These days there’s a growing list of essential content you should include in every email you send. You know the drill. Unsubscribe mechanism, postal address, link to web version, the list goes on.

The permission reminder message

Of all the essential content though, there’s one I consistently see missing in many of the thousands of campaigns we deliver each week. What makes this more surprising is that this is one of the most important elements and also one of the easiest to add. I’m talking about the permission reminder message – a simple sentence or two reminding the subscriber how they gave you their permission to email them. Here’s a quick example:

Hi, just a reminder that you’re receiving this email because you subscribed via our website. As promised, this issue includes great tips on ……

Simple hey. In 2 simple sentences you’ve assured each recipient that your email isn’t spam and reminded them why they were interested in hearing from you in the first place.

Don’t stop there

We’re nearly there, but now that you’ve reminded the subscriber how you got their permission and what you’re sending them, why not give those that are no longer interested the option to unsubscribe right there and then. Here’s a complete example:

Hi, just a reminder that you’re receiving this email because you subscribed via our website. As promised, this issue includes great tips on ……, but you may unsubscribe if you’re no longer interested.

If you can’t summarise how you got their permission in a few words, then there’s every chance you don’t have it or they won’t remember giving it to you. “Remember that time you downloaded a report from our partner and gave them your email address” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

We know how important segmentation is in allowing you to target your subscribers with the most relevant content. So in the last few months we’ve been doing a lot of work on our segments feature, including releasing our new segments builder and extending the way rules could be created.

We’re now excited to unveil one of our most popular feature-requests – segments in autoresponders. You can now use what you know about your subscribers to send them more relevant autoresponder emails and combine the power of the most relevant message with sending it at the best time.

Here are a few ways you might want to use segments in autoresponders:

Personalized welcome emails

Say you run an online clothing store and capture whether someone is male or female when they sign up. Now you can use that information to send gendered versions of your welcome email and make your communications highly targeted from the very beginning.

Targeted birthday emails

If you’re sending birthday emails to customers using the anniversary of a date autoresponder option, you could apply segments to make the campaign even more relevant. For example, you could identify VIP customers based on how much they’ve spent with you over the past year, and then target the VIP customer segment with an extra special birthday gift.

Subscription renewal series

Or finally, say you sell annual virus protection software subscriptions. Using the exact match of a date autoresponder option you could set up a series that sends a renewal notification out 30 days before the subscription expiration date. You can then use information on whether someone has paid or not paid, to target those who have not renewed at the 15 day mark and then again at the 7 day mark. Each email in the series would only be sent to those who fell into the segment ‘have not paid’, which would automatically refresh each time updated payment information was uploaded.

We know a lot of you were have been looking to see this feature so we’re really excited to share it with you. We look forward to seeing how you use it to improve how you communicate with subscribers and ultimately drive better results from your email marketing.

Location can be a powerful tool in driving relevance in email marketing. Whether it’s providing local information or personalizing your content to match local conditions, knowing where your subscribers are is the first step. Collecting this information isn’t always easy though, so we’re excited to introduce a new way to create mailing list segments based on the location of your subscribers: geolocation segments.

Whether you’re interested in targeting people from particular countries, or those living within a certain distance of specific locations, you can now do it with our geolocation feature. It automatically identifies the location of a subscriber and allows you to create a segment based on that information. That’s right, even if you haven’t collected the location of your subscribers you can use this feature to send geo-targeted campaigns.

We already calculate a subscriber’s location using their IP address to power features like Worldview and our subscriber notification emails. We do this by storing the IP address of subscribers that sign up from a form, or open or click a link in a campaign. We then look that up against an IP-to-location database. So basically, once we know the IP address used by a subscriber, we can tell roughly where they are located.

Now we’ve applied that information to segments so you can use it to target your email campaigns. You can search your subscribers and segment based on their location being known or unknown, their location being near somewhere, as well as them being specifically in, or not in, a location.

Here’s a few ways you might use the geolocation feature:

Targeting those in or near a location

Say you sell bathing suits globally. In the middle of January you could target customers living in Australia, where it’s summer, without bothering customers in the US, who could be living through a polar vortex.

Or, say you sell concert tickets for gigs across the US and there’s one coming up in San Francisco. You could use geolocation segments to only send an event announcement to people living near San Francisco.

Targeting those not in a specific location

Say you include banner ads in your emails. You have specific banners for US subscribers but then a generic one for everyone else. You could create a segment targeting everyone not in the US for the generic version.

