Email Marketing

How to increase revenue per thousand emails sent
The Mequoda Email Performance Report measures your split tests to help maximize email revenue and profit
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Online Marketing Tools: Using an Email Lifetime Value Calculator to measure the real lifetime value of an email name

The essence of the Mequoda Method is to build a database of email newsletter subscribers, send them valuable free content, build your brand, earn trust, and eventually monetize these email subscribers by selling them paid products and services.
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Use PDF files to improve your site’s landing page rankings with Google

Help build your niche brand with this eight-step link-building technique … Continue Reading »

Maximize your subscriber file size with aggressive email conversion architecture.
Discover how to forecast and increase profits with the Mequoda Email Circulation Calculator.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways for any business to increase profits.

Want to make more money? Either increase the number of customers, or increase the average sale per customer. Or both.

The success of your online publishing business depends on the same two factors. The important variables are: … Continue Reading »

Using email newsletters to lower the cost of creating online brand building. When the history of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election is written, the role of the Internet, and especially email, will be recognized for having revolutionized campaign strategy more than any technology since John F. Kennedy mastered using television in 1960. … Continue Reading »

Listen to your audience when making an eBook by doing keyword research, tracking your user activity, observing your competitors and just flat out asking them what they need. … Continue Reading »

Complete these seven to-dos and get your IP removed from email blacklists

Last week we talked about whitelisting, but today we’re going to cover how to get off those nasty email blacklists once you’re already on them.

Being blacklisted refers to the ISP that your readers are using (like AOL, Yahoo!, etc.). One person marking you as spam in their email inbox won’t get you blacklisted, but many spam complaints will. Once you are blacklisted, no one using that ISP will get your emails. This is very troublesome for B2C publishing companies because their users are more likely to use an AOL or Yahoo! account than B2B users. … Continue Reading »

If an email gets sent to an inbox and lands in the junkbox, does it make a sound? … Continue Reading »

How Golf Vacation Insider Manages 75 Complimentary Special Reports and a Page #1 Ranking in Google on Almost All of Them. … Continue Reading »

Email copywriting best practices for effective consumer email marketing … Continue Reading »

Subscribers generally buy a paid product within 90 days…or else!

“In any 12-month period, one out of four subscribers to a free Agora Financial email newsletter eventually buys something”, Andrew Palmer, former Director of E-Commerce/Web Marketing for Agora Financial, LLC told us in our last interview with him at Agora. … Continue Reading »

Mitigate spam complaints by finding out who’s putting you in the junkbox … Continue Reading »

10 Criteria for Increasing Open Rates and Conversions on Your Email Newsletters or Promotions … Continue Reading »

Does your revenue per thousand come up short while your “white web” transactions seem curiously high? … Continue Reading »

14 ways to get your email delivered and viewed correctly on any browser … Continue Reading »

Use these strategies developed by the folks at HR Daily Advisor to help your writers and editors sell more product. … Continue Reading »

How to sell products while maintaining the honesty and tactical transparency required to preserve a trusting audience … Continue Reading »

Bob Bly shares his tips for writing subject lines that get your email opened and read at SiPA’s 32nd Annual International Newsletter & Specialized-Information Conference … Continue Reading »

Put this list of no-no’s next to your desk and check it often … Continue Reading »

29 Insider Secrets for Creating Effective and Profitable Email Newsletters … Continue Reading »

8 best practices for effective email marketing in a preview-pane world … Continue Reading »

How a publisher made one change that increased their delivery rates from 65% to 98% in days. If your email provider is not giving you a delivery report, and you are not registered with a service like Delivery Monitor, we seriously recommend that you pay attention. … Continue Reading »

It’s happening to all publishers as open rates continue to drop across all industries. Luckily, the email service providers have stepped in to shed some light on the situation.

Two of the most important delivery rate factors are the “from” address and the subject line. However, if you want your emails to get opened, your subject line has two tests to pass: the spam checker, and the email checker. You want your email to get delivered, but you also want it to get opened. … Continue Reading »

How easy is it to interact with your email newsletter?

Marketers can get carried away with email. Some will hide the unsubscribe link with tiny text. Others will use more calls to action than a drill sergeant. These marketers forget that people, not cash machines, are reading the email, and they should be treated well.

