If my alarm doesn’t go off again after I hit the snooze button or if my faucet won’t give me hot water, it throws me off. It doesn’t necessarily ruin my day, of course, but it does remind me how reliant we are on routine and how disruptions in that routine aren’t usually welcome.

And just what does this have to do with your email marketing campaigns?

You’ve done a great job getting subscribers to your site, generating signups to your list and putting great content in your newsletters, but maybe your open rates aren’t where you’d like, or you’re seeing an increase in your unsubscribe rate.

You’ve looked at your messages, and you’re still providing the great content in the messages that you always have. So why isn’t the response where it should be?

Maybe you’re not making yourself part of your subscribers’ routine.

There are several things you can do to build consistency into your newsletters, and in doing so, build your subscribers’ expectations and get them into the habit of anticipating, opening and reading your newsletter:

Format Your From Line and Subject Lines Consistently

Once subscribers have gotten your initial message and the first issue or two of your newsletter, they form an expectation of what your messages look like in their inbox. Future messages that follow this format are more likely to stand out when they scan the dozens or hundreds of messages in their inbox.

The best way to build in consistency is by sending each message with the same from line. This, along with the subject line, is the first thing subscribers see.

You can build consistency into the subject line itself, too, but don’t make it boring… after all, you want people to get excited about what’s in the email!

Many email marketers develop a “voice” that shines through in their subject lines and makes them different and compelling, yet unmistakably “theirs.” Others use tags such as [Justin's Totally Sweet Newsletter] and place those at the end of their subject lines.

Brand Your Messages, At The Top

Whether you use a logo, your company name, your website URL, or your own name as your brand, get it in front of your subscribers, at the beginning of your message!

Example:

---

Justin’s Totally Sweet Marketing Newsletter:
What Do Your Subscribers Expect From You?

http://www.example.com/issue15.html

August 1st, 2006

---

You’ll notice that I put a URL in the headline. As Marc noted in an earlier post, you can put online versions of your newsletter issues on your site, and give links to those online versions in your messages.

This is a great idea because it can drive subscribers back to your site, where they may sign up for another one of your newsletters, purchase one of your products, or click on an AdSense ad on your site – and there’s certainly nothing bad about them doing any of that!

Format Your Message Body Consistently

Now that you’ve gotten your subscribers to open your messages through consistent subjects and message beginnings, you’ll want to provide readers with a consistent format.

Readers scan email for the information they deem relevant. When your subscribers are familiar with the format of your messages, they’re better able to scan your mailings and find the information they want.

If they’re not able to find the information they want easily, they’re less likely to read future issues and more likely to unsubscribe.

Stick To Your Schedule

Build expectations for when your messages will arrive. If you’re offering subscribers a weekly newsletter, send it weekly.

By doing this you will be building anticipation that will foster relationships and lifetime readers.

Consistency with your newsletter can make you as much a part of your subscribers’ routine as my snooze button is a part of mine.

Lately I wonder if as email marketers, and as companies with a web presence, we don’t give enough thought to this, and how it affects how our subscribers perceive us (and how they treat our messages).

The online actions of other businesses, who may not have any association with you, can give you — can give all of us — a bad name.

It’s up to us to make sure that your visitors and subscribers know how you differ from the “bad apples” — because otherwise, you may suffer the consequences of someone else’s poor email marketingpractices.

But Why? That’s Not Fair! I Haven’t Done Anything Wrong!

Remember, we’re talking about “the company you keep,” not necessarily what you’re doing yourself.

Many web users are suspicious and mistrusting, as Mark Brownlow points out.

According to the study he cites, users believe that a majority of companies will share their email address with others. (Unfortunately, some companies still do this, which in my view is an abhorrent practice, no matter how it’s framed or disclosed.)

Combine this with the fear of many (69%) that they’ll be the victim of an email scam, and the fact that half of those don’t know how to identify a potentially dangerous email, and the fact that they’re often told not to trust unsubscribe links, and what do you get?

A situation where the average user may be afraid to share his/her email address because he/she is afraid of getting spam from you — and from other people.

