Not long ago, we conducted an A/B Split Test with a 60 Second Marketer e-newsletter subject line.

Which subject line won? See if you can guess.

• Subject Line A: “Where Does Your Brand Fall on this Brand Spectrum Chart?”

• Subject Line B: “Apple, Google, GoDaddy and the Brand Spectrum”

Can You Guess Which Subject Line Won?

Normally, when we do tests like this, one subject line might beat the other by 10%. But in this case, the winner outperformed the loser by 40%.

Yup, you heard right. The subject line with “Apple” and “Google” in it generated 40% more opens than the “Your Brand” headline. Better still, the click through rate was 15% higher in the “Apple” email — even though the copy in the email was exactly the same.

My guess is that the higher click-through rate happened because the people who opened the “Apple” email were more engaged and interested in the content.

Action Steps for You:

If you aren’t already running tests on your marketing program, here are some things to consider.

• Build Testing Into Your Program: Make sure A/B Split testing is built into your marketing program. Don’t make it random — do it every time. (Truth-o-Meter: We don’t test every time, so do as we say, not as we do.)

• Keep it Simple: Only test one variable at a time (unless you’re doing multivariate testing with a sophisticated research company)

• Start with Easy Stuff: Test the simple things first (e.g., subject lines, “Buy Now” buttons, etc.), then work your way up to more complex tests (e.g., layout, design, e-commerce options, etc)

• Test Your Way Into Success: When you have something that’s a winner, use it as your control. Continue to test against your control to see if you can beat it

We’d love to hear from you about your experiences with A/B Split Tests. You can let us know what your results have been by adding your comment below.

Other Articles of Interest from the 60 Second Marketer Blog:

• How to Measure the Value of a Brand

• What is Mobile Marketing?

• Social Media Glossary of Terms

Posted by Jamie Turner, Founder of the 60 Second Marketer and co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile.” He is also a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

What are the best ways to supercharge your email marketing campaigns? Here are 10 tips to help you get started.

1.  It’s all about deliverability, verifiability, and bounce reduction. Permission-based lists and clean data have the best chance of getting response.  Make sure your email solution has high deliverability rates and can track message activity (deliveries, bounces, clicks); or you’re just wasting marketing dollars.

2. Aim Before You Send. Email marketing starts with targeted, clean, and compliant lists. Build your email lists based on specific attributes and behaviors of your target audience to best capture attention and encourage response.

3. Create a marketing ecosystem that walks, talks, and works together. Your email campaigns, website, social media channels, and sales team all need to have the same key messages and value propositions.  Give your prospects an easy way to respond to your offer; wherever and however they find it.

4. Give your lists a fighting chance. Build trust with prospects by providing them with opt-in opportunities, delivery preferences, and privacy settings. Follow up with valuable content with relevant subject lines and messages. Avoid spam-trigger words: “Free,” “Discount,” or “Click.” Test before launching.

5. Don’t Ignore Opportunities to Improve Conversions. When analyzing the success of an email, determine what recipients clicked on vs. what was ignored. Note where the majority of prospects navigated away from your content and adjust future email campaigns based on these results.

6. Email haiku – You’ve got 3 seconds to make an impression. Can you answer these three questions: “What am I asking them to do?”, “Why should they care, or do it?”, and “Am I making it easy for them to act?” Have just one objective in an email, and make your call to action clear and easy to respond to.

7. Be Human: Write your email as if you are speaking to an audience of one. Ask the recipients opinion and present future content thataddresses these conversations. And whenever possible, have the email come from a real person, such as the CEO, CP of Sales, CMO, or other appropriate contact.

8. Avoid the dreaded “Big X” – How to beat the preview pane. Don’t make prospects click “download image” to even understand what you’re offering. Focus attention on the message and call to action. Downsize your banner and make it clickable. Shorten horizontal graphics, move up a promotional message, or add header box to increases response rates.

