A free guide from your friends at Zapier

Written by the Zapier marketing team, with content from Danny Schreiber, Matthew Guay, Joe Stych, and Nat Eliason.

Cover by Bryan Landers.

Originally published at zapier.com/learn/ultimate-guide-to-email-marketing-apps/

Copyright 2015 Zapier, Inc. All rights reserved.

About This Guide

For all of the social networks and chat apps today, there's one online messaging system that everyone uses: email. No matter which email service and apps you use, you can send an email and know your recipient will see it. That makes it the best place to share your marketing and transactional messages, and make sure your message will get seen.

But it'll take a bit more than just opening Gmail and sending an email message. You'll need a tool that helps you send thousands of emails easily, and the tips to optimize your messages and make sure they don't get flagged as spam.

That's where this eBook comes in. It includes tips on the apps you should use to send every type of business emails, along with ways you can integrate your email apps with the other tools you're already using, guidelines to make your emails great, and more.

Who is This Guide For?

Ever send emails to market your products, announce upcoming events, share news about a non-profit, or just about any other type of emails that go out to more than one recipient? Then this guide's for you.

If you're already sending email newsletters, transactional messages and drip campaigns, you'll find tips in this book to help you optimize your messages and integrate your email tools with the rest of your workflow. And if you're just getting started with sending bulk emails, you'll discover the tools you need to send amazing emails from apps that aren't much more difficult to use than Gmail.

Table of Contents

1. Intro: On Great Emails

2. The 25 Best Email Marketing and Newsletter Apps

3. Grow Your Email List: How to Get Subscribers, Organize Lists and Follow Spam Laws

4. How to Segment Email Lists for More Opens, Click-Throughs and Conversions

5. Master Your Email Marketing List: How to Automatically Import, Copy and Remove Subscribers

6. What is Drip Marketing?

7. The 25 Best Email Marketing Apps to Send Drip Campaigns

8. Successful Drip Email Campaigns: How to Pick the Best App, Add Advanced Automation and More

9. Transactional Email: The 7 Best Services to Send 1000s of Emails Daily

10. A/B Test Your Email Marketing

11. Experts Weigh In: 21 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

12. Don't Quit: How to Keep Sending Great Emails

Intro: On Great Emails

Choosing the Best Email Marketing App, Crafting the Best Email Marketing Strategy, and Creating an Email Workflow that Works for You

Email's important. It's an essential part of our marketing efforts at Zapier—not to mention the way we communicate directly with our partners and customers. And yet, it can so often be confusing and difficult.

There's dozens if not hundreds of ways to send your marketing email messages, along with innumerable different ways you can word your titles, write and schedule your messages, and followup on replies. There's plenty of great options, but even more ways to mess up your entire marketing strategy with one button click.

That's why we wanted to help simplify email marketing, with a guide to every part of email marketing: the apps, the messages themselves, and the ways you can integrate email marketing into your workflow with automations and more.

First, though, you'll need to pick out an email marketing app that'll work great for your needs. There's so many ways you could send your marketing emails, it can be incredibly hard to pick the best option for you.

Kale Davis, founder of Hacker Newsletter and MailChimp employee, picked MailChimp for his emails long before he was a MailChimp employee. He's quick, though, to say that the same app isn't the best for everyone.

"There are a lot of apps and integrations out there to help you build newsletters, so find something that works with your workflow and try to make the publishing process as frictionless as possible," advises Kale. "That will give you more time to try experiment and work on growing your list."

To help you pick the perfect apps to send your emails, we've rounded up the 25 best apps to send email newsletters, the 25 best apps to send drip emails, and the 7 best apps to send transactional emails in chapters two, seven, and nine respectively. Those will show you what each app offers, along with their pricing plans, a screenshot, and a link to an in-depth review to give you the info you need to choose an app.

Before you dig into the app roundups, though, here's some pointers from successful email marketers on how they picked their email newsletter app—tips that are well worth keeping in mind as you dig into the rest of this book.

Start with Something Free

Starting with a free app is a great option, since it takes away one of the first things you'd otherwise have to worry about with your email marketing. That's why marketing consultant Claire Pelletreau chose MailChimp.

"When I was first getting started in my business it was difficult to imagine a monthly investment," says Claire. "I liked that I would only need to pay for a plan as my list grew."

And then, MailChimp worked out so well that once she needed to pay for MailChimp, she chose to stay with the app that'd help her start her email marketing. "As I continued to use Mailchimp, however, I got hooked on the incredible customer service and how easy it was to use," Claire continued. "It was a no brainer to upgrade to a paid plan in order to use their more advanced features."

Upgrade for the Feature You Need

As your email needs grows, though, you might end up wanting to switch to another app to grow your marketing efforts. That's why Rebecca Dekker started out with MailChimp, but then switched to Aweber as her lists grew.

Before switching to a new app, she researched her options thoroughly, then picked based on the features she needed for her work. "A big part of that decision was the glowing reviews I read on Aweber's customer service," explains Rebecca. "Another part of my decision was that Aweber has really easy-to-use autoresponders. So when somebody signs up for my email list, I can automatically send them a series of emails welcoming them to the newsletter."

A similar focus on features helped Jeffrey Nichols choose to use Emma for the email marketing efforts at his company, adPharos. "We chose Emma because we liked their simple approach to A/B testing subject lines, and … because of their agency-friendly model," said Jeffrey.

And sometimes, it's a less obvious feature that'll be the best reason for your team to choose a particular app. Whether you're looking for an app that lets you store more info about your contacts, or is ready to send millions of emails a month, think through the features that are crucial to your email lists, and then pick based on that.

Find a Team That Understands You

The app is only one part of the equation. You'll also need to be sure that the team behind your email app is ready to answer any questions you'll need, and that there's documentation and training to help you get started easily. Those are as crucial to your email list's success as the app itself.

Johnny Shelby picked VerticalResponse to send emails for his company, Third Coast Training, after coming across their informative documentation online—and then stayed with them because of their own email marketing efforts. "I found VR through a web search and not only was their newsletter builder easy to use but their informative newsletter as well that keeps me in the loop on how to better use their service," Johnny said.

If your team's based outside of the US, getting support when you need it can often be tricky, so you might want to pick an email marketing app with a global team. That's why the Aspermont team chose Campaign Monitor as their email app. "At first we chose Campaign Monitor as they were an Australian based company which was great for Aspermont, but we stay for the awesome international support and customer service teams, handy for those early morning or late night hiccups," explains the Aspermont team.

Support, features, or price: all are great ways to evaluate the email apps you're considering using. But at the end of the day, what really matters is that you pick an app, integrate it with your workflow, and start sending emails that get read and convert into real sales for you.

That's what the rest of the book is about. Chapter 6 will teach you about the various types of marketing emails you can send, while chapter 11 will walk you through common email marketing mistakes so you can be sure to avoid them.

The remaining chapters will teach you how to grow your email lists, segment your email lists for best results, automatically import, copy, and remove subscribers, and a crash-course on A/B testing your email messages to make sure they're effective. Then, to close it out, you'll get some quick tips from successful email marketers on how to keep your email marketing going, even when it seems you have nothing else to say.

It's a lot to take in and put to action in your work, but email is important and worth the effort. So let's dive right in with an overview of the best apps to send email newsletters in the next chapter, so you can get started sending the best emails you've ever sent.

Written by Matthew Guay

Chapter 2: The 25 Best Email Marketing and Newsletter Apps

Stuff's happening, and you want to tell everyone about it. That might have required paying for a newspaper ad, publishing a press release, or printing and mailing a flyer in the past. Today, though, reaching your customers and contacts is as easy as clicking a button in an email newsletter app.

The only question is: Which email app's button should you be clicking?

Any email app worth mentioning can send newsletters, so let's look at which ones make email marketing easy and effective. We dug into 25 of the most popular apps that send email newsletters, picked out their best features, and put it all together in this roundup. If you're looking for a great way to send emails to all of your contacts, this is the chapter for you.

Why Do I Need an Email Marketing App?

You probably send and receive emails every day using an app like Gmail or Outlook. Those tools work great for sending one-off messages to individuals and groups—and if you abuse the BCC field, you might be able to send an email to 100 people without annoying everyone. But for larger groups and scheduled sends, you'll need another option—something that makes it as easy to send an email to everyone as it is to send a message to one person.

That's where email newsletter apps come in. They're the tools that power the bulk emails you receive every day, and they're a great way to share news, announce new promotions, or send out an annual email update to all of your friends and family.

Every app we looked at lets you organize your contacts into lists, add new contacts easily via a signup form or integrations with other apps, send beautifully formatted messages in a half-dozen clicks, and analyze how your email performed. Plus, we found mobile apps that send messages on the go, tools to manage your events, and integrations to import your customers. Finally, all the newsletter software we profiled integrates with Zapier, our app integration and automation tool.

So without further ado, here are the best apps that send email newsletters (ordered alphabetically). For each app you'll find a screenshot, a brief summary, and pricing information. If an app catches your interest, you can click through to our in-depth review, such as the MailChimp review above, for more detailed info.

ActiveCampaign

Emails that are just about the latest happenings at your company can get boring. To really capture your customers' attention, you should write emails that are focused on their interests. ActiveCampaign makes it possible by including a full CRM and marketing automation suite along with its email newsletter tool. It'll help you gather detailed info about each of your customers, then divide them into lists based on interests, locations, and more.

Then, unlike most CRM apps that let you send emails, ActiveCampign includes a full-featured email editor. You can drag-and-drop email elements, design them the way you want, and quickly send your finished newsletters off to your customers. And if you also need to manage sales prospects, you can upgrade to ActiveCampaign's Plus or Enterprise plans to unlock useful features beyond email marketing.

ActiveCampaign Pricing: From $9/month for email marketing to up to 500 contacts; from $49/month for full email marketing and CRM suite

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our ActiveCampaign review.

AWeber

An email list is nothing without subscribers. You have customers and people who are interested in your products, so AWeber focuses on making sure those people will get added to your email lists. It natively integrates with WordPress, PayPal and Facebook so you can add people from the places where they already interact with your company.

AWeber also lets you create advanced subscriber forms with up to 25 fields and import contacts from a variety of list formats. Once your lists are built, it has the tools you need to make your emails look great, putting hundreds of free templates and stock photos at your disposal.

AWeber Pricing: From $19/month for unlimited emails to up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our https://zapier.com/zapbook/Aweber/review/ Aweber review

Benchmark Email

Email needs to look great everywhere. Benchmark Email aims to make this easy in two ways: with an internationalized app that's easy to use anywhere, and email templates that look great on mobile and desktop.

Benchmark's cleanly designed email editor lets you pick from a variety of layouts for your text and multimedia components, then accents them with color schemes for emails that look beautiful everywhere—not just on a large desktop monitor. It lets you store your images and videos in the app to easily reuse them in future messages. Then, the entire app's interface is equally at home in English, Chinese, Spanish, and more, and its team works with the standard email sending coalitions as well as China's ICP to make sure your emails will be delivered everywhere. It's an email app for global teams.

Benchmark Pricing: Free for sending up to 14k emails to 2,000 contacts; plans from $9.95/month for sending up to 600 emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Benchmark Email review

BombBomb

Check your inbox, and the vast majority of your emails are just plain text. Some will be wrapped in beautiful templates, and others may include images, but for the most part they look quite similar. BombBomb breaks the mold by sending emails that are centered around video.

You can shoot videos in BombBomb's app or upload your pre-created videos, then send them out as email newsletters. Then, your contacts can reply with video messages of their own, recording a new video email online and sending it back to you through BombBomb. It sounds crazy, but it just might be the way to break up the monotony of text emails and get your contacts' attention.

BombBomb Pricing: From $25/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our BombBomb review

Campaign Monitor

Your emails need to stand out, and using a tweaked standard email template likely won't be enough. That's why Campaign Monitor tries to make it as easy as possible to code your own email templates, then gives you the tools to customize standard email templates far beyond the basics.

There's a drag-and-drop email template editor with pre-made templates that show you variants of the templates that other teams are using to inspire you to make it your own. Or, you can hand-code your own template using Campaign Monitor's simple email code snippets, and host your CSS and assets on Campaign Monitor's server. And if you run a design agency, it even lets you make your own templates, white-label the app and resale it to your clients with your own custom designs.

Campaign Monitor Pricing: From $9/month for sending up to 2,500 emails to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Campaign Monitor review

Campayn

If you've been hacking together email newsletters by abusing your email app's BCC field, Campayn might be the easiest way to break that habit and start sending proper email updates. It can import your contacts from a variety of apps—including your Gmail and Yahoo! Mail address books—and will keep up with all of their info just like a real address book, including their social media profiles.

