VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Building Your Email List - Opt-In vs. Opt-Out, Which Way Should You Go?

Many businesses have had the opt-in vs. opt-out discussion at one time or another. The question asked: do you get visitors to take an action to sign up for your newsletter or offers? This is considered opt-in. Or should you email people that never signed up nor have done business with you and tell them they can unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from you? This is known as opt-out.

At VerticalResponse we have always recommended that you get people to opt-in to your list or only email those who have done business with you. You usually wind up with higher open and click rates, and lower bounce and unsubscribe rates, which gives you a better return on your email marketing campaigns. Generally if you use an opt-out method, it means that you've obtained a list or someone has sold you a list, and many times these lists have been built in an unethical way.

Here is a perfectly great example of an opt-out email campaign I recently received from a company called OptInteractive, totally unsolicited.

Dear Janine,

Welcome to our email program!

You are now among a select group of professionals who receive emails packed with product news, information and offers.

Our hope is that you will enjoy this email program and take advantage of its offerings. If, however, you do not wish to receive emails from us, please click on the unsubscribe link below. Keep in mind that you can unsubscribe at any time in the future as well.

Thanks,

Your Friends at Dunhill Interactive

Please click Unsubscribe  from receiving future emails.

Lesson: The "from label" reads "Opinteractive", but they signed the email "Dunhill Interactive" so I'm not sure which company (neither of whom I have an affiliation with), is sending me the email.  And "OptIn-teractive" sounds more like "OptOut-teractive". They probably scraped my email address from the blog or a website somewhere and added me to this list.

Again, we don't recommend you start to build an e-relationship by force-feeding recipients your messaging and telling them they can opt out or unsubscribe. By doing it the right way, you're brand will be protected.

Your Social Media Planning Checklist

Just like we created our Checklist for Email Marketing Campaigns, our Social Media Expert here at VerticalResponse Jenna Jantsch created this Checklist for Integrating Social Media & Email. It's simple and great checklist for you to keep on track with your social media duties, we use it here ourselves. Cheers!

29 Great B2B Subject Lines

With a business-to-business offering, you might be trying to get your customers to sign up for a free trial, get them to an event, a webinar or give them information on how to be better at something or use your products or services better. Here are a few examples of some great B2B subject lines I dug up that you can test out for your business today.

How to Leverage [your product] in Your Business

Save Money and Look Like a Star to Your Boss

How to Impress Your Cranky CFO - Save $1000

Increase Your ROI by [xx]%, Guaranteed

How to make it onto your buyer's short list

Complimentary Webinar: [insert webinar name]

Now you can do even more with your [xxxx]

Should your company outsource [insert thing to outsource here]?

Breakfast & Secrets for How to [insert problem you solve or product you sell]

Success Tip: 5 Ways to a Better [xxxx]

Register Today: [inert name of event] Nov. 5 2009

Entry deadline fast approaching

New White Paper: Best Practices for [Insert problem and solution here]

Success Tip #1: [Insert Tip Headline Here]

A gift employees and clients will love: [Insert gift name here]

Extended for a Day: Get Free Shipping Through Friday

Your Weekly Alert: [insert topic here]

Hear Exclusive Research Presented on [insert what your event is about] - Register Now!

Inside: [hot topic in your newsletter you think will get the most opens]

5 Ways to Maximize Holiday Sales

Save $200: [insert event here] Early Bird Registration Ends [insert date here]

Specific ones I think are good and why:

Marketing on a Tight Budget - Part 1 - Hits a pain point and makes it seem like there is even more information to help me, on its way.

Countdown to the Awards Gala: Reason #5 to Attend - This company did a series of 7 email campaigns in a row, to get people excited.

The Venture Capitalist Industry Isn't Broken: VatorNewsletter - Here they started with the hot topic in the front of the subject line and it was somewhat controversial.

Secure Your SaaS Application (White paper Included) - I like that they tell you there is something tangible in it for you right in the subject line.

