Caroline Shahar's Blog Posts

Increasing the impact of your emails today is all about segmenting your list so you can send tailored communications that hit subscribers’ interests. Consider these facts:    

58% of consumers say they unsubscribe or simply stop reading emails because “emails weren’t relevant to me.”
– MarketingSherpa, Consumer Media Survey, September 2008

56% of consumers consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is “just not interesting to me.”
– Spam Complainers Survey, Q Interactive 2007

Achieving relevancy in your emails takes more than knowing your subscribers’ email addresses, names, and what type of emails (i.e. newsletter, promotions, etc.) they want from you.  In the first part of this series I discussed the first step to achieving better results – how you can quickly and easily learn what each of your subscribers actually care about.  Today I’ll dive into the second step to getting more from your email marketing.

Immediately knowing the success of a marketing campaign once it’s out the door is a huge benefit of using a service provider for your email marketing. But when you get the metrics back, do you know what they mean or how to improve them?  

You can start by looking at benchmark metrics to see how you compare with others in your industry. Chances are good, though, that you’d rather learn how you can get more people to open your email to increase their exposure to your brand, more people to click on the links within the email to take advantage of your offerings, and more people to forward your email so they can spread the good word about you.

Surpassing your current email marketing results can be achieved in three steps.  

We don’t like to admit that we put a high value on what other people think, but we clearly do, as reflected in the huge buzz around social media and user-generated content these days. Social media and user-generated content are all the rage largely because they are methods to harness the herd mentality. Human nature makes us curious what other people are saying. Often we want to be part of this and share our own thoughts. As a business, if you are willing to listen and respond in the right place with the right tools, you can grow your email list and increase your reach.  

Sound interesting? How do you do it? One way is to use a short online topical questionnaire (survey) where your target audience spends time.  Here’s how…

Polls are a fairly effortless way to get much more from your marketing. Part 1 of this series highlighted one neat way you can use polls to step up the experience your web visitors and email readers have with you.

Polls are also an easy way to help solve the biggest catch-22s of these times: people have so many options but so little money to spend. How can your organization be the stand-out choice in good times and bad? By letting people know that others just like them found success and satisfaction with this same choice.

How easy and fun is it to participate in polls? In just a second, you can cast your vote on a topic you care about and have the benefit of knowing how other people answered. It is instant gratification.  

Deliver this same benefit to your customers by posting polls in your emails, on your website, and on your social media sites. Beyond stepping up the experience your visitors and readers have with you, you also gain quick, easy insights into the attitudes and preferences of your audience. Here is one simple, practical way to really step up your website and emails with a poll.  

We’ve just about reached the end of our series about how to get even more feedback from your online surveys. In part 1 and part 2 of this series, we covered the right content to include in your survey invitation and how to ensure that your invitation stays clear of the bulk folder and lands in your recipients’ inboxes. Now, here are the best ways to engage the people who didn’t respond to your first invite.  

Your survey invitation is what’s in between your survey and lots of useful feedback.  Get your audience interested in taking your survey by first adding in the right content, which you can discover in part 1.  Then give your audience the opportunity to take your survey by having your invitation make it into their inbox.  If your invite ends up in recipients’ junk mail folder, which most people don’t look at, you will greatly decrease the amount of feedback you get.  Here are the 5 keys to getting your survey invitation delivered successfully into the inbox, not the junk folder.

You're doing a survey to discover smart actions you can take for your business, but the feedback you get won’t be useful if you don’t get a good chunk of your audience to participate.  It all comes down to the invitation.  Here are the three ways to get your audience to act on your online survey invitation:

1. Have the right content in your invitation
2. Get your invitation successfully into the inbox
3. Hold a place in their mind

In this first post of the series, you will have No. 1 nailed down.  What you put in the invitation directly relates to how much of a response you’re going to get. You can get your audience interested by making your survey invitations short, sweet and to the point.  No big long explanations.  Keep the text down to a short paragraph and then make that link really stand out.  Here are the eight key components to include in your survey invitation:

What’s your newsletter doing for you?  If done right, it’s a powerful tool to stay in front of customers and prospects so they come to you when they’re ready to buy or donate.  Are your readers looking forward to your next issue?  Is your newsletter getting solid opens and clicks?  If you want more response to your newsletter, here are some ways you can get content that will better engage your readers.

Consumers have so many attractive choices available in the marketplace today.  Why should they do business with you?  A logo isn’t enough of a reason.  As discussed in part 1 of this post, it’s essential to clearly express your uniqueness to keep customers coming and to get more in the door.  So now here’s how to easily identify your organizations’ true uniqueness and what to do with it to have a competitive edge.  

Step 1: Send an online survey to your current customers to learn why they come to you.  You are selling something far greater than a product or service.  By sending your customers a survey they will be glad to see you care, and you will both quickly and easily find out why your customers really do business with you.  Here’s an online survey tool to use if you need one.  And here are the brand perception survey questions to get you the feedback you need to uncover your true uniqueness.  It should take your audience less than 5 minutes to complete, which will help in getting a good response.  Include the time it will take on the invitation.  I would also consider offering them a discount on their next purchase or a free whitepaper to get more participation.   You can find more about getting people to participate at this post about getting a good response.