Then, it'll make sending emails simple, with pre-made templates, a nice editor, and an email sending process that lays everything out in one page so you can add any of your email's details at any time. It'll even put that extra contact data to work for you, using it to segment your lists to help you make sure everyone gets the news most important to them.

Campayn Pricing: Free for up to 20,000 emails per month to 2,000 contacts; from $10/month for unlimited emails to 1,000 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Campayn review

Constant Contact

If you run a brick-and-mortar business, you're likely sending emails about your events, discounts, and more. Constant Contact is an email app that's also great at managing all of those other things you do, so you can create events and promotions, send them out to your existing contacts, and gather new contacts—all from one app.

Constant Contact's EventSpot tool lets you schedule your upcoming events, create a registration page, and spread the word via email and social networks. Then, its Social Campaigns tool helps you create coupons or downloadable resources for social networks to gain new follows and keep your existing followers excited about your products. Tying it all together is Constant Contact's email tools that'll let you share these events and more with your contacts and easily add new subscribers to your lists whenever you run an event or promotion.

Constant Contact Pricing: From $15/month for up to 500 subscribers; 60 day free trial

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Constant Contact review

EmailDirect

Every email app has a list of your contacts, and many let you filter your contacts and sort them into specific lists and more. EmailDirect takes it a bit further by letting you interact with your entire contact list as a relational database. You can use it to store anything you want about your contacts, then slice-and-dice them up into the lists that make the most sense for them.

To give the database as much info as you need, you can use EmailDirect's API to tie it into your eCommerce store, or you can list your own products directly in EmailDirect and track which ones customers have purchased. You can then make as many lists as you need, and let subscribers manage which email lists they receive. That way, they don't have to unsubscribe from all of your emails—they just can quit receiving emails about the products they're not interested in.

EmailDirect Pricing: From $40/month for sending up to 2,000 emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our EmailDirect review

Emma

Effective emails take time to design, write, and schedule. Emma does its part to help with an email app that's easy to use, and comes packed with beautiful email templates—including template collections specifically for special events, thank you messages, and more.

The Emma team also offers concierge services that'll make a beautiful template for your business, help you schedule a drip campaign, and more. You can use that to jumpstart your email marketing strategy, and then easily reuse the templates and content in your future messages. Emma even integrates with other apps like Shopify so you can target your emails to customers who've purchase certain products, and lets you schedule drips for holidays and more with the aforementioned template collections.

Emma Pricing: From $45/month for unlimited emails to up to 2,500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Emma review

FreshMail

Picture a nicely designed email in your mind, and it likely includes—at most—a small header photo at the top, a background color, and formatted text and images below that. At best, most emails look like nice blog posts. And that's good. But if you want more, FreshMail's templates can make your emails look like beautiful product demo pages, complete with full-sized images, beautiful Google Fonts-powered text, and detailed layouts that go far beyond your standard email.

Creating your own design from FreshMail's templates is easy, with rich content blocks that you can drag-and-drop into the editor, and a simple editing screen that lets you change the style of your text headers and body. Then, you can add your content and send it to your contacts with all the standard email sending features you'd expect from any other app.

FreshMail Pricing: Free for sending up to 2,000 emails to 500 contacts; from $17/month for unlimited emails to 1,000 contacts.

Zapier support coming soon

GetResponse

Ever wondered how your emails look on smartphones? With GetResponse, you won't have to send your email to your phone to find out. Its email designer lets you preview how your message will look on computers and phones while you're laying out your design and adding in your text.

Then, you can add more to your emails with GetResponse, as well. It'll let you import images from Flickr, Facebook, and iStock, sell products directly in your emails with PayPal buttons, and even bring in text from previous emails with its snippets feature. Then, you can schedule your emails in advance by dragging them to the correct date on a calendar. And if you're promoting your products online, GetResponse has you covered with tools to import contacts from Facebook forms and Twitter ads.

GetResponse Pricing: From $15/month for unlimited emails to 1,000 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our GetResponse review

iContact

Your business likely already uses a number of apps to manage your contacts, get interest in your new products, and more. iContact's designed to make it easy to add those contacts to your email lists and automatically get new contacts subscribed. It's deeply integrated with everything from Salesforce to Drupal so it can import contacts and use their data to segment your lists.

Beyond sending emails, iContact also includes social networking tools so you can draft and schedule Twitter and Facebook status updates right alongside your email updates. iContact can even help you get started, with design services to make a custom email template for your brand and advisory services to help you setup your email campaigns and get the most out of your marketing efforts.

iContact Pricing: From $10/month for up to 250 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

Mad Mimi

Email apps shouldn't be so complicated. But, once you put in every feature that everyone could want, there's bound to be buttons everywhere. Mad Mimi tries to calm the madness by making its app focused just on emails, and then leaving the rest of the features for you to turn on or off as you need.

Everything's simple in Mad Mimi. You'll see quick stats from your latest campaign on the front page, with a screenshot of the email to remind you how it looked. Go to create a new email, and you'll see a simplified editing page with themes based on color schemes and content blocks that'll look great on any device. Then, when it's time to pick the contacts that'll receive your emails, you'll be shown every list with a simple on/off switch to pick who receives your emails. And if just emails aren't enough, there's drip emails, social media integration and more ready for you to turn on in the Mad Mimi add-ons page.

Mad Mimi Pricing: Free for sending 12,500 emails to 2,500 contacts per month; from $10/month for unlimited emails to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Mad Mimi review

MailChimp

MailChimp may be the first email newsletter app you think of it you spend any time listening to podcasts—or have ever seen any of its monkey-themed shirts and hats. But beyond the swag, MailChimp is an app that's serious about helping you send better emails. You'll find everything here from a drag-and-drop email editor to rich subscriber profiles that track your contacts' interactions with your emails, and more.

The best part is the extra apps and tools that come along with MailChimp. There are nine mobile apps that come along with MailChimp, letting you do everything from send emails and check your stats to sending email newsletters based on pictures you snapped on your phone and signing up new contacts to your lists from a tablet. You'll also come to love its smarts that'll automatically find the best time to send your emails based on its data from everyone else's campaigns, and recommend smart lists from your contacts based on other email newsletters they're subscribed to.

MailChimp Pricing: Free for sending 12,000 emails to 2,000 contacts; from $10/month for unlimited emails to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our MailChimp review

Mailigen

Email's important, but so is mobile messaging. If anything, mobile messaging may be more important today than email. After all, your phone's always with you, and while you might ignore your email, you're unlikely to turn off your SMS notifications. So Mailigen lets you combine your email and mobile marketing, so you can target your audience wherever they're most likely to check their messages.

On the email side, you'll have all the features you'd expect, with a familiar, Office-style editor that makes it easy for anyone on your team to edit your email campaigns. Then, you can further your email marketing by sending out SMS messages with your latest announcements and deals, with all the same tools to gather contacts and segment them into lists that you're already using with your emails.

Mailigen Pricing: From $10/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Mailigen review

Mailjet

If you're looking for a service to send emails directly from your app's code, Mailjet's a transactional email service that's ready to deliver as many emails as you need. But if you'd rather something simpler, with an interface to lay out your emails and manage your contacts, Mailjet's ready for you as well.

In addition to its send API, Mailjet includes a graphical template designer where you can customize its built-in themes and use them to send email newsletters to your customers. There's deep list segmentation built-in, along with A/X tests with up to 10 versions to test anything about your marketing that you want. You can have it automatically send your app's notification emails, then use the graphical editor to simply update your users about your news and more, all from one service.

Mailjet Pricing: Free for sending up to 6,000 email per month; from $7.49/month for sending up to 30,000 emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Mailjet review

MailUp

There are plenty of email apps that'll work great for small lists, but what if you're sending millions of emails a month to tens of thousands of recipients? MailUp is an email app designed exactly for that. It's priced to make sending millions of emails affordable—as long as you're not in a rush to send your messages. You'll select how many messages you need to send each month, then choose how soon your emails need to be sent—the slower, the cheaper. That'll way, you can send millions of messages a month without breaking the bank.

And, of course, there's a rich email editor, tools to organize your contacts, and even SMS and social network marketing to reach your audience on the go. It's an email app designed to send your marketing messages even to the largest audiences.

MailUp Pricing: From $49/month for up to 1,641,600 emails per month to unlimited contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our MailUp review

Sendicate

Looking for a very simple way to send emails? Sendicate just might be the app for you. Its interface is stripped down to be focused just on your emails, with an editor that lets you pick the sections you want to add to your emails and fill in content without any clutter. There are still themes for your emails, but they're tucked away behind a menu so you can focus on your content.

Then, you can draft emails in advance to make sure they look great, and then send them when you're ready. That's easy with a draft section on the front page that shows your emails complete with their header photo and subject. You can then segment your audience with simple search filters, and schedule emails to be sent at the time and date of your choice. And with simple, typography focused templates, you can be sure your emails will always look great.

Sendicate Pricing: Free for sending 1,000 emails to 500 contacts a month; from $9/month for unlimited emails to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sendicate review

SendinBlue

Want an email and SMS marketing tool that can integrate with your site? SendinBlue is an app that's designed for just that. With WordPress, PrestaShop, and Magento plugins, as well as an API that you can use to integrate it on your own, SendinBlue can work directly with your site or internal apps for sending email newsletters, drip campaigns, and transactional emails.

You can design your own email templates or import an HTML page to send as an email, then use those templates for all of your emails. Then, you can also market to your users on the go with its integrated SMS marketing. Combine that with its marketing automation, and you can see what your customers are doing on your site and what products they've purchased, then followup via email or SMS automatically. And, you can use the same tool to let everyone know about your latest news and deals.

SendinBlue pricing: Free for sending up to 9,000 emails per month; from $7.37/month for sending up to 40,000 emails

Zapier support coming soon

Sendloop

If you've already tried another email newsletter app and want something different, you'll want to be able to move your lists and not have to start over from scratch. Sendloop lets you do just that with its migration assistant that can import contacts from a number of email services and let you bring over the HTML email template you're already using.

You can then use that to start sending automated emails and newsletters to your old contacts, as well as new ones you add via its Facebook app or WordPress widget. Then, you can add Sendloop's code to your site to watch your customers, see which pages they visit, and hone your marketing strategy accordingly. It's a marketing automation tool that's focused solely on email, helping you know as much about you contacts as you can and send them the perfect emails.

Sendloop Pricing: Free for sending up to 10,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers; from $24/month for unlimited emails to up to 2,500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sendloop review

Sign-Up.to

It's tough to find time to send emails, much less learn how to use a new email app and create a template for your emails. Sign-Up.to tries to make it simpler with training and design services to help you get started quickly, along with managed marketing services that can make your emails for you.

Or, if you'd rather work on your own, you can do that too with Sign-Up.to's email designer and and form builder that'll let you gather contacts and contact them easily. You can even reach them on social networks and via SMS with Sign-Up.to. It'll even help you target your customers better by building profiles about them, ranking them based on their location, the domain their email is based on, and more.

Sign-Up.to Pricing: Free for sending up to 1,000 emails; from £39 (around $59) per 2,000 emails sent

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sign-Up.to review*

Tinyletter

If you want the absolute simplest way to send emails to your contacts, and you don't have more than 5,000 people that need to receive your emails, you can't get any simpler than Tinyletter. An insanely simple email newsletter app now run by MailChimp, Tinyletter has no templates, no integrations with other apps, and almost no features—that's why it's the only app on this list that doesn't integrate with Zapier. All it lets you do is make a landing page for people to signup, and then gives you a simple writing space where you can pen plain-text emails and send them out in a click.

And that's actually all it offers. It's really the simplest way to get your message out, and get back to everything else you need to do. Then, if you end up needing more, it's easy to migrate your lists to MailChimp and grow from there.

Tinyletter Pricing: Free

VerticalResponse

Full-featured email apps don't have to be complicated and confusing to use. VerticalResponse proves that with its clean, simple interface that makes it simple to make beautiful emails and send them to your contacts. You can use its pre-made templates, edit them with colors and add your own photos—complete with filters—and then turn the templates into both emails and matching signup forms.

Your emails will look great everywhere, since the templates are designed to look great on mobile, and you can have your newsletters automatically shared on Facebook. Once your announcements have gone out, you can come back and check your stats from both your emails and your social network shares, and see what interactions that campaign brought in. And if you need more professional features, there's VerticalResponse Classic with deep integration with Salesforce for your most advanced marketing projects.

