No man is an iland

December 29, 2006

So what tickles the forefinger of those sending marketing emails? I analyzed 12 months worth of newsletter data to discover the articles that got marketers clicking furiously to find out more.

There are two lists. The first is the top nine list for articles published at this site (which got an unfair level of promotion and thus a biased number of clicks). The second is for articles published by the great and good elsewhere on the Web.

Top 9 articles at Email Marketing Reports:

1. Benchmarking metrics for email marketing
2. Email open rates guide
3. What football teaches us about email marketing (eh?)
4. 31 content tips and ideas for your B2B email newsletter
5. 9 things to put in your list welcome messages
6. Email marketing quiz
7. 9 things they don't tell you about email marketing
8. Subject lines: what's the story?
9. Email authentication

Top 9 articles on the Web:

1. Email design guidelines for 2006
2. A List of Subject Lines and Offers for the Holidays
3. A creed for email marketing
4. Tips for an email marketing makeover
5. Get customers to open your email
6. Deliverability Felonies: The Bottom 10
7. Case study of Cirque du Soleil
8. Five common email marketing mistakes
9. The Ten Most-Ignored Best Practices

Tags: email marketing

December 22, 2006

This blog will get a little intermittent over the next few days as I imbue some holiday spirit and do a few unhealthy things (all in the name of peace and goodwill to friends and family.)

Listen...thanks for your interest this past year! I hope 2007 brings you good health, good cheer and resounding success at home, work and wherever else you find yourself in the coming 12 months.

And an extra thanks to those who linked to posts and articles here, consented to interviews or left comments.

I have only one wish for 2007 (excepting the usual ones concerning certain football results, the fate of Tibet, Catherine Zeta Jones etc.). Here it is...

Somebody (anybody) please solve the spam problem. If it's true that nearly all spam is accounted for by a mere handful of people, then surely it can't be that hard? And if they're hiding away in small offshore countries, isn't it possible for the likes of the US and EU to flex some of that international trade muscle and get this scourge sorted? Please.

All the best to you and yours!

There are a couple of email marketing industry folk where I always get the feeling that they really care about helping non-experts do better email marketing, rather than just trying to thrust their services on the uninitiated.

One of these is Infacta's Tom O'Leary who writes the Messaging Times blog. He's just posted a few new articles up there for those still a relatively short way along the email learning curve.

One is a collection of miscellaneous tips on publishing email newsletters, covering such things as archiving, branding templates, buttons, the content/promotion balance etc.

Another good one is on building your list, with a look at registration forms, data collection, permission issues and similar.

Sometime I mean to produce a list of "vendors whose writing you can trust." Tom's name will be on it.

More on list building, newsletters and email marketing basics | Tags: email marketing, list acquisition, email newsletters

Transactional emails have attracted a lot of buzz recently. And the email service industry has noticed.

Silverpop, for example, just completed a study of "how 84 top online retailers use transactional email and the types of promotional offers they include."

The article introducing the study report highlights just how much money is left on the table by not exploiting all the potential marketing benefits of order confirmations and similar.

And it ends with some general recommendations for how you might turn transactional emails into more sales and more loyal customers.

More on tactics | Tags: email marketing, transactional emails, customer relationship management

A lot of email marketing articles and posts are self-congratulatory posing frankly (I'll let you decide if I fall into that category).

"Look at the shiny new toys we've got."

Trouble is a lot of people in the field simply don't have the skills, time or resources to do all the clever things that commentators say they should be doing.

But a few "thought leaders" are making an effort to present marketers with practical options that fall somewhere between very basic emails and cutting edge technologies.

One is Bill Nussey. In this article, he describes how you can split your list into three simple segments: "Interested Prospects, Engaged Customers and Lapsed Customers."

Then he describes how you might treat each segment in terms of the voice, content and frequency of the emails you send each one.

The argument is basically that's it better to do some segmentation than none at all. And better to start down the path toward advanced email marketing than give up because it all looks so darned complicated to implement.

More on advanced tactics | Tags: email marketing, segmentation, lifecycle marketing

Eamon O Neill's version of the "things to think about next year" article is more detailed than most. He highlights five areas for you to focus on: data integration, refining your engagement strategy, segmenting based on behavior, testing, and exploiting the complementary benefits of RSS.

Perhaps the best resolution anyone can have (and I'm thinking of me in particular) is to somehow find the time to step back and review things in a calm and collected way. Drop out of the daily grind and simply ask the question, "How can I make my emails more relevant and engaging?"

