire sales—suits, ties, belts—and mix in some high-top sneakers to appeal to his love of basketball. 

* Product Interest

Segmenting customers by the amount of interest they have (or potentially have) in your product — is known as lead scoring. This allows you to identify which of your contacts are “hot” leads and then create email campaigns exclusively for them. For example, “hot” leads with a high engagement score can be marketed to more aggressively, while leads with a lower engagement score can be nurtured to raise their interest and engagement.

The more refined you are in creating segments, the more successful you’ll be in achieving your marketing goals. These segments are going to help guide future marketing decisions, so take the time to really think about what type(s) make sense for your business.

2. How to Determine Each Lead’s Segment?

Once you’ve determined the specific segments that you’d like to start targeting more precisely, you have to figure out how to get the data you need to place leads onto your segments. Make sure you pick fields that will help your business benefit the most from the information your leads provide. Here are the best ways to gather data from your leads and start segmenting:

Buy It!

* List Appending Services - Buying data can be extremely effective for ‘hard’ demographic information such as address, income level, company size, and more. Data collection companies can append your databases with their information and help you find other prospects like the ones you’ve got.

Ask for It!

* Forms - Asking for information via web forms is, of course, tried and true. Forms are the easiest and most organized way to gather information about your customers.

* Surveys - Utilizing surveys can be an amazing way to gather the necessary information you need to effectively segment your audience. The problem with gathering data online is that asking for anything — even just an email address — can be perceived as pushy or risky and adds significant friction to your conversion process. In general, the more information you require from prospects online, the fewer responses you’ll get — not to mention visitor’s propensity to use false fill information. Still, asking for data is often necessary, and when done right is very effective.

Infer It!

* Online Behavior - There’s an enormous opportunity to infer important information about your prospects by tracking their online behavior. By strategically designing advertisements, websites, Landing Pages, and email communications in coordination with profiling tools it’s possible to learn a vast amount about specific prospects, the quality of your lead sources, and much more.

* How to Organize Segments?

Due to the highly connected nature of segments and contacts, proper organization is a must. The two main ways to organize segments are:

* Database Systems – Dynamic systems that interact with the user, other applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze data. Like ONTRAPORT is a database system. You can create multiple groups that have overlapping contact records, and our system, because it’s a database, will only count the record as one contact. These systems are essential to running a successful business with a variety of segments.

* List Based Systems – Static systems that are less complex than database systems, but also far less powerful. For example, AWeber is a list-based system where you can segment people by creating different lists — newsletter lists, marketing funnel lists, sales funnel lists, etc. The problem with these systems is that they utilize fixed lists that don’t communicate with any other aspects of your system. If a contact record is on more than once list, the record will be counted as two separate contacts instead of one, which can cause a variety of problems. These systems are somewhat useable for small businesses that only have one or two segments but can be a real pain in the butt when businesses try to scale.

3. Create Your Content 
Once you decide on how to segment your email lists, you need to write and design content that's targeted towards each group. 
Finding the right voice takes experimentation, and we could spend many blog posts covering copy strategies. So instead of doubling the length of this chapter, check out the chapter on copywriting and designing strategies in te beginning of this guide. 

4. Employ an Email Marketing Tools' Segmentation Feature 

You have data and a plan to use it. Now comes the fun part: sending your emails out into the world. For that, you're going to want an email marketing app that can handle list segmentation and make multiple sends a breeze. 

*  Apps That Offer List Segmentation 

Here are some quick links to other services (in alphabetical order) that let you segment lists: 

• ActiveCampaign - List Segments 
• Benchmark - Segments 
• Campaign Monitor -Segments 
• Constant Contact -Segment Contacts 
• Emma -List Segmentation and Dynamic Segments 
• FreshMail - Segment a subscriber list 
• GetResponse -Advanced Segmentation 
• Hatchbuck - Tags 
 
And many more.

5. Measure, Adjust, Repeat 

Now that your emails are out in the world, you get to collect another kind of data. Make sure you're tracking how people interact with your emails: measure what they open, what they click on, and what kinds of content get them engaged. 

And once you crunch the numbers, use that knowledge to improve future campaigns. If open rates skyrocketed after lunch, try sending more emails around 2 p.m. If you saw better click-through rates on emails with images, apply more visuals to your messages. 

You can speed up the learning process with A/B testing—these experiments go hand-in-hand with email marketing because it's so easy to split any list into "A" and "B" groups. 

Conclusion 

Each of your customers has a unique background, set of interests, and level of experience with your brand. So don't send all of them the same emails—with list segmentation, it's easy to personalize your message based on the recipient's interests, demographic information, and purchase history. 