9. If you aren’t tracking behaviors and metrics you’re missing the boat. Demographics, psychographics, online and offline interactions, transactions, and responses deepen customer profiles. These should be used to drive personalized, relevant, and timely communications, as well as sales engagement.

10. Drive Conversions Through Social Media. Take conversations outside the inbox and integrate socially by creating a site with social media sharing capabilities. When a prospect shares your content, track the activity to gain knowledge for future campaigns. Social sharing is the new viral marketing.

This guest post was written by the kind folks at Act-On Software. Act-On Software is the provider of the fastest growing, cloud-based marketing automation platform for the Fortune 5,000,000, enables marketers to realize their creative expression to the fullest.

I attended the Facebook Success Summit this fall, and after listening to Jay Behr’s seminar on killer ways to integrate Facebook into your email campaign, I wanted to pass along some tips!

Want to connect with the 60 Second Marketer on Facebook? Click the image above and visit us on Facebook.

The one thing those of us in social media have always pursued like the Holy Grail (and found equally elusive) is getting “Likes” on a Facebook business page.  You could have engaging content, fun links, an inviting landing page, great promotions… but not many fans.  So how to get more?

Of course, many think the best solution to obtaining fans is to run Facebook ads.  But quite frankly, if you have an active email list, this may be a less costly way to obtain Facebook fans/Likes.

First you need to realize that people on your email list may not be the same as people who have clicked “Like” on your Facebook fan page… but they should be!  Second, when you think about it, Facebook and email are really not that different:

• Email subscribes = Facebook “Likes”
• Email unsubscribes = Facebook “UnLikes”
• Email opens = Facebook impressions
• Email clicks = Facebook feedback
• Email forwards = Facebook shares

If you understand this language, you can see that they are really the same.  In both cases, you are trying to stay top-of-mind for people who have opted in.  You can also use email to help build up your Facebook fans.  Here are 5 tips for integration:

(1)   Opt-in: Set up an email opt-in page on your Facebook page; add buttons in the actual email that make it easy for people to “Like” your Facebook page.

(2)   Reuse Your Material: If you have a post or content that is very successful on Facebook, send out an email which contains the same info.  By the same token, if you send out an email with content that gets a high response rate, be sure to post it on Facebook.

(3)   Test Email Subject Lines:  When you send out emails, test different subject lines (while using the same content) to determine the open rate.  Once you see which subject lines get a higher open rate, you can use those to create Facebook ad headlines.

(4)   Status Updates as Email: If you have a series of status updates that work together and help create a story, use them together to create one complete email.

(5)   Ask Email Recipients to Like or Comment on Facebook:  Edgerank has always favored the posts that get the most “Likes”, “Comments” or traffic.  So in your emails, ask your readers to do the same on your Facebook page.

(6)   Special deals for Email Recipients in Your Facebook eCommerce Store:  If you have an eCommerce store on Facebook, be sure to come up with coupon codes or deals that are exclusive to people on your email list.  Advertise those specials by sending out emails to let people know about these email-subscriber-only deals.

A few things to keep in mind: While your Facebook fans really should be the same as your email list, never assume they are the same.  Therefore, you should never hesitate to reuse content.  In addition, just because somebody is a Facebook fan, this doesn’t mean they have seen your content.  So sending the same information in an email is not necessarily going to annoy those on your email list… it might even make them want to follow your Facebook page a bit more closely!

Karen Naide is a Social Media Barista for Project Social, a virtual social media management company in Alpharetta, GA.  She loves helping her clients make sense of the social media space, and use it to their benefit.  Karen is married to Adam Naide, Executive Director for Social Media at Cox Communications. Her Twitter handle is @ProjSocial.

Today’s teens aren’t enchanted by email in the least. A roundup of 167 teen opinions on email, shows that less than half are confident that email even has a future.

Now, 5% of these teens reported that postal mail is already dead, the mail carrier walking by their window notwithstanding. So this does not, as some might assume, mean that email will die out as this generation comes of age.

It simply means that at their stage of life, teens look to communication technology for social connection, and they can connect with more friends at once on social media.

