The Whitelist: Long Live Email Marketing
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Email is alive and well.
There was no doubt in our minds but this we confirmed our already-strong feelings about the inbox. First, the New York Times covered the resurgence of email newsletters, then we were inundated with positive feedback about our guide to transactional email.
Here are the best articles we read this week. Did we miss something? Let us know in the comments.
For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated
It’s nice to see a well-regarded publication like the New York Times cover our industry. The more crowded social networks like Twitter and Facebook get, the article reports, the more valuable curated email newsletters become.
“Email is dismissed as something old people use,” said Gideon Lichfield, global news editor at Quartz. “But in the past few years, we have started to see email as a peer to publishing platforms like Twitter, Facebook and the web, one that has its own strengths and weaknesses that we are starting to figure out.”
6 A/B Tests That Did Absolutely Nothing for Us
It’s easy to love Alex Turnbull’s candid stories on all-things startups. Failure can be difficult thing to write about but Alex pulls it off beautifully in this post.
Seeing blog posts nearly every day about how a company doubled, tripled, or quadrupled their results with the simple flick of a switch — even on this very blog — can make it easy to believe that such a button exists.
But one of the hardest lessons that I’ve had to learn as an entrepreneur is that, try as I might, I can’t find that button.
And I likely never will.
What we don’t see when we look at those “big win” case studies is the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of tests that had to completely flop before success happened “with a simple test.”
How To Create Customer Personas With Actual, Real Life Data
Your business will never reach its potential if you don’t understand who your customers are and what makes them tick. A great post from Jennifer Havice on the ConversionXL blog.
When was the last time you took a long hard look at what makes your customer base tick?
Think customer personas – those detailed representations of the different segments of your target audience. Fueled by data driven research that map out the who behind the buying decisions of your products or services, customer personas can help inform everything from more effective copy to product development.
If you answered “it’s been awhile” or “never,” you need to keep reading.
27 Marketing Tips That’ll Woo Your Visitors and Win Them Over
Some great reminders from Neil Patel. If you’re frustrated with your marketing, get back to basics with these tips.
- Blog to help, not to sell – most people blog to gain visitors and to convert them into customers. People are smart, and they’ll see right through that. Blog to help educate your visitors. Eventually, they’ll want to give you money without you even asking for it. Just look at what someone emailed me today: “This is Alice, founder of [WEBSITE], an art and culture blog that is now at 4 million uniques/month. You helped us tremendously in the beginning, and I can’t thank you enough for your valuable advice. I’d like to see if you could help us get to the next level. Would love to work with you if you’re available.”
- Give away guides – one of the most powerful forms of marketing I’ve ever created is free guides. They are 30,000 to 40,000 words long, and they look beautiful. These guides are this popular because they contain everything I know, and you can have it for free.
- Care about your readers – have you noticed that I respond to every comment? It’s because I care about you. I really do…When I first started blogging, I didn’t realize the benefit of responding to every comment. Now, I know that it helps me build a powerful connection with my readers, who become loyal visitors and even customers.
The Complete Guide to Transactional Email
Just in case you missed it 🙂
For this guide, we looked at 31 transactional emails and analyzed them for smart marketing and missed opportunities. The result is a wealth of information about taking your business to the next level. We divided the emails into categories and tore apart five in each section:
Did we miss any great articles this week? Let us know in the comments.