The Goal: Prove That You’re Different. But How?

Most of your visitors don’t know you from Adam. They’ve found you from an online search, or a link from another website, and carry few or no preconceptions about your email practices.

What visitors do know is that you’re a business, with a website, who wants their email address. And what do they believe happens when they give a business their email address?

So to earn their subscription, you have to differentiate yourself from the “bad apples” out there.

A few ways to do so:

• Don’t share subscribers’ email addresses (obvious, but worth emphasizing)
• Create a privacy policy that clearly states what you will — and more importantly, won’t — do with your subscribers’ personal information.
• Near your signup form, tell would-be subscribers what you will send them, and how often they can expect to hear from you. Setting subscriber expectations up-front like this goes a long way to not only increasing your signups, but reducing spam complaints.
• Or, in a twist on the previous idea, record a short video of yourself telling subscribers that you value their trust, and that you won’t misuse it. Put the video near your form.This also shows there’s a real person behind your site and creates another opportunity to ask for the subscribe.

Each of these can potentially reduce your visitors’ fear of giving you their email addresses.

Other Ideas?

While you know your own permission and privacy practices (or, to put it another way, your “email ethics”), your potential subscribers do not. Better to assume you’re not trusted, and go about earning that trust by informing subscribers about both yourself and your business, than to simply hope you are trusted by default.

What other ways can you think of to earn subscriber trust?

We get a lot of people asking what a “good” confirm rate is — out of everyone who signs up to your list, what proportion will open the confirm message and click on the link to activate their subscription to your list?

So, I thought I’d share some of our own results, from our own blog’s email subscribers.

Confirm Rate For Past 30 Days: 78.1%

Over the past month, between three-quarters and four-fifths of addresses entered into a signup form for the blog confirmed.

At right is a chart showing the breakdown (active, unsubscribed, unconfirmed). (Click on it to get a full-size version.)

When you consider that right off the bat, 5-20% of addresses entered into web forms bounce (due to typos or to people intentionally entering invalid addresses), this is arguably pretty high.

Now, we have a signup form on every page of our blog. But this doesn’t mean addresses that sign up on each of those various pages are all equally likely to confirm. If we drill down to specific groups of subscribers, we may be able to gain even more insight into what affects our confirm rate.

But Is That Rate Even Higher For Certain Subscribers?

In our web form webinar, Marc and I suggest trying out signup forms at the end of blog posts to capitalize on visitors who are interested enough in a post to read to the end of it.

I wanted to see whether or not people signing up through that kind of form were more apt to confirm than others. I took as an example our recent article, “Six Ways to Screw Up A Customer Email” and looked at the subscribers who signed up through the form at the end of that post.

I found that over 86% of people signing up through that form confirmed!

I attribute this to the fact that after reading the article and finding the content compelling and relevant to their interests, they were especially likely to want to get other email marketing advice like that article. They’re especially engaged and so are more likely to confirm.

If You Think Our Confirm Rates Are High…

Let me throw a couple of ideas your way for increasing your own confirm rate, based on what we’re doing on this blog.

An Informed Audience: If you don’t make it 100% clear to people, before they sign up, what it is that they’re signing up for, then they’re going to make their own assumptions. If those assumptions are at all wrong, they’re not going to confirm.

Make it clear to people what they’re getting when they sign up.

Clear Instructions: Tell subscribers — better yet, show them — what they need to do to activate their subscription. Video on the thank-you page has worked well for us. So has telling subscribers to whitelist help@aweber.com, since that’s the address we send from.

Provide A Little Extra: On our Thank You page, we sweeten the deal by offering them a free copy of our Email Deliverability Guide in exchange for confirming. Now, our subscribers have yet another incentive to confirm!

What Has Worked Well For You?

What tactics have you used to maximize your confirm rate? Share them below!

Friday’s post on confirmation rates sparked a discussion of other other stats that we can measure and improve.

