The first autoresponders were created within mail transfer agents that found they could not deliver an e-mail to a given address. These create bounce messages such as "your e-mail could not be delivered because..." type responses. Today's autoresponders need to be careful to not generate e-mail backscatter, which can result in the autoresponses being considered E-mail spam.
Use personalization. Personalizing the content of your emails (depending on your segment from Chapter 3) will make it so much more relevant and valuable to them. Personalization goes beyond sticking your subscriber’s first name into the email. You need to tailor the actual content of the email to address their needs. For instance, an online retailer will find it much more valuable to read an email with the subject line, “How to build backlinks to your eCommerce store” than just a generic subject line, “How to build backlinks.”
These lists often have very high instances of dead addresses and duplicates - sending to dead addresses can also cause reputation damage, these delivery failures are called ‘bounces’, they are split into hard bounces and soft bounces (permanent and temporary delivery failure). If your email marketing software doesn't have a de-dupe tool, then you may miss duplicate email addresses contained within your purchased lists, sending the same email to the same person multiple times is a sure fire way to generate complaints from your mailing list.
Sarah Pickersgill at Cancer Research UK says it’s important to be clear what the charity wants to learn from testing and how it will add to the supporter’s experience. “Simple A/B testing is a great methodology for us, as well as gathering insight from heat maps.” Ultimately, the interaction rate with its supporters tells the organisation how it is doing, she adds.
Improve results from your email marketing campaigns with these 22 top tips. From writing valuable content, adding a CTA, segmenting your list, and writing an irresistible subject line, to formatting for readability, optimising for mobile, updating your list, and testing and tracking results, optimise the performance of your email marketing campaigns to reach and engage prospects, retain customers, and encourage your audience to take action.
Using automation ensures consistency with your email marketing, if you’ve got an automated chain of emails set up, this means that they will go out at predetermined times no matter what. This is really advantageous for small business, it means that if your resources are stretched (as they often are for small businesses), then no matter how busy you become, your email marketing will still go out at the perfect times/intervals.
What we liked: MailerLite’s ease of use makes it an ideal tool for getting started with autoresponders – even beginners can master setting up emails and campaigns fairly quickly. And it’s great that you can use most of the features completely free of charge (as long as you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers). If you do need to upgrade, it’s one of the most competitively priced providers on the market – so it’s a great way to set up cheap autoresponders.
If you’ve been following along from the beginning, you have now learned how to grow your email list to epic proportions, you’ve segmented your list so that your emails are highly relevant to each individual subscriber, and you’ve learned how to send amazingly effective emails that have a high open-rate. Now you are ready to automate the process and turn your campaigns into money-making machines!