Which is not to say you can’t market to them with email – quite the opposite, in fact. If you’re trying to sell to teens, combining the medium of email with the mood of social networks should do the trick.

Why bother trying to reach them through email?

Reaching teens via email marketing has been and continues to be a viable marketing channel.

Here’s the thing. As teens grow older and start sending more formal communications, they’re going to be pulled into email more and more.

In fact, even now 95% of teens who fan companies on Facebook also subscribe to commercial email. It may not be the place where their buddies are present, but it’ll become the place where they expect to hear from the businesses they’re interested in.

Since you’re not their buddy, and you are a business, this is good. When teens check their email, they’ll be looking for deals, expecting updates and ready to entertain offers.

Plus, with email, you have a much higher chance of your message being seen than on social media, where feeds continually update.

Invite your teenage fans to subscribe now, and you’ll build loyalty with them early. They’ll get to know your emails and your brand, and you can start building relationships with them.

In a few years, when other brands are preening, posing and competing for a spot in their (adult) inboxes, you’ll already be there, a favorite fixture.

Now, how can you create a teen-friendly experience with email?

First, let’s ask establish what kind of experience social media provides.

In one word: community.

Social networks are places where teens can:

• Share their own opinions.
• Get feedback on their own ideas and questions.
• See people that they know.
• Find out what’s going on in the world.

When teens show up on their social network of choice, they find something intensely relevant and personal to them. So to appeal to them with email, try to bring them the same kind of experience. Slant your campaign toward building a community and involve teen subscribers in your emails as much as possible.

Introduce yourself.

The formal face of a brand isn’t likely to appeal to an audience so accustomed to informality. So write as a person (or a team), not as a brand. Share personal anecdotes or opinions. Include signatures. Include pictures. Let them get to know you.

Invite their replies.
A very common function of social networking is telling other people what you’re thinking.
So when it makes sense for your subscribers to share their questions or opinions, tell them they’re welcome to hit that reply button. (And tell them sincerely, not in a canned, drop-the-same-line-in-every-email way.)

FEATURE those replies. Include quotes as testimonials. Post their questions and then answer them in emails. Include their first names (though not their last, for privacy), so they notice that they’re featured. (You may want to get their permission first – which gives you even more of a chance to interact with them one-on-one.)

Keep it current. Whatever is going on “in the world” is affecting each of your subscribers individual worlds, as well. By relating your marketing emails to the events of the moment, you have a chance to share those experiences with them, further strengthening your sense of community.

And as these teens become adults…

They are going to grow older. But these tweaks designed to appeal to them as teens aren’t something they’re likely to grow out of, like black lipstick or a Skittles-and-root-beer breakfast habit.

They’re molded to the way this generation is growing up, to the way today’s teens expect to communicate online.

Teens may accede to more formal messaging as they grow up, but for the best of both worlds, bring the social element they’ve grown used to.

Amanda Gagnon writes about email marketing for AWeber, a leading email service provider for small-to-medium businesses. For more email marketing tips from AWeber, you can subscribe to their twice-weekly emails here.

Most of us are all addicted to our email. In fact, more than 90% of Internet users between 18 and 72 say they send and receive email, making it the most popular online activity.

E-mail is a powerful marketing tool because it is intimate. You are among friend’s party evites, family messages and funny forwards that everyone can’t get enough of. You need to develop a relationship with the consumer as well. Otherwise you are just an intruder in a house you don’t belong in.