Targeting those whose location is not known at all

Say you run a business events company and in your weekly emails you feature what’s happening in a subscriber’s city. You could target subscribers whose location is unknown, so you can send them a generic version that covers the top 5 events from across the country instead.

Location data is already being collected for everyone who’s ever sent a campaign. So you can jump in right now, check out where your subscribers are and start targeting by region today.

Often there are good reasons to exclude subscribers from a campaign. For example, you may want to send an email update that’s only relevant to people who haven’t registered for a specific event. Or alternately, you may want to avoid sending your monthly newsletter to people who are already on your weekly mailing list. Well, it’s now possible to exclude lists and segments with a single click – here’s a quick look at what you’ll see when you next send a campaign.

As with much of the app, we’ve really aimed at making the exclusion of lists and segments as simple and self-explanatory as possible. When creating a new campaign in your eConnect Email account, you’ll now see an “Exclude list” or “Exclude segment” button when you hover over either a list or segment on the “Who will receive this campaign” screen. Clicking this button will ensure that subscribers in the list or segment are not only removed, but excluded, or “washed” (as it’s sometimes called) from other lists that have been included in the send.

What’s also worth mentioning is that excluded lists and segments are subtracted from the unique subscriber count in our updated Campaign Snapshot.

This has been an actively requested addition to the app, so we really hope that you find it to be helpful when sending targeted campaigns. Just to give you an insider tip, we’re going to be unveiling a few updates to how you manage your lists in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned by subscribing to our blog updates below, or at least checking back often. In the interim, if you have any questions or feedback, either let us know in the comments below, or get in touch directly – naturally, we’d love to hear from you.

So far this year we’ve rolled out a couple of big changes to help you organically build your email lists. Following the introduction of our subscribe form app for the iPad, the subscribe button and the subscribe page, we’ve turned our attention back to the original website subscription form builder.

After we spruced up the “Grow your audience” pages in “Lists & Subscribers,” it became quite evident that the trusty option to generate your own subscription form code within “Copy/paste a form to your site” was well due for an update. While the old website subscription form builder did the job, it was well, looking a bit tired and not at all consistent with the rest of the eConnect Email platform.

After a large amount of work, we’re happy to announce that we’ve overhauled the “Add a subscribe form to our site” section of your account, to make it easier to create a form, get the code and preview the results. It’s also a lot more intuitive and user-friendly.

Flexible forms with and real-time previews

While many of our clients have no trouble customizing our website subscription form code to their heart’s delight, we’ve gone the next step with our form builder. For one, it’s now easy to re-order the display of form fields – for example, if you want the “Email address” field to display before “Name”, you can now drag-and-drop it into place. As you make changes to the forms, the preview alongside it will update automatically.

An improved workflow

Once you’ve tailored your website subscription form to taste, you can simply copy the code, or move on to other popular tasks, like customizing your subscribe confirmation page, confirmation email or setting up an auto-responder. All it takes is a few minutes to build a form, and then customize what your subscribers see, before and after signing up for your lists.

While these changes are all fairly subtle, we hope that they make the process of creating subscription forms for your website a touch easier. Of course, if there’s anything we can improve to make it even easier to build your website subscription forms, please sound off by posting a comment below.

A couple of hours ago we launched Subscribe Me, an app that turns your iPad into a beautiful subscription form. It’s perfect for the counter at your store, an event you might be hosting, or anywhere else where people might like to join your list when they’re not in front of their computer. It’s totally free and available now.

Customize everything

When we built Subscribe Me, the most important thing was that it could be completely customized to match your own look and feel. When it’s sitting at the counter in your store, it should look like it was built just for you.

We’ve included 10 great looking themes to make it easy to get started, but you can throw in your own logo and background image, change the copy to suit, the button label, the fonts, text sizes and plenty more. To make this easy, we’ve gone for a live preview approach so you can see exactly how your form will look as you make changes.

Once you’ve designed your form, you can easily secure it by setting a passcode, ready for people to start subscribing. This means anyone can join your list, but they can’t make any changes to the form or your settings. If you want to make any tweaks, just enter your passcode and you’re good to go.

Works offline

Let’s say you sell handmade goods each weekend at the local fair. Now you can take your Wifi only iPad with Subscribe Me installed, set it up on the tabletop and hundreds of people can sign up to your weekly newsletter, all without an Internet connection.