Glenn voiced a question that I think all of us have asked at some point:

For a lot of people, email stats are a way to monitor the “health” of their campaigns. We want to see, at a glance, how profitable our email marketing is.

But before we can begin to answer his question, we should address the two bigger questions here:

Is there one “best” or “most important” email metric?

If not, are some helpful metrics that we can look at, and what do they tell us?

Is There One Superior Metric?

Glenn’s comment reminded me of the question, “If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only have one CD with you, what would it be?” It’s a fun exercise, but is/should be entirely theoretical.

Here’s the thing: if you restrict yourself to looking at one stat, you miss out on information that other stats tell you, and the potential gains that your reaction to those other stats could bring.

Take conversion rates, for example. They give us a broad view of our success. If you know your conversion rate, how many subscribers you’re communicating with, and what your profit is per conversion, you can easily calculate how lucrative your email campaigns are.

But what if you want to improve your conversion rate? What’s the first step you take?

A lot of things factor into how effectively your email campaigns convert prospects to customers. Like subject lines, and “from” addresses, and your calls-to-action. If all we look at is our conversion rate, we’re less likely to see that (for example) maybe our subjects are poor, or maybe our calls-to-action work better as images than as text.

So What Are Some Basic Stats To Keep An Eye On?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible metrics, but if you’re not sure what to track, this is a good place to start.

There are tons of other stats that you could come up with as you go, but when looking at the effectiveness of your emails, these three are a good place to begin.

And yes, you’ll want to keep track of your conversions too

But even if you can’t make it, you’re probably interested in learning more about split testing now, right?

Fortunately, we happen to have a case study on hand that shows just the sort of information you can learn about your email marketing campaigns by conducting split tests.

Today, let’s look at a split test that we ran on our own blog newsletter to get more of you to come to the site and read the latest posts.

The Test

Last year, Marc and I were discussing how to increase clickthroughs on the emails we send to our blog subscribers.

One of the ideas that came up was to replace the text links that we had been using to drive people to the blog with a “button.”

Previous testing on the website had shown that in many cases, buttons make better calls to action than text links do. We thought the same might hold true for email.

So, Marc created a button-shaped image with the words “Read More” stamped on it:

We then created A/B split tests for our Blog Broadcasts, inserted this image into one version as the call to action (to read the full post on our blog) and continued to use text links in the other version as we had before.

The emails were otherwise identical — we kept subject lines, sending dates/times and templates the same for each version.

Measuring Our Success

Since we’re trying to get people to visit our site to read the full blog posts, we want to compare clickthrough rates.

We chose to use clicks-to-opens as our measure of success. Instead of dividing clickthroughs by the number of emails sent, we divided it by the number of emails opened.

That way, if one version of the message got an unusually high number of opens, it wouldn’t skew the results to make that version’s call to action look more effective than it really was.

Our Expectations

Going into this test, we expected the button to beat the text links handily.

Why?

It was physically larger than the text link

It contained a clear call to action — “Read More” — while a contextual link might be less obvious.

It was an image placed in a part of the email where readers hadn’t previously been shown images

Basically, we expected the button would grab people’s attention as they scanned through the email.

On the flipside, we knew that readers might have images disabled and wouldn’t see the button.

So we added the ALT text “Read More” to the button image.

Since with images disabled the text “Read More” would appear in place of the button, we felt that even for those readers with images disabled, the button should do at least approximately as well as the text link.

Initial Results

We started running the test on our Blog Broadcasts last year.

As we expected, the button grabbed readers’ attention and incented them to click through, much better than the text link did.

Clicks-to-opens for the button was repeatedly higher — a lot higher — than it was for the text link.

In our first five split tests, the button drew a clicks-to-opens rate that was on average 33.29% higher than the text link clicks-to-opens rate.

At this point, about 2 weeks into our test, it was tempting to say, “The button clearly draws more attention and clicks than text links. Let’s just start using buttons and move on to another test.”

…But, We Kept Going!

We could have stopped after those first few tests — and in many cases, one-time or short-time split tests are appropriate.

However, even in our initial few tests, the text had beaten the button once, and by a large margin.