I reckon everything else will follow from that.

More on strategy | Tags: email marketing strategy

December 21, 2006

Gosh, load yourself up with caffeine, get out your notepad and read Mark Wyner's article on testing HTML emails.

He goes into the details of all the different operating systems, devices, webmail services and email clients he uses to see how his emails display.

And follows that with a comprehensive discussion of his approach to email design per se, with a look at the pros and cons of basic HTML coding, use of CSS etc. An absolute must-read for those whose lifeblood is email design and coding.

More on email design | Tags: email marketing, email design, css in email, html email

A couple of wake up calls for UK marketers if you want to avoid the long arm of the law disturbing your post-New Year peace and quiet.

According to CRM Today, 31% of 200 top UK companies surveyed by CDMS still aren't complying with local email marketing law.

Breaking the law is one thing if you're protesting the loss of grassland habitat to make way for a road bypass. But I'm not sure it's good practice for respected businesses.

And according to Out-Law.com, companies need to add the "company registration number, place of registration and registered office address" to the footer of outgoing emails as of Jan 1st (if you aren't already.)

More on anti-spam legislation | Tags: UK email marketing, anti-spam laws

You've seen those forms where they ask you to type your email address twice. The theory says that requiring this extra input can increase or decrease sign-ups.

Increase them because it helps ensure the address is the correct one, typo-free. So you don't lose subscribers just because their finger slipped and they typed Q instead of @.

Decrease them because the more input you require, the more people abandon the form. (Though you have to wonder if they'd have been worthwhile addresses if their interest in your list was so small as to be destroyed by the prospect of an extra 3 seconds typing.)

So the question is, what's the overall effect when you ask people to type their email address in twice? More or less subscribers?

According to the marketers who contributed to this forum post over at MarketingProfs, the answer is MORE subscribers through a second email field. And they have numbers to back up this claim.

More on list building | Tags: list acquisition, email marketing, sign-up forms

Stefan Pollard describes the steps you should take as you seek to weed out bad email addresses from your list. Not bad in the sense of dead or mistyped addresses. Bad in the sense that they don't respond to your messages.

The idea is to isolate them, try and get them back into the fold and responding to your emails, and then to dump them if they still don't respond.

More on list hygiene | Tags: email list hygiene, email marketing

There are some valuable insights in this look at how Bass Pro approach email marketing. They've had particular success sending custom 1-to-1 emails based on how people browsed the website. In other words, if you spend time looking at carbon-fibre sea fishing rods, but don't buy any, you'll get an email a bit later promoting...carbon-fiber sea fishing rods.

Their application of that advanced tactic is particularly interesting, for two reasons...

1. It illustrates the thought that needs to go into emails based on behavioral triggers. In this example, people need to view a minimum number of items in the same category at the website before an email promoting that category gets sent out.

2. Note that they don't try and tempt purchases with price reductions. If someone browsed a category heavily, but didn't buy, an email showcasing appropriate products was enough to get "simply ridiculous" conversions without resorting to coupons or discounts.

More on advanced tactics | Tags: email marketing, bass pro shops, behavioral targeting

December 20, 2006

No, not the usual debate about which day to send, but advice on which days of the year to avoid when targeting a business audience.

List broker Lisa Bowen identifies some days when any B2B email is likely to bomb. And has advice on how you might work out other times of the year when your particularly audience is probably unreceptive to incoming marketing messages.

She also links to her 2007 calendar, with all the "bad email" days filled out for you. Nice.

More on timing | Tags: b2b email marketing

December 19, 2006

• you don't end friendships or love affairs...you "opt-out" of them
• you can't read any text wider than about 600 pixels
• you can think of 17 different ways to describe something as free without actually using the word "free"
• the shopping list you give your spouse has all the important items squeezed into the top lefthand corner of the piece of paper
• you look for the unsubscribe link in direct mail
• you reject birthday cards that don't have the postal address of the sender printed on the reverse of the envelope
• your signature on checks includes your job title, address, phone number, fax number and website address
• you delete people from your address book if they fail to return your phone calls three times in a row
• when people accept your dinner invitations, you send out another invitation asking if they're sure
• the photos in your wedding album don't have labels...they have alt tags
• you send everyone two Christmas cards...one text-only, the other with images and colors

Feel free to add your own to the comments section...

More email marketing humor | Tags: email marketing, email humor, marketing humor

Silverpop's Bill Nussey recently reported on some design and copywriting tips he picked up at an email marketing event. Catch them here.

