The Whitelist: Welcome to Our Weekly Email Marketing Roundup

Welcome to The Whitelist, our brand new weekly roundup of articles, case studies, tweets, reports, and news. Many (but not all) of the content we share here will come from these 50 blogs. Our goal is to curate the best, the most interesting and the most insightful content on email marketing. We are reading it anyway, so why not share it with our readers?

We hope you enjoy, and let us know if you think there is a post we should share next week.

Onboarding Emails: What Happens After They Sign Up For Your “Free Thing”

Tommy Walker from ConversionXL has a way of articulating complex growth strategies in a way that anyone can understand. He dug through a number of reports and studies to explain exactly how and why businesses should be paying close attention to their onboarding process. There are plenty of examples and action items … don’t miss this one.

Just so I’m clear when I’m talking about “Email Onboarding”, I’m not talking about newsletters or batch & blast messaging that asks me to read your latest blog post.

What I’m talking about is creating a narrative in the inbox that – best case scenario – seamlessly transitions me from “lead” to “customer” and “customer” to “evangelist” by acknowledging how I interact with the stuff you send me and adjusting itself accordingly, made possible by trigger & behavioral-based email rules.

4 Hacks You Should Know Before You Craft Your Next Email Subject Line

We love hacks, so it’s not surprising that we really liked Zach Bulygo’s post on subject line hacks on the KISSmetrics blog. These tips are straightforward, simple and potentially very powerful. Keep this bookmarked for the next time you are struggling with a subject line.

There is no such thing as the perfect subject line. As a marketer, you need to test your subject lines and see which ones get the most opens. (Now, clearly, getting people to open your email is only one part. After that, you need to get them to click or tap on something in the email.) But you’ve won half the battle if you can get them to open the email.

What is spam?

Seth Godin, the father of permission marketing, offers a philosophical explanation of spam. In short, spam destroys trust. Read on to see how to earn trust and keep it.

Spam is in the eye of the beholder, and so my definition of permission marketing kicks in: If the person you’re communicating with would have missed you if you didn’t show up, you have permission. On the other hand, just because you know someone’s email address or phone number, just because you have figured out how to automate a captcha or hack a discussion board doesn’t mean you’re welcome there.

The back button is your number one enemy

I had never heard of the Weigel distribution but it’s application to content marketing is spot on. Basically, the longer a visitor stays on your site, the less likely they are to leave. The principle is simple but getting those visitors interested in the first place isn’t easy. Nate Munger breaks it down with plenty of examples and tips.

It just so happens 99% of websites follow a negative Weibel distribution; the longer a person stays on a site, the less likely they are to leave.

The steep portion of this graph is that first 10 to 20 seconds a visitor uses to decide if a website is worth their time. If you can get them past that initial quick, harsh judgment, your chances of keeping them for much longer increase dramatically. That’s the flat part of the Weibel curve.

If you can keep them for 30 seconds, you’re almost as likely to keep them for 2 minutes or more.

The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing

The latest Whiteboard Friday video from Rand Fishkin touches on so many of the challenges that content marketers face. It’s ten minutes well spent.

This week on the Vero blog:

• The Art of the Welcome Email: 3 Examples to Improve Your Onboarding Process
• 18 Must-Read Email Marketing Articles

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments.