Create the Best Email Subject Lines

Email Marketing

Your subject line is the key to getting your readers to open your emails. Without an eye-catching subject line, all your hard work is bound to end up in the trash bin. Of course, guessing what the best email subject lines are can be almost impossible. Luckily, lots of brands test this all the time and research has found that there are certain keywords that just stand out among the rest. If you start incorporating these killer words in your email marketing plan, you’re going to start seeing from increasing open rates.

Of course, we always say it’s best to test! Start by replacing some words in your upcoming email campaigns with these and doing an A/B subject line split test to see which one performs better. You can judge them for yourself!

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Birthday Email Automation – Best Practices

Email Marketing

Birthday Email Automation

Best Practices, Tips, & Tricks: Create a birthday email marketing campaign that converts readers to customers.
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Automation has quickly become an email marker’s best friend. By being able to segment lists into targeted groups and schedule precise messaging, the whole email marketing world has changed to one that says no more to mass, generic messaging.  If you haven’t started with email automation yet, one of the easiest and most effective types of campaigns you can set up is the birthday email.

Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Make Your Audience Feel Special

There are a lot of reasons why birthday emails are a valuable addition to your email marketing campaigns, like the automation. Once you get your form fields, email, and triggers set up, you don’t have to think about it again until you’re reporting or updating your offer.

Of course, the main reason is that it’s a highly effective email marketing strategy. Just look at some of these statistics from an Experian study:

  • Birthday emails have 481% higher transaction rates than promotional emails
  • Birthday emails get 342% higher revenue per email
  • Birthday emails also average 179% higher unique clicks than promotional emails

Don’t those stats make you want to create an automated birthday email campaign right now? The numbers aren’t lying, birthday emails just work. On top of amazing analytics, birthday emails can also help you keep customers engaged and re-engage inactive subscribers since everyone loves a deal. You’re doing your business a disservice by not starting these types of targeted email campaigns.

Before you get started creating Happy Birthday graphics, read our best practices and tips. We’ve seen a lot of birthday emails and you could be sending high performing and high converting emails in no time.

Collecting the Data

If you’re not collecting your readers birthday, you can’t start sending out birthday emails. The way that this type of targeting messaging works best is by sending a coupon code or offer to your readers during the month of their birthday. However, if you don’t have that data, you can’t segment your list properly to set it up.

If you didn’t think to set up a birthday or birth month field, don’t panic! There are a couple solutions. Make sure that you add a birthday or birth month (this depends on how targeted you want to get) field to your email sign up forms ASAP so that you capture everyone’s information moving forward.

If you haven’t been asking for birthdays already, you can send an Update Your Account email. This email can be effective in getting some of your list to provide additional details if set up correctly. However, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get your whole list to update. The best way to entice people to update their account information, including birthday, is to offer a prize. It can be as simple as a $25 gift card to Starbucks or Amazon to one lucky winner. They are entered into the drawing by updating their account. It’s amazing what people will do for the chance to win $25!

Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Of course, the most effective way to ensure that you are collecting birthday information is to add it as a required field on your sign up forms.

Birthday Email Sign Up Form ExamplesEmail Form Sign Up Examples Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But best practice says to keep the forms simple.” This is true, but requesting Name, Email, and Birthday is still a very simple form. There are also ways to create a two-part form, depending on the email sign-up form that you use. You can create the first half of the form to be just an email address field that it looks really simple, but when the customer hits submit a second part of the form pops up that asks for name and birthday. Again, keeping it streamlined but asking for a little bit more information.

The Birthday Offer

It’s their special day! An effective birthday email automation has to offer something to your customer to make them feel special and encourage them to buy. This can be a simple coupon code or discount or a freebie. The freebie can be premium content that you created specifically for the birthday list or one you already have on your site. However, reusing premium content that is available elsewhere isn’t as effective as creating a birthday specific freebie.

Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Discounts and coupons always work well, but surprisingly the biggest draw is a mystery birthday offer. Mystery birthday offers had the highest revenue at 502.4% compared to other promos like discounts and free shipping.

Birthday Email Automation Best Practices Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Don’t have anything to offer? Even sending a simple Happy Birthday message is a great way to build customer loyalty and stay top of mind during a time customers are likely to spend.

Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Keep the Subject Line Simple

Before your customers can take advantage of your offer, they have to open the email. Keep your subject line short, simple, and straight to the point. People look to open birthday emails because they know there will be something of value to them inside, so make it easy for them to recognize a birthday email in their inbox! Here are some great examples we’ve come across:

  • Happy Birthday, [Name]!
    • Why this works: It’s simple, straight to the point, and it’s personalized.
  • We have a birthday SURPRISE for you!
  • A special gift for your Birthday
  • Your Special Birthday Gift
  • Birthday Bonus on us
    • Why these works: Playing on a sense of mystery makes readers want to click.
  • [Name], is it your Birthday?
    • Why it works: There will be a ton of happy birthday emails, asking a question stands out among them.

Any variation using the tricks of the trade in the subject line – you, birthday, or recipients name – is a winning tactic. We always recommend testing to all our clients. Even if you’ve been running successful birthday campaigns for a year, you should be testing your subject lines to improve open rates. A/B test some of these against each other and see which ones your audience responds to the best. Don’t forget to get our free Percent Change Worksheet to help you calculate the effectiveness of your tests!

Best Email Layouts

The birthday email should be short and easy to read. Your offer needs to stand out right away to grab their attention. Remember, you won’t be the only birthday offer in their inbox. If they opened your email, it means they are interested in spending money with you. Don’t make them work for it. Keep the offer details above the fold and eye-catching.

Birthday Email Automation Best Practices Birthday Email Automation Best Practices Birthday Email Automation Best Practices

Repeat the Success

You’ve seen how successful a campaign like this is, repeat the success with similar types of campaigns! Send your readers a special discount code for being a member of your site for a year or celebrate a business anniversary by including your readers. Any chance you see to set up an automation that will make your readers feel special is a opportunity for success!

 

Best Time To Send Email

Email Marketing

Best Times to Send Email Newsletters

There are so many important factors in whether or not someone will open your email campaigns. Of course, subject lines are one of the most important since that’s how people decide if they are going to open and read your email, but have you ever thought about the best time to send email? The time and day of the week that you schedule your email can have drastic effects on your open rates. There are a lot of studies out there done on the best times and days to send email, but the reality is you have to A/B test your times against your audience. The best time to send email changes drastically by industry and audience, so they only way to really know which times work best for you is to test! However, understanding the average best time and the average best days to send for your industry will give you a great place to start with your testing. Especially if you’ve just started sending emails or have never sent any emails before. Using the average times for your industry will give you the perfect jumping off point to start testing. Take a look at some of the average days and times in our infographic to use as a starting point for testing the best email send times for your audience!  

5 Common Mistakes in Email Marketing

Email Marketing

We have been doing regular Facebook Live sessions in our Email Marketing Group answering you questions and common issues we see. This broadcast focused on the top 5 mistakes we see people making in their email marketing far too often. We’ve recapped those 5 mistakes below and you can watch the two-part broadcast with full examples and details on each mistake in the video section of our Email Marketing Group.

5 Common Mistakes in Email Marketing

1. Not Checking Mobile First
Google’s search strategy is mobile first and your email marketing strategy should be too! Most of the traffic on the Internet comes via mobile and tablet, if your subscribers can’t read or click your email on their phones, you are losing a lot of potential customers.

2. Not Testing Before Sending Out To The Entire List
Test, test, test! We all make mistakes and you’ve seen this in your inbox. You get an email and the subject line has spelling errors or links inside the email don’t work and it’s so frustrating! But you don’t usually take the time to find the link and neither are your readers.

3. Only Publishing New Content
Your old stuff is just as good! If you’re a content publisher, make sure you’re pulling in all the content on your week’s newsletter theme. You’re constantly gaining and losing subscribers and your email subscribers are not the same people as your social media followers. You might be sick of your old content, but your new subscribers are excited to see it and it’s new to them!

4. Not Testing Your Sign Up Process at Least Twice a Year
User experience is everything and widgets break on websites all the time. Just because you subscribed to your own list when you set it up two years ago, doesn’t mean that everything is still working the way you want it to. The main thing we see all the time is people telling us to sign up for their list but their submit button doesn’t work. It happens way too often.