These come from studies of how people actually read emails. Done using eyetracking technology, which also finds great application in landing page design.

If these kinds of insights intrigue you (they certainly intrigue me), then the EyeTools company blog is a fascinating read. The look at E*Trade's homepage is particularly illuminating!

More on email design | Tags: email marketing, eyetracking, heatmaps

2007 may be the year that mobile email comes of age (or it may not...) Anyway, Melinda Krueger picked the brains of ExactTarget to get the current situation on how to solve the problem of people reading emails on mobile appliances, where there may be any combination of display technologies and standards at work, not to mention a tiny screen.

(Copywriting aside: that was a hefty sentence and way too long for the online medium, but I'm tired.)

If you send emails to a business or technology audience, keep your eyes open and ears alert for more information on mobile email. It's important.

More on email design | Tags: email marketing, mobile email, email design

In an earlier post I highlighted various services that give people email addresses that die after a short time. So they can sign-up at a company website, get the password/download/whatever sent to them. And then never see another email again from that company.

These services address consumer demand for more email privacy. But they also mess up the lists of those who would respect that privacy anyway. As a result, many companies don't accept such temporary email addresses during a sign-up process.

To do that, you need to know the domain names used by these services. And a new breed of email address providers make that pretty well impossible. Every week, 2prong.com, for example, changes the domain name used in the temporary email addresses they give out.

It's a problem we will have to live with. And again, I would stress that the blame for those dead addresses appearing in lists everywhere lies with those spammers and marketers who abused email addresses in the past. Just another example of how the black sheep have messed up life for the rest of the marketing flock.

More on email list management | Tags: temporary email addresses, email marketing, list hygiene

A couple of survey results recently popped into my inbox. I pass these on without comment since I can't find any background information on how the research was conducted etc.

1. DMNews reports that a survey by agency eROI revealed a consumer preference for free shipping over discounts in email promotions.

2. iMedia Connection reports on an Acxiom Digital survey suggesting that people actually value email from the companies they buy stuff from.

More email marketing metrics | Tags: email marketing surveys

December 18, 2006

David Baker hits on a much-loved (by me) theme. Namely that there's a lot of great email marketing theory around, but not everyone has the skills, time or resources to turn theory into practice.

In this article, he outlines how you might go about personalising emails without delving into advanced database theory.

The most important point to takeaway is to think a little more innovatively (I know, easier said than done) about personalisation. What do we know about the recipient and how can we use that to send them a more engaging email?

More strategies and tactics | Tags: email marketing, personalisation

Another hot topic in 2006 was image blocking: where recipients see incoming emails with images blocked by the software or website they're using to view those emails.

Jeanne Jennings takes a look at how some B2B and B2C marketers are doing in terms of designing their emails to account for the possibility of image blocking. The results are mixed.

She also takes the opportunity to make some useful design or coding recommendations in this context.

I'd perhaps attach a touch more importance than Jeanne does to using alt tags in your images. She notes that Outlook 2003 displays these tags in a rather unfriendly manner, negating their usefulness.

However, other email clients do use the alt tags in a much more "marketer-friendly" way. Here are two screenshots showing how Thunderbird handles alt tags, for example.

This one shows how the email should appear:



This one shows the display when the logo image is blocked. The alt tag "Email Marketing Reports" is displayed prominently and linked to the website just like the image is:



Update: David Greiner has some great comments on this issue -- including more tips on alt tags/attributes -- here.

More on email design | Tags: email marketing, image blocking, thunderbird, outlook 2003

Relevancy was a big word in 2006. Like many such keywords, it's really a no-brainer to suggest that more relevant emails lead to better results. The devil is in the details (isn't it always?)

Just how do you make emails more relevant?

In this long post, the folk at GOT Corporation provide some answers for those with customer databases and similar to play with. They highlight those areas of your email marketing program that provide the data, context, tools and mechanisms to support more relevant messaging.

There's a big dollop of self-promotion at the end (it's a company blog after all), but otherwise it's a detailed presentation of what you need to pay more attention to in 2007.

More tactics and strategy | Tags: email marketing, relevancy, segmentation, targeting

December 15, 2006

This time of year sees a veritable cornucopia of reviews, predictions and resolutions in a giant end-of-year article-fest. Here's two new additions for you...

First, Kate Maddox gets Tara Lamberson to reveal ten quick tips on how to improve your email marketing next year.