I wanted to see whether the button was doing better because it was a more compelling call to action in general, or because of the “novelty” of it.

So we continued to split test our Blog Broadcasts…

Later Results

We ultimately ran the button-versus-text split test about 40 times, over the course of several months.

For a while, the button continued to beat the text links — but we noticed that it wasn’t doing so by as large a margin as it first had.

While over our first five tests, the button beat the text by over 33%, after 20 tests it was only winning by an average of 17.29%, and the text version was beginning to hold its own in the win column.

Final Outcome

With each new split test, the text asserted itself as the better call to action.

By the time we ended our experiment, text links were consistently outperforming our button, winning nearly two-thirds of the time, by double-digit margins as high as nearly 35%.

Conclusions: What Happened?

The button is effective in the short run, but after a while readers become “numb” to it and no longer respond at the same initial high rate.

Consider the following two stats from our split tests:

• Overall, text links outperformed buttons 53% of the time.
• After an initial period where the button was more effective, text links outperformed buttons 67% of the time.

That first stat doesn’t seem important in and of itself — 53% is barely over half the time.

However, for the first three weeks of the experiment, the button won two-thirds of our split tests. After that, the opposite became true — the button just stopped “working.”

Which brings us to conclusion #2:

Test results are not forever.

What works today may not work tomorrow.

Had we stopped our testing after one broadcast, or even one or two weeks, we would have concluded that buttons were better than text links.

It’s important to continually test your email campaigns to make sure that you know what works, rather than assuming you know what works.

Finally, one last point I feel obligated to make:

What works for someone else may not work for you.

The text links won out in our split test, but that doesn’t mean a button can’t be an effective call to action for you.

We send our blog newsletter often — 2 or 3 times a week. So we exposed subscribers to the button often, which may have increased the speed with which they started to ignore it.

If you send less frequently, or only use a button for emails where you have a particularly compelling offer, you may find it to be effective.

Plus, we tested a specific button. Perhaps another one, with different design or wording, may have been more effective.

Again, don’t just take our word for it. Find out for yourself through your own testing.

What Do You Think?

What are your thoughts on this case study?

Have you tested calls to action or other elements of your email newsletters? What were your findings?

Can you think of any other factors that may have influenced our results?

Share your reactions below!

The reason you hear it so often is because when it comes to email marketing (as well as any other marketing channel), testing separates the pros from the Joes.

It’s one thing to think we know what works best, but when we apply a little bit of scientific method to our marketing, we not only find out for sure, we learn more about our visitors and subscribers — and that helps us predict more accurately what will work in the future.

The challenge for a lot of people (including us at ProSender) is deciding what to test. There are simply so many small changes we can make to our forms, messages and other parts of our campaigns, that it’s easy to get stuck on deciding where to start.

So, to help you get started with split testing (or to get back into it if you’ve gotten complacent and stopped testing regularly), here are seven split tests you can run on your website to get and retain more subscribers, lower spam complaints, and increase response.

7 Split Tests

Give these a try and see how they affect your subscribers’ response (not to mention your perception of your subscribers).

• Create one signup form where you ask for name first, then email, and one where you ask for email first, then name.See if the order that you ask for information affects how many people sign up.
• Send one broadcast with personalization in the subject line, and one without.Do subscribers respond to personalization, or do they see it as a “gimmick?”
• Split your next message into three broadcasts with different sending times: one between 8AM and 9AM, one between 12PM and 1PM, and one between 4PM and 5PM. Compare open/click rates for each message.Find out what time of day your subscribers prefer to hear from you.
• Try using a different call to action on your signup form besides the old classic “Submit.”Come up with 2-3 short phrases, create your forms and compare opt-in rates (a couple options: “Sign Me Up”, “Send Me _____”, “Keep Me Informed”). Keep whatever you’re using now too, and make it the “control” in your experiment.Not everyone wants to submit to getting email from you. Find out what trigger they respond to.
• Add a privacy statement (i.e. “we will not share your email address…”) to your signup form. Create another form where you instead link to a privacy policy on another page of your site.Compare opt-in rates for those forms against a form where you make no privacy statement.Are visitors more likely to sign up if you tell them you will treat their inbox with respect, and differentiate your email practices from others’?
• In your next HTML email, test using a button for your call to action against using a text link. Is a well-written text link more compelling than a colorful, more prominent button?
• For your next broadcast, add a permission reminder (”you’re receiving this email because you signed up at ____” etc) in the message. Compare your clickthrough rates, and your spam complaint rates.Does reminding people why they’re receiving an email make them any more likely to recognize and trust you? Does it make them more likely to read through your email and/or click on links in it?

