Justin Premick is Director of Education Marketing for AWeber Communications. He recently took a few minutes for a Q&A with Bryan Haines.
Bryan: Everyone hates spam. How big of a problem is spam for your company?
Justin: Nobody hates spam more than a responsible email marketing service like AWeber, because it's the first thing that the non-marketer thinks of when they think about email marketing. So we work hard to make sure that the only emails being sent through our system are going to people who have come to our customers directly and asked to be on their email lists.
There's a lot of technology that goes into this, but we also train our people to identify potential problems before they happen and to educate well-intentioned but misinformed businesses about how to market themselves responsibly and ethically via email.
As a result, over the past 12 years AWeber has developed a reputation for sending exclusively legitimate, permission-based email. This helps us to continue to attract business and to get our customers' emails delivered.
Bryan: How do you prevent email campaigns from being considered “junk” or “spam”?
Justin: A number of things influence whether an email marketing campaign is treated as spam, but the #1 factor is reputation.
At AWeber, we've developed a reputation over 12+ years of sending exclusively legitimate, permission-based email. This helps us maximize our customers' email deliverability, or the likelihood that their campaigns will reach subscribers' inboxes as intended.
Getting email delivered also depends on the reputation of the individual business behind the campaign. So we educate our customers about email marketing best practices, and check their campaigns to detect issues that could hamper delivery.
The #1 thing you have to keep in mind as a business if you want to keep your emails out of the spam folder? Send relevant, valuable email to people who want to receive it from you – in other words, to your email list of your own customers and prospects.Bryan: Should a premium (ie. free report, an ebook, video access) be offered as an incentive for subscribing to a newsletter? If so, what type of subscriber increase is typical? What type of premium/incentive works best?
Justin: Incentives can certainly improve your opt-in rate (the percentage of visitors who sign up to your email list). They're a solid way to convince people who are “on the fence” about signing up to your list to go ahead and take the plunge.
However, that doesn't mean they're always necessary or a good idea. An incentive can cause people who don't really want your emails to sign up, just to get the incentive (such “freebie seekers” may then unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam in their email account). Make sure that your offer (what people would be signing up for if you didn't have any incentive) is a powerful reason to subscribe all on its own. Don't prop up a weak offer with an incentive; fix the offer first, add the incentive later.
Before you start adding incentives, make sure you know your current opt-in rate, so you can compare it to the new opt-in rate after you add an incentive. That will give you a picture of how effective your own incentives are, and help you decide whether the increase is enough to justify the cost of providing that incentive to subscribers.
Bryan: What does the term click-through mean? What can be done, to encourage click-throughs in an email campaign?
Justin: Click through rate is a common email marketing statistic that you should be familiar with. It gives you an idea of how good your email is at getting subscribers to your website.
You can calculate it by dividing the number of clicks on your link into the number of emails you delivered to your list (but at AWeber we automatically do the calculation for you and display it in your email campaign statistics).
If you're not happy with your click through rate, the first thing you should do ask yourself why someone receiving your email campaigns would want to click through. What's in it for them to do so? If there's no compelling reason to click, they're not going to do so. You'll also want to look at:
- Whether your emails are relevant and on-topic with why people are signing up to your list in the first place
- Whether it's easy for readers to see and understand exactly what you want them to do with the email. Don't hide the link – make it obvious. Also, get to the point quickly in your emails.
Bryan: Should a company display the number of their subscribers on their signup form? What are the benefits/drawbacks of doing this?
Justin: Showing a potential email subscriber how many other people have also subscribed can make them more likely to sign up, thanks to the concept known as social proof. Basically, people are more likely to do something when we see other people doing the same thing. AWeber customers can display how many subscribers you have on your web form (the number will update as your list grows). This can lead to a nice increase in your opt-in rate; here's an example of how it helped one of our customers build his email list 32.4% faster.
I don't recommend display your subscriber count when you first start building your list, because showing someone that 2 other people are on your email list isn't going to make them want to sign up. In fact, it may have the opposite effect. But for the typical small business, once you have over 100 or so subscribers, I think it's a good idea to show that fact off.
The main potential drawback to showing your subscriber count is that people may think that you'll treat them like numbers (and not people), and then not sign up to your list. However, in my experience the risk and incidence of that is low, so I do recommend displaying your subscriber count.
Justin Premick is Director of Education Marketing for AWeber Communications. He recently took a few minutes for a Q&A with Bryan Haines.