Chapter 7
Email Program Management & Optimization Strategies

A. Planning an Email marketing calendar

If you’re like the majority of companies reliant on email marketing to nurture leads, generate sales and grow the business, you’re not sending fewer messages, you’re sending more. As programs become more sophisticated, they also become more complex, and that complexity bleeds over into both planning and scheduling. 
With an email marketing calendar you can:
* Get a better idea of your email output
* Identify your priorities
* Commit to a schedule
* Further segment your list
* Monitor the frequency of your sends
* Spot gaps in your marketing efforts
* Avoid redundancies
Step 1: Starting with a blank calendar for 2017, your first step is to slot your continuity emails into it. Your company may have multiple newsletters; or quarterly newsletters and weekly digests, or even other types of digital publications delivered as email; regardless, schedule them all and identify the target audience for each.
Next consider your promotional campaigns – for ecommerce marketers, those are the messages that make the cash register ring. Whether your company sells online or not, they directly or indirectly drive revenue and contribute to the bottom line, so they absolutely can’t be ignored.
Step 2: Layer your promotional email schedule into the calendar. If it is highly seasonal (B2C), make sure major holidays and key dates (tax day, summer and winter solstice, etc.) throughout the year are identified so you can plan accordingly. For example, in some years Thanksgiving falls almost a full five weeks before Christmas, in others more like four. The dates for Easter, Jewish holidays, and Ramadan are different every year. Take increased volume during the end-of-the-year holiday period into account in your planning.
Or, as is the case for many B2B marketers, consumer holidays may not be as meaningful as other dates, such as those of your own events, major industry conferences, fiscal year beginnings and endings, or service/ contract renewal periods. Especially if you host and promote events, identify those dates and the promotional windows for each on your calendar.
Third, consider any educational or content marketing campaigns or email series that might be in existence to support particular brands, products or lines of business. Some of these may be targeted to an entire audience segment (like lead nurturing programs are targeted to warm up prospects), while others might only deploy if a subscriber demonstrates a certain level of interest, signs up for them specifically, or engages with content or other features on your web site. Educational and content email is huge in B2B, but also a great supplement to the often-heavy promotional and broadcast messages in B2C marketing.
Step 3: Identify these types of programs and any fixed dates you plan to deploy them, and add them to the calendar. 
Fourth, it’s time to consider special campaigns you know you’ll run every year but that don’t necessarily recur very often. For example, contests, sweepstakes, and refer-a-friend programs. Or surveys, feedback, ratings/review request campaigns. Maybe you’re planning a new brand or product launch? Engaging, interactive promotions and programs like games, prize awards, online forums/communities and contests are common in those scenarios, and email supports them.
Step 4: Add any known interactive “engager” campaigns to your calendar
 (by now it might be getting quite full) if they’re slated for specific periods, and identify any periods throughout the year during which you think you might need to deploy such campaigns in support of major company initiatives.
Finally, there are the 1:1 triggered email campaigns driven by marketing automation to consider. Campaigns such as welcome and onboarding series to new email subscribers or customers, birthday emails, up-sell and cross-sell offers, abandoned cart/browse messages, reactivation or renewal efforts, reminders and alerts all fall into this category. Due to their conditional nature (only sent if a subscriber “trips” a trigger which qualifies them for the campaign), it’s impossible to add them to your calendar on fixed days, but you do want to factor them into the overall volume of messages certain segments or, say, a typical type of subscriber might receive from your company over the course of a year.
Step 5: Identify your automated email campaigns and how often each may touch a subscriber over the course of a year. Set maximums if necessary. 
For example, will you send an abandoned cart email after every uncompleted purchase, or only up to a certain maximum number of incidences? Over what interval of time (i.e., if the max is five abandoned cart emails, is that in one month? One quarter? Five months? )
By now your calendar should look quite full if not jam-packed. If you’re using a simple Excel spreadsheet to map it out, apply a different color to each distinct type of email campaign/program. Can you see where there is overlap? Crowding? Gaps? Rest periods? Areas of overlap are key in identifying the campaigns that might need to be suppressed in favor of higher priority efforts should certain subscribers or audience segments qualify for multiple efforts deploying at the same time.
Conclusion
Building your email marketing calendar for the year layer-by-layer will alleviate the chaos and shot-gun approach too many programs fall victim to due to lack of planning, while identifying space where messages can be added if necessary or new information can be communicated in existing campaigns.
B. Common email marketing mistakes to avoid
1. Incorrect links
It’s somewhat common to come across emails that contain broken or incorrect links. Although this may sound like a minor issue, it could cost you if the problem isn’t caught and rectified. This is why sending a test email prior to sending out your email is vital. It provides you a chance to test all the elements in your email from the subject line to CTA buttons and of course, your links. Make it a habit of clicking on every link in your test email to ensure your links go where you want them to.
CycleSurgery chose to send this email to subscribers who had already clicked on their email that had a broken link.

2. Technical difficulties on your website
Technical troubles seem to be one of the most common reasons for sending an ‘oops’ email, especially among e-commerce companies. This can often be an unforeseen problem, where a website goes down due to increased traffic, or technical issues. In this case, it’s a good best practice to get back to your subscribers as soon as your website is back up-and-running with a small incentive to say sorry.
This example from Reebok gets straight to the point with a short and snappy message and a 30% discount. Notice how they even use the word “Oops” as the promo code:

3. Incorrect segment
Sending to the wrong segment or no segment at all has the potential to confuse your subscribers and harm your brand. Shutterfly sent an email to its entire database of subscribers, congratulating them on their newborn children. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, it was picked up by media and discussed at length on Twitter and Facebook:

Shutterfly swiftly followed up on this mistake with a formal apology email from their chief marketing officer, who explained what happened and invited concerned subscribers to email the company.
4. Sending the incorrect version of an email
Brands often create two different versions of an email, with the intent of sending one version based on the result of a game, event, or vote. Unfortunately, it seems like every year we see an example of when the wrong version is fired off. This can be a high profile and potentially damaging mistake to make, depending on what’s said in the email. If this happens to you, you’re usually best off sending an apology email with an explanation ASAP to those affected.
The Cal Bears Shop made this mistake when they prematurely sent an email celebrating a win and offering a discount on hats before the end of a game. Unfortunately, the other team came back to win 49 to 45. Cal followed up with an apology and promise on Twitter that the discount was still valid.

