Adding a Feedback Survey to an Email

Should you or should you not place a survey (form) in your email? I've seen both positive and negative results and all that I can suggest is to test this for yourself. It's a known fact that forms in emails will not render properly in Outlook 2007 and Hotmail but you may find an increase in conversions for forms directly in the email. Again test this for yourself and let me know how it goes. This email goes beyond adding forms to your email.

I read a great blog post by Adan Covati called: Quick And Easy Surveys. Adam makes the point that you don't need to add a form to an email but you can use links that make it appear like you've added a form. Here is the image he used:


To take this further, why not add a simple link in the footer of your email (or at the bottom) that says: "Did you find this useful? yes/no". The idea here is that some people may be reading your emails but don't feel that the email is applicable to them or are not interested in this topic. You can analyze this data by cross referencing the people who selected "no" with their past email activity and contact data (title, demographics etc...). You can do the same with the people that selected "yes". This may be another way to analyze the success of your email campaigns.

Try it out and see if it works on a campaign and then you can decide if it's something that you want to implement across all campaigns. I would start off with your newsletters.

Chad

Tags: email surveys, email best practices, e-mail marketing

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Email marketing tip - break out your lists

Good tip over on ClickZ in an article called "When an E-Mail Marketing Campaign Goes Bad". Try breaking out your email list based on the source of your list. In this way, you can determine where you should focus your marketing dollars on as your email opens and click-throughs will tell you what was successful and what wasn't.

Here are some examples:

• If you're doing a new product launch email, you may want to at least break out your prospects vs. your existing customers.
• If you're sending out a email newsletter, break out a list between those who have subscribed to your newsletter vs. those that are part of a list that you may have purchased. You can even dig down deeper to break out the list between those that have signed up say in the last 2 months vs. the rest of the newsletter subscription group. Get creative!
  

Keep experimenting and see what works. Remember, you can also slightly alter the content of your newsletter for your different segments that you're targeting - that's a whole blog post on its own.

Bloggers sending out their own email newsletters are becoming extremely popular. Problogger and Blog Traffic Kingare just two examples of very successful email blog newsletters (we need a better name for these - how about "blogletters" or "b-newsletter" ?). As your blog newsletter increases in popularity, don't forget to measure the key metrics that made you so popular. In addition, if you're looking at targeting some new key prospects, try experimenting with your lists as suggested above.

Chad

Tags: clickz, newsletters, email marketing, business blogging, clickz, problogger

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People not reading your content? Here are some headlines that work

Marketing Sherpa released a case study this week that looked at how CareerBuilder.com increased its click-through rate by writing more informational content that its readers could appeal to.

Here are some of the top headlines that resulted in high click-through rates:

#1. Headlines with numbers
"7 Tips for Improving Your Cashflow"
"Top 10 Interview No No's"
"Top 10 Recruitment Myths -- Busted"
"Top 10 Sales Killers"
"5 Traits of Great Leaders"

#2. Stories with a controversial angle

"Are Your Employees Telling the Truth?"
"Eliminate 10% of Your Staff Each Year"
"Get Your Underperforming Employee to Quit -- Counseling Out"

#3. Humor
"Top 10 Excuses for Being Late"

Notice that most of these are either lists or stories that are controversial. You can apply this to your blog as well as Problogger recently demonstrated the successfulness of lists. In addition, one of the other reasons that Career Builder's newsletter became much more successful is becuase they moved away from using it as a sales tool and more of an informational piece. This is something that I had talked to earlier in my post "Linking Blogs and Newsletters Together".

Have fun blogging and remember that as good as your content may be, if the headline isn't good, no one will read it.

Chad H.

PS - Also check out the recent ClickZ article "Ten E-Mail Starters to Break Writer's Block".

Tags: Marketing Sherpa, newsletters, e-mail marketing, business blogging

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Linking blogs and newsletters together Part II (Lead Nurturing)

As a business blogger, one thing that probably won't work too well is to include in every post some sort of call to action to buy your products or services. If you don't believe me, I challenge you or Microsoft or IBM to include a post with the title "BUY NOW! BUY NOW! BUY NOW!". At least it will generate a few comments. :)

However, this is not what the blogging community wants to hear about. This type of mentality is what really pissed me off when I found Nike's Basketball blog. However, this is perhaps what male teenagers (their target audience) want to see.

While knowing what products and services you offer is important, it's even more significant that customers and prospects know what the business challenge is that is affecting them that would cause them to consider your company. For example, a large business that has a tough time amalgamating all of it's customer data may not realize that there are people out there that can help them. What they don't want to hear is "Call us now for a quote on how we can help you fix your CRM". Some may not know what they want to hear or know that they actually have a CRM (I'm serious). This is where marketing comes in. A blog post that demonstrates that 60% of companies are losing money as they can't manage their customer data properly may be a good start. A follow up article demonstrating the ROI success of a clean database would be another great approach. A even better one is "Are you staying late at night fixing your customer data?" It's all about building yourself up as the trusted advisor as described by Brian Carrol in his B2B Lead Generation blog

This whole concept dawned on me as I was reading through a B2B Online article by Karen J. Bannan regarding "Keeping Newsletter Readers Engaged". Blogs are not that much different from newsletters in many ways. Instead of using your e-newsletter as a selling piece, use it as a nurturing or matuation channel to ensure that your readers know about what problems are out there and that they are not alone. Blogs can be used in conjunction for this purpose. The difference? There are many.

The main differences are timing and style. B2B Newsletters ussually come out once a month or quarter as you don't want to push too much content at a prospect or customer for fear of the nasty "unsbubscribe". With blogs, people who are subscribing to your feeds are they're saying "I like what you're blogging about". The tone is different too as newsletters are mostly sappy marketing crap (no offense offense). Blogs can be more creative and personal.

Remember to use blogs as another piece of the marketing pie to keep your prospects and customers engaged and keep the name of your company at the top of their mind.

Chad H

Technorati tags: newsletters, enewsletters, email, blog, emarketing

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