Part of respecting your audience is designing an email newsletter that is usable. That means it should read well, link to a webpage of the article, and yes, even allow readers to unsubscribe easily. … Continue Reading »

This Mequoda System Operator has found high profitability with a unique Internet marketing strategy

The website and email newsletter feature updates five days a week, with editorials sent on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and promotions sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”Mequoda essentially gave us the winning formula, which was to create a newsletter where 60 percent of it was editorial and 40 percent of it was marketing,” said HR Daily Advisor Managing Editor Jay Schleifer.The editorial strategy for HR Daily is what Schleifer calls the “1-2 punch” sequence, where a human resources problem is posed on Monday and Wednesday, and the solutions to those problems are delivered via a product offer on Tuesday and Thursday. Friday’s are left for stand-alone editorials.Last week, for example, an HR Daily article cited several statistics that illustrated the need for managers to provide feedback to employees. The next day’s article discussed how a BLR product helps managers constructively provide employees feedback. The “1-2 punch” strategy is proving to be very successful, Schleifer said. … Continue Reading »

These benchmarks will reveal where your emails have to be tweaked

The metrics for email marketing make the platform very measurable and adjustable, but without benchmarks how will you know what adjustments to make?

To measure a campaign without benchmarks is to guess at its effectiveness—and blind guesses rarely make money.

Marketing research firm Jupiter Research gives the following industry averages for generic e-mails, via DMNews: … Continue Reading »

A report shows 5 tactics are commonly executed and commonly fail

A mantra that remains true across email marketing and direct mail is “the money is in the list.”

Email marketers are always trying to grow their list, but a recent study shows that many of them are planning to use tactics that others in the industry say show little results.

Silverpop’s “2006 Email List Growth Survey” asked 321 companies what methods they planned to use to grow their list and which were most successful. … Continue Reading »

Find out how this email newsletter is raking in revenue and awards

We are happy to announce that the 19th Annual Awards for Publishing Excellence awarded HR Daily Advisor the grand award in its newsletter category.

HR Daily Advisor is a human resources management newsletter running on a Mequoda System. It and seven other newsletters came out on top of the 540 entries in APEX’s newsletter category. … Continue Reading »

Reporting from the 31st Annual SIPA conference … Continue Reading »

Adjusting the time your emails are sent can save your customers from sifting through spammy subject lines to find your content.

Variety, the bible for show biz insiders, has provided Hollywood movers and shakers with the industry news they need for over 100 years. The company has been around the block when it comes to print publishing, but even the wisest publishers make mistakes when transitioning online. … Continue Reading »

Find out why your email newsletter should follow the 60/40 rule

Email newsletters are a great way to keep a company’s brand in front of its customers. Their popularity, however, has not spawned effectiveness, and many email newsletters have flawed formats.

Thankfully, the Mequoda Group has a new free email newsletter review to help publishers avoid the flaws and mimic the best practices of email newsletters by analyzing The Daily Dish, South Beach Diet Online’s email newsletter. … Continue Reading »

Use different emails to relate to your customers in different ways.

The Mequoda Group is a strong advocate for the power of email. It is cheap, easy and effective at maintaining customer relationships. However, an effective email marketing campaign cannot be initiated without a plan.

If you want to maintain customer relationships, Mequoda Pro contributing editor and Clickz email marketing columnist Jeanne Jennings has a new book, The Email Marketing Campaign, that outlines three emails that will help do it. … Continue Reading »

Email marketing expert Jeanne Jennings has released an authoritative handbook on her specialty. … Continue Reading »

Email newsletters are not like the direct mail campaigns of old. They are based in a volatile environment where spam laws and software capabilities constantly change, and where best practice rules are still undefined. The emerging use of preview panes in email software is the latest change to that environment. … Continue Reading »

More attention to detail would help improve the reader experience and lift response.

Many years ago my father bought a boat and was soliciting ideas for names. My brother jokingly suggested “Drug Money,” not because my father was into anything seedy, but because he had spent his entire career in the pharmaceutical industry, which was lucrative enough to allow him this splurge.

FDAnews is also keenly aware of the revenue opportunities inherent in the world of pharmaceuticals and is leveraging them with a stable of free email newsletters, one of them recently analyzed by the Mequoda Research Team. … Continue Reading »

Top Chef, Iron Chef, Rachel Ray, Bobby Flay—seems like America’s new favorite hobby is cooking. Publisher Cook’s Illustrated is also in the mix with a TV Show, a website network and a free email newsletter, which we’ll put to test today in this review. … Continue Reading »

10 Guidelines for Designing Effective Email Newsletters

While success or failure of an email newsletter should be directly tied to bottom line goals (like sales, revenue, etc.), there are some things that can help—or hurt—a newsletter’s chances of achieving those goals.