VerticalResponse Pricing: Free for sending up to 4,000 emails to 1,000 contacts per month; from $8.80/month for unlimited emails to up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our VerticalResponse review

Vision6

One of the easiest ways to manipulate data is by throwing it into a spreadsheet. Almost anyone can then easily sort the data and quickly find similar segments. Vision6 lets you do this with your contacts, with a spreadsheet-like interface to filter your contacts. Instead of having to set filters and hope they pick the right people, you'll see all of your contact info laid out and can filter it visually using tools you're already used to.

Then, you can use Vision6 to reach those contacts wherever they are. Right along with your email updates, you can schedule SMS and social media messages to go out at the same time. Without having to schedule a blog post and remember to post online at the same time, you can spread the word about your latest deals and promotions everywhere with Vision6.

Vision6 Pricing: From $9/month for sending up to 5 times a month to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Vision6 review

Build Your Own Email Newsletter App

There are dozens of great online apps to send emails, and they're typically your best option. If you try to send emails from your own server, you may end up seeing your emails blocked by spam filters and more. But there's a happy medium if you'd like more control: you can host your own email app, and then use an email sending service to send your messages. There's Amazon SES, Mailchimp's Mandrill, SendGrid, and Mailgun to name a few, all of which are dedicated email sending services that can work with your own in-house email tools. That gives you the flexibility of an app that you control, with the confidence of sending emails with a dedicated server that's working to make sure your emails are delivered to any email app, anywhere.

Here are some great options:

Sendy

For a self-hosted app to send beautiful email newsletters, look no further than Sendy. It's a PHP and MySQL based app that'll run on your own servers, and it shouldn't be any more difficult to setup than a new WordPress install. Once it's up and running, you can use it to create rich email newsletters with your own templates, and can use autoresponders to automatically send emails.

What's more, you can setup multiple brands inside your Sendy account. That'll let you send emails to all the list you need for multiple products or companies. You can even white label Sendy, give your clients access, and host your own email sending service for each of them. Sendy might not just save you money on sending emails; it might make you money, too.

Sendy Pricing: $59 for a Sendy license, then around $0.0001 per email sent via Amazon SES

Although Sendy isn't currently integrated with Zapier, you can use Zapier's MySQL integration to connect to its database and integrate it with other apps

Sendwithus

While not a self-hosted app, Sendwithus is an email app designed to let you send emails from your own app, using the emails sending service of your choice. Instead of building email features into your own app or site, Sendwithus gives your team one place to manage your email templates, organize and sort your contacts, then trigger new emails via a CURL or API call. You can use Amazon SES, Postmark, SendGrid, Mandrill and more to send your messages, then track their stats and more in your Sendwithus dashboard.

It's designed for transactional and other drip emails, but Sendwithus could also be a great way to send out email updates from your blog and more. You'll be able to trigger emails to go out automatically whenever you publish—or make them work however you want. It's an easy way to send emails via an email sending service and integrate emails deeply into your app, while still having the convenience of beautiful email interface.

Sendwithus Pricing: Free for sending unlimited emails to up to 1,000 contacts per month; from $79/month for up to 10,000 contacts, plus email sending charges from your email service

Zapier support coming soon

Django Drip

For an email app you can tweak and integrate into your own apps even further, there's Django Drip. An open-source project from our own Zapier dev team, Django Drip is designed to make it easy to send automated emails to your users. But it can also send an email to everyone in a list whenever you want, making it a great tool to send email newsletters to all of your users.

Then, if you still want to avoid the problems of sending the emails from your own server, you can setup Django to send them via Amazon SES, Mandrill, Sendgrid, Mailgun and more.

Django Drip Pricing: Free

Integrate and Automate Your Email Marketing App

Now that you've picked out great email newsletter software, it's time to get it working with the rest of your apps. There's no reason to hand-copy your contacts into your email lists or export your email lists to your CRM later. Instead, app automation tool Zapier can tie all of your apps together, making sure everyone gets added to your email lists and more.

Here are some of the best ways to automate your email newsletters.

Gather Subscribers from Everywhere

New contacts can come from anywhere. You might have a form you're already using to collect email addresses, or a spreadsheet where you list new customers. Perhaps you have a landing page to gather interest in your upcoming product. Or, you might just want to add everyone who emails you about a certain topic.

These integrations will get you started:

- Add Wufoo signups to an AWeber Mailing List

- Add Google Contacts contacts to MailChimp Automatically

- Add contacts to a Vision6 list from a Google Sheet

- Save Unbounce Leads to GetResponse

Add Customers to Your Email Lists

Customers are the best people to add to your email lists. They've just bought your product, and now you can use your email lists to teach them how to use it or let them know about upcoming promotions and training sessions. Just let Zapier copy their email address to your newsletter, and add an autoresponder to get them up to speed quickly.

- Automatically Subscribe PayPal Customers to a MailChimp List

- Create Mad Mimi Customers from Gumroad Sales

- Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

Welcome New Subscribers

Your best opportunity to engage with your subscribers is right when they first sign up. That's why so many email newsletter apps include autoresponder features, which let you setup an automated queue of messages to go out to new subscribers.

But if you already have a drip email app you love—or would rather use an even more personal touch and reach out from your personal email account—you can use Zapier to hook your newsletter to your drip or email app and automate the process.

- Welcome New AWeber Subscribers with a Personal Email

- Add MailChimp Subscribers to Drip

Publish Your Newsletter

Many email newsletter apps let you share your posts on Twitter and Facebook, but you can do more. You could use Zapier's WordPress integration to send your email newsletters to your blog as a draft posts, or you could publish your emails on any social network—including LinkedIn.

- Share Your MailChimp Newsletter on LinkedIn Automatically

Move Subscribers to New Lists

Run more than one newsletter, or started a new newsletter that you'd like to jumpstart with your existing contacts? Then you can add contacts to both of them at once, just by having Zapier copy their contact info over to your other list.

- Copy MailChimp subscriber to new list

- Copy a Vision6 contact you add to one list to another list

Market Your Events

Events take a lot of work, so don't waste time sending out manual emails to invite people to your events. You can integrate your event platform with Zapier, to have your email form contacts added to your event automatically so you don't have to make a new signup form just for your event. Or, you can have meeting attendees added to your email newsletter if that'd work better.

Then, once you're done, you can put the video of your event online and add its viewers as new email subscribers as well. That way, your event will still be bringing in new contacts long after it's finished.

- Use an AWeber Form for GoToWebinar Webinars

- Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor list

- Add Your Wistia video visitors to a Mailchimp list

Integrate with Your CRM

CRMs are great tools to keep up with all of your contacts, track everything you know about them, and make sure you keep your marketing wheels spinning. Might as well market to your contacts with your email newsletter at the same time. Just connect your CRM to your newsletter app with Zapier, and have it send all of your new contacts—or, perhaps, just ones who have a certain tag added to their account—to your email newsletter.

- Add a new Intercom user to AWeber

- Add a New Highrise Contact to a MailChimp Mailing List

- Send Capsule CRM contacts to Campaign Monitor

Or, perhaps you're getting people to subscribe to your newsletter first, and then want to add those contacts to your CRM. That's the best option if you're using a form in your email app to add subscribers. And it, too, is simple with Zapier. Just have your new list subscribers copied over to your CRM, and you can easily follow up with them later.

- Create Nimble Contacts From MailChimp Subscribers

- Create OnePage CRM Contacts from Constant Contact

Conclusion

From simple ways to send email updates to advanced marketing tools that'll manage your contacts, automate marketing, and send email updates, there's email newsletter apps of all shapes and sizes. Hopefully this list has helped you find a few that look like they'll work for your business. Give them a try, then pick the one that ends up fitting your needs the best and start sending the email updates you've been waiting for.

Next

Now that you've picked out the perfect app to send your emails, you'll need some people to send your emails to. In the next chapter, we'll look at tips to help you grow your email lists, along with ways to automate your email lists and ensure your messages don't get marked as spam.

Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Newspaper picture by Mick Backer via Flickr

Chapter 3: Grow Your Email List

How to Get Subscribers, Organize Lists and Follow Spam Laws

Email matters.

"People don’t change their email addresses," notes New York Times best-selling author Jon Acuff. "Facebook, Twitter, Google+, people join and drop that pretty often. But changing your email address is a hassle. That’s why you still have friends with AOL and Hotmail accounts."

Acuff goes so far as to call his past lack of attention to building his email list the "biggest social media mistake" he's ever made. It's for good reason, too: email proves again and again it's the best way to engage customers, blog readers, fans and others. Even with the deluge of social media options, email maintains the best response rates.

That's why you need to start an email list, grow it, and optimize it for your needs. Here's everything you need to get started.

The Email Advantage

One of the reasons for this is the amount of time your followers have to engage with email. According to research by social media analytics company Wisemetrics, the total life of a Facebook post is only around four and a half hours, and the life of a Tweet is just over an hour.

But email? Email takes 12 days for its open rates to drop off that much.

Moreover, engagement as a percentage of your audience is much higher through email. When you put a Facebook post in front of 5,000 people, 75% or more of them won’t see it at all unless you're paying for a promoted post. It’s even worse on Twitter, where less than 10% of your audience is likely seeing each Tweet because of the number of tweets in their feed each day.

Email marketing is your best bet. So if you're not already, it's time to take advantage of this effective marketing channel. To help you do so, this post breaks down 12 ways you can utilize an email list, the simplest steps to start building a list, and 17 ideas for rapidly growing that list. Let's get started.

In this Chapter:

- 12 Ways to Utilize an Email List

- 3 Steps to Start an Email List

- 17 Ways to Rapidly Grow an Email List

- Optimize and Segment Your Email Lists

12 Ways to Utilize an Email List

Email lists can easily be boring if they only feature your company updates or holiday sales. Plus, they're far too much trouble if you have to write an extensive newsletter each time you want to send out an update.

Emails lists can be far more versatile than that. Here are some of the best ways you can use your email list to engage your audience and keep them excited that they signed up for your emails. Each of them may not work for your business, but even a few of them can go a long ways towards making your emails interesting and easier to send.

1. Share New Content

Your audience want to hear from you. That's why they subscribed to your email list in the first place. But you don't have to create content just for your emails; you can send them the content you're already creating.

So if you have a blog, YouTube channel, or anywhere else that you're publishing relevant content, consider sending it to your subscribers. For example, you could send them your latest blog posts, infographics about your industry, videos of your product walkthroughs or conferences, or case studies about how people are using your product. Or, if you have new helpful documentation, consider sending it as well. And if you have too many things to share, you could bundle them together in one email, or spread them out over time.

Here at Zapier, the majority of the marketing emails we send out fall in this category. We've se tup email lists for our blog and app updates page (pictured), and send out messages whenever we publish something. That way, our fans can keep up to date with the latest things at Zapier and hopefully learn something new, while our team makes content that's great for everyone—not just for our email audience.

2. Provide Company Updates

If people took the time to sign up for your emails, they want to know about any major changes in your product or service. This is especially true if you’re working on anything that’s evolving rapidly, like a software startup with an app that has notable changes and improvements from month to month.

Sending occasional updates to your subscribers about what you’ve recently changed and improved is a good way to keep them in the loop and engaged with your company, and keep yourself accountable to your users. It doesn't even have to be that hard; the Pushbullet team, in the example above, just sent a simple email out to let people know about their latest app releases.

3. Give Access to Exclusive Content

Instead of sending out content that you’ve publicly published, try sending your email subscribers content that’s exclusively for them and isn’t found anywhere else.

By doing this, you create a special bond with your readers. They know that they’re getting content special to them, and that you aren’t just giving it away to the masses. In addition, you have an attractive offer on your site—visitors should sign up not only to be alerted of new posts, but to get special access to content that you don’t share elsewhere.

One popular writer who’s built a massive email list this way is Ryan Holiday, who has over 35,000 people signed up for his monthly reading recommendations. It’s a simple plain-text email, as in the screenshot above, with the best content he's read that month paired with short summaries of what you’ll get from each piece. He only sends this to his email list and doesn't publish it on his blog or anywhere else.

By doing this, Holiday builds his brand as someone who reads a lot, and as someone who cares about others’ self education through books.

4. Collect Product Feedback

It’s impossible to predict what will succeed in the market and what won’t. That impossibility is what’s made The Lean Startup approach so popular, since it emphasizes constant testing and getting feedback as you develop your product to make sure it’s aligning with consumer desires.