After a successful day of selling, Subscribe Me will automatically sync all your new subscribers straight into your eConnect Email account the moment it’s connected to the web. This all happens seamlessly behind the scenes without you lifting a finger.

Beautiful, flexible forms

As well as looking great, we made sure Subscribe Me was as easy to use as possible for your subscribers. We designed stunning custom form controls that looks awesome on a retina display. We also give you control over which fields to show, and what order they should be displayed.

You can also set certain fields as required, and we’ll handle error checking for your subscribers to let them know if they missed something.

Available now, for free

Subscribe Me launched in the App Store a few hours ago. It’s free to download, all you need is a eConnect Email account. When you first run the app you can choose which list you’d like to connect it to, but you can easily change this to any other list at a later date.

We’re really excited about getting our first dedicated app out there. We’ve got plans for more improvements down the line, so please give it a try and let us know what you think.

In a post on the eConnect Email Blog at the beginning of October, James Trumbly, Director of Business Development at eConnect Email explained how to use an email marketing system to nurture leads. Trumbly discussed how the best lead nurturing approaches to email marketing consists of delivering high quality content to a narrowly targeted audience at regular intervals. In addition, they always provide incentives to opt in to an email list that contains your ultimate offer and leads to a sale.

I’d like to talk about how marketing should approach leads after they’re nurtured by email marketing when the prospect is ready for qualification. In my view, the lead qualification process, like the lead nurturing process, should stay within the marketing department. I also think that marketing personnel should take the additional step of getting on the phone to qualify leads. While this is a function normally left to sales departments, I think Marketing is in a better position to qualify leads- and by doing so will ultimately produce higher quality leads for your sales teams. Here’s why:

Marketing Doesn’t Have Near-Term Quotas to Close Deals
The reality of sales departments is that salespeople live quarter to quarter, and they have to hit a quota each quarter in order to stay in the good graces of their department. While this is a great incentive for keeping your sales team motivated to bring in revenue, that same incentive could be counterproductive in the lead qualification process.  So that is the reason I believe Marketing is better suited for lead qualification.

First off, the marketing department isn’t particularly concerned with hitting near-term quotas. This allows the marketer to engage a prospect in a more open and honest conversation about their needs, purchase time frame, budget and other factors that comprise typical qualification criteria. Beyond that, marketing departments should become more responsible for the quality of leads that they send to the sales team. By managing the qualification process, the marketing team becomes intimately tied to the quality of the lead.

In order to make this work however, marketing departments need to be methodical about whom they hire, how they compensate and how the lead qualification process is managed- and improved. Here are four tips for managing this process:

1. Hire at the Junior Level
In any role, hiring the right person is critical. For the role of lead qualifier, you want someone energetic, competitive and willing to spend time on the phone. You also want them to be junior enough to grow into a different Sales or Marketing role. Beyond that, you want someone that can really drive a phone conversation and has the inquisitive nature to dig beneath the surface to and uncover information from the prospect.

2. Compensate with a Sales-like Pay Structure
The biggest driver in increasing the quality of marketing leads is to tie compensation to the sale. The easiest way to do that is to start them off at a base salary while offering them a commission based on the total revenue of closed deals. You can also add incentives for qualification accuracy such as an additional bonus for a great sales-accepted lead.

3. Decide How to Route Leads
The natural lead category breakdown is to create three buckets of leads:
a.  Qualified leads
b.  Disqualified leads
c.  Leads that need to be nurtured

All of these are fairly self-explanatory but the last one is worth elaborating on. The real opportunity for shifting this role to a marketing department is that you can dedicate someone to nurturing leads with a human touch. As such, there should be an intense focus on the nurturing aspect of lead qualification.

4. Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
While this is a long-standing issue in companies across the globe, it’s a necessary area of focus for making this model work. Both the sales and marketing departments should have regular meetings about lead qualification criteria. This allows the sales team to fully understand why Marketing is disqualifying certain leads (and to double-check that they’re not disqualifying a few hidden gems). The best way to manage this process is to have both departments meet frequently. Introduce weekly meetings and gradually move to once a month.

While this is not a comprehensive list of what needs to happen, I believe it to be the key area of focus. If you follow these steps, you can create a Marketing team that drives more sales, is more accountable and is better suited to see its contribution to revenue.

How long do you have to snag your reader’s attention before you lose them? Say it with me: ten seconds or less. We’ve had this drilled into our heads, and great designers know what keeps people reading and what doesn’t. But what hasn’t been learned nearly so well is that your customer’s online attention is not only short, but also very narrow.