We’ve developed 10 guidelines for designing an effective email newsletter that we will use to analyze the email newsletters of successful B2B and B2C publishers. … Continue Reading »

How the business media giant capitalizes on 37 free email newsletters and email alerts

Forbes.com has a highly sophisticated email system based on its 37 free email newsletters and email alerts. Visitors to the site can sign up for free email newsletters in a variety of topics.

They can also sign up for single-story alerts by subject. Mequoda estimates that Forbes.com has six to eight million email subscribers to its various email newsletters with a variety of contact frequencies that include daily, weekly and “as needed” for the Forbes Desktop Alerts. … Continue Reading »

Why Harvard Health Publications includes press releases in its email marketing mix

Harvard Health Publications makes its email newsletter subscribers feel like privileged members of the fourth estate.

As part of its email marketing strategy, the publisher sends out only four email messages monthly, often mailing a modification of its press releases to the 50,000 subscribers to HEALTHbeat, its free email newsletter. … Continue Reading »

Jeanne S. Jennings in an online marketing consultant specializing in email marketing. She has developed more than 170 email publications for Reed Business Information U.S., Congressional Quarterly, KCI Communications, and numerous other companies. She publishes The Jennings Report, a free email newsletter for email marketers and also writes an ‘Email Marketing Column’ for Clickz.com. … Continue Reading »

Today, the challenges of email newsletter marketing are similar.

Unfortunately, many Internet marketers spend too much time building the number of names on their list. But they don’t devote enough effort to assuring that their existing subscribers actually receive and open their email newsletter.

The math is simple but bone-chilling: If you’re sending a regular email newsletter but the “open” rate is only 50 percent or less, you’re simply not getting through to half (or more) of your potential customers. … Continue Reading »

If breaking up is hard to do, your email newsletter could be hurting your reputation

Has this ever happened to you? You sign up for someone’s f*r*e*e email newsletter, then discover that you don’t like it or don’t have time to read it, and you can’t get off the distribution list?

That happened to me. I get a weekly email newsletter from a well-known online publisher. Except in this case, I don’t even remember signing up to receive his email newsletter. … Continue Reading »

In any 12-month period, one out of four subscribers to a free Agora Financial email newsletter eventually buys something.

But after 90 days, if a subscriber has not clicked back to an Agora marketplace website to buy or at least consider an upsell product, that subscriber is dropped from the list and must re-subscribe in order to continue receiving the free mail newsletter. … Continue Reading »

Someone has just signed up for free access to your site, or they’ve just purchased a product from you. How do you reinforce the positive experience they’ve had on your site and peak their interest in coming back for more?

In the confirmation email you send your newfound customer, be sure to pitch them again on the benefits of whatever they’ve just done, whether they’ve signed up for a free email newsletter or purchased a product. Remind them of all the tools they’ll find on your website, or all the ways your newsletter or product will make their life better. … Continue Reading »

When you’re a designer or a developer working in a small company, you learn to look for bright ideas wherever you hear of them. Vitamin is one such idea. With the tagline “a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs,” Vitamin is an excellent website for good, helpful suggestions. … Continue Reading »

Internet marketing professionals, users, email services providers and Internet service providers are all winners with AOL and Yahoo!’s plan to provide legitimate email senders a premium delivery email plan that guarantees their mail makes it to the inbox. … Continue Reading »

Discover how one special interest consumer publisher uses low-priced eBooks to increase the lifetime value of his email marketing database by 59 percent. … Continue Reading »

I’ve seen three sets of test data in the last month that demonstrate the power of urgency for driving readership and email newsletter click-through rates. In each of the three tests, the email newsletter subject line was changed to reference a current news event by name, versus a more generic version. Click-through rates and site traffic was then measured for each of the two test groups. … Continue Reading »

The publisher of a small group of B2C print newsletters and other related information products decided to get serious about her email newsletter marketing efforts. She had a free, opt-in, monthly email newsletter on the same topic as her print newsletters, but had never put much effort into it. She was serious about sending promotional email to the email newsletter list, and did so several times per month with some success. Her email newsletter annual retention rate was about 48 percent, with more than 90 percent of the unsubscribe requests coming from the promotional emails. … Continue Reading »

I received a call from a publisher who had recently gotten very aggressive about building an email database by offering website visitors a free email newsletter. It seems that the conversion rate for new sign-ups was running seven to eight percent and he’d built a list of more than 300,000 active email subscribers in less than 90 days. That was the good news. That bad news was that his email delivery rates had tanked and he didn’t know it. … Continue Reading »