Second, Al DiGuido takes a more reflective stance, bemoans the short-term nature of much of our marketing thinking, and makes a call for giving more thought to the value and meaning of relationship building in email marketing.

More on tactics and strategy | Tags: email marketing strategy

December 14, 2006

And more from Denise Cox through her business of email newsletter. This time, it's an interview with Jeanne Jennings on transactional emails.

You may know Jeanne through her articles at ClickZ, and in this interview she addresses various issues with using those confirmation and other mails to better market your products and services and/or establish a warmer rapport with the customer.

Among the topics discussed: transactional emails and anti-spam legislation, metrics, format and reasons for viewing them as marketing opportunities.

More on tactics | Tags: email marketing, transactional emails, jeanne jennings

That rather cryptic title reflects the idea of using enewsletters internally to communicate with employees. It's the subject of this article from Denise Cox of Newsweaver.

Denise outlines the benefits of using newsletters in this way and then has six ideas for the kind of content you can put in these internal messages.

As we all get locked into the "newsletters-for-customer-retention" mentality, it's good to step back and think about other ways we can apply the concept to help the overall business.

Since I'm a one-man outfit, I shall be sending myself an email with the latest company rule: the number of used tea mugs on my desk may not exceed the number remaining in the kitchen.

More on email newsletters | Tags: email marketing, email newsletters, internal marketing

ITWales has a nice two-part article with a detailed introduction to email marketing for small business.

The first part reviews the justification for using email in marketing, list building, the spam issue and technical considerations.

Part 2 looks at branding & style, metrics, and legal issues.

Both articles are compiled from interviews with (or comments from) professionals and others in the field. There's a UK bias, but much of the information is equally applicable to other regions.

More on the basics | Tags: email marketing, small business, UK marketing

December 13, 2006

Ken Magill talks with Ken Burke and discovers death by success. If you send too many email promotions out all in one go and you've done a great job at getting people to respond...then your website can die through too many visitors trying to access it all at once.

Then a successful email sendout becomes a customer relationship disaster.

Either you ramp up your website infrastructure (or make sure your host has the capacity to cope with visitor surges) or you spread your emails out. The latter may not be possible if getting that good response depends on the timing of the email in the first place.

However, spreading out the emails does tie in nicely with Bill Nussey's variable timing approach suggested in this article.

And website stability is just one of the non-email things you need to watch when sending out emails. In this article I wrote way back in 2002 (needs free registration to access it at MarketingProfs.com) I mention customer service and fulfillment. Do they know about the planned email promotion? And can they cope with the likely surge in related inquiries/orders?

More on strategy and tactics | Tags: email marketing

Here's another case study that highlights the great results you can get from local email newsletters.

The theory behind this technique is this...

You have a national or global brand, but customers have a "relationship" with the local franchise, store, dealer, agent, rep, whatever.

Ideally, you want to have your cake and eat it. Which means an email newsletter with a local flavor, sent from the local entity. But with close control over messaging, branding, images etc.

The solution is now offered by several email marketing services I think. The national/global organization produces template newsletters with useful content. And leaves a space or spaces for the local folk to add their material.

Very neat, and I keep hearing that it works very well for all concerned.

More case studies | Tags: email marketing, email newsletters

December 12, 2006

No email marketing plan is complete without a few overview numbers to ram home the point that "people use email a lot."

So, here are some stats on general email usage and particularly the market share of the big webmail services. With links to all the data sources for those who want to explore further.

The main point to come out is that Google's Gmail gets a bigger share of press coverage than its actual user base would seem to justify. They've got some work to do to catch up with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.

And here's something you rarely hear mentioned. Can you guess the third-most popular "webmail" site?

Answer: The mail center at MySpace.

More on metrics | Tags: email, webmail, gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, myspace

December 11, 2006

Marc Orchant reports on a new feature over at Google's email service. MailFetcher allows you to use Gmail to send and receive email through any Pop3-enabled account.

That means people can use Gmail to work with the emails they send and receive through other services like Yahoo! Mail Plus.

So what? (You may well ask.)

It used to be relatively easy to see which of your addresses used the Gmail service (the @gmail.com address was a big clue).

It's not so easy anymore.

Gmail now offers a mobile version *and* MailFetcher *and* is the behind-the-scenes technology powering the email systems of various organisations (see this post). Which means -- depending on the take up rate of these new services and features -- that any number of email addresses might actually be Gmail "in disguise".

What does this mean for you and me?

If you haven't worried too much about how your emails display in the Gmail interface, it's time to do so. Even if your list doesn't have too many @gmail.com addresses in it.