5. Your Unsubscribe Process Is Broken 
Having no unsubscribe button at all is illegal. But assuming you do have one, make sure it actually works! Users shouldn’t have to take multiple steps or re-enter their email address, and the unsubscribe shouldn’t take weeks to go into effect. So it’s best to keep the unsubscribe process simple, clean, and effective so they leave the email list without a bad taste in their mouths. They’ll be much more likely to interact with your brand again in the future.
6. Create a completely false sense of urgency
One of the best ways to get people to open your email is to create a sense of urgency. For example, if you’re running a short-term sale or special offer, let people know that it’s their last day to save 40% or get free shipping.
Here’s what not to do: Don’t create a completely false sense of urgency and then proceed to keep playing the urgency card again and again, week after week.
If you do have sales running all of the time, maybe make that part of your brand’s value proposition, instead of pretending that your sales are rare and special events.
7. Over-Personalization
Avoid over-personalization by leaving un-vetted, user-generated data out of your emails. For example, information collected in a single lead generation form may be inaccurate and turn the customer off when repeated in an email.
You don’t want to start out an email relationship by calling someone a wrong or made-up name! Remember that if a piece of personalized data does not directly correlate to a future step in your lead nurturing or sales process, then it’s best to leave it out.
Planning for mistakes
Rather than reacting after a mistake happens, it’s best to have a plan in place, in case things go awry. This will ensure that you can act quickly and calmly if you run into trouble.
Email mistake response checklist:
• Make a list of all potential issues – Typos in the subject line, broken link, incorrect price, slow website, wrong segment, broken HTML, etc.

• Determine which potential issues require a response – Spelling mistakes, broken merge tags, or an incorrect image don’t usually need to be addressed or could be fixed without any attention being drawn to them. Any issues which could hurt your brand or reduce your conversions should be addressed.

• Define how you plan to respond to each of the more serious mistakes – Will you send a follow-up email, apologize on social media channels, send a physical apology letter, or do all of those things? Set appropriate response times with your marketing team and make sure that everyone knows the plan.

• Get agreement – Formal sign-off from your boss and the marketing team on your response plan will ensure that everything goes a lot smoother when something does happen. This also gives you the opportunity to set reasonable response times.

• Outline the creative approach for each type of apology email – Will you simply change the subject line, insert some text in the pre-header, add some text above the primary content, or create an entirely new email?

• Prepare an ‘oops’ email template – Have a few “audible-ready” templates for different scenarios; one for light-hearted errors with appropriate images and a discount code ready to go, and another more formal template for serious issues.’

Conclusion:
Now that you know some common email marketing mistakes and how to deal with them, you’ll be prepared in case an error happens in your campaign.

C. 	Determining the Optimal Email Frequency
Want to start emailing customers but are worried about sending too many? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Questions regarding text message and email frequency are some of the most commonly asked questions I get. If you are like most marketing directors, the fear of over-sending probably prevents you from sending regular communication, or has prevented you from sending texts and emails all together. Here are seven key SMS and email frequency guidelines that will help you engage customers and start to grow your business through text and email marketing.

1. How often should I contact my customers?
It has been found that the average business with regularly returning customers should contact their customers 2-4 times per month. More than four times per month can be overbearing while less than monthly may not be consistent enough to get results. However, the better answer may be, “that depends on the message,” to which point you should keep on reading.


2. Frequency is directly related to relevance.
Next, let’s get something straight. Customers don’t hate communication, they hate spam. A relevant, timely message is often treated as a gift while an irrelevant, untimely message can do more harm than good. With that said, it’s not hard to schedule relevant, timely messages by asking a few important questions. Here are three questions to get your ideas rolling:
* Is my content providing value to my customers? 
*  Does my message apply to my intended recipients? 
* Is my message being sent at the right time? 
 
3. Let the data decide text and email frequency.
While your experience and intuition can help you schedule your email and text messages appropriately, there are other metrics that serve as useful indicators of how your customers are responding. Compare the following metrics between each of your campaigns and set your text and email frequency accordingly.
* Open Rate—Try sending messages at different times of the day, different days of the week; and test different subject lines to see what works best.
* Bounce Rate—As you send more emails and text messages, your bounce rate will go down as your lists get cleaned up. Send regularly and consistently to keep nice clean lists.
* Opt-out Rate—While each campaign is different, I like to keep my opt-out rate less than 1-2%. There are certain cases when your email campaigns will likely go above this threshold, such as welcome messages or other text and email messages where the recipients have not previously received communication, so make sure to compare each campaign with other similar campaigns. If your opt-out rate goes above 2%, take a look at the message content as well as the frequency to see if you can identify what is causing the high opt-out rate. If your opt-out rate is low or non-existent, feel free to keep sending!
* Click-through Rate—If you get a high click through rate, it is a good indicator that your customers like what you are giving them.

