Only 14 People on Your Mailing List? Create a Compelling Opt-In Offer with These 14 Tips!

So you finally got around to writing some blog posts, but your excitement turned to disappointment because so few people are finding and reading what you wrote.

One of the next two things will happen.

Now how do you attract more subscribers and get their precious permission to deliver to their inbox?

First, what not to do. Don’t blast all of your [Read more…]

This week, I looked back and saw that I have been sending out my newsletter, Just a Digital Minute, every Wednesday morning since the summer of 2010. I’d say this email newsletter has turned into a long-term relationship!

I am particularly proud that I have not missed a single day. Not when Christmas fell on Wednesday while I was in the mountains in a cabin without Internet. Not even when my dog swallowed a whole pecan and died in surgery. I am diligent about it since I know it would be all too easy for me to come up with great reasons to let things slide.

When I first started New Tricks, I put an opt-in box on the sidebar of my website, but that year I didn’t send out a single newsletter to the 33 people who had subscribed. I knew that was pretty lame so I set up an RSS feed newsletter to send out my posts automatically. It seemed like a great idea until six months later, I got an unsubscribe notice from someone I really respected. [Read more…]

When people visit your Facebook page, it is a great opportunity to capture their attention, and get them to sign up for your newsletter.  Luckily, Mailchimp makes it easy to connect your sign up form to your Facebook page.

In order to integrate Mailchimp sign up form with your Facebook page, you first need to make sure that you have administrator access to the Facebook page.  The connection to Mailchimp first occurs through your personal Facebook account, and then you can select which Facebook page you want the sign up form to show up on. [Read more…]

Increase Engagement with a Video

A lot of people have been asking how they can add a video to their email newsletter. So I am going to break it down for you below.

Before we get started, it’s important to understand that one can’t actually play an embedded video in an email.  How I have been handling this is to create a picture of the video and link it to play in YouTube.  I found a better method from Amy Bloom’s blog, bloom online  which lets the video open directly in a lightbox when it is clicked.  I like this method because it doesn’t take your reader away from your newsletter. [Read more…]

When you send out email newsletters you can use a merge tag to dynamically pull information from the email list database and insert it into your email. The most common thing to do is to personalize your email with the recipient’s name.

It is good to do this at the beginning of an email message, but you can also put it somewhere in the body of the email for emphasis. People love [Read more…]

According to HubSpot, “Customers who write just 3-4 blog posts per month get 20 more monthly lead submissions, 800 more monthly site visits, 60 more Twitter followers, and 50 more Facebook Likes than customers who only write 2 blog posts per month”. I’d say that those are pretty impressive statistics.

This week the New York Times posted an article, For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated.  As part of their premise that Email Newsletters are not actually dead, they went on to say that they can provide a sort of intimacy between a company and its clients.  I like how they put that since I think that is the best reason for a newsletter. [Read more…]

This post is for you if you have been thinking about sending out your own newsletter, but don’t know how to get your list started without being in danger of being called a dirty spammer.

Many people have an email opt in box on their websites but have never gotten around to sending out a newsletter. If you are ready to start this process, then you want to warm up a cold list and add current clients, friends and close colleagues to your list in a way that decreases the possibility of unsubscribes or reports of spam.

Be sure to sign up for an email service provider such as MailChimp rather than sending out emails from Outlook, Gmail or any other service you use for your business and personal email. There are two main reasons for not sending newsletters from your personal email. First, bulk emails sent from those services get through spam filters more effectively. Second, email newsletter services provide people with an opportunity to easily unsubscribe. [Read more…]

MailChimp has some big news. Based on customer feedback and preferences, they just completed a redesign. Over 3 million people use MailChimp to create, send, and track email newsletters.

I have been playing with some of the changes to my Just A Digital Minute newsletter for the past few weeks. You may have noticed the new streamlined format.  I used the Drag and Drop Editor to create a one column template which should make it easier to view my newsletter on Mobile devices.

The following are guidelines are for making a change to the Drag and Drop editor for those of you who have been using a regular template. [Read more…]