Treat your email marketing like a friendship and follow the proper etiquette that all good friends stick to:

1. Don’t be a stranger. You talk to acquaintances only once in awhile, but you speak to a friend frequently, so stay in contact with your subscribers. If you send too many emails, you can definitely become a pest. However, sending too few emails can cause your consumer to start relying on someone else instead. Find the right balance so you will be anticipated, not dreaded.
2. Be personal. Talk to the consumer like a friend. Be informal. Your tone should sound like you are talking to them, not at them. Use their name and make sure it is spelled correctly! Use information that you know about your subscribers to a add a personal touch, such as wishing them a happy birthday. It doesn’t always have to be about the hard sell.
3. Get to the point.You don’t want to be that friend who takes 20 minutes to tell a 2 minute story. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to read an e-mail that just won’t end. People are pressed for time, so keep it as short as possible to get across what you are trying to say. Write the email first and then cut it down by half. It will take longer to make the email shorter but it will be worth it in the end.
   

   Since we're on the topic of e-mail marketing, why not check out a sample of our e-newsletter by clicking the image above?

4. Maintain consistency. Nothing is worse than someone who is two-faced. You never know which person you are going to get and it can be confusing. You want your emails to maintain a consistent flow that is steady and reliable. Keep this in mind with elements like your company logo, overall email design, from address and name, as well as tone. This will make your email more recognized in a crowded inbox and recipients will appreciate the familiar look so they can better navigate the different elements.
5. Master the art of timing. A friend knows when “it’s just a bad time.” Your consumers all have a part of the day or week that is best for them in receiving emails. If they are stay-at-home moms, mornings would most likely be best. However, if you are talking to the 9-5 crowd, you might not want to send it at 6pm on a Friday when the last thing they want to do is read an email. Since there are no hard-and-fast rules on the exact best day to send an email, testing is always a good way to figure out when your audience prefers to receive your emails.
6. Don’t be selfish. A friendship is one where both parties should benefit. So make sure you are giving your subscribers what they want whether it is information or special deals, which should be hinted at in the header of your email. Don’t send pointless emails; all of them should have a purpose. Give the people what they want.
7. Make their lives easier. Friends are always thoughtful. Since the number of users checking e-mail on their mobile devices has risen by 36%, you should consider developing a mobile platform. This will involve upgrading your campaign to perform properly on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Windows mobile platforms and other devices as well as adjusting your content to the smaller screen size.
8. Don’t hold on when it’s just not working out. Going your separate ways can be difficult, but don’t make it harder than it has to be. If a person wants to stop accepting your emails, they shouldn’t have to jump through leaps and bounds to be able to. Make the unsubscribe link clearly visible because it’s way better to receive an unsubscribe than a spam complaint!
9. Learn from your mistakes. It is always disappointing when a relationship ends, but it is important that you improve as you move forward. Let your audience provide you with the reason they are unsubscribing so you can prevent future losses.

Email is a much more personal plane of marketing than other forms of communication, such as television, radio and magazines. You are among family, friends and co-workers. This can be to your advantage if used properly.

The take-away: Building trust is the key. Instead of just flooding subscriber’s inboxes with your messages, consider each email carefully. It can make all the difference in your correspondence with the subscriber and whether that relationship is fleeting or enduring.

It seems as though every new marketing article or blog post these days is focusing on social media or mobile media. But email marketing is still one of the most efficient ways to connect with customers and prospects.

So, how do you get consumers to actually open your email and read the valuable contents inside? Mashable and AdAge broke down a list of smart and effective email marketing tactics. Here’s a baker’s dozen you should consider implementing into your campaign.

1. Combine with social platforms: Brands are seeing success when using Twitter and Facebook to gain email subscribers. Send your followers tweets with a shortened URL that allows them to easily click and opt-in to your email mailing list. By creating easy email subscription sign-ups on your Facebook page you have the opportunity to attract more subscribers.

2. Know who you’re talking to: Companies often make the mistake of sending universal email blasts to their entire mailing listing with zero regard to who they’re actually talking to.  Segment your database and design personalized emails that the specific viewer will actually want to read. One way is to screen your subscribers when they first sign up. Ask them what they want to get out of these emails and find out who they are as a consumer. This way, you’re sending them content they actually want to and will read.

3. Let them know who’s talking to them: According to AdAge, 70% of consumers say the “from” line drives their decision to either open or ignore the email and 30% say it’s the subject line. These two touch points give you an opportunity to brand your email and let consumers know who’s talking to them.

