Bigger is better in email marketing, right? Generate more leads, send more emails, make more profits – or so the story goes. This has been the mantra of email marketers for the last two decades. But the situation has changed. For a new era of email marketing, we need a new strategy. It’s what I call “Karma Sending.”
Karma Sending is the equivalent of working smarter, not harder. It means sending more targeted emails to the right people – those who are actually engaging with them. It means sending the right offers at the right time.… Read the rest
In December, I got an email from one of our publishers.
Hi folks,
I’m having annoying deliverability issues with Gmail over the last few weeks (perhaps 15% of folks at Gmail who used to get every issue are no longer seeing them). …
This particular publisher has extraordinary open rates (50%+ open rate), so this was rather unusual. He reached out to his email service provider to see if they could help, but their response was not particularly helpful.
Thanks for reaching out to us. I can definitely understand your
concerns about the recent drop in opens, however in all likelihood its
probably just related to this specific time of year.
Lots of advertisers ask what they should be bidding on a cost-per-click basis. It’s a tough question, especially if you don’t know the lifetime value of your average customer yet. But, I just read a solid blog post by WPEngine entrepreneur Jason Cohen on his rule of thumb for CPC bidding. The post makes some assumptions about your conversion rate and your customer retention, but nonetheless, his numbers are good proxies for most Saas businesses.
tl;dr — you should bid your monthly recurring revenue / 25. E.g. If your average recurring paid package is $100 per month, you should bid at max $4 per click.… Read the rest
Yesterday, I held a webinar on “How the best advertisers do lead generation.” We talked about:
Driving traffic: best practices in creating ads
Building compelling landing pages
Packaging content into ebooks, pdfs, whitepapers
Cultivating your audience
And, we teamed up with our friends at Tout, who talked about doing lead generation through cold-emailing. If you couldn’t make it, we’ve recorded it and published it below.
Working in the email world, you learn about some seriously shady practices and what goes on behind the scenes. I was initially reluctant to talk about this publicly, but the other day, an acquaintance approached me for some advice.
Me: Oh what’s up?
K: I bought an email list, and I want to know the best way to send these people emails.
Me: As in, you bought actual email addresses?
K: Yeah. 38,000 emails of professionals. From a site similar to Salesforce’s data.com.
Me: Oh…I see…
K: Yeah, I paid $18,000 for the list. How should I send marketing emails to them?
There are a lot of marketing blogs out there that are just awful. They aren’t insightful. They don’t teach you something new. They’re boring.
Here are our favorite marketing blogs that we’ve found to be extremely helpful and tactical.
1) Unbounce
The team over at Unbounce writes tactical posts on how to improve your marketing. Best practices for building landing pages. How to optimize your email marketing.
We’ve spent a couple of posts like this and this, talking about what other people think affect their email engagement. But nothing we discussed in those posts either had any or had just a small effect on increasing email engagement. So, let’s cut to the chase — what are BIG factors that lead to higher newsletter engagement?
The Background
We brainstormed a long list of potential factors that we thought could lead to a higher click-through-rate. We picked three factors from that list that we thought would be highly correlated AND have a strong effect on click-through-rate.… Read the rest
The marketers we work with love growth. (Who doesn’t?) But, growth can sometimes come at the expense of getting the wrong audience.
Last year, I was talking with one of our advertisers. They were running a bunch of contests to give away awesome stuff. You could potentially win a free iPad and other really cool things by entering your email address into their landing pages. “More volume! More volume!” they yelled. They were getting crazy conversions off their landing page, and their cost per lead was far lower than their expected threshold.
And then the crash…
They were getting leads like crazy for months, and then they realized their leads were not paying off in the same way that their non-contest leads were.… Read the rest
This is our third LaunchBit Blast, with the prior two here and here. In this Blast we competed with Snapette, a popular fashion discovery app, to see if we could beat their engagement in their newsletter. So, let’s gear up for Blast #3! For this competition, the publisher wanted to increase the overall number of clicks back to their site.
The Background
Snapette sends a weekly digest-style newsletter that shows off fashionable apparel items. They had a very long and image heavy newsletter. As such, we suspected that a portion of their newsletters might be going into spam.… Read the rest
In the 90s, people would send text email newsletters. Now, so many email service providers make it easy for you to add images, and we’re seeing a ton of email publishers add images to their newsletters. One publisher told us that they are adding a boatload of images to their email newsletter to increase their click-through-rate. Does that work? Do publishers who include images lead to a higher click-through-rate than publishers who don’t?
The Background
We separated newsletter publishers into two categories: “has images” and “doesn’t have images,” and then we analyzed them to see if we could find a correlation between having images and increases/decreases in various forms of engagement.… Read the rest