More on designing for different email address services | Tags: email marketing, gmail, mailfetcher, email design

Bill Nussey favors specifics over generalities in his forward look at email marketing in 2007. He picks out three "cool" tactics -- personalised sending times, relationship-building surveys and marketing messages in transactional emails -- which he thinks will prove winners next year.

More on email marketing tactics | Tags: email marketing

The ever-excellent Tamara Gielen at B2Bemailmarketing.com has a couple of blog posts with some stats for those interested in the Belgium and Netherlands markets.

Metrics from outside the USA are as rare a moment's peace in the Brownlow household, so keep a note of the source.

More on metrics | Tags: email marketing metrics

December 08, 2006

Regarding yesterday's post about double opt-in forms causing trouble with blocklists, I got this email from Dave Greiner of Campaign Monitor, another newsletter and list management provider...

"This isn't as rare as you'd think unfortunately. When we first launched we made the mistake of using the word 'email' in the email element name for our supplied subscribe forms."

"Comment spammers (and other nasties) basically trawl the web looking for these kinds of forms to hammer. We since made changes at our end to stop this, but some spam bots are even going as far as looking for the word email in a page near a form input and targeting that."

"It's a serious problem that I fear is going to get worse before it gets better. We might even end up seeing Captcha images on subscribe forms soon."

Anyone else with thoughts or experiences on this problem?

More on email deliverability | Tags: email marketing, spam, email blacklists

December 07, 2006

The whole point of double opt-in is to ensure you never send email to anyone who doesn't want it.

Not only must someone submit their email address to you, but they also have to manually confirm the submission by clicking on a link in a subsequent welcome message. It's one of the core elements of a really clean sender reputation.

But here's a story that had me scratching my head. The source is a very respectable Email Service Provider (quoted with permission):

"A spambot is hitting one of our customers' double opt-in signup forms and submitting email addresses to his list. Dozens and dozens of times a day. Of course, the signup form sends a confirmation email every time. Dozens of "click this link if you really want to join..." emails get sent."

No problem, you'd think. After all, nobody ever clicks on the confirm link. But wait...

"The problem is, the email address that this particular spambot keeps submitting happens to be a spamtrap for a very major anti-spam firewall company. So they see it as dozens of pieces of spam, sent straight into their trap. They of course start blocking our IP address. Ouch."

"Luckily, we have dozens of IP addresses, and we watch them all closely. We can re-route emails as soon as we discover problems. Also, the anti-spam group that blocked us has a great abuse desk staff that responds fast. If they didn't have a "human" team watching their block list so closely, that IP address would have been in deep doo-doo."

Scary, huh?

I think the situation is probably down to extremely bad luck. But the moral of the story is to pay attention if you get a lot of unconfirmed sign-ups suddenly appearing in your reports. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

More on email deliverability | Tags: email marketing, double opt-in, email blacklists

December 06, 2006

I never worried too much about the phishing problem (see the definition at Wikipedia), since it only seemed to affect big financial brands.

Stefan Pollard begs to differ, pointing out that while we may not be targeted by phishers, we may be mistakenly identified as one.

In other words, if your urls are coded inappropriately in your emails, you might get tagged as a phisher and see your messages blocked. Stefan has the lowdown on how to avoid that rather nasty fate.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, phishing

I do sense a shiver of pessimism running down the spines of the email marketing world at the moment. Thanks to the sudden jump in spam I presume. And the ongoing efforts of various folk looking to push the "next big thing in online marketing."

The earliest use of the phrase "email marketing is dead" that I could find dates back to early 2002.

Quite.

People always rave about new things at the expense of the old. For a more realistic assessment of the state of email marketing (albeit from someone selling email marketing services!), read this article by Chris Marriott.

Not that complacency is called for. Given all the new technologies, services, skills and experience we've gained, it's sad we're not doing better. So don't believe the hype about new-fangled marketing methods. But don't believe any hype about email marketing either.

Tags: email marketing is dead

The 2007 edition of MarketingSherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide just hit the streets. But does it deserve its reputation as the "Email Stats Encyclopedia" for email marketers?

I got hold of my copy yesterday and my detailed review is here. 326 pages...my eyes are hurting.

More email marketing book reviews | Tags: email marketing benchmark guide

Mark Wyner tested Apple's new version of their webmail service and came to a sad conclusion: it kills your CSS.

The good news is that one of the comments on his post has a solution to the problem. If you or your designer use CSS to style your emails, take a look.

