I was scanning through some email marketing blogs yesterday and noticed a fellow ESP put out a “press release” on some new feature they had added.

I see these all the time, but this one caught my attention, probably because it’s something we’ve had for over a year.

We don’t have a fancy name for it, but it’s a function that allows you to send automated daily emails with content populated from a static URL.

For the sake of marketing and fancy names, let’s call it “The Daily Recurring Email” or the “Easy Email Express” or something like that.

Here’s how it works, using the example of one of our media agencies that currently owns 13 TV stations all across the country.

Their situation

They had several emails a day they wanted to deploy (daily weather, afternoon headlines, etc.), but they didn’t want to input the data by hand. Rather, they wanted to pull in content from a static URL that was populated with new information every day.

They also didn’t want to have to hit ‘Send’ every day either. Rather, they needed the system to simply deploy to specific list segments every day at the same time…and not on weekends. I don’t blame ‘em as that 6 am wakeup call to deploy emails to 13 different stations five days a week would have got old after a while!

The setup

With our recurring system, they could do exactly what they wanted and the setup was done in three easy steps:

1. They imported their lists and created the corresponding segments for those that wanted to receive the various emails they offered. In some cases, they let the user select a region for weather so it was truly catered to them.
2. They set up snippets that pulled the content from the static URLs. Then, they simply created an email with a generic headline (“Today’s Morning Headlines”) and placed the snippet in.
3. They scheduled the specific email to go to the specific list at a specific time, eliminating Saturdays and Sundays.

Great success.

With the CMS they used, they were still able to remain CAN-SPAM compliant with an unsubscribe and sender address merged from our system.

In addition, they modified their subscription forms to correspond with the new lists, ensuring that new subscribers were being added consistently and to the right segments.

This approach works awesome with any company that consistently churns out content, especially one using a static URL. Of course, you could change it up and pull some of your latest blog posts instead but that’s the beauty of snippets. Do what you want to do and make it easy on yourself.

So while we don’t have an officially branded fancy name, the recurring email feature in SendLabs is pretty awesome and has been for a while now.

The Takeaway

If you have great content updated daily, recurring emails can be a great addition to your email marketing plan. As long as the content is relevant and you have some important elements in place like a static URL, there’s nothing stopping from you building a new tower in your email marketing empire.

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

There’s no bigger wasted opportunity in email marketing than failing to send a great welcome email when someone signs up for a list.

However, I’m still surprised by just how many marketers prefer to skip the pleasantries and jump straight into whatever they want to say via their next scheduled deployment.

Here’s why you should pay more attention to strategy behind welcome emails with some examples I encountered over the last week.

1) You have the immediate opportunity for the feel-good moment.

Think of the welcome email as a warm blanket on a cold Sunday afternoon or the feeling you get when you leave work for the week. It’s that feel-good moment marketers kill for, but they neglect it and rip that blanket right off!

When someone signs up for your list, they are putting a trusted communication channel in your hands. They can leave anytime they want and there’s a lot of competition, so making a great first impression is important. Remind them about why they signed up in the first place and give them the value from the get-go, assuring them they made a good choice.

I’m not a fan of the Miami LebronWades…err, the Heat…but I did sign up for their email recently after hearing they were doing some good things with it. Here’s what I got:

It is quick-hit, included a prompt to whitelist the sending address and reminded me that I can update my preferences at any time. While it might be more transactional in nature, it’s still formatted nicely in a template with a subtle nod toward Heat merchandise with a link.

Wait a sec. Your welcome email doesn’t have to be just boring transactional text? It can actually look great and serve a dual purpose? On to my second point…

2) Your welcome email can turn into clicks and more content views.

In other words, your welcome email IS a marketing email, so think of it as such. Why make your new subscriber wait to hear from you? Send them something while the iron is hot, not a month later when they may have forgot they signed up in the first place.

Here’s an example from Funny Or Die, a video-driven comedy site co-founded by Will Ferrell. I recently spent about an hour laughing hysterically viewing all the various video content and felt enticed to sign up for the email. Check out what they sent me within a few minutes of signing up:

Other than the not-so friendly design for Outlook ’07, it’s a nice email reminding me that I signed up, what to expect and most importantly, links to the site’s most popular content!  How great is that? A welcome email turns into a marketing piece that translates into clicks into page views into laughing people like myself. Awesome!

3) It’s automated.

Much like the drip campaigns I wrote about last week, the welcome email is simply an autoresponder you can set up for your new subscribers. Immediately, an hour later, a day later…it doesn’t matter. Any system should be able to make this process easy and marketing pain-free. If not, you need better email marketing software.