4. Different marketing channels allow different engagement.
Consider the goal of the message and use the most appropriate channel. Social media, for example, is great for general awareness while text messaging can drive instant action. On the flip side, targeting customers on social media is less personal and may be considered less intrusive than text messaging. Be strategic with the channels you choose and understand the benefits of multi-channel marketing.

5. Communicate consistently.
On average, driving customers to action takes multiple “touch points.” A touch point may be as simple as an email, text message, social media blast, or as large as a radio or media ad. Whatever the channel, it usually takes multiple messages within a given window of time to get a customer to act. With that being the case, your communication needs to be consistent. 

D. How to use Split Testing/AB testing to create results?
Email campaigns and newsletters can be a great way to get repeat business, as well as new customers. You’re already working with a somewhat pre-qualified base: these people have said they want to receive information from you. And a lot of them have likely already done business with you. And we all know it’s easier and cheaper to retain customers than it is to get new ones.
This is why it’s vital to run A/B tests when trying out new techniques or formats for your email campaigns. Improving conversion rates here can make a bigger difference in your bottom line than many other marketing efforts, especially those of similar cost.
1. Decide What You’ll Test
The first step in setting up an effective A/B test is to decide what you’ll test. While you may want to test more than one thing, it’s important to only test one thing at a time to get accurate results. Things you might consider testing include:
* Call to action (Example: “Buy Now!” vs. “See Plans & Pricing”)
* Subject line (Example: “Product XYZ on Sale” vs. “Discounts on Product XYZ”)
* Testimonials to include (or whether to include them at all)
* The layout of the message (Example: single column vs. two column, or different placement for different elements)
* Personalization (Example: “Mr. Smith” vs. “Joe”)
* Body text
* Headline
* Closing text
* Images
* The specific offer (Example: “Save 20%” vs. “Get free shipping”)

Test Your Whole List, Or Just Part?
In the vast majority of cases, you’ll want to test your entire list. You want to get an accurate picture of how your email opt-in list responds to your new email campaign, and the best way to do that is to test all of them. The larger your test sample, the more accurate your results will be. Make sure that the split is done randomly, too. Hand-picking recipients (or even using two lists from different sources) is a great way to skew your results. The goal here is to gather empirical data to figure out which version of your A/B test material really works best.
What Does Success Mean?
Before you send out your email versions, it’s important to decide what you’ll be testing for and what you consider success. First, look at your previous results. If you’ve been using the same email campaign style for months or years, then you’ll have a good pool of data to pull from. If your historic conversion rate is 10%, then you might want to increase that to 15% to start with.
Tools For Testing
Most email campaign software has built-in tools for A/B testing. Campaign Monitorand MailChimp both have such tools built in, as does Active Campaign.
If your email campaign software doesn’t have specific support for A/B campaigns, you can set one up manually. Simply split your current list into two separate lists, and then send one version of your email campaign to one list and the other to the other list. You’ll then need to compare results manually, though exporting your data to a spreadsheet can help with this.
Analyze the Results
Once you’ve run your email campaign with the two different email versions, it’s time to take a look at the results. There are a few different categories of results you’ll want to look at:
* The open rate
* The click-through rate
* The conversion rate once they’re on your website

The reasons behind tracking the first two are pretty obvious. But a lot of people might wonder why we’d want to track the conversion rate outside of the email. Wouldn’t that be beyond the control of the email itself?
Yes and no. Ideally, the email you send shouldn’t have much to do with the conversion rate once a visitor is on your website. If one email leads to 10% of readers clicking through to your website and another one leads to 15%, then the second email should result in 50% more conversions than the first one. But that doesn’t always happen.
It’s important that the message you give in your email is consistent with the message on your website. If you’re promising your visitors a special deal, and that deal isn’t perfectly apparent on your website, then you’re going to lose customers. The same can happen if your email doesn’t echo the look and feel of your website. Visitors might get confused, and wonder if they’ve landed on the correct page.
Make sure you track your conversion rate from each email version to ensure that you aren’t losing sales. The end goal here is conversions, not just click-throughs. You may find that one email gets more click-throughs than the other, but that it doesn’t result in as many conversions. In that case, you’ll probably want to do more testing to see if you can get an email that not only results in higher click-throughs, but also higher conversions. Tools like those from KISSmetrics can help you track these on-site results.
Best Practices
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when running an email A/B test:
* Always test simultaneously to reduce the chance your results will be skewed by time-based factors.
* Test as large a sample as you can for more accurate results.
* Listen the empirical data collected, not your gut instinct.
* Use the tools available to you for quicker and easier A/B testing.
* Test early and test often for the best results.
* Only test one variable at a time for best results. (If you want to test more than one, look into multivariate testing instead of A/B testing.)