Cognos Training: 50% Discount - Year-End Budget - I LOVE the way they use Year End Budget because in many companies if you don't spend the budget you have this year, you won't get it again next year. This also works well with "Quarter-End Budget"

Thank You From Dice - This was just a nice thank you for your business with a huge discount to get customers coming back.

Get a $30 Gift Card for 30 Minutes of Your Time - It was to take a demo of a new product.

Frustrated with Graphics in Microsoft Office? - This company sells a product to make it all better and they got to a real pain point for people.

Subject lines are so important since it's the reason your recipients are going to look to that to decide if they want to open your email. If you've got some B2B subject lines that have worked for you in the past, comment on the post, we'd love to know them.

Case Study: Test a Subject Line in 2 Minutes & Get More Clicks

Recently we did a survey on the State of Small Business, you may have received it. Our Marketing team performed a subject line test in the email. One subject line was very generic and one was a bit more specific. We split our list in half using the list segmentation tool. It took just a few extra minutes but from what we learned it was worth it.

The first subject line: Take Our Survey and Tell Us What You Think

We received 181 more opens and 35 more clicks than the following more specific subject line: Take 5 Minutes - See How Your Business Stacks Up

In this specific case it seemed to be that we had more opens and clicks from the generic subject line and more people taking our survey. This illustrates why it's important to be testing subject lines to get more opens or content inside your email to be getting more clicks.

50 All-Time Great Retail Subject Lines

Here at VerticalResponse we're always being asked things like, "What is the best day to send email?", "What are the real email marketing secrets?" and "What are great subject lines?". I decided to focus this post on that last one, and offer some really great and proven-to-work subject lines that you can test out for your email marketing campaigns.

First of all, I'm assuming at this point that your recipients will recognize you from your "From Label". I've written why your From Label is very important in your email marketing campaigns. If they are familiar with who the email is coming from, you'll have better luck getting your email opened with a catchy subject line.

As a retailer your email marketing campaigns are probably all about selling. If you sell your own products or products from other manufacturers, you'll be trying to announce new products, new seasons or discounts and sales. You'll want your recipients to act fast, so you may want to try expiration dates in your subject line. We even see businesses using hours in the day in their expiration time periods.

You'll see that some of these subject lines are a bit vague like "An Exclusive Offer for You", however sometimes that might get more opens than if you talk about a specific product. That's something that you need to test for yourself in your own campaigns.

Offer, Offer, Offer

Enjoy this Special Offer at Our New Location

25-40% off - Email-Only Offer – Today Only

Invitation-Only 2 Hour Event Starts 11:30 AM CT

Ends Today! 20% Off Friends & Family

Top 10 under $10

Free shipping - offer ends in 3 days

Free product with purchase of [product name]

[New Product] has arrived. Order now before we run out.

Earn double points for [insert product or action].

Last Chance: Get up to $25 now

Save 10% on your next order

Enjoy [season] with rates from $65

Service Notice: Exciting new changes at [your company]

An Exclusive Offer for You

[Your company] October Specials

Last minute deals, special offers, and new [product name]

Act Now to renew your [subscription name]

Online only: 25% off friends and family

Introducing our latest…[product/feature here]

[Product name] Promotion week. Save 25%

Extended for a day! Get Free shipping through Friday

Stock up and save 15%

Limited Supply: Limit 2 [product name] per customer

Ho-ho-ho: The [your company] holiday catalog is here!

Email subscriber exclusive: [Product name] sale is here

Ends Today: Take 20% off your entire order

Private Sale Ends Today

Your choice of amazing items $50 + under

Great gifts for [Dad, Mom, etc]

Best Sellers every [girl, boy, man, woman, dog, etc.]