The Big Takeaway

By putting the same amount of marketing effort and thought into your welcome email, you’re not only setting a great tone for your new email relationship but taking advantage of a limited time opportunity to engage your new subscriber while their interest is high.

If you’ve found a retailer or service that has awesome welcome emails, comment and let us know!

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

While autoresponders are great for their main focus of the automatic response (hence the name autoresponder!), one of the tactics you can use this feature for is the drip campaign.

Not familiar with the drip? You’re missing out. Here’s an example, loosely based on a client of ours. The person signing up is Eddie and the company makes gas grills.

Any similarities to real people – dead or alive – is purely coincidental.

- Eddie signs up for your email list.

- You send him a marketing email and he clicks on a link: “BBQ U: Really Learn How to Grill in Seven Steps”. The program is all fueled by email and will send Eddie seven separate emails over the next two months with seven tips and tricks on how to really BBQ. Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

I’ve never understood when I get emails that don’t use a valid reply-to address.

You’ve seen this before: Company A sends out a great email, but you might have a follow-up question or want to engage a bit more. The immediate response is usually to reply. You then reply and get a ‘noreply@companyA.com’ instead of an actual real email address.

Even more baffling is when there’s no valid reply-to address but there are references to other contact emails within the email or worse, there’s no method of contacting the sender at all.

!!! Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

Ever see that show Hoarders? You know, the one where you get to see people who simply can’t throw anything away or organize and as a result, their houses look like garbage dumps?

When’s the last time you really looked at your lists? Hmmm…that’s what I thought.

As someone that helps in support and jumps through hundreds of client accounts on a weekly basis, I see a lot of clutter when it comes to lists. Master Lists, Master Lists with a new date, New Prospect Upload A, B and C, lists with dates, do not send lists (so why are they in there?) and so on and so on.

There are times I feel like I’m navigating through a crowded house and I’m not talking about the Australian 80′s band. Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

Usually, I put the ‘What you can learn’ part of these posts at the end of the email. However, this is such a bad job of email marketing that I’m going to kick off with it instead.

If you’re sending your very first email on behalf of your brand — or even if you haven’t sent one in a while — bring your A game, not a half-hearted attempted just because you can.

On one of my personal blogs, I installed Feedjit, a cool lil’ widget that allow you to see who’s visiting your site and from where. It’s interesting stuff and with a few clicks and pastes, I had this deal running. I never think about it…it’s just there and requires no attention from me.

This was several years ago. Suddenly today, the company decided to send an email – the first I can remember getting from them. In the first paragraph, they allude to the fact they recently launched a daily newsletter. (Well, it might be weekly, which they referenced in the copy. Huh?)

Without any editing, this is their introduction to my images-on inbox: Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

Of all the things that should work in your email, the Modify Details/Update Preferences option should be right up there. For Epic Records (a Sony company), this sadly isn’t the case.

I’m in the final stage of inbox transfer from Hotmail to Gmail as the user experience for Hotmail has disintegrated for me over the past few years. I’m on the mailing list for several Epic Records musicians including Chevelle and Incubus. Over the past few days, I’ve got emails from both and wanted to start pushing them to Gmail.

Easy enough, right? See below. I even included a fancy red arrow, so you can see the placement. Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

Even 17 months after writing this, I’m still in email marketing love with Dunkin’ Donuts approach to our business. Here’s my original post from March 2008. The principles still apply today…even if I cannot find the email signup on their home page.

I’ve written about Dunkin’ Donuts’ email marketing campaigns before, which fit awesomely (is that a word?) into their entire advertising effort. I simply love this brand and as a native New Englander, I’m amazed at how this franchise that just served coffee and donuts 10 years ago in slightly dingy shops is now a fast-food mega-power.

It’s incredible what a little guile, money and some luck will do. Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

When it comes to doing demos of our email marketing software, the cherry on the sundae is always the reports: the meaty metrics of who’s clicking, opening and forwarding the emails your marketing team is spending their time on.

The two biggies are open rates and click-through rates as both are direct gauges of email marketing activity. The more people that open, the more that are (supposedly) viewing your message and more clicks mean that they saw something they liked. Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

I feel like MTV just abandoned me at some point like an old friend that decided they wanted to get a new haircut, new clothes and hang out with younger people. I don’t even know you anymore.

In any case, I got on their list somehow (I assume through the VH1 newsletter I’m signed up for) and received the following email the other day that stood out for all the wrong reasons. Continue reading

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.