Usability guru, Jack Nielson, explains in a recent Alertbox Column that most users focus only on what interests them or what they expect will give them the answers that they need while ignoring the other content. Known as “Tunnel Vision,” this phenomenon can make the difference between click-throughs and deleted messages.

Let’s consider an example. You design a newsletter advertising your website’s 20 percent off sale. You include a headline, an image, a block of text that includes a coupon code, and a call to action that says “Shop Now.” Nielson’s usability research suggests that if you haven’t stated the coupon code in the headline or included it as part of the call to action, many subscribers won’t see it. It’s a phenomenon similar to banner blindness, where readers ignore portions of the screen that they think aren’t essential to the overall message. If the coupon code is necessary in order to receive the savings, you’ll need to follow a few design tips in order to keep it within your subscribers’ field of vision.

• Put important elements near each other.
  If your image shows sale items and information, try putting the coupon code within the image or as the image caption. If subscribers must read through a block of text in order to find the coupon code, they may miss it altogether.

• Include essential info in the link.
  People tend to focus on click-able elements within an email design. Your call to action button and any nearby links should contain the essential information you’re trying to communicate. So instead of using a call to action that says “Shop Now,” try “Save 20% with coupon code FALL2012.”

• Test with actual users.
  Designers have difficulty recognizing usability problems with their designs because they already know where the important information is and their eyes gravitate toward it. They might not recognize where tunnel vision might occur for the average subscriber. Creating simple A/B split tests can point out problems that keep your readers from noticing the important stuff amongst everything else.

Tunnel vision means that users often don’t see things that are right in front of them. By grouping important elements together and putting essential information where readers tend to look anyway, you can boost your click-through rates and ultimately, your conversions.

In nature, “nurturing” always implies a particular relationship between the nurturer and the nuturee: the party with more knowledge/experience/information/power shares those qualities with the party possessing less, with the goal of bringing about positive change. Appropriately, “lead nurturing” in the email marketing world refers to the educational relationship you create with subscribers, with the goal of persuading them to act. When you get it right, you’ll not only get more customers to say yes, you’ll also build a core of loyal clients who throw their business your way again and again.

Basics of Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing isn’t just sending emails once a week. It involves providing relevant, useful information to the subscriber about the offer you want him to accept. And it requires planning.

• Create a target audience persona. Your email list includes a variety of personality and customer types, but in order to create the most effective email campaign, you’ll need to choose one target persona to focus on. Create each email with that personality in mind. What motivates them? What information do they need? What questions do they want answered? Focus on building a relationship with your target audience in order to earn their loyalty.
• Determine a consistent email frequency and sequence. Every new lead on your list should receive the same emails in the same order and at the same frequency. Each new message should have a specific goal and call to action. Frequency should be no less than once a week; every five to six days works well in most cases.
• Create content. Each email should contain helpful, actionable, and educational content. Be creative. Try videos, FAQs, surveys, special reports and other formats to get the most important information about your company and your offer into the hands of your subscribers. Emails should build on each other, creating forward momentum and culminating with your ultimate call to action.
• Use offer-based opt-ins. Provide an incentive for opting in to your email list that is related to your ultimate offer. If you’re selling a weight loss e-book, for instance, your opt-in offer could be a free report detailing seven secrets to reducing the risk of Type II diabetes.
• Use autorepsonders. Autoresponders ensure that each new lead gets the same emails at the same frequency. It’s the smartest way to keep your email campaign ducks in a row.

Securing Action With Lead Nurturing

Once your campaign is up and running, keep a close eye on your analytics. Monitor which links are being clicked, how many subscribers convert, how many new leads you get, and where those leads are coming from. Tweak your campaign based on subscriber behavior.

Persuading your target audience to say yes begins with a strong lead nurturing campaign designed to educate and build relationships. Strong content, effective planning, and a solid approach to email creation and distribution will create a loyal audience that wants what you have to offer.

Hyde Park Baptist Church, located deep in the heart of Austin, Texas, reached out to us with the need to create a stronger, more appealing way to communicate to its members.  With that in mind, we were able to assist HPBC by creating email templates that would allow them to send out customized weekly messages to a variety of groups.  The email templates provide a consistent and organized theme that allows for a variety of people to receive announcements and other information without the dread of reading, yet another, boring black and white email.

University Ministry Example

General Ministry Example

Do you want to improve your email strategy?  Just a simple change can bring great results.  Contact HMG Creative to get started.