More on email design | Tags: mac webmail, email design

December 05, 2006

Figuring you are all weary of work as the year draws to a close, thought you would enjoy this tough 12-question quiz on email marketing. Find out if you qualify as an e-marketing guru. Have fun!

Tags: email marketing, quizzes

Some high-powered executives are at an email marketing event this week and seem a little downbeat, according to this report.

Various interviewees suggest consumer response to marketing emails could be better, blaming organizational problems and delivery issues related to legitimate emails getting reported as spam.

(NB: this pessimism contrasts with the findings released in the executive summary of MarketingSherpa's latest benchmark survey.)

Some of the comments echo a mournful tone I've read elsewhere, wondering why email hasn't got all the excitement and kudos of new funky stuff associated with "Web 2.0."

I wonder if we should worry less about discovering the next big email thing and more about getting the email basics right (where there is still plenty of work to do).

More on email marketing basics | Tags: email marketing

People might read your promotional emails. But they will read your transactional emails. In fact, once they buy something online they probably sit there clicking "get mail" repeatedly until the order confirmation comes in.

Given that level of interest and engagement, it's a travesty that we don't put more effort into the copy in such emails.

Jeanne Jennings takes a long hard look at the "DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL" line so frequent in transactional emails and argues that it's not exactly sending a warm personal message to the recipient.

She has a lot of suggestions of how you can get the same result (no email replies to an unmonitored address) without sounding like a "Go to jail now" Monopoly card.

More on copywriting | Tags: email marketing, transactional emails

December 04, 2006

Like a well-trained Olympic relay team, the email marketing media world prepares to transition from "holiday tips" to "end-of-year reviews."

Baton-holder in the first leg is Gail Goodman over at ConstantContact, who poses five questions that you should ask yourself as you look back over your 2006 email marketing performance.

She asks you to consider your success in meeting objectives, progress with growing your list, message quality, results and professional development. All questions and issues which might get you to set new targets and make new plans for 2007.

More on strategy | Tags: email marketing, annual marketing review, marketing strategy

December 01, 2006

Apart from panic. Actually, don't panic. Which is just one of the many useful pieces of advice in this article by Derek Harding.

He explains in plain English the actions and steps you need to take if you find yourself stranded on one of the blacklists used by ISPs to filter incoming email.

Tags: email marketing, email blacklists

Those in the know will know already. Those not, will know now. The Sherpa 3-day email marketing summit is set for March next year in Miami.

The organizers are not reliant on ad revenues and sponsors for their business, so the event is slanted towards real practical help, rather than vendor speeches.

The agenda is a mix of workshops, interactive labs and case study presentations covering key topics like deliverability, growing your list, developing successful creative, integrating with web analytics and similar.

It's not cheap. So probably not worth attending if you're a small business or email marketing is just a side activity for you. Definitely worth a look if you're a big company with a serious email program. There's a $300 discount until year end.

(Disclosure: Sherpa didn't pay for the event plug - nobody can buy coverage in this blog. But they do pay a bounty on referrals from this site. I don't know if that leads to subconscious bias on my part, but I thought I'd mention it given all my rants about authenticity.)

Tags: email marketing, marketingsherpa email marketing summit

This case study is about using multivariate testing to improve website sales. But tucked away within it is a morsel of insight about sign-up forms and getting visitors to take your email newsletter.

Conventional wisdom says your sign-up form should be at the top of the page, where people are most likely to see it.

The winning website design from a sales point of view had the form at the bottom of the page, below the copy. Which also produced a 600% increase in sign-ups. Gulp!

Three possibilities I can think of:

1. All we know about sign-up form positioning is nonsense (unlikely)
2. Overall improvement in site design engaged visitors better and thus made them more likely to sign-up to the site's newsletter anyway (plausible)
3. Putting a sign-up form below an article catches the attention of those who've read through that article and are now thinking of what to do next / where to go from here (definitely worth thinking about).

One conclusion: everything's just an assumption until you've tested it.

More on list building | Tags: email marketing, list building, list acquisition, sign-up forms

Many email marketers I speak to express an interest in mobile marketing, whether through SMS text messaging or with mobile-friendly websites.

This Adotas contribution by Omar Hamoui is a touch self-serving, since he's CEO of a "mobile advertising marketplace," but it does contain a lot of info about the topic.

In particular, check out the tips on the article's second page on how best to advertise to mobile phone users.

(Update: this is a good site for general mobile marketing info.)

Tags: mobile marketing

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