You can use your email list to move through product ideas quickly without ever having to invest in building them. To do so, put together a document outlining what you plan on building, and then send it to your email list. This strategy will work well your first year in business—as your email list will likely be smaller—but beyond that, you’ll need to segment it into different groups in order to connect with your most dedicated users.

Marketer, blogger and founder of Videofruit Bryan Harris used this tactic to validate an idea of his and make over $40,000 on it. Instead of building something and trying to force people to buy it, he simply asked his email subscribers what they were most interested in and then he delivered.

5. Source Content Topics

Beyond figuring out what type of product would be best for your followers, you can also determine what type of content they're most excited about. This could be future blog posts, videos you record, eBooks and PDFs you put together, or even podcasts.

Tim Ferriss, creator of the “4-Hour” book series and author of a popular self-improvement blog, uses his email list to figure out the best guests for his popular podcast “The Tim Ferriss Show.” When he emails his readers about a new podcast release, there are two calls to action:

- Listen to the podcast:

- or Tell Ferriss who you want him to interview next:

By doing this, he makes sure he’s interviewing individuals his audience genuinely wants to hear from and discussing topics that are of interest to his listeners.

6. Help Launch a Product

You don’t have to stop at the ideation phase. After you’ve validated an idea with your email list, you can also use that same list to help you launch a product by putting it in front of as many people as possible.

Your email subscribers already like what you’re creating, and they’ll be the most likely to buy from you. Don’t be afraid to try to sell them something that they could benefit from, especially if you were involving them in the ideation and testing phase of developing the product.

Brennan Dunn, founder of Planscope and creator of Double Your Freelancing, used this technique to re-launch his already successful book “Double Your Freelancing Rate” and make over $31,000 on it. A big part of that involved segmenting his email list based on his most engaged readers, giving them a ton of free content, and then making a hard sell at the end.

7. Strengthen Loyalty with Early Access

This method falls between sharing specialized content and sharing your existing content. A very simple way to prioritize your email subscribers is to give them early access to anything you post or create, and to give them an extra behind the scenes look at creating it.

To do this, publish your content, then delay promoting it until you’ve given your email list an hour or two to peruse it. On top of that, you can throw in some more information that’s not included in the post, such as downloads you’re employing as lead magnets, or transcripts of interviews. Or, if you're creating software, you can give your subscribers beta access to your app, as the Duo team did in the email above.

One example of this is the Groove blog, which is focused on the helpdesk software maker's journey from $0 to $500,000 a month in revenue. They write about all of their lessons along the way, and when you sign up for their emails you get access to posts an hour before they’re promoted to the public.

8. Keep Your Community Engaged

If your site operates primarily as a community, it can be hard to keep people coming back day after day sometimes. It’s no fault of yours—people just forget, which is why email is such a good way to re-engage them and let them know about important things they might have missed.

One startup that’s leveraging this is Product Hunt. Product Hunt encourages its community to post products they find, and then the members of the community vote up the products they think are the coolest. But here’s the kicker: a product can only be on Product Hunt for one day, so you need to check it frequently or you’ll miss something.

Product Hunt makes this easy, though. At the end of each day they send out an email with the top five or ten “hunts” from that day so you don’t have to keep checking the site. It’s information their users asked for, making it non-intrusive, and it’s a reliable way to keep their users engaged.

9. Kick Off Promotions

Aside from your regular email marketing, you may have bigger promotions or marketing campaigns that you want to involve your subscribers in.

At Zapier, we did a "28 Apps in 28 Days" campaign last year where throughout the month of February we added 28 new integrations. By having an active email list we were able to quickly promote it to our existing fans, who in turn helped share it with other people they knew.

Another example is through giveaways. Giveaways have become a popular method for growing your email list recently, and that’s not without good cause. Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, for example, grew his email list by nearly 200,000 people with a single giveaway.

One of the biggest contributors to having his giveaway go viral, according to Flynn, was the fact that he already had a good number of people on his email list, and those people helped spark the initial sharing.

If you want to run any sort of campaign or promotion, having a good starting point in your email list is important.

10. Build a Product Around an Email List

For some companies, the email list isn’t just nice-to-have: it’s the core of the product. These companies usually have fast moving inventory that they need to tell their customers about quickly, and people who are joining their email list are expecting to be sent opportunities that they’ll have a limited amount of time to act on.

One example of this is the startup Dollar a Day. The premise is simple: you sign up, they bill you $30 every month, and then they donate a dollar every day to a different charity in your name. They'll then email you with info about the non-profit your dollar went to that day.

Alternately, a popular way to monetize blogs is to offer an exclusive newsletter for subscribers. Stratechery, a site by Ben Thompson with analysis about technology, offers an email subscription with an in-depth look at the important tech trends of that day. The content that's on the website is free; it's the emails that people are paying for.

If you’re selling something that customers will only have a short time to act on, or providing time sensitive and quickly changing information, then building your product around a strong email list could be an advantage.

11. Distribute Special Offers

Whether you're selling physical goods, digital downloads, or services, having an email list is a powerful way to drive more sales from past customers by sending them coupons and special offers.

One way of doing this is to send out offers around the holidays. You could have different coupons or relevant goods that you put on sale during that time period, and then let the members of your email list know about it.

Or if you want to be more advanced, you can send emails to different parts of your email list based on what they bought in the past. If you have two products that complement each other, then you should let someone know about the other one once they buy one.

You could even have a special promotion setup for people who've signed up for your emails but haven't purchased anything from you yet, such as the email from Uber above. Just setup an email automation that waits long enough to give the user a chance to buy, and then send an email to tempt them to reconsider your products.

12. Promote Upcoming Events

An email list is also a great way to build an offline community. If you have a list of subscribers interested in something very specific, maybe you sell badminton gear, you can let your subscribers know about upcoming events, such as a national tournament, that might be relevant to them.

This also gives you a chance to meet your customers in person and get valuable feedback from them. If they’re passionate about your product or service, then they’re most likely excited to meet you, too. So speaking with them at an event can help turn them into even bigger promoters of your brand, as well.

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3 Steps to Start an Email List

Now that you have some ways to use your email lists, it's time to start building your list so you can start sending marketing emails. If you’ve never set up an email list for marketing purposes, this next section will help take you from zero subscribers to collecting sign-ups as fast as possible. There are only three steps:

1. Set up an email marketing tool

2. Start collecting email addresses

3. Embed an email signup form on your site

But before we get started, let’s define three terms you’ll be seeing throughout the rest of this post.

Key Email List Terms

Opt-In - This refers to the process of a reader or buyer to confirm that they want to receive your email newsletter, either by clicking a button—such as the "Let's Go!" button below—to sign up, indicating that they want to receive emails from you in a form, or checking a box to receive your emails when they're signing up for your app or service.

Double Opt-In - This is the process whereby someone signs up on your site, and then they receive an email asking them to confirm that they want to sign up. Subscribers will only receive your emails after they click the link in that confirmation email. This email is important since it verifies that they do actually want to sign up with that email address, and it can help prevent you from getting in trouble for sending spam.

Welcome Email - This is usually the final step in the sign-up funnel, where you send your new subscriber an automated email welcoming them to your list. If you’re going to send them a piece of bonus content or a special offer, this is a good time to do it, too.

With that out of the way, it's time to start your email list. Here's how:

1. Set Up an Email Marketing Tool

Email marketing software makes it easy to manage an email list as it stores your subscribers' email addresses, helps you segment them into different groups, and makes sure that the emails you’re sending are spam-law compliant. Popular email marketing apps are likely familiar names to you, such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and AWeber, but to manage your own list, you could use one the over two-dozen email marketing apps we wrote about recently.

For a short tutorial on how to get started, let's take a look at setting up an email list with MailChimp.

First, you need to register for an account which should only take a few minutes. You will have to provide a physical address that represents you and/or your business in order to comply with spam laws, which we'll discuss more later.

Next you have to create a “list.” A list is a collection of email addresses, and you need at least one set up before you can start collecting email addresses on your site. Just click “Create A List” or the corresponding button on your provider.

Then add the information you want your list to contain:

Finally, if you already have some subscribers, you can import them directly from a CSV. Click on the tab at the top of your list to “Add Subscribers” then select the “Import” option.

On this page you’ll be able to import existing subscribers from a CSV or TXT file, as well as from many other apps.

Once that’s done you’ll be set to get started. Now it’s time to start collecting email addresses.

2. Start Collecting Email Addresses

MailChimp and other providers give you an easy way to get started collecting email addresses using their sign-up forms. A sign-up form is a simple questionnaire that you can send or point people to so they can join your email list, or that you can embed right on your site if you want them to be able to sign up there.

First, you need to decide the information you want collect and then design your signup form. After you made your list in MailChimp in the previous step, you should have ended up on this page which has a link to "Signup forms".

Click on the link, and you’ll be taken to a page where you can select one of a few different types of forms. Go with “General forms” for now.

Here you can design the form, remove fields you don’t need, and add new ones with information you want to use.

Once you have it looking how you want, you can grab the URL at the top to share with your potential subscribers. You can just share this link on your site, social network accounts, or blog posts for the absolute easiest way to get signups on your list.

3. Embed an Email Signup Form on Your Site

If you want to go a step beyond just having a link to your signup form, then you can embed the form directly in your site.

To do this, go back to the “signup forms” tab on MailChimp and select “Embedded forms” instead of “General forms.” Other email marketing tools should have a similar option.

Here you can design the form just as you did before, but instead of designing it for its own independent page, you’re designing it as a block that you can drop directly into your site. With that in mind, be sure to choose complimentary color schemes and typefaces that will blend in with the rest of your site.

Once you have it looking the way you want, copy the code from the box at the bottom right and paste it wherever you want a signup form on your site. If you don’t have access to the code for the site, or aren’t sure how to edit it, you may want to ask a developer for help.

Now you can start collecting email addresses anywhere on your site. But before you start emailing your new subscribers, let’s make sure you’re not breaking any laws.

How to Avoid Breaking Email Laws

By now, you know how you're going to utilize your email list, you're using an email marketing tool, and you have an email signup form embedded on your site.

Before we move on to sharing other ways to grow your email list, you'll want to make sure you don’t get into any trouble with your newfound power.

Most countries, including the US, have strict laws determining what you can and cannot do with email marketing. In the U.S., the “CAN-SPAM” act dictates what you can and cannot do, and it’s important that you understand it so you can stay compliant.

Here's the most important parts of the CAN-SPAM laws, with an image showing how we follow these regulations:

- You must include a link to unsubscribe from your emails—it's common to include this in the email footer.

- If someone submits an unsubscribe request, you must honor it within 10 days—your email marketing software should take care of this for you.

- You cannot lie in the “From” line—so, no, you can’t pretend to send emails from the White House.

- You must include a physical address representing the company or the sender—it's common to state this in the email footer, too.

- You cannot send email to “harvested” email addresses—don't purchase email lists from a third party.

For a more detailed overview, read the FTC's article, "CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business." There are also separate laws for Canada, The European Union, Australia, and many other countries.

This is one of the great features about service providers like MailChimp and AWeber: they force you to comply with the law before sending any emails, so you’re protected. If you’re sending through a good email marketing tool, not lying about who you are, and not importing harvested email lists, you should be fine.

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17 Ways to Rapidly Grow Your Email List

Now that you know how to start gathering email addresses and the laws you need to be following with your new powers, let's look at some more creative and advanced ways you can boost those numbers. We'll do this by breaking list building opportunities down by where they occur:

- On your site

- Off your site

- Offline

- Elsewhere

Increase Signups On Your Site

1. Add More Signup Forms

We covered the basic method for embedding a signup form in your site, so now the question is where else can you embed signup forms that would make sense? You want to have them appear on your site frequent enough that they’re hard to miss accidentally, but not so frequent that your readers are annoyed by them.

Here are a seven places you could add a signup form:

1. The end of every blog post as a final call to action

2. Page footer so that it’s at the very bottom of every page, as well

3. Page header so that there’s a call to action at the top of post as well

4. Sidebar

5. About page

6. Contact Us page

7. Feature box or welcome bar at the top of every page or post

Another option is to use app integration tool like Zapier to start pulling in email addresses from other forms you already have set up. For example, you could add people who complete your “Contact Us” or “Sign Up” forms and also opt-in to receiving your marketing emails as part of that form. Just be sure you have a check box in that form to signup for your newsletters, or use double opt-in.

Here are three Zapier integrations with popular online form software and email marketing apps that could help you grow your email list. To find your tool of choice, visit the Zapier app directory.