4. Give them an incentive: Everyone loves getting a little something special in the mail. Send your subscribers a free gift on their birthday or a 20% off coupon for Father’s Day. Give them a reason to open up the email and they’ll be wanting to come back for more.

5. Extend the offer across social platforms: Extend this incentive across social media platforms by giving viewers the ability to share their news on Facebook and Twitter. By making consumers an advocate for your brand, their friends and followers will be interested in signing up, too. 

6. Create mobile-friendly emails: According to ComScore mobile email usage increased 36% in 2010.  By creating mobile-friendly emails, your on-the-go viewers have the opportunity to read and click-through while on the train or waiting at the doctor’s office.

7. Where to put your most important message: When designing mobile-friendly emails, the key is to make sure the first line in the email is your most important message. Why? The first line is what shows up as the preview on smartphones. It’s about putting your best foot forward.

8. Expand your email list with SMS text: Give consumers an easy way to opt-in to your email database with a simple text. You can do so by letting consumers know all they have to do is text their email address to you SMS short code to subscribe.

9. Make announcements: Consumers are more likely to open up an email with announcement of news. Letting them know a sale ends soon, a new product alert or limited time offers gets them to open up the email and act fast.

10. Frequency and Relevance: AdAge reports that these are the two key elements to keep in mind when using email as a marketing tactic. Don’t bombard your subscribers with a flood of emails, but don’t neglect them either. Provide them with relevant content. If they just bought a product at your store, send them a survey to learn about their experience.

11. Current event tie-ins: Mashable states that viewers respond well to emails related to current events and pop culture. Find creative and fun ways to tie in what’s going on in the area with your brand.

12. Test your tactics: Test subject lines, offers and messages to see what works and what tanks. By testing your tactics you have the ability to know what grabs readers attention and gets them to interact with your email.

13. Listen to feedback: Make it easy for your consumers to leave comments and give feedback so you can give them more of what they want. Email is and always should be a form of two-way communication, so give them the opportunity to respond.

Posted by Rebecca Wilson, Marketing Analyst for the 60 Second Marketer.

By Justin Gray, Maas Impact

First we had Five Tips for “Outside of the Inbox” Email Marketing from Justin, and then we had Four More Tips. That makes nine. Marketers like nice round numbers so that simply won’t do.  The 10^th tip for improving open rates, engaging prospects and customers and, of course, nurturing a revenue producing sales funnel is, as you might guess, the final jewel in the email marketing crown.

10. It’s Called an email Message for a Reason – Campaigns start and finish with a compelling message.  Long drawn out email messages that don’t contain a clear, concise and VISIBLE (!!!) call to action aren’t messages at all.

Any idea how simply moving the call to action above the fold in email preview panes effects response?  Here’s a clue – it’s in the double-digit percentiles.  Even more comprehensive efforts, like a newsletter or customer service follow-up, need to be easy to navigate and click through.

After all, that’s what we want in our quest to become omniscient marketing gods isn’t it?

We want to compel the reader to take the next step and begin tracking that behavior in an effort to translate that to a lead score.  With that said, take a look at our tips for creating compelling content that converts the time-starved executive to a ravenous content-hound, quickly leaping to the top of your sales funnel.  Click here for more…

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Justin Gray is the Chief Brand Officer for MaaS Impact.  Justin’s vision is to transform traditional ‘grassroots’ marketing efforts through the use of cloud based marketing solutions. MaaS Impact  specializes in outsourcing the core functions of a marketing department either through on-demand solutions, consulting or both.  www.maasimpact.com .

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By Justin Premick, Education Marketing Director at AWeber

Like most email marketers, you’ve probably obsessed over your subject lines, trying to pack in as much compelling information as you can while keeping the subject as short as possible.

But have you ever thought about the other half of what your email subscribers see when they find an email from you in their inbox?  The “from” line that you use with your emails can impact the success of your campaigns, but it doesn’t get nearly as much attention from email marketers as it merits.