Chapter 8
Funnel creation & Drip Marketing
When people opt in or get added to your list, what if they don’t buy your product from your first autoresponder message? It’s expensive to get leads, and it takes up a lot of your time. You might run social media campaigns, advertisements, or pay for other forms of exposure to get new contacts, but when someone opts in and doesn’t buy after the first autoresponder, it’s easy to forget about them while you’re busy servicing clients and talking to others who are ready to buy.
You spend a lot of time and money bringing them in — how can you leverage these contacts to turn them into eventual sales? On average, it takes five continuous follow-up efforts before a lead becomes a customer. That’s a lot of follow-up emails to keep track of! The better answer is to nurture these leads over time by designing a funnel that guides them through the sales cycle.
What is a Funnel?
To maximize the number of leads who become customers, smart marketers design a funnel to guide new email contacts through a series of actions aimed at converting their interest into a purchase. ONTRAPORT Campaign Manager Samantha Troupe defines a funnel as “The ideal steps a lead should take on their way to becoming a customer.” Simply put, funnels are a series of communications your customer receives from you, each one building on the last to push the lead toward an eventual sale.
A funnel should involve content that is geared toward educating your lead about the solution to their pain point. It’s also a smart strategy to integrate your email communications with phone calls from you or your sales reps. Think about what you can offer your contacts to increase their awareness of their problem and your solution by building a relationship. A funnel could include:

• An explanation of the features and benefits of your product.
• Case Studies of customers like them who have had positive experiences with your business.
• Offers for discounted products or free purchase add-ons.
• Links to educational content such as ebooks, blog articles, worksheet, white papers or webinars.
• Offers for a phone appointment.
• Direct mail pieces.
• SMS messages.
• Links to videos about your product.
• Any other content that will move your leads toward taking action!
While autoresponder emails are triggered by a specific event, like opting in or purchasing a product, emails in a funnel will continue to go out whether the contact takes another action or not. They’re typically designed with a specific duration of time between emails, and successive emails are staggered out relative to the date they entered the funnel. 
Planning the structure of your funnel includes deciding how many emails they will receive, whether those emails will be broken up by other forms of communication, and strategizing about the length of time between each successive event in the funnel.
Here’s an example funnel that shows how you could stagger your series of emails and other communications:
Trigger: A new contact downloads a free piece of content from your website.
Day 0 - Email: Thank you with download link to free content
Day 3 - Email: Check in to see if they enjoyed your content and send a link to a related blog article
Day 6 - Email: Send a link to a helpful how-to video on your website
Day 9 - Call: Check-In from your Sales Team
Day 14 - Email: Answer a common objection about your product with link to a video testimonial
Day 28 - Direct Mail: Send a beautifully designed brochure with a case study about a client like them
Day 35 - Call: Sales Follow-Up
Day 42 - Email: Send a promo code for a limited-time discount on your product
When planning your funnel, it’s important to customize it to your own product. Think about your customer’s journey from interest to action. If it’s a relatively inexpensive product with low risk, that journey usually happens a lot faster. If it’s a significant investment, it may take more time for your customer to move through the funnel. Consider how your customers will make their decision, and tailor your funnel to meet them where they’re at.
Drip Marketing
Email newsletters are a great way to send out your team's latest announcements, but they have a major problem: new subscribers only see new emails, and never get the first emails you’d sent out to your list. All they’ll see is the stuff you send after they sign up. 
Often called drip campaigns but known by many other names— drip marketing, automated email campaign, lifecycle emails, autoresponders and marketing automation—the concept is the same: they’re a set of marketing emails that will be sent out automatically on a schedule. Perhaps one email will go out as soon as someone signs up, another will go out 3 days later, with one more going out the next weekend. Or, the emails can be varied based on triggers, or actions the person has performed like signing up for your service or making a purchase, which is why they're also sometimes called behavioral emails. 
The beauty of drip emails is that this all happens automatically based on triggers and user segments that you define. 
But do drip campaigns really work? Yup: According to research collected by the team behind the email-marketing suite Emma, relevant targeted emails produce 18-times more revenue than globally-broadcasted ones. Perhaps that's not so surprising, since they also found that people who read your drip emails are far more likely to click the links in them, with a 119% increase in click rate from drip emails. 
Like any good thing, you don’t want to overdo it. Too many drip emails will only annoy your customers. 
When Should You Use a Drip Campaign? 
"Drip marketing" is a blanket term that covers several different marketing strategies. But the goal remains the same: keep users engaged with your product. 

Let's look at 10 use cases where setting up an automated drip campaign could help you get relevant information to targeted readers, and convert them into customers. You might want to try a few of them with your users, or perhaps they'll spark your imagination for other ways you could use drip campaigns for your product or service. 
1. Nurturing Leads : Zapier sends new users a nurturing drip email to help them brainstorm automation ideas. 

2. Welcoming : Meditation app Headspace welcomes new users with a playful drip email and a brief explanation about what they offer. 

3. Onboarding : Cloud storage app Box employs drip campaigns to teach people how to use their product. 

4. Abandoned Shopping Carts : Online clothing retailer Gilt delivers automated drip emails to users who put an item in their cart, but did not buy it. 

5. Recommendations : Music streaming service Spotify suggests new music based on your listening history. "You might also like" isn't just for Netflix bingeing—recommendation engines are a cornerstone of nearly every giant online retailer (ahem, Amazon). 

6. Renewals: Cook's Illustrated alerts users before they automatically renew a year-long subscription. Whether your user extended their subscription or it's about to run out, you can leverage drip campaigns to engage customers during the renewal process. 