- Create MailChimp subscribers from Typeform entries

- Add Wufoo form entries to a Vision6 contact list

- Create Infusionsoft Contacts via Unbounce

2. Add a Pop-Up Signup Form

The jury is still out on if pop-up forms are worth the annoyance or not, but it's clear they effectively yield signups. One way to get started with pop-ups is to install a tool from AppSumo called SumoMe, which will let you quickly add three different types of popups to your site.

Getting started with pop-ups, whether your site is uses WordPress or is custom built, is a quick process using SumoMe's tools.

- If You’re Using WordPress - This only takes a minute. Log-in to your WordPress Admin, go to “Plugins” and then click “Add new.” Search for “SumoMe,” then install and active it.

- If You’re Using Anything Besides WordPress - First, go to SumoMe’s Instructions Page and grab the code for putting in the of your HTML. Then either paste it into the section of your page yourself, or ask one of the developers on your team to do it for you.

Once it’s installed, go to your site’s homepage and click on the badge in the upper right.

This will let you manage SumoMe on top of your site, without having to log in elsewhere.

You have three options for adding list building popups:

- List Builder - The typical email signup prompt that you’re used to

- Scroll Box - Creates a more subtle pop-up as you scroll down the page

- Smart Bar - Small call to action that stays at the very top of your page

They’re all effective at growing your list, but there are trade offs. List Builder is the most intrusive, but also the most effective. Smart Bar is the least intrusive, but also the easiest to miss. Scroll Box is right in the middle. It’s up to you how many of them and which you want to use.

Once you’ve picked one (or a few), you need to set it up with your email marketing tool. With the setting panel open, click on “services” on the left bar, select your email marketing tool, and then follow the instructions to get it set up.

And there you have it: you’re now building an email list passively as new people show up on your site.

3. Catch Visitors on the Way Out

When I visit a website that has a pop-up asking me to signup for their email list is, my first thought is "How do I know I want to sign up? You won't let me read your content."

What if instead of immediately showing someone a pop-up asking for their email, you did it on the way out? Services like Exit Monitor will watch your readers' mouse movements and when they get too close to that "X" at the top of the screen, Exit Monitor will bring up a call to action to sign up for your mailing list. Alternately, you can use the first tip and put a signup box at the bottom of your posts for a similar effect.

You have a much better chance of selling them at the end than at the beginning. Having a pop-up right away is like showing up at a first date and immediately pulling out your calendar to schedule the next one. You don't even know if you're into each other yet!

4. Show a Subscribe Page Before You Show Content

If you go to the blogs of Noah Kagan or Andrew Chen, you’ll notice something different. Instead of immediately taking you to their blog content, you’re greeted with a picture of them and a reason you should sign up for their mailing list.

According to Kagan, his signup rate increased to 14% on his homepage once he implemented that big call to action.

If you’re dedicated to building your list quickly and you have something compelling to offer to visitors, then you might consider changing your blog index page into a giant call to action. If you’re on WordPress, there’s a simple plugin that lets you do it. If you’re not, then you’ll have to custom build it.

5. Get Email Subscribers With Your By-Line

One option that can have a smaller but meaningful impact on your signups is to add a call to action directly to your author by-line. Your byline is the small line of text at the top of every post that tells the reader whose writing they’re reading. It’s going to be on all of your posts, so you may as well optimize it.

James Clear uses this on his site by have a subtle call to action right after his name, suggesting readers sign up for his newsletter.

When they click it, they’re taken to his dedicated newsletter page where they can sign up for his regular updates.

Doing it on your own is tricky, but Bryan Harris from Videofruit recorded a video that has a section explaining how to do it. Skip to 9:55 if you just want that part, but really, the whole video is valuable.

6. Lead Magnets: Use Incentives to Capture Email Addresses

Better than just asking someone to sign up is giving them a reason to do so. With so many sites asking for peoples’ email addresses today, many of us are protective of giving out our email address since we’re worried about getting spammed.

To reassure your readers that you’re providing high quality content in return for signing up, you can provide a “lead magnet” for their email address, which is just any bonus that they get in return for joining your email address.

Here are some commons examples of lead magnets:

Create an Email Course

Your readers want to learn from you, and what better way to help them and prove your value than a carefully built email course introducing them to the core of what you know and how they can apply it?

Brennan Dunn does this with his free “Charge What You're Worth” course.

You sign up, he sends you some very well thought out emails on how to boost your rate as a freelancer, and then at the end he asks you to pay for his much more in-depth “Double Your Freelancing Rate” course.

After providing that much good content for free, why wouldn't you sign up?

And setting one of your own up is fairly simple. Just create a new list in your email provider of choice, write an email series, then set it to run automatically for new people who join the course. If you want to learn more, you can read about it in our article on building drip campaigns and using automated emails.

Just make sure you have a good call to action at the end of the course.

Embed a Video

One effective method for incentivizing people to sign up for your email list is to give them access to a video in return. You can do this two ways, you could send a link to an unlisted video on YouTube once they sign up, or you could just host the entire process right within a page or blog post.

To do it the second way, you'll want to upload your video to Wistia, which offers two benefits:

1. Your videos will be backlinked to your site when they’re embedded, which means that watching the videos helps your own site’s SEO. With YouTube, when people watch your videos, it helps YouTube's SEO.

2. You can add a call to action at the end of the video to sign up, or better, you can add one to the beginning that they have to enter if they want to watch your video.

Offer PDFs, Spreadsheets and Other Lead Magnets

Another incentive you could give to your readers downloadable documents that expand on what you discussed in the post. For example, the PDF could simply be an easy-to-print version of the post. You could also take a few extra steps and create a spreadsheet template or in-depth how-to guide that would help your reader execute the tactic you outlined in your post.

To employ this method, you have a few options. You could get set up with Unbounce, which lets you create separate landing pages that you can use to offer a bonus when people sign up. Or you could host a PDF on Gumroad and then use their widgets tool to embed the sale right on your site, even if you’re giving away the PDF for free. Just remember to set up a Zapier integration to connect your email marketing tool with Gumroad.

A third option that’s especially good for WordPress users is Easy Digital Downloads which embeds in any WordPress site and lets you sell (or give away) digital goods on your site, without having to pay a dime.

Lastly, you could do something as simple as promising to send them a PDF when they join your list. To do this, create the PDF, put it in your Dropbox or Box folder, and then copy the sharing link. Then when someone signs up, include that link in their welcome email so they get it immediately.

Supply Coupon Codes

Another lead magnet that you can use to incentivize signups is to provide coupon codes that give your signups a discount on a service that would be relevant to them. This will vary based on your site, but if you can identify a highly-desired service that your readers would want to save money on, you could drive a lot of new signups. It could even be your own product.

For example, marketer Joshua Earl wrote one of the emails for the Email1k email marketing course led by Noah Kagan. In the email, Earl explains how to set up a viral giveaway using KingSumo, and then at the end of the post he tells you that you can get 50% off of KingSumo by joining his email list. It’s a perfectly timed incentive that earns him new readers, and saves his readers just under $100.

7. Host a Giveaway

Giveaways have become easier and more popular recently thanks to the WordPress plugin KingSumo by Noah Kagan and the others at AppSumo.

KingSumo incentivizes people who join the giveaway to share it with their friends by giving you two or more extra entries (usually three) per referral you get to the giveaway. So if Zapier is giving away something cool, and I find it, and then I get you to sign up for it too, my number of entries just went from 1 to 4 while you only have 1.

Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income did a giveaway when KingSumo was in its early days and he grew his email list by 200,000 people! And that was for a prize only worth $60.

The key to this is:

1. Getting your giveaway in front of as many people initially as possible, either through an existing email list or through outreach

2. Making sure that you're giving away something people actually want

All you need to do it is have something to give away, the KingSumo plugin, or to build a custom giveaway using something like Harry's open source referral contest code.

Increase Signups Off Your Site

So far we've offered ideas for ways you can collect email addresses on your site, but why stop there? These ideas will help you get started collecting email addresses from other sites as well.

8. Get Signups from a Tweet

The idea is simple. When someone shares your content on Twitter, you follow up with them immediately suggesting they sign up for your email list.

It works because they’ve already demonstrated that they’re interested in what you have to say, enough that they would share it with their followers. And since you’re reaching out to them personally asking them to sign up, it’s more effective than a generic pop up.

If you’re interested in setting it up yourself, check out a guide to setting up these Twitter Lead Generation cards for free on the Moz blog.

9. Guest Post and Offer a Bonus

Guest posting is one of the best way to drive traffic back to your blog, but why stop with traffic? The marketing tactic can also be an effective way to generate new sign ups on other peoples’ sites, without readers having to come back to yours.

Bryan Harris demonstrates this in “A Tale of Two Launches: One Made $43,380 and the Other -$1,385” on the company blog of LeadPages. In the piece, he explains why email list building is important, then at the end he has a call to action telling you that he’ll send you a video on how he grows his email list if you sign up for updates.

When you click it that button, instead of taking you to his site it just gives you a popup right on the site so you don’t have to go anywhere, which LeadPages would appreciate since they don’t want to drive traffic away from their site.

10. Publish Slideshares

Presentations that speak for themselves are a fantastic way to convey large amounts of information, especially when it benefits from visual supplementation.

Once you've created a great looking presentation (or "deck") you can upload it to SlideShare and share it with the world. But that’s not enough—you also need the Slideshare to convert.

You can include hyperlinks in your presentation and SlideShare retains them. That means that you can include a call to action with a link to your site where they can subscribe; a great way to convert readers at the end of looking through your presentation when they’re already primed and appreciative of you.

For example, in Zapier’s Slideshare on the 35 best CRM apps, each tool has a link to read more about it on our site where the reader can also signup.

11. Subscribe Your Buyers

If you sell digital or physical goods with the help of a service like PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, or Bigcommerce, you want to make sure that your customers' email addresses are making their way onto your list so you can let them know about future products, sales, or info related to what they just purchased.

The easiest way to do that is through Zapier, which integrates with most eCommerce software and email marketing tools, and can send the email addresses of your buyers directly from one to the other.

To be safe though, you should check the option for “double opt-in” in the Zap, since only getting a single opt-in (from the sale) is not considered a good practice in email marketing, and could lead to spam reports against you.

- Automatically Subscribe PayPal Customers to a MailChimp List

- Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

- Nurture Bigcommerce Customers via Email with HubSpot

Increase Signups Offline

12. Bring in Business Card Contacts

FullContact is an app that lets you take a picture of a business card, then have a person—not a computer—translate it into contact data, which is then added to your FullContact network management dashboard.

From there you can add them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or send them an email. But maybe you’re going to an event and collecting a large number of business cards which you want to add to your email list.

Instead of doing it manually, you can set up an easy integration through Zapier to send some or all of your new FullContact contacts immediately into your list manager of choice.

13. Pull in Event Attendees

Another situation you don’t want to miss out capitalizing on is making sure that all of your event attendees make it on to your email list so you can let them know about future events, as well as send them follow-ups from the event.

If you use Eventbrite, then you can set it up to push your attendees straight to your mailing list through Zapier, using an integration like the one below.

- Add new Eventbrite attendees to a MailChimp list to improve event communication

- Add Eventbrite attendees as contacts in Infusionsoft

- Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor list

Or, check your email newsletter tool for a mobile app to add signups from a tablet at your event. Many email apps offer such tools. If yours doesn't, you could have a tablet open to your website's form instead, as an easy way to get signups at a booth or promotion display.

Increase Signups Elsewhere

14. Create Your Own Email List Additions With Zapier

So far we’ve covered ways that you can use parts of your site, and other peoples’ site, to add new email addresses to your list. But what about adding them from odd sources such as your email client or CRM? Here are a few ways you can use Zapier to build up your list.

Gmail Labels

If you have a certain label in Gmail that you want to use for adding people to your mail list, you can set up an integration between Gmail and your email marketing tool so that whenever you add a certain label to an email, the person who sent it gets added to your email list.

CRM Entries

Whether you use Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Podio, Pipedrive, or any of Zapier’s other CRM integrations, you can quickly set it up to add any new CRM contact to your email list, using an integration like this one between Salesforce and MailChimp.

- Send Highrise Contacts to Campaign Monitor

- Create New Constant Contact Subscriber from Capsule CRM Contact

- Send Pipedrive Contacts to Mailchimp Subscribers

Google Contacts

Another option is to add anyone who you record in Google Contacts straight to your email list. This works well for more personal email lists, or if you keep all of your work contacts within a section of Google Contacts. If you use MailChimp, this integration will let you have Google Contacts added automatically.