Everything you need when the temperatures [rise, fall]

Free Shipping--Limited Time Offer

Catchy & Creative

Sometimes all you need is a little vase lift  (retailer selling vase's)

We've got you covered from head to toe (retailer selling hats, shirts, pants and boots)

How La Perla got its name (retailer selling lingerie, telling a story inside the email)

Temperatures Fall, Style Rises (retailer selling coats)

Celebrity Favorites (selling accessories that Hollywood is wearing)

Did you remember to get a gift? It's ok, we did. (retailer wanting to get people to register for gift reminders)

10 Gift Ideas for your little ones (retailer listing top 10 suggestions for kids)

Manhattan View for a Song in the Shower (retailer selling shower curtain with Manhattan skyline on it)

Take your pick: Our 9 Favorite Dresses (retailer suggesting by popularity)

Coolest modern desk on the job...for $149 (retailer including price in the subject line)

Score Great Savings on Game-Time Gear: HDTVs, Furniture & More (retailer selling TV's with a sports slant)

Party Like it's 1999 Aged Cabernet Special (wine retailer)

In our store: Last minute Mother's Day combo ready to go (retailer getting the last minute shoppers with a catch "combo to go".)

Adorn Your Home Now & Through the Holidays (Home decor retailer)

Mind-Blowing Grenache (wine retailer)

Bring this email to a Gap store and win! (retailer trying to get store traffic)

I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. You can also find some great holiday-specific subject lines here. If you've got some great subject lines that have worked for your business, comment and let us know.

The Importance of Your From Label

I was perusing my inbox and saw a particular email that looked spammy to me. This one in particular was from "accountupdate". Now, like you, I get a lot of email and I have a lot of "accounts" so I question an email coming from "accountupdate" because it is not a person or business I know. I didn't have time to read a lot of emails on this day so I skipped it, which I'm sure many people did.

When I had time, later in the day, I went back to my inbox. I looked again at this email and the subject line read "Important Notice Regarding Your Domain Name(s)". So I opened it. The email was actually from my domain registrar Go Daddy wanting me to update my information. I don't know about you, but anyone asking me to update any information makes me suspicious, but because it's from "accountupdate" I was even more skeptical. It made me very reluctant to go in and "update my account". 

Bottom line? Make sure that the from label you use on your email marketing campaigns is from your business, you, or whoever it was you used to make your initial e-relationship with your recipient. I bet this campaign didn't get a great response if they emailed people like me.

Follow-Up Emails Can Save You Customer Service Costs

Our Vice President of Business Development Alan Keller, gave me a great idea for a blog post. He got an email from a company that he does business with that he thought would be a great idea for our readers. It's a simple way to follow-up with customers that have just purchased a product from you that will get delivered. Here is a copy of the email:

Why is This Email Good?

Good Subject Line - The subject line "Have you received your Caswell Inc. Order?" It's catchy and if you have ordered from them you're likely to open the email.

Personalize it! - The detail of how long it's been since their customers have placed an order is something you can do with personalization fields. This shows that you know just how long it has been since they've ordered and you're up on their ordering habits.

Contact Info - They prominently display an email address so that you can get to someone quickly with any questions the recipients may have.

Customer Service - They encourage recipients to open the package and contact them with any issues they may have via email. This might actually decrease customer service costs because they're being proactive in getting customers to take action and send an email instead of potentially having to make a phone call.

All in all I thought this was a great example of a transactional email that encourages your customers to take an action that could save your business money in the long run. Are you doing this?

Use Email Marketing to Get Reviews!

I received an email this week from CB2, a Crate and Barrel brand. It was interesting to me because they used an entire email marketing campaign to compel their recipients to give their products a review. If you give a review you'll be entered to win $1000 shop card at CB2. I think this is a great use of an email campaign.

I went to their site and I found that they have an area on most of the product pages where you can post a review for each product. The only potentially negative issue is that CB2 seems to have control over these reviews so the reviewers may question if they are "filtering" them. For some reason I doubt that they are, but we just don't know.