7. Confirmations: Fairfield uses drip campaigns to confirm user reservations, and show off some of the hotel amenities. 

8. Engagement : RunKeeper sends users who have not logged a workout in a while a re-engagement drip email. 

9. Courses: People like to know what they're getting with emails. So if you can offer a planned set of drips—say a six-week course on how to double your blog traffic—subscribers won't just flow in, they'll interact with the content at an incredible rate. Send stuff at random, and they may just ignore it. 

10. Unsubscribes: When we're talking about automated emails, there are opportunities everywhere—even when a user is about to slip away through the "unsubscribe" button. Instead of cursing that email address and blacklisting the IP address from your site, use an autoresponder to take one last shot at pulling the user in. 

How to Set Up a Drip Campaign? 
Now that we've studied some of the best ways to use drip campaigns to convert more sales and engage your customers, how do you actually map out a successful automated drip campaign? 
Turns out, it's actually not that hard. Here are five steps that you could use as the basis for building your drip emails, including examples of how to target your audience, write your emails, and tweak for best results and more. 
Just to note: It’s never too late to get started with a drip-based strategy. But make sure you aren’t sending current users a bunch of emails that they didn’t sign up for—if they don’t understand why they're getting an email, they could unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam. 

1. Identify Your Target Audience 
Drip campaigns are all about breaking your subscriber list into subsections, and targeting information to niches of customers. 
2. Craft Your Message 
Now that you know whom you're targeting, you need to generate  a message that's helpful and grabs their attention. What do you want the user to do? Or, what do you want the user to learn? 
Based on your answer, write copy that's clear, actionable, and attractive. Maintain the voice that you've built for you brand, but make sure that your message is clear. 
3. Plan Out Your Campaign 
Next you need to figure out the logistics of your drip campaign— what the workflow looks like from first contact to sale to support. 
4. Start Your Campaign 
Once you've decided on a strategy, start sending. To do this, you can either implement your own custom drip software or buy an off-the-shelf product that'll have you up and running in minutes. 
5. Evaluate and Adjust 
Just because your drip campaign is automated doesn't mean you can let it run unsupervised. You spent a bunch of time researching user segments, and it's important to readjust those segments and your strategy based on the results. 






Chapter 9
Transactional Emails: The 7 Best Services

Have you ever stopped to think about what happens to your email message after you press "Send"? If you're just sending your own personal emails through Gmail or your email app, your emails likely get routed through your email service's Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service to your email recipient's email service's SMTP service. It typically just works, and so most of us just ignore it. 

But, if you're sending thousands of emails a day through your app, or are delivering your company's newsletter to millions of people, suddenly you need to think a lot more about how your emails get sent. You'll very likely need a transactional email service, a dedicated email sending service that'll make sure your emails get delivered no matter how many you need to send. 
Here's a primer to getting started with transactional email sending services, with tips to help you pick the perfect app for your need and integrate it with your apps and workflow. 

Here are the three best reasons why you should outsource your emails: 