You might have some interesting findings (if so, please share them!)…

…but even if you don’t — even if you run all 7 of these split tests and none of them bring immediate, significant changes to your campaign — you’ll still be more familiar with split testing than you were yesterday, and better prepared to test and improve your campaigns in the future.

Naturally, as a permission-based email marketing company, we respect your privacy.

What Do YOU Split Test?

Are there other split tests that you run regularly?

Share them with your fellow email marketers below!

While social media isn’t a replacement for direct email marketing, it can complement it by helping you connect a larger audience to your site and campaigns.

One social media tool that a lot of you seem to be using (and that we also use here at ProSender) is Twitter.

Today, we’re happy to announce that you can now use your Twitter and ProSenderaccounts together to expand the reach of your email newsletters.

Publish Your Email Newsletters to Twitter

Now, whenever you create a broadcast message in ProSender, you have the option to automatically “tweet” that email too!

Here are a couple examples taken from real ProSender users on Twitter:

How It Works

To use this feature:

1. Go to the Broadcast pageof your account.
2. Create a broadcast.
3. Before saving your broadcast, mark the “Syndicate” checkbox.

1. Mark the “Twitter” box and enter your login/password

When you send your broadcast, we’ll automatically update your Twitter status with the subject line of your email and a short link to an online version of your email.

Twitter Email Newsletters FAQ

A couple quick questions and answers:

• Can I choose which broadcasts get tweeted?Once you enter your Twitter login and password once, we’ll assume you want to tweet all of your broadcasts.

  If there’s a broadcast you don’t want to tweet, just unmark the checkbox while editing it.

• How many Twitter IDs can I link to my account?You can link one Twitter ID to your account at any one time. You can change which ID is linked to your account by entering the login/password for it in step 4 above (this will replace your previously selected Twitter ID).
  

  We’ve updated our social media options since this post was made – now, you can link to as many Twitter IDs as you want! Learn more about our new Twitter integration in our knowledge base.

Have any other questions? Ask them below or get in touch with us.

Social media is a big part of the marketing world these days. Most net-savvy businesses (including us here at ProSender) have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. That being the case, we’ve found that people are always looking for ways to make their social media and email marketing campaigns work together.

Those of you familiar with our service will know that we’ve helped customers automatically tweet their email newsletters for some time now.

Recently, we’ve updated our social media options to make combining your social media efforts with your ProSender account even easier.

Automatically Post Broadcasts On Facebook!

With our new Social Media / Sharing options you can automatically post your broadcasts to your Facebook wall.

In the spirit of consistency, you can create new connections with Twitter and Facebook through your account’s List Settings page. This is also where you can pick a default Twitter and Facebook account specific to each list.

If you want to get started with this new feature right away, you can refer to our knowledge base for a more detailed walkthrough.

Multiple Twitter / Facebook Accounts? No Problem.

As we were revisiting our options for social media integration, we decided to make it easier for our users to work with multiple Twitter accounts. If you’re unfamiliar with how Twitter works with Prosender.

When creating a broadcast you will find the options to tweet / post your broadcast towards the bottom of the page under the “Social Media / Sharing” section. The accounts you have selected as your defaults will automatically be selected for your convenience.

Don’t Forget To Check The Preview!

So now that you’ve added your Twitter and Facebook accounts and selected a default for each, we’ve provided you with a preview of what your new tweet / post will look like. As a good measure and reassurance you can see exactly what you are about to post / tweet before you send your message.

