The Whitelist: Email Marketing Is About Putting the Pieces Together

Email marketing is really complicated.

You have to write great subject lines and persuasive copy but you won’t have anyone to email without great landing pages. And without A/B testing and segmentation, those emails might not perform very well. The best email marketers put all the pieces together.

This week’s Whitelist touches on almost all of these topics, with great examples and in-depth details to help you improve your own marketing.

Did we miss a great article? Just let us know in the comments.

Landing Pages by Apple

If you are looking for tips on creating landing pages that convert like crazy, why not look at one of the most successful companies in the world? Apple uses landing pages not only to sell products but to build hype. This great post by Will Hoekenga on LeadPages explores exactly how Apple approaches landing pages.

Even when you have top-notch products, hundreds of millions of customers, and great design, you can still use copywriting to give yourself an advantage over your competition.

Here’s the deal — this landing page isn’t really designed to get you to buy something right away.

It’s about building excitement.

It’s about legitimate hype.

It’s about craftsmanship.

And it’s about placing you, the customer, squarely in the middle of it all.

The Secret Social Network: AMA with Reddit’s Erik Martin

There is some seriously valuable advice in this article for brands looking to engage with customers not just on social media, but anywhere. It’s definitely worth a read.

And people on the network are okay with being approached by brands?

The weird thing is that as an industry we’ve got this mindset of, “Oh we’ve got to make something viral. You have to be cute and clever and you have to add cats and make it likable.”

On Reddit it’s almost a throwback, where yes, really good content is really good content, but that’s not really interesting to people. If you have a product, people want to talk shop. They want to ask questions about it, they want a human response from someone about why various choices were made about the product or distribution or things like that. It can be a very focused or product-driven conversation.

For some reason online marketing has moved away from that. And I think that speaks back to the findings of the report, that people want human and they want innovation – they want to talk nuts and bolts sometimes.

4 Ways to Turn Boring Transactional Emails into Cash

Our CEO Chris Hexton contributed this article to the Unbounce blog this week. Thanks to Dan Levy and Amanda Durepos for the opportunity and for being so easy to work with.

Transactional emails are opened at over twice the rate of promotional and newsletter emails. The reason for this is context. Each of these emails serves a purpose and relates directly to something that your customers have done, meaning that those same customers are much more likely to open them.

It was a busy week here at Vero. I contributed a post to the LemonStand blog. They are a cool eCommerce platform and together, we crafted some ideas to help eCommerce businesses take advantage of email.

An eCommerce business without a robust email marketing strategy is like a defanged python. You simply cannot compete with your competitors if you don’t make email a priority.

Email marketing can seem overwhelming, especially when every marketer is also thinking about social media, SEO and content marketing. I’m not suggesting you drop those things, but I am suggesting that you take a closer look at how email could explode your business. After all, 91 percent of consumers check their email every single day.

Minimum Viable Email: A New Approach Email Marketing

Last but not least, take a look at a new way to approach email. We call it lean email marketing, after the now-famous lean startup model popularized by Eric Ries.

The product must be both minimal — requiring the least effort to create — and viable — functional enough that users can provide useful feedback. Rather than spending time and money perfecting a product, the lean approach gives entrepreneurs the chance to get rapid feedback, fail fast and improve quickly.

Did we miss any great articles this week? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.