Webinar Attendees

If you’re hosting webinars, you want to either add those people to an existing email list or to a new one specifically to people who are interested enough to come to your webinars. If you use this GoToWebinar and AWeber integration (or an integration with any other email marketing tool) it’ll be taken care of automatically for you.

15. Email Referrals

If you’re trying to get someone to sign up for your email list, the sell will be much easier from one of their friends than from you. Whenever someone signs up for your list, you should take the opportunity to ask them to refer you to one of their friends who might also be interested in the site.

You can create a hyperlink using a mailto: link, which then links whoever clicks on it to a pre-filled email. Now instead of having to type out why their friend should sign up for your course.

If you're having a hard time understanding what I mean by that, just click here to tell a friend about Zapier. Cool, right?

To do this, you create a mailto: hyperlink, but instead of just putting in an email address, you put in an entire email. This URL will look like it’s written in a different language, but there’s a method to the madness.

Then, you can take that to the next level. Instead of just asking for them to email a friend, you could ask them to email a friend with you CC'd or BCC'd in order to get some bonus!

To do it, you just need to make a “mailto:” link that looks something like this:

mailto:?BCC=nat.eliason@zapier.com&subject=I%20think%20you%20will%20like%20this&body=I%20just%20found%20this%20awesome%20website%20called%20Zapier%20for%20automating%20different%20services%20online.%0A%0ACheck%20it%20out%21%20http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zapier.com

You can change the “BCC” to be a “CC” or a “To” if you want, and then set the email address. Change the subject and body to whatever you want, but you’ll have to use the “URL encoding method”. If you’re not sure what all the %s and numbers mean, an article from W3Schools explains it all and makes it easy to create.

16. Text Messages

If you have a user group that meets in person, or just are discussing your product with someone in public, you may end up wanting to add someone to your email list while you're out without a simple way to do it.

You can write down their email and add them later, or you can tell them to go to your site and hope they sign up, but there's a better way. For that, all you need is a mobile phone with SMS and a Zapier account.

Use this integration you'll be using—replace MailChimp if you'd like. Then, you can create any mail-to address you want:

Then pick your email list, and put the body of the text as the email of the new subscriber.

Add this email as a contact on your phone:

And now anytime you text an email address to that contact, that new email address will be added to your email manager.

17. Your Email Signature

Last but not least, you can add a very simple call to action to your email signature that tells people in one line why they should sign up for your list, and is then hyperlinked to where they can sign up.

To do this in Gmail, go into your settings by clicking on the gear in the upper right.

Then scroll down to the signature section, type in what you want it to say, then add a hyperlink to your blog or signup form

Optimize and Segment Your Email Lists

So far we've just dumped all of your new signups into one email list, but that actually limits your marketing potential. Most email marketing tools will allow you to create “segments” or “groups” that break up your subscribers into different categories based on where they signed up, their demographic data, what they’re interested in, and more.

Harnessing this segmentation can drastically increase your open rates, since you can send emails that are specifically targeted to your readers' interests. That's what you'll learn in the next chapter, which includes a full guide on how to segment email lists.

Conclusion

"Your email list is the heart of your marketing strategy."

~ Marketer Greg Dineo

“Your email list is the heart of your marketing strategy," says marketer Greg Dineo on the KISSmetrics blog. "When you write a blog post, the people on your email list will be the first to read it. When you have a webinar, the people on your list will be the first to sign up. And, when you offer a new product, the people on your list will be the first to try it.”

Your email list members have the potential to be your biggest fans, your most loyal buyers, and your most reliable sources of feedback and traffic. But you have to start collecting them now.

If you haven’t started building your email list, go back to the beginning of the chapter and follow the steps to get set up collecting email addresses. If you’ve done the basics but aren’t using as many strategies as you could be, start incorporating some of the ones we talked about later in the article and see how they boost your sign-up rates.

Next

No matter which app you're using to send your emails, you'll want to make sure your emails are as effective as possible. For that, you'll want to A/B test your messages, as we'll look at in chapter 10, and you'll also want to segment your lists to make sure you're targeting the right people with the perfect message for them. That's what we'll look at in this next chapter.

Written by Nathaniel Eliason

Image credits: Envelope photo courtesy Erin Nekervis; BlackBerry photo courtesy Ian Lamont.

Chapter 4: How to Segment Email Lists for More Opens, Click-Throughs and Conversions

Reports of email's death are greatly exaggerated. Every month a new email-killing product comes along, and every month my Gmail inbox continues to swell with product updates, company news and coupon codes.

Heck, those email-killers use email to teach me how their apps work.

Take social media: it was supposed to supplant email as a marketing channel long ago. But email is almost 40% more effective than Facebook and Twitter for acquiring new customers. Twitter still emails me when I gain a new follower.

What makes email marketing so powerful? Some say that the secret sauce is list segmentation—the practice of dividing your email list into groups based on characteristics like interests and demographics.

Segmenting your email list helps you speak more intelligently and directly with your customers, giving them information that they want at the opportune time. And when you do it right, the payoff can be huge: MailChimp found that when their users segmented email lists based on data like location and job title, open rates increased by almost 19%, and click-through rates by almost 22% compared to non-segmented sends.

In this guide you'll learn what email list segmentation is, when you should do it, and how you can put it into action to power up your email marketing.

In this Chapter:

- What is List Segmentation?

- What You Need: The Basics

- How Will List Segmentation Help Me?

- Leveraging Data for Effective List Segmentation

- When Should I Segment My Email List?

- How Can I Start Segmenting My Email List?

What is List Segmentation?

Bob Belcher owns Bob's Burgers. Every day he serves customers with drastically different food preferences: vegetarians and bacon lovers; regulars looking for "the usual" and first-timers who might be overwhelmed by a massive menu.

Wouldn't it be nice if Bob knew every customer's preferences, background, and tastes when they walked in the door so he could provide each person with a customized menu? Meat-free offerings for vegetarian customers, a "greatest hits" menu for new diners, free sides for his best patrons, etc.

In reality, this strategy would be hard for Bob to pull off in his restaurant—soon he'd be buried in a mess of menus. But in email marketing, personalizing your customer's experience is much easier, and just as effective.

Email blasts that go out to your entire list might help some people, but others will be left confused and in the dark.

Personalization is the purpose of list segmentation: you slice your email list into segments based on what you know about each user—like their buying habits, familiarity with your company, and professional background—then you send each segment of people personalized information.

List segmentation puts unique content in front of unique customers, and that makes everybody happy.

The segments can be as large (for example, people who signed up for your site less than a day ago) or as small (for example, people who bought a specific product after discovering your site on Pinterest) as you want. But generally, the smaller they get, the more likely it is that the information you send will resonate with the recipient.

If you get your segments right, your users will receive relevant emails packed with information that they actually want. That personalization leads to more conversions, more purchases, and happier customers.

Note: In email marketing, you'll also hear the term "personalization" applied to the method of personalizing the subject line or salutation of an email by including the recipients' first or last name.

What You Need: The Basics

List segmentation might sound daunting. But don't panic: it's an evolving strategy that builds upon itself, and most email marketing tools are set up to handle multiple segments.

It doesn't take much to get started with email list segmentation if you're willing to put some effort into the planning process. Here's what you'll need at a basic level:

- User data that's tied to an email address - This data can be anything from someone's gender to their favorite soccer team. If your user data is sparse, no worries: you can collect information and build out user profiles as you go. Some email marketing apps will gather data for you, too, like the recipient's location and level of engagement.

- An email-sending tool - Preferably one that plays nicely with list segmentation, like MailChimp, AWeber, or Intercom (we'll discuss these more later).

- A way to organize your segments - In their purest form, segments are just email lists with acceptance criteria. Many email marketing apps will manage segment organization for you (some will even automatically sort your customers into segments), but you'll need a rough plan in place before assembling groups.

How Will List Segmentation Help Me?

List segmentation works because it provides an individualized experience via a mass medium. Email is unique because unlike other widespread communications—television, social media, radio—you can craft content for groups of users and deliver it in batches, instead of broadcasting generic content to everyone and hoping it appeals to a majority of your audience.

Targeted emails offer an ideal way to usher prospective customers through your sales cycle without a sky-high price tag or lengthy hands-on time. With the right segments, you can make it easy for customers to understand why they need your product, or what they should buy from you. Plus, accurate segmentation leads to improved click-through rates, conversions, and deliverability.

1. Increase Open Rates

It doesn't matter how compelling the content inside is: if people don't open your emails, they won't be buying what you're selling. Using list segmentation you can send tailored subject lines to specific groups, better enticing them to click.

Proof: Women's fashion site SwayChic segmented their email lists based on buying habits and high-engagement hours during the day, and they managed to increase open rates by 40%.

2. Increase Click-Through Rates

You can spend weeks A/B testing calls-to-action and email designs. But without relevant content, your email click-through rates will plummet faster than a skydiving elephant. List segmentation helps you send customers content that they actually want to see, click on, and interact with by organizing them into interest groups.

Proof: HubSpot used list segmentation as part of their marketing strategy to hit a 16.4% email click-through rate—that's 583% better than the 2.4% standard around the email marketing industry.

3. Increase Conversions

Don't make your customer think. When you hit the sweet spot with personalized content, a strong call-to-action, and a motivated customer, it should be a no-brainer next-step to hit "buy." List segmentation helps you put the right content in front of the right customers, removing as much resistance as possible.

Proof: Isotoner—famous for their gloves and slippers—increased their email marketing revenue by 7,000% by segmenting their list based on which products customers were looking at when they visited the site.

4. Decrease Unsubscribes

When someone unsubscribes from your mailing list, they're cutting off your direct line to their inbox. They're also opting out of a valuable marketing channel. So yeah, try to avoid that.

Think about why you unsubscribe from emails: for me, it's either that someone's flooding my inbox, or that the messages aren't relevant to me. List segmentation can help with both of those problems—it helps you control how often someone gets your emails, and what's in those emails, based on how they interact with your content.

Proof: Constant Contact polled people on why they unsubscribe from emails: 56% said because the content isn't relevant, 51% said because it wasn't what they expected.

To be balanced, though, MailChimp found that segmenting email lists actually increased unsubscribes. It usually wasn't by much—from anywhere between 0.071% and 0.986%—but the data was clear. Here's what the email giant had to say about the surprising results:

"We’re baffled as to why more people would unsubscribe from seemingly more relevant campaigns. We have some theories: Maybe the segmented campaigns were sent in addition to normal batch-and-blast campaigns, which resulted in annoying duplicate messages, or maybe the content was just too specific."

5. Avoid Spam Filters

An email never delivered is just as worthless as one never sent. And it's surprisingly easy to land in a junk folder: Email intelligence company Return Path estimated that 7.56% of emails in the U.S. hit spam filters. Legitimate companies face email deliverability issues every day—we're not just talking about Nigerian princes here.

Many senders hit spam filters because they send irrelevant content too often and to unengaged recipients. Using list segmentation, you can send personalized content that's less likely to annoy customers.

Proof: The team at OpenMoves segmented one client's email list into two groups: people who had and had not clicked on a campaign. They sent an email to the clickers, and nothing to the non-clickers. The results: deliverability improved from 90% to 95% instantly, helping them avoid spam blacklists.

Spam: Want to triple check that you're doing everything possible to avoid spam filters? Read up on Mailchimp's best practices for email deliverability, and the FTC's rules governing spam and the associated penalties.

6. Increase General Customer Happiness

Nobody likes generic emails; they're lazy, unhelpful, and a waste of inbox space. So by segmenting your email sends, you're saving your customer time and helping them discover products they'll love. And remember: a happy customer is a return customer.

Proof: The smile on your customer's face :-D

Leveraging Data for Effective List Segmentation

There are no hard-and-fast rules about what information you can and can't use for list segmentation. Really, any data that ties back to a specific email address could be a segment. Every company knows different things about their users based on the products that they offer—for example, at Zapier we know if someone manages their to-do list with Trello versus Google Tasks—but here are a few segment ideas to get you started.

Demographic Data

Demographic data includes any quantifiable characteristics of a person: age, gender, hometown, job, salary, and so on. These are your base-level segments—they help you group users together without getting granular over interests and past purchasing patterns.

But that doesn't mean demographic segmentation is ineffective. Just by segmenting their list into male and female customers, clothing brand Johnny Cupcakes saw a 42% jump in clickthrough rate, 123% more conversions, and a 141% increase in revenue for each email campaign. All that, using only two segments.