1. Send More Messages, Faster 

Gmail's limit of 500 emails a day might be the first reason you'd look for another way to send emails, but you might face similar limits with your own email server. Many shared hosting services will limit how many emails you can send per day, as detailed in this list by MailPoet, so you'll soon have the same problem you would with Gmail or Exchange. 
2. Ensure Your Messages Get Delivered 
Even if you're running your own servers, and have the infrastructure to send the messages you need, there's another catch with running your own email sending server: deliverability. You might technically be able to send emails on your own, but the chances of those emails showing up in your recipients' inboxes are slim to zero. 
3. Do More With Your Emails 
Add deliverability onto the trouble of running yet another service —one you're likely inexperienced at managing—and email sending services start looking far better. But there's also another reason to pick them: the extra features they offer. 
Some transactional email services, such as Amazon SES, are barebones and focused only on sending emails—and priced accordingly. But most others include advanced stats, notifications, filtering and more that let you do far more with your emails. With a bit of coding, or just some clicking around in stats dashboards, you can accomplish amazing things. 
Picking the Perfect Email Sending Service 
Picking a service to send emails is similar to picking between different cell service providers. At the end of the day, they all offer a very similar service, all of which work in similar ways and are very competitively priced. What makes the difference is the small things: the libraries and integrations that make them easier to use with your app, and the stats, dashboards, and other extra features they include. 
With that in mind, here are some of the most popular transactional email services:
1. Amazon SES 
Amazon may have started out as the world's largest bookstore, but today they're also one of the world's largest web services company. Best known for S3—file storage in the cloud—and EC2 —their servers-in-the-cloud—Amazon also offers CDN services, online databases, DNS server and more. Among the offerings is Amazon SES, or "simple email service", a transactional email service that's also one of the cheapest and most barebones offerings available. 
Amazon SES is designed to work with Amazon's other hosted services. Rather than supporting everything in one place, you'll use SES just for sending emails via its API or SMTP server. Then, you can track bounced emails with Amazon's SNS notifications system, setup DKIM records with Route 53, and store files with S3. There's no advanced analytics, but you will find stats on your successful deliveries, bounced or rejected messages, and complaints. 
2. SendGrid 
One of the largest transactional email sending services, SendGrid delivers over 14 billion emails each month for companies like Spotify and Uber. It's designed to be simple to integrate into your app, with a number of different APIs and supported client libraries. 
You'll find built-in support for email authentication and reputation scoring for your IP address, to make sure you emails get through, along with a library of online documentation and videos to help guide you along. 
In addition to sending standard transactional emails over its API, SendGrid also includes a marketing platform with a drag-and drop email template editor and online list management. You can create your templates and manage your lists in SendGrid, then use that data through SendGrid's interface or its API—or you can handle everything yourself. And, if anyone replies to your emails, SendGrid can parse those emails and any attachments they may contain, and send them along as you'd like. 
3. Mandrill 
The company that makes MailChimp wasn't content to just send beautiful email newsletters; it also uses its email sending expertise to ensure your app's emails get delivered. That's what Mandrill is designed for. 
Mandrill includes almost every feature you'd want, in all of its plans: dedicated IP addresses, in-depth analytics, template hosting, inbound email parsing, and more. There's also a split testing tool so you can use different templates and test their results, as well as email scheduling for $0.05 per thousand scheduled emails. That way, you can handle your own emails but still get some of the conveniences most often found in email marketing platforms. 
4. Mailgun 
Built by the Rackspace team, already known for reliable hosting, Mailgun is designed to be a reliable email service for developers. Not only can it deliver your emails well, it even includes email validation features to check and make sure you're sending emails to valid addresses. 
You can send emails the way you want in Mailgun, with isolated sub-accounts for each domain you add, giving you an easy way to manage all of your email lists separately or manage client emails along with your own. There's batch sending features to personalize emails, detailed analytics and logs, and a powerful parsing engine to turn incoming emails into JSON and route it where you want. 
5. Mailjet 
Picking a transactional email service doesn't have to mean you leave behind the features other email marketing apps offer. Mailjet brings the best of both worlds to the table, as a full-featured email marketing and transactional email sending service. 
You can customize Mailjet's email templates, store your customer's data and use it to personalize your emails, then use that data to segment your lists and send the perfect emails to your audience. Or, you can do the heavy lifting on your own, and send emails using Mailjet's API. 
6. SendinBlue 
Want to send transactional SMS messages along with your transactional emails? SendinBlue might be the email service for you. 
It's another app that includes email marketing along with a transactional email API, and it also includes SMS marketing to give you one more way to get in touch with your audience. Using the same REST API, you can create campaigns using SendinBlue's marketing platform, or you can send transactional email and SMS messages. 
7. Postmark 
You don't need to buy stamps to send letters anymore, but you might need to pick up some Postmark credits to start sending emails simply from your apps. Instead of having to subscribe to a certain plan or figure out what your price will be once you're sending a certain number of emails, Postmark lets you purchase email credits at the rate that works best for you and use them as you need. That gives you a chance to get the bulk rate, even if you're just starting. 
That bulk rate will get you a lot with Postmark, too, since everyone gets the exact same features. You'll get 45 days of search-able history, so you can see the full contents of the emails you've sent and pinpoint why they bounced. You can also see full profiles of each of your email recipients, complete with info about which emails they open, their location and more. And if those users reply, you can put those replies to work after Postmark turns them into JSON and sends them to you with its API. 









Chapter 10
10 email styles to boost your profits

Email marketing has a 4300% ROI.
And here’s another fun fact:
Email conversions outperform search conversions by 84% and social media onversions by 633%.

Who ever said email is dead? ...............Lots of people, but they’re wrong.

It’s still the most effective marketing channel at your disposal. The bottom line is, if  you’re not using email marketing, you should be, and if you are, you should be sending more emails than you’re sending now. There are many different kinds of emails you could send. We won’t cover them all here, but as you plan to expand your email communications, here’s a helpful model to consider:

A. Emails to Send After Initial Opt-in
It’s a miracle of cosmic proportions when you get an opt-in to your list. There are 987 million websites right now, and that number is only growing.
Email #1: Your Challenges + Wants
Send an email immediately after opt-in and ask this simple question:
What are the biggest challenges in your business today?
If the question doesn’t apply to your business, consider sending a segmentation email. Just ask which of your products or services the person is most interested in receiving.

Email #2: Introduce Your Company
One of the first things you should do is welcome and thank your new customer. Here’s an email from LivePlan that reinforces their value proposition:
Notice how LivePlan uses social proof — “you’ve joined over a million entrepreneurs” — to reinforce the impact and value of their offer.

Email #3: Content Follow-Up
If you receive email addresses through a content download, ask them what they thought about it!
Email #4: Educational Drip Campaign
Educational emails anticipate your prospects’ thought process and deliver information to them in the order they need it:
* Price: Why is your price so high/low?
* Credibility: Why should a prospect choose your company?
* Fit: Is your solution right for the prospect?
* Timing: Should the prospect wait a while before purchasing?
* Authority: Prospects need to involve other people in the decision.