All in all, a great idea of how to use email marketing to get people talking about you.  Hey CB2, get bold! I found you on Yelp, a review site, where you get some pretty good reviews. Next time why not include other ways in your email campaigns for people to review you? At VerticalResponse we asked users to post reviews to Yelp and our Facebook Fan Page as well as Twitter. If there's a problem, we know it pretty quick and can work to fix it. Transparency is good!

Do you have any experience with using email marketing to get reviews? Chime in!

How To Use Video in Email Marketing Campaigns

I have talked about creating videos for your business and your website in the past here but it's more important than ever for you to take advantage of video marketing in your business, especially in these tough times. If you've got a video clip of one of your customers talking about you, or your product it's a great way to showcase the video inside your email marketing campaigns and potentially boost response.

Why Embedded Email Still Has Challenges

Embedded email simply put means that when your recipient opens your email, it starts to play. Sounds like a marketing dream come true, doesn't it? It can play out to be more of a nightmare though since there are many technical issues surrounding embedded video.

First of all, ISPs that you send email through, don't like to accept video embedded in email. To get around this Anna Yeaman tells us how you can create an animated gif out of your video. However as Mark Brownlow points out it won't work in Outlook 2007 since it only displays the first frame. Also, there is no audio in an animated gif.

Insert the Image of Your Video

Displaying a video image in your email campaigns can be simple. We've heard that when businesses use a graphic of the video clip, then link off to where it's hosted, whether it's on YouTube or the business's website, they've increase response to their campaigns.

From a VerticalResponse customer:

"Here's a stat for you. Using video as part of my last VerticalResponse email campaign QUADRUPLED my click rate. Very powerful and compelling."
David Cleary, www.davidcleary.net

You can either take a screenshot of the beginning of the video and insert the image into your email, or you can use the "embed" code that YouTube provides you and insert it into your email, it has the nifty "play" button already there. That's how I included our video below in this blog post.

At VerticalResponse we're starting to include our video tutorials in our welcome email campaigns, we'll post how they're doing. We use customer testimonials, video tutorials, interviews we've had, recorded webinars and employees giving presentations.

Are you using video in your email campaigns? What is your experience?

Have a Great Risk-Free Offer & Get Great Word of Mouth

Having an offer for your products or services that is truly risk-free might be just the ticket you need to really make a difference in your email marketing campaigns. To get a risk-free offer off the ground, you'll need to assess everything from your refund and return policy, your shipping policies, your customer service and how your policies are implemented. An awesome risk-free offer can really spark some great word-of-mouth.

If you sell a product that needs to be shipped to your customer, a really great risk-free offer encompasses free shipping, a generous time window your customers can return the product, a short turnaround in processing their refund and you picking up the tab for shipping the return back to you.

Here are a few companies that do it right and get positive word of mouth as a result.

Zappos - They have a 365 day return policy and they'll pay for the shipping back to them. They even have a handy way for you to print your UPS label from the Zappos site!

Nordstrom - You need to have your receipt, or your item tag but you can even return worn items without a problem. They make it easy to return items purchased on the web as well as in-store. But, they also monitor offenders.

Walgreen's - Walgreen's lets you return makeup you purchased within a month if it didn't suit you. I'm sure they got a lot more in sales then they ever would in returns.

However, do it wrong and you could really spark negative word of mouth like the Video Professor. On his TV ads he boasts a free trial of one of his eBay software program (pay $6.95 s&h) AND he'll give you $50 if you can show that you've successfully bought or sold something on eBay. Sounds too good to be true huh? Turns out there is a pretty big list of restrictions, a 30-day window which sounds impossible to make (they mail you a form to fill out which takes about 15 days to get). People sounded off.

And avoid adding tons of restrictions like restocking fees and different time limitations by the type of product customers buy like I saw at Best Buy. It could also spark some negativity and make people not want to purchase from you if they think they have to jump through hoops to return something.

If you have a great risk-free offer and you follow through on it, it really can generate good will and positive word of mouth. Do it wrong and it'll bite ya!