Archive for category Email Marketing
January 2010 Affiliate Connection Newsletter is Out!
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Email Marketing, Legacy News on January 29th, 2010
OK, so it has been out for almost a week and I am just now posting it here haha.
You can check out our January 2010 Affiliate Connection Newsletter here.
We had some new entries in the top performing banners list so make sure to check those out.
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How Darren Rowse Uses Email Newsletters
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Email Marketing on November 12th, 2009
Darren Rowse wrote a great post two weeks ago on ProBlogger about how he uses email newsletters to drive traffic (and thus, make money).
It’s not anything new per se, but it really is a great article about how to effectively use email newsletters. It contains a great strategy and might help you organize your process for new subscribers, from the time they subscribe, to the welcome email, to weekly (or whatever period of time you want) updates, to themed updates, to special promotions.
Some of the advice may not apply to your site, but give it a good read and it will likely inspire some great ideas for your own newsletter…or if you don’t have a newsletter yet, it will definitely make you want to start one!
Email From Line Length
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Email Marketing on October 17th, 2009
Justin Premick recently posted something that I just shared with our resident email guru, Morgan, who sends all of our company emails and newsletters.
It is about email from line subject length…in other words, your name or company name or name of the newsletter. Mine, for example, is “Matt McWilliams.” A recent newsletter I got came from “Affiliate Marketing Professionals Group Members” which showed up as “Affiliate Marketing Prof.” in my email box.
Different email clients allow a different number of characters in their from lines, ranging from 21 (Windows Live Hotmail OSX) to at least 32 (Outlook 2007 and Mozilla Thunderbird).
Yahoo displays 22 characters, GMail shows 24 characters on both XP and OSX, and Live Hotmail shows 23 in XP. AOL Webmail allows 24 and the iPhone 20. GMail on the Android phone shows only 24.
So, what to do about this exactly? Well, my personal opinion is that you should target using a maximum of 22 characters since that will show all of them on 99% of emails clients. Of course, it should be something that is recognizable and easy to read. Make sure that if they signed up for the “Guitar Players News” newsletter that they are getting the email from “Guitar Players News” not “Super Duper Guitar Site.”
Keep it simple, keep it short, and keep it consistent!
You can read Justin’s post here.
Lessons on Subject Line Length from Amazon
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Email Marketing on August 8th, 2009
Mark Brownlow wrote a great article recently on the Email Marketing Reports blog about the subject line length of Amazon emails.
He charts 187 emails from Amazon and finds that the average email subject line is 57 characters.
He also finds that most of their email subject lines are even less, around 39-52 characters.
This is relevant to email marketers because, well, Amazon is really, really good at email marketing.
Mark has some great examples and some very interesting commentary for those email marketers out there, so I strongly suggest checking out his post.
Email Marketing Mistakes - What to Do?
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Email Marketing on July 10th, 2009
Jordan Ayan writes about every email marketers’ worst nightmare in his recent post “To Err Is Human; Sending An Email To Correct It, Questionable.”
Have you ever sent an email out only to realize there were errors? Broken links, bad images, typos, you name it. All of them can just give you a sick feeling in your stomach and leave you wondering what to do next.
I have certainly made more than one mistake just in the last 2 months (if you have been an affiliate with us long enough, you of them).
My nature is to write and send. I usually fail to write, let it sit, review, then review again, and then, and only then, send.
What to do about these mistakes though? What type of mistake is it? Do you send a follow-up or not? Jordan has some great advice here.
Newsletter FAIL: Learn from This Auto Dealer
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Tips, Email Marketing on July 3rd, 2009
Newt Barrett recently made a great post about a recent newsletter he received from a BMW dealer.
Germain BMW recently sent out a newsletter that highlights some common mistakes made by newsletter senders. Some of the odd items found in this newsletter (in lieu of actually talking about BMWs):
What hits you in the face like a big wet fish are a big bunch of misguided elements which are made even worse when you add items from their table of contents:
- A giant RV–incase you’re tired of driving your BMW
- A big picture of watermelons that relates to keeping cool in Florida but has no car connection
- A treetop adventure story that doesn’t appear to involve any driving
- A feature on adopt a cat month(my baseless hunch is that BMW owners are dog people)
- More from the TOC
- Lessons in longevity for the oldster demographic that BMW targets
- Make your garden green–for the typical tree hugger BMW owner
- A story on ice cream–who doesn’t associate BMWs and ice cream cones?
And then he gives five tips for better newsletters:
- Make sure that your regular communications with your target customers match your brand promise. Don’t wander off the ranch like this enewsletter did.
- Make it clear to your target readers that you understand what is really important to them as it relates to the products and services you offer.
- Don’t squeeze so much content into an eNewsletter that nobody is likely to find the time to read it.
- If you feel that you want to combine both precisely targeted content with information that is less targeted, at least lead off with the stuff that aims directly at your ideal customers.
- If you have a strong local presence, don’t let your parent organization overwhelm what could be great local content with unfocused generic material.
Great post Newt and thanks for sharing others’ missteps 
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