B. Emails To Send After Purchase
Email #5: Thank You For Your Purchase
Send an email thanking them for their business. But don’t stop there. Let them know what will happen next and what their purchase means to you.
Email #6: Receipt Email
Send an easily searchable receipt email. Receiptful does this amazingly well, and it’s totally free. Here’s an example of a discount offer on one of their receipts: 

Email #7: Satisfaction Survey
A few days after purchase, send an email asking for feedback through a survey. MOO, a fantastic printing company, sends one with a lot of personality:

Email #8: Referral Request
Always ask for referrals. Keep in mind that customer acquisition through referrals is typically much cheaper than other channels. Also keep in mind something my dad always told me: “It never hurts to ask.”
* A reminder of the customer’s experience
* An incentive for successful referrals
* Your core value proposition

C. Emails to Increase Lifetime Value
What a journey it’s been so far. People actually landed on your website, joined your list and bought something. Phenomenal!
Don’t stop there! Now take the time to show them that you can provide even more value.
Three essential and logical steps in place:
* Upsell
* Cross sell
* Discounts
Email #9: Upsell Email
An upsell is simply selling a better version of the same product. You might have a good-better-best product line.
Here’s a typical example of how pricing works for software as a service product:

Notice that each price point indicates the value of the product. As you pay more, you get more. If you have a product offering like this, consider sending an upsell email enticing your customer to buy a better version of what they’ve already bought.
Email #10: Cross Sell Email
A cross sell is suggesting products related to a purchase. For example, if you buy a camera you might need a memory card. If you buy a new television, you might need a warranty. Here’s an example from Under Armour:

Notice that they’re cross selling right on their receipt.
If you have an ecommerce business, this is an absolute no-brainer. Whatever you’re selling, identify related products and be sure to tell your customers about them.
So Many Options, No Excuses
You’ve now seen 10 types of emails you could send immediately, but this is an abbreviated list. There are so many options I couldn’t cover them all, but you’re off to a good start with just the information in this post.
Do this: pick at least three types of emails and add them to your autoresponder. You’ll see a lift in revenue in no time at all.







Chapter 11
Case Studies
1. Apple

Sometimes it really is as easy as this… Apple has done an amazing job keeping their brand insanely simple yet bold at the same time, and this email is no different. The headline isn’t as profound as you’d expect, but it doesn’t need to be when you utilize pragmatic yet descriptive copy and a single call to action button that easily guides readers to click through to the Landing Page.


2. Blue Apron
This email from Blue Apron is great for a few reasons. It’s got a clear headline that offers a discount as well as introduces a new product. The top image is a gif that adds movement to the email and quickly engages the reader. The copy is easy to read, persuasive, benefit-driven, and implies a sense of urgency without being too pushy. Placing call to action buttons at the top and bottom is great, although the buttons should probably be a different color (Orange would work nicely) than the rest of their email to stand out and grab the reader’s attention.
 

3.  Surfline
This is a great example of an upsell email from Surfline. Outstanding imagery quickly captures the reader’s attention. It features a clear, simple headline that is benefit driven and personalized. Supporting copy supplements the headline and offers a discount to further persuade the reader to convert and even includes a deadline, which adds urgency and inspires action. The call to action button is huge, green, and stands out like a sore thumb -- but in a good way. That's what you want. They include social sharing buttons which is good, but they should be less noticeable as they somewhat take away from the radiant call to action button. 


4. Outbrain
This is an amazing email from Outbrain. A strong headline and subheader proclaim the company as the best option. The image shows the reader exactly what the company does, and the copy easily makes a connection with the reader by clearly stating the problem and solution their product solves — it’s very benefit driven copy. The call to action is great, as it persuades the reader to find out more, although it should be a different color — something that stands out more, as Orange is used predominantly in the email. Add in social sharing buttons and you have the makings of a great email.


5. The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails
I think this line will pique your interest about Obama’s last campaign: “Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails.”
Hot damn.
The Obama campaign famously used a casual, conversational in tone in the email subject lines. The most famous subject line was simply “Hey.” Another – “I will be outspent” – raised $2.6 million on its own.

This didn’t happen by accident. The folks behind the campaigns tested incessantly, sometimes playing with a dozen or more variations on a single email. Here’s one of the most interesting findings revealed by digital analytics directo Amelia Showalter:
…these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest,” says Showalter.
They bottled lightening over and over through rigorous testing and exceptional copywriting. The viral effect was manufactured, not serendipitous.
6. How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week?
Pulling off a wildly successful email campaign isn’t easy.
Even when the goals are simple, the logistics tend to get messy. The smartest of companies dig in anyway.
In Harry’s case, they used a landing page to gather 100,000 emails in the week leading up their launch. As a shaving company, they are competing against institutions like Gillette. The only way to outsell them is to out-maneuver them.

Harry’s drove traffic to a landing page, asked for a signup, then used a referral mechanism to incentivize people to share the product. Those who referred friends earned free products. They gave away a ton of free razors that week but it cost way less than broadcasting the upcoming launch on traditional advertising channels.
This post gets into the nitty gritty of driving the traffic, managing the flood of interest and actually delivering the free products.




Conclusion
You've conquered email marketing—don't stop there!
Even though mastering the techniques and leveraging the tools in this guide won’t happen overnight, you deserve some serious kudos for making the decision to take control of your email marketing. Take the time to make these strategies work for your business, and over time you will build a solid relationship with the contacts on your list - and that’s a benefit you can take to the bank.
Although there are a slew of digital marketing mediums out there that can boost your business, from social media to SEO, email marketing gets you the most for your marketing dollar - with an ROI of up to 4,300%! With only a bit of time and money required to get up and running, email marketing is a long-term investment you can feel great about.
















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