Try using these demographic groups to form an infrastructure for your list segmentation:

- Gender - Gap sells clothing for men and women, but they won't get me to bite if their emails are pushing sun dresses (my legs are a little hairy for that). Men and women shop differently, and your email marketing should reflect that.

- Where they live - When there's a new, popular restaurant in Portland, Maine, Yelp sends me an email about it. That's because Yelp knows that I live in Portland, and that I've rated restaurants around town. Segmenting your list by location helps you guess what a customer might be interested in, which creates value for the customer.

- Job title - Jack the intern might use your app as a "team member" for a one-off project. Jill the CTO might buy annual access for her entire team as the "account admin". You wouldn't give Jack and Jill the same sales pitch in person, so why should they get the same emails?

- Their chosen persona - The easiest way to understand your users: just ask. I told MLB.com that my favorite baseball team is the Minnesota Twins, so they send discount codes for Twins merchendise. They might get me to buy a new Twins jersey, but I'd never glance at a rival team's products. Segmenting by persona—like a favorite team, a job function, or a personal goal—helps your emails stay out of the trash bin.

Behavioral Data

Once you understand who's using or buying your product, try to figure out why and how. Are people sending it as a gift? Do they only use one section or feature on your site? Are they just interested in a single product line? You can use that data to send your customers relevant emails based on behavior. Try using these segments to target people based on their interests:

- What they do with your product - Knowing which features of your site someone uses most often gives you insight into their interests. At Zapier, we know who uses Evernote and who doesn't—we wouldn't send a lengthy email about our favorite Evernote Zaps to non-Evernote users, because it would be worthless to them. We want to send people tips about the apps they use with Zapier to maximize engagement.

- What they buy - This is the classic Amazon strategy: watch what your customers buy, and pitch them on similar products. The tough part here is determining which products are similar: Amazon might calculate that 63% of people who bought a breadbox also bought a toaster. So if someone buys a breadbox, Amazon tries to sell them a toaster, too. Segmenting by purchase habits doesn't require a complex algorithm, though: if a user purchased dark chocolate in the past, send them more email offers about dark chocolate.

- Free and paid users - Freemium services should always maintain separate segments for paying customers and users on the free plan. Non-paying users are free-game for email-based upgrade pitches. But once someone provides their credit card info, they don't want sales-focused emails—it's better to keep them engaged with your product so they stay in that paying customer group.

- When they last clicked on an email - Click frequency tells you who your most-engaged customers are, but it also tells you who doesn't want to be bothered. Using list segmentation, you can experiment with low engagement in a couple ways: by sending more emails to get the user involved, or fewer to avoid being annoying. Shopping site Fab actually opts users out of emails automatically if they haven't been interacting with the site—that's drastic, but it keeps their open rates up.

- When and how often they buy - Sorting customers based on when, not just what, they buy can help you determine a timeline for your email campaigns—you can create segments based on seasonal purchases, or specific data like the peak time of day for click-throughs on Wednesday . If I bought my mother-in-law a candle for Christmas three years running, Yankee Candle better be stuffing my inbox when December rolls around.

Customer Sign-Up Date

Each one of your customers is at a different point in your sales cycle—some are long-time users, others have no idea what you do. You need to communicate with these people differently. If you're explaining solar eclipses to a third grader and a graduate student at Harvard, would they get the same speech? Probably not.

Segmenting your list by how long someone has been a member of your site can help you gauge how familiar they are with your brand, what they already know, and what they still need to learn.

- Onboarding new users - Knowing when someone signed up for your site lets you start an onboarding process, or a walkthrough of how to use your app. Apps like Pinterest use onboarding emails to encourage new users to set up their profile and start pinning. This engages new users and gets them hooked while their interest is piqued.

- Rewarding your best customers - Ok, segmenting by how long someone has been a customer is usually more beneficial for app companies. But ecommerce sites can use these insights to thank long-time customers, or delight new ones. Simply sending a coupon code for someone's first purchase—or to celebrate the anniversary of their first purchase—can go a long way in retaining that customer.

Customer Email Client Data

More than 65% of emails are opened on smartphones first. The email marketing landscape is changing, and it's important to build campaigns around each customer's reading preferences.

To improve a customer's experience with your content, account for how and when they're opening your emails. Using list segmentation, you can create groups based on browsing devices and how often your customers use email.

- If they're browsing on mobile or desktop - Mobile phones and laptops provide two vastly different email-reading experiences. And while many brands have moved towards mobile apps and responsive websites, a survey from MarketingSherpa estimates that 49% of email marketers still don't segment their lists based on device habits. Consider sending mobile-focused customers a tweaked HTML version that's optimized for the smaller screen—you could even experiment with plain-text templates, which render natively based on device.

- When they say they want to receive emails - Instead of trying to pick the perfect send time out of thin air, just let your customers tell you when and how often they want to receive your emails. Ros Hodgekiss, community manager at Campaign Monitor, suggests asking your customers about their email preferences, and creating groups from there. "You can have your subscribers submit their email frequency preferences—either on subscribe, or later, via an email preference center or something similar. Once you have sufficient data, you can segment accordingly."

Pro Tip: Unsure where to start with mobile-optimized emails? Check out HubSpot's 5 tips to kickstart your responsive email designs.

When Should I Segment My Email List?

The short answer is: almost always. There are very few cases when you'll want to send out a mass email to all of your customers—maybe to announce an acquisition, a site-wide sale, or a change that affects all of your users.

And it's never too late to start segmenting. You can learn about your users and sort them into segments at any time. Your goal is to build a more complete profile of each user on an ongoing basis, factoring in new purchases, activity, and provided information.

Yeah, some things like persona and gender are easier to collect when someone signs up, but sometimes you can infer those factors based on other actions—if someone consistently clicks on necklaces in the emails they get from shopping site Fab, and 95% of Fab's necklaces are purchased by females, it's safe to assume that the clicker is female.

That said, your email list segments are always a work in progress. Let your segments evolve as you gather more data about your visitors, and focus on what converts them into customers. You can divide any segment into smaller ones to test specific sales strategies, or collapse related segments into a single unit if your unique versions are getting out of hand.

How Can I Start Segmenting My Email List?

Effective list segmentation can be a major win for your email marketing, but getting started is a daunting task. What used to be a single-list operation can quickly erode into a tangled mess of email campaigns if you don't have direction.

If you aren't sure where to begin, think through these six steps and try to plan out a flow that would work for your segmented email marketing campaigns.

1. Define Your Data Points

First thing's first: you can't build segments without data. The data that matters most to your company is going to depend on what kind of product you sell—for example, Target is more interested in whether or not you have children than Dropbox would be.

So before you start segmenting, decide what customer data will help you sell more efficiently, how you're going to organize that data, and how you're going to collect the data that you don't have.

At Zapier, we ask new users about their professional background—marketing, business owner, project manager, developer, and so on—and use that information to give them more relevant Zap recommendations. And since we integrate more than 350 apps, we find that our customers appreciate a nudge in the right direction.

But your main goal here is to get people to the activation stage of your sales funnel—whether that means getting them to buy something or use a specific feature. So to make the most of your email marketing, focus on optimizing your data-gathering processes so it fits your conversion goals.

Answer these three questions:

1. What data are we already collecting? - These are your lowest-barrier-to-entry segments.

2. What data can we start collecting? - These are data points that you have the ability to track, but haven't organized into usable information.

3. What data do we need to ask for? - This is data that you need to request from your users directly, or that you need to engineer a way to collect.

You likely won't have all the data points you want, and your current data-gathering framework won't always support the tests you want to run. That's when you need to pull in development resources, or invest in a third-party tool (we'll touch on those below).

2. Create Personas for Your Customers

Great Chinese General Sun Tzu's military wisdom was highlighted by three words, "Know your enemy." That's fine and good for wartime tactics, but on the battlefield of email marketing, try adopting a different mantra: know your customers.

Every company should know who their best customers are—mothers, college students, beer snobs, audiophiles, lobster fishermen, whatever. But not every company goes in-depth to create personas for those customers.

Customer personas provide bedrock for your list segmentation, because they help you define which segments need which message. To build a helpful customer persona, try to answer these questions from HubSpot:

- What demographic information do you know about this customer?

- What are the pain points for this customer?

- What do they want to accomplish (and how can I help them accomplish it)?

- What does a day in their life look like?

If I wrote up a persona for someone who shops on high-end fashion and lifestyle site Gilt.com, it might look something like this:

Nick is hitting his professional stride: at 30, he's a senior marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company in New York City, and he's finally pulling in enough money to enjoy some of the finer things. He likes to dress well, but that doesn't mean he's willing to blow a day's pay on new shoes—frugal habits die hard. Nick spends a lot of time working, but on the weekends he likes to play basketball and catch a movie with his friends; shopping isn't his idea of the perfect Saturday.

This persona tells us demographic information about Nick (30-year-old living in NYC), his career and seniority level (senior marketing manager at a large company), his motivation (dress well without breaking the bank), and his pain points (doesn't want to shop around or pay marked-up prices).

We can see that Nick spends a lot of time working, so you might put him in a segment focused on office attire sales—suits, ties, belts—and mix in some high-top sneakers to appeal to his love of basketball.

3. Choose Your Segments

Now that you have your data and understand who you're talking to, choose some email list segments to experiment with. We covered some ideas that work for other companies in the "Leveraging Data for Effective List Segmentation" section above, but feel free to get creative with your groups based on the unique knowledge that you have about your customers.

For example, at Zapier we know which apps small business owners tend to use, like Google Docs, Gravity Forms, and Evernote. We could create an email list segment that contains small business owners, and send them tips on how to automate Gravity Forms and Google Docs.

Pro Tip: Whichever segments you choose should be geared towards driving your customer to purchasing something or using your product. If you segment your list on every little detail, you're just going to create a confusing email flow and a lot of work for yourself.

4. Create Your Content

Once you decide on how to segment your email lists, you need to write and design content that's targeted towards each group. Finding the right voice takes experimentation, and we could spend many blog posts covering copy strategies. So instead of doubling the length of this chapter, check out these excellent guides to creating appealing email content:

- Vero: "The Ultimate Lifecycle Email Marketing Guide"

- Constant Contact: "Improve Your Open Rates with These 12 Subject Line Tweaks"

- Customer.io: "How to write emails people actually want to read"

- MailChimp: "Write Effective Subject Lines"

- Copyblogger: "37 Tips for Writing Emails that Get Opened, Read, and Clicked"

Pro Tip: The best way to learn what copy converts for your business is A/B testing, which we'll look at in Chapter 10.

5. Employ an Email Marketing Tools' Segmentation Feature

You have data and a plan to use it. Now comes the fun part: sending your emails out into the world. For that, you're going to want an email marketing app that can handle list segmentation and make multiple sends a breeze.

Here's a brief look at some of the more popular marketing apps out there, and the list segmentation features that each one offers.

MailChimp

MailChimp makes sending email newsletters painless. And they apply the same philosophy to list segmentation: MailChimp lets you segment lists by location, engagement, sign-up date, and more using a straightforward interface. You can also save segments and automatically add users to those segments if they meet your chosen criteria.

To learn more about MailChimp's list segmentation features, read their documentation.

Customer.io

Customer.io calls their list segmentation features "Segment Triggered Emails," and they work a little differently than standard list groupings. Users trigger these emails once, whenever they enter a segment—like reaching the 3rd day of a trial period, or enabling a feature on your site. These tools are great for crafting campaigns like welcome emails and onboarding scenarios.

To learn more about Customer.io's list segmentation features, read their documentation.

AWeber

AWeber offers one of the most robust sets of list segmentation tools on the market. You can carve up your AWeber email lists by who opened certain emails, which pages people visit on your site, who's clicking on links in your emails, and other information that you collect with their custom forms.

To learn more about AWeber's list segmentation features, read their documentation.

Intercom

Intercom's list segmentation capabilities are built on three different features: filters, segments, and tags. Filters let you sort through your email list for users who meet specific criteria, like when they signed up and how active they are on your site. Segments are created from filtered lists, and Intercom will automatically add new customers to these segments if they match its rules. Tags work like segments, but there's no automation involved—in other words, they're totally custom segments.

To learn more about Intercom's list segmentation features, read their documentation.

Vero

Vero focuses more on behavior-based transactional emails—like triggering a message when a user visits a specific page—than newsletters. But segments come into play here, too: Vero treats segments like individual lists, and they're built based on user behavior, past emails, and distinct events.