For starters, have you ever thought about how long your “from” line should be?

It’s an important consideration. After all, if your “from” line is too long, your subscribers’ email programs will cut it off, making it harder for subscribers to know who’s sending them that great email.

After receiving several emails with really long “from” lines recently, I set out to do some testing to see exactly where the cutoff points are in major email programs. So I created an email with a long “from” line (32 characters) and sent test copies to addresses in a variety of email programs in Windows, Mac and mobile environments.

So how long can your “from” line be before subscribers’ email programs truncate it?

Here are the cutoff points from my test. Operating systems are in parentheses.

Yahoo! (Windows XP) – 22 characters

Yahoo! (Mac OSX) – 22

Gmail (XP) – 24

Gmail (OSX) – 24

Windows Live Hotmail (XP) – 23

Windows Live Hotmail (OSX) – 21

AOL Webmail (XP) – 24*

AOL Webmail (OSX) – 24*

Microsoft Outlook 2007 (XP) – 32**

Mozilla Thunderbird (XP) – 32**

iPhone Mail (iPhone) – 20

Gmail (G1 Android mobile phone) – 24

* AOL Webmail shows the sender’s email address, not their name.

** Outlook and Thunderbird displayed the entire “from” line. I did not test to see just how many characters they would display. It should be noted that I used their default settings when testing, but that individual users can easily widen or narrow the “from” column in those programs.

So what does this mean?

1. When possible, try to keep your “from” line to about 21-24 characters. That way, it will display it its entirety, both in desktop environments like Outlook and all of the major webmail environments.

2. If you do go with a “from” line longer than 21-24 characters, make sure that you can still clearly see who the sender is in those initial characters. Use the name of your company, or another highly recognizable element, in the first part of the “from” line.

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Justin Premick is the Education Marketing Director at AWeber. Read more at his blog, www.aweber.com/blog .

Email is where it's @.

What are your objectives in your email marketing campaign? What formats are most effective to communicate these objectives? How often should you send the emails?

Constant Contact, an email marketing solutions company, and the company we at 60 Second Online University use for our weekly eNewsletter, offers a way to match the formats you choose based on the objectives of your email campaign. Here are:

• three typical formats
• the informational objectives that work well in those formats
• a suggested frequency for sending those emails.

1)      Newsletter Format: Use this format when your objectives include:

1. Enhance awareness
2. Increase interaction
3. Educate recipients

Send a Newsletter monthly or quarterly.

2)      Promotional Format: This format works best when your objectives are to:

1. Motivate purchases
2. Generate traffic to a storefront
3. Generate traffic to a website

You’ll want to send promotional emails bi-weekly or monthly.

3)      Announcement Format: These press releases or new product offerings are effective with objectives such as:

1. Increase event attendance
2. Increase donations/contributions
3. Improve public relations

Since these are usually event-based, send an event invitation with multiple communications allowing for recipients to first “save the date”, then sign up, then get a reminder. Announcements, of course, would only need a single communication.

Constant Contact reminds us – track your responses to be sure what you think is effective really is effective. If the campaign isn’t getting the results you expected, check your format, check you objectives, check your timing, and see if you can tweak.

Writing effective emails for marketing purposes has its challenges. When contacting potential customers (or even steady customers)in an email, you’ll want to take these 5 steps to encourage them to take action.

1. Use an attention-getting subject line: Include exciting words, “Free”, or anything that will differentiate your email from all the others your customers receive.
2. Explain the problem/need: Educate the recipients on the problem they have, just to be sure they are aware of it.
3. Describe solution: Now that they know they have a problem, they want a solution. Tell the recipients what your product will do to help them.
4. Explain benefits: Be sure your potential customers know how your solution will benefit them.
5. Ask for action: It’s an old saying, but true: “ask for the sale.”

These five steps don’t need to be elaborate. In fact, the simpler the email, the better. Keep it strong but minimal in words, and powerful in impact.