How Does Integrating Email Marketing and Social Media Help Your Business?

Have you been sharing your email newsletters on Twitter, Facebook and/or other sites? (If not, are you planning to now?)

What have the effects been (or what do you expect they will be) on your business and marketing?

You can find out yourself by segmenting your list. Sorting subscribers into segments based on various criteria means you can send them the emails you know they want – all without reading their minds.

Your subscribers will be impressed not only by your apparent ESP, but by the customized quality of your emails.

You can segment your list in all kinds of ways, including how recently subscribers signed up, where they live and what preferences they’ve indicated on web forms or surveys.

Let’s practice your mind-reading skills now: below are six ways to segment your list. Which ones will let you send custom emails that your subscribers will appreciate?

Segment to Find Out What Readers Want

Online sign-up location.

You can guess a lot about a person based on the page of your site they sign up from. Should you email promos for women’s clothing or kids shoes? Healthy recipes or cafe coupons?

By applying ad tracking to your web forms, you’ll have more than a premonition to go on – you’ll be able to segment by subscribers’ “add” method.

Bonus: You get a glimpse of the nature of your audience this way, so you can create content you know will be well-received.

Personal interests.

You can also segment by subscribers’ interests. For example, your car dealership might want to see which subscribers drive which brands. You may also want to send broadcasts about those brands to those specific customers.

To find out what cars subscribers drive, create a custom field to add to your web form. This will cause it to appear in your subscriber search options. Simply search for the answer you’re looking for to create the segment you need.

Survey results.

Subscribers may communicate their interests and preferences in surveys instead of on your web form. Don’t worry; you can still segment according to their answers.

For example, your real estate agency may want to email listings to your clients. Each client only wants listings for the neighborhoods they’re house-hunting in.

To make this happen, send out a survey asking clients to click on their neighborhoods of interest. Link each option back to a hidden page on your site. Then create segments according to which links were clicked.

Prospects vs. customers.

Segmenting helps you market differently to those who have bought from you and those who haven’t.

For example, you could send e-book customers suggestions for practically applying ideas from the book or recommend similar products. Prospects still have to be sold on the merits of making the purchase.

You can create these segments in ProSender by applying sales tracking and searching for any subscribers whose sale amount is greater than $0. And when you’re ready to email your customer segment, check out these content ideas.

Online vs. offline customers.

While customers who visit your store might be interested in on-site event announcements, online customers are more likely to prefer coupon codes.

As described above, online customers can be found with sales tracking. It’s just as easy to segment customers who signed up in your store. When you import them to your list, apply an ad tracking category (such as “in-store”). Then you can segment by the add method “import” and your chosen ad category.

Location.

With just a little effort, you can keep your messages appropriate across the globe. Segment based on driving distance to your location, seasonal and climate differences and the times your emails will arrive in each time zone.

Create a custom field that asks for location, then add it to your web form. Search subscribers by location to send each group the appropriate messages. If your readers marvel at your accuracy, just tell them you have a sixth sense for these things.

How Much is Too Much?

How deeply you segment depends on how much time you can dedicate to customizing your emails. You may opt to segment only one way, or your list might benefit from a serious break-down. Some companies hyper-segment: for example, Cetaphil creates 400-3,000 versions per send.

So put down your crystal ball and pick up a pencil. Start brainstorming ways you can sort through your list to give each subscriber the experience you already know they’re looking for.

Because after all, you don’t have to be a mind reader to know there’s no such thing as too-relevant email.

Now you can view all the possible templates and color schemes for web forms in one place with this snazzy, searchable web form template gallery.

Enjoy! And, if you have a moment, tell us what you think of the templates and the gallery!

Want to Learn More About Web Forms?

If you’re not familiar with our web form generator, our features page has a great overview of creating beautiful custom forms for your website.

Customizing your web form is easier than ever with our web form generator:

Finally, skip right to the web form template gallery if you just want to check out the cool templates our design team has put together: