This article takes you step-by-step on how to create an HTML email template by using Photoshop. If you are naturally a designer or work with a graphic designer, this is a great tutorial on how to build your own email template yourself.
If you’re not familiar with Photoshop, Microsoft Word can be a simple option for creating an email newsletter template. This tutorial also takes you step by step on how to create a newsletter.… Read the rest
Using advertising to drive immediate sales can be really difficult. But, our best customers use ads to drive new leads to their free content and then will build the relationship to eventually drive sales later. Ebooks, in particular, work really well. HubSpot, derives 27,000 leads per month through their free content. This is how they write effective ebooks:
1) Set expectations
Not every ebook is going to be right for everybody. So, it’s important to state upfront who your ebook is for to set proper expectations.
Note: if you’re a beginner they point you to a different book that might be more appropriate.… Read the rest
Native ads are all the rage these days, seamlessly blending engaging content into the property’s environment. But to really understand why, we need to take a look at the history of online advertising. In the 90s, when the dot com boom was starting to take off, I was just entering high school in the Silicon Valley and I had the opportunity to briefly help (if you can call it that) at a banner ad company. They were rocking it, seeing very high click-through-rates (CTR) and charging just pennies per click. Back then, everyone and their mother was clicking, so even at just pennies, this company was rolling in the dough.… Read the rest
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