5. Not Doing a True A/B Test
Testing does not mean changing your email every week. You aren’t actually testing anything, you’re just making changes that you can’t make decisions on. A true A/B test involves changing 1 thing in your email and sending it to half of your list and sending your same email template you always send, wth no changes, to the other half of your list. This is the only way to get real test results.

They seem so simple, right? Now that you know the mistakes, you’ll easily spot them in other email campaigns too. Remember to sign up to as many email lists as you can to steal great ideas and test them in your own emails.

Want to join our group so you don’t miss awesome tips and tutorial like these? Ask to join today!

11 Tips for Surveying Your Customers for Best Results – Free Printable!

Email Marketing

Running surveys on your customer base can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. You put all the work and energy into crafting questions to help you get deeper insight for your business and receive such a low response rate. We’ve been there too. After years of running regular surveys for publishing brands, we found some tried and true tricks to get your response rate up, clearer answers, and actual usable data. Before setting up your next customer or client survey, take a look at these tips and tricks to set yourself up for success.

Tips for Running a Successful Survey

Best Practice: Tips for Surveying Your Customers

All questions should reflect your end goal.
It can be tempting to cover several topics in one survey. Keep each survey very focused and specific to one topic, since splitting the focus can create confusing questions. This will help get the clearest and best possible results. If you are looking to get insight into two different types of problems, plan for launching two surveys and stagger their timing. Be ruthless in cutting unnecessary questions and you will get better results.

Ask basic demographic data.
This is your chance to learn more about your customer! Since most demographic data provided by analytics sites is estimated, it gives you a good idea but not necessarily the most accurate one. Now is your chance to ask age, income range, location, and anything other general demographic data that is important for your business and segmenting your customer lists. You can later use this data to target your customers by location, age, or whatever is appropriate for your products or services. 

Keep it short.
Keep your language clear and concise, focusing on the simplest and shortest way to phrase your question to avoid survey abandonment. A survey should take three minutes or less for someone to complete. Remember, you’re asking for your customers and clients to do your business a favor. Be mindful of their time and you’ll have much better success at getting them to that thank you page.

Avoid leading questions.
If you lead the customer to an answer there’s no point in sending a survey. For example, instead of “We’ve recently put in a lot of time and energy to create a world class website. What do you think of the new website?” ask “What do you think to the recent changes to our site?” Keeping your questions basic without a lead in will give you more honest answers. 

Ask one question at a time.
It can be tempting to throw all of your ideas into a long, related series of questions. Though this seems like an effective way to make use of limited questions, it will actually just produce conflicted or confusing answers. It’s better to ask 3 short questions, versus 1 long, complicated one.

Show how long it will take to complete the survey.
Keep your customer top of mind, you’re asking them to take their time and help your business. Include a completion percentage or total number of questions until the end on every page. Understanding how long a customer needs to commit to a survey before starting it will lead to more completions. 

Send at the beginning or end of the week.
A SurveyMonkey report showed that people are most responsive on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays. For best results, plan to start promoting your surveys on these days.

Allow a month run and promote your survey across all marketing channels.
If you use the Internet to promote pieces of content, you have a content promotion plan across several channels like social media, email, and your website. Make sure you’re utilizing all these same places to promote your survey so that you catch a good sample size.

Offer a prize.
Offering an incentive can be the key to a success survey and a waste of time. Even something simple like a $10 gift card to one random winner will increase your response rate. People are more likely to complete a survey if there is a chance of them getting something out of it, even if that chance is small.

Promote the incentive.
When marketing your survey make sure to call out what survey takers can potentially win and how easy the survey is to fill out. Specifically, call out the time it takes to complete (Take our 2-minute survey!) and what they can win (For a chance to win a $15 Amazon Gift Card!). 

Include an end of survey Thank You page.
Make sure to thank your customers for their time and included details on when and how a winner will be chosen if you offered an incentive. You can use the thank you page as an opportunity to link to another survey or additional information about your company.

Want to have our tips handy when building your next survey?

Download our free printable!

Download The Free Printable