To learn more about Vero's list segmentation features, read their documentation.

Custom App

Sometimes it's easier to build a custom solution that fits your needs. That's what Zapier did with Django Drip, a Django-based email sending service that lets us dispatch messages based on very customized segments.

With Django Drip, we have the ability to build solutions for gaps in our email campaigns, while keeping our user data in-house.

Note: Django Drip is an open-source project. If you're a developer using a Django-based site, give it a shot for your email marketing needs.

More Apps That Offer List Segmentation

Those aren't the only apps that make list segmentation a breeze. Here are some quick links to other services (in alphabetical order) that let you segment lists:

- ActiveCampaign - List Segments

- Benchmark - Segments

- Campaign Monitor - Segments

- Constant Contact - Segment Contacts

- Emma - List Segmentation and Dynamic Segments

- FreshMail - Segment a subscriber list

- GetResponse - Advanced Segmentation

- Hatchbuck - Tags

- HubSpot - Segmenting Tools

- iContact - Segments

- MailUp - Groups

- Mailgen - Email List Segments

- Pardot - List Segmentation

- VerticalResponse - Segments

- Vision6 - Segment your Sends

6. Measure, Adjust, Repeat

Now that your emails are out in the world, you get to collect another kind of data. Make sure you're tracking how people interact with your emails: measure what they open, what they click on, and what kinds of content get them engaged.

And once you crunch the numbers, use that knowledge to improve future campaigns. If open rates skyrocketed after lunch, try sending more emails around 2 p.m. If you saw better click-through rates on emails with images, apply more visuals to your messages.

You can speed up the learning process with A/B testing—these experiments go hand-in-hand with email marketing because it's so easy to split any list into "A" and "B" groups.

Continue making small, iterative changes, testing them against your current email campaigns, and applying your takeaways to your other segments.

Related: If you aren't sure where to start with A/B testing, we wrote a guide on how it works, and why it can help you perfect your email marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

Each of your customers has a unique background, set of interests, and level of experience with your brand. So don't send all of them the same emails—with list segmentation, it's easy to personalize your message based on the recipient's interests, demographic information, and purchase history.

With a strategy and the right tools, you can customize each user's exposure to your email marketing flow, and maximize the impact of every opened message. When you provide more relevant content, everybody wins.

Next

Segmenting your email lists will help your emails reach the best people, but it'll also give you a bit more work. To offset that—and to make the rest of your email marketing strategy viable—you'll want to automate as much of your email marketing as possible. In the next chapter, we'll look at the ways you can use Zapier to automatically add new subscribers to your lists, move existing subscribers between lists, and more.

Written by Joe Stych

Image credits: Mailboxes photo courtesy of Beate Meier. Email filter graphic created using icons from Edward Boatman, José Campos, Agus Purwanto and Megan Sheehan of the Noun Project. Smile GIF courtesy Giphy

Chapter 5: Master Your Email Marketing List

How to Automatically Import, Copy and Remove Subscribers

There's a service that 92% of online adults use, with 61% of them using it daily for an average of 13 hours weekly. This service has click-through rates that are 6-times better than social networks, and on average it sees a 94% return on investment.

The service is email, and those stats—compiled by email marketing giant Campaign Monitor—illustrate why you should be employing email in your marketing strategy.

But with no free time in your work week, how are you going to implement effective email marketing tactics?

Zapier. That's how.

With Zapier, an app integration tool, you're able to connect your email marketing software to the other apps you use—such as online forms, eCommerce platforms, CRM apps—and begin to rapidly grow your email list. You'll also be able to copy contacts from one list to another, automatically remove contacts, and stay off spam lists.

This post takes you through dozens of ways to use Zapier to help you manage your email marketing like a pro.

In This Chapter:

- Add Subscribers to an Email List from Any App

- Keep a List Updated with Automation

- Take Subscribers Beyond the Email List

Add Subscribers to an Email List from Any App

Rebecca Dekker uses Zapier to automatically add her Gumroad customers to an AWeber list.

Adding contacts to your email lists doesn't sound difficult, but imagine what you'd do if you had thousands of contacts to manually add in one day? That's what happened to Rebecca Dekker, a PhD-prepared nurse who runs a resource site about childbirth. She made a PDF download that was so popular, it crashed her server. So, she turned to email marketing software AWeber to let her fans know that they could still get the PDF from Gumroad, a tool to let visitors download a file. The campaign yielded nearly a thousand downloads, but the success came with extra work, too.

"I was able to download a spreadsheet from Gumroad with everyone's name and email address," says Dekker. "It was too time-consuming for me to sit down and figure out who was already a subscriber and who wasn't, and then hand-enter the new people into my AWeber account. It was kind of discouraging that I had this huge surge of people submitting their email addresses, with no way of quickly and easily adding them to my email list."

The next time she released an extensive article download, Dekker was armed with a new weapon: Zapier. "I signed up for the basic plan and integrated it between Gumroad and AWeber," Dekker says. "A large number of people either downloaded the PDF for free, or for a fee, since it was 'pay what you want.' These people were all automatically sent an invitation to join my email list."

- Zapier Integration: Send Gumroad Customers to AWeber

After her second campaign, Dekker turned a list of new email addresses into her next opportunity. "This task was really important to me, because once somebody downloads or buys something from you, they are likely to do so again in the future. It's critical that you capture their email info before they disappear into cyberspace. And I'm too busy to do this by hand!"

Your site visitors, customers, conference attendees, and more provide you the same contact with people that you can turn into a lasting customer relationship—and you, also, likely are too busy to do it all by hand. Here are some of the many ways you can automatically add subscribers to your email lists like Dekker did.

Send Form Entries to a List

BillCutterz has an email subscribe option as part of their signup form.

Whether it's a contact form on your website, a "Let me know when it's launched" form on a landing page for your new projects, or a detailed survey to offer quotes to potential clients, forms are your best ally in email marketing. All you have to do is ask for people's email addresses, and then let Zapier copy their address over to your email list.

That's how web design firm Opus Media keeps forms from dozens of websites connected to an email newsletter app. "Our client runs a network of over 60 websites, so having the ability to tether Emma to each individual site (ala Zapier) is a huge benefit as we don’t have to replicate files, or worry about coding conflicts," explains Jason Werner, principal of Opus Media. "Zapier just works."

- Zap: Use Gravity Forms Entries to Create New Subscribers in Emma

Just be sure to make sure your form respondents know they're getting signed up for your emails, and use double opt-in to make sure you don't run afoul of anti-spam laws. With that, your forms are the perfect place to get new email addresses for your list.

Zaps:

- Create MailChimp subscribers from Typeform entries

- Add Wufoo signups to an AWeber Mailing List

- Add Subscribers to ActiveCampaign via Unbounce

Related: "The 14 Best Online Form Builders for Every Task."

Add Survey Respondent to a Subscriber List

One of the best ways to find out what your customers think about your products, services, or just about anything else is with a survey. They can be as long or short, as specific or generic as you want—and they can give you the perfect opportunity to ask for their opinions via email. In fact, you can use their answers to put them on the perfect email list for their tastes, now that you know so much about them.

As with a form, just be sure to use double opt-in or have a specific box on your form so your users will know they'll get emails from you. Do that, and you'll be able to keep in touch with people who fill out your surveys—and you may be able to get them to fill out another survey in the future to further hone in on what they think.

Zaps:

- Create/update Infusionsoft contacts from new Surveypal survey answers

- Add New SurveyMonkey Respondents to a MailChimp Email List

- Add FluidSurvey Respondents to Constant Contact

Connect a Landing Page to a List

Planning on launching a new product? Don't wait until your launch to gather new email contacts—instead, put together a launch page with a teaser about your product and a signup form to let people enter their email address to get updates.

Connect that to your email marketing app with Zapier, and you'll be able to send updates as your product progresses. You could even offer subscribers a special discount when your product launches, and keep them updated about the latest features you've added going forward.

Zaps:

- Add New Lander Form Responders to a MailChimp Email List

- Add Subscribers to ActiveCampaign via Unbounce

- Add KickoffLabs Contacts to Campaign Monitor

Share Links to Build Your List

Sniply allows you to collect email addresses when you share a link.

It's easy to share links to interesting articles and content on Twitter and Facebook, but a quickly shared link is typically not that valuable to you. Your followers will see your post, click the link, and that's it.

Or, you could share your links with an app like Sniply, which lets you add a tiny form to any link that you share. You can share the same great articles and videos that you would have shared otherwise, but this time there will be a pop-over box where your followers can enter their email address to get other great content from you.

That's your chance to connect the Sniply form to your email marketing app, so you can keep in touch more directly with your emails.

Zaps:

- Add Subscribers to Aweber From Sniply Forms

- Add Subscribers to MailChimp From Sniply Forms

Add Event Attendees to a List

There's one thing that email can't beat: in-person interaction. But your events and conferences can still be a great chance to put email marketing to work. You can ask for attendee email addresses—either in a signup form, or using a dedicated app like Eventbrite—and then send them email updates as the big day approaches. And, of course, you can follow up after the event with your regular emails.

Doing all that manually could take hours—or up to one day per month, as Chris Rickett, manager of entrepreneurship services for the City of Toronto, found out.

"Prior to using Constant Contact and Zapier, our team spent close to one day a month sending out our newsletter to our contacts and adding / removing contacts to the list," says Rickett. "With Constant Constant Contact and Zapier, staff don't need to worry about managing contacts and can easily send our newsletter via Constant Contact in under a hour."

- Zap: Add New Eventbrite Attendees as a Constant Contact contact

These Zaps—or the form Zaps above—can help you save that much time with your own events.

Zaps:

- Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor list

- Add GoToWebinar Registrants to an Aweber Mailing List

- Add Your GoToWebinar Attendees to Your Benchmark Email Newsletter

Upload Business Card Contacts to a List

In-person meetings aren't always planned in advance, and they're not always in a group. It's those spontaneous meetings where, over a handshake and a business card, you get to talk about your product and perhaps get someone's interest that otherwise would have never heard about your company. And now, you can keep that connection going by adding them to your email lists.

Typing in every email address from every business card could be a daunting job, but there's an app for that: FullContact Card Reader. Connect FullContact to Zapier and all that's left then is the easy task of taking a picture of the card you want to add to your mailing list.

Zaps:

- Add New FullContact Business Cards to Constant Contact

- Send New FullContact Contacts to a MailChimp List

- Add New ActiveCampaign Contacts from FullContact Business Cards

Add Appointment Attendees to Lists

For the most personal marketing, you'll need to spend time on the phone and in meetings with your potential customers. That one meeting isn't enough, though; you'll want to keep the connection going long after you've hung up the phone or left the restaurant. Zapier can help.

"I would spend an hour or two per week mining my contacts that had previously scheduled appointments with me," says Third Coast Training founder Johnny Shelby, who schedules meetings with each of his most promising leads. "Not any more, now that I have Zapier to handle this function for me." This one automation has freed him up over a hundred hours a year, giving him more time to spend with his contacts.

Just schedule meetings with your contacts, and then let Zapier add those contacts to your email app so you can keep the conversation going.

Zaps:

- Add Acuity Scheduling Appointments to VerticalResponse as Contacts

- Add new YouCanBook.Me bookings to a MailChimp list

Pull Email or Support Inbox Contacts Into a List

Or perhaps, you've never actually met your new contact—not in real life, anyhow. Instead, you've chatted a bit on Twitter, then jumped over to email to continue the conversation. Or perhaps, they emailed you first with a question about your product or for support with a problem they've had. You already know they read their emails, which makes them perfect people to add to your email list.

You can connect your support system to your email list with Zapier, or have Zapier watch your inbox or a specific label for new contacts. Then, you can add them to your email newsletter app—being sure to select double opt-in so your newsletters don't get marked as spam—and keep the conversation going automatically.

Zaps:

- When I Label an Email in Gmail, Subscribe them to a MailChimp Mailing List

- Add Google Contacts contacts to MailChimp Automatically

- Add Your Customers From Desk to Your Benchmark Email Newsletters

Parse Emails And Add Them to Lists

Sometimes the important contact info in an email's From line isn't the important part of the email. If you receive notification emails from your apps, or have a contact form that sends an email to you with info about the person who wanted to get in touch, it's the email address in the email's body that really matters. For that, you'll want an email parser.

Zapier offers a free Email Parser that can read the email messages you send it, copy specific data from them, and then use it to integrate with your other apps. You'll just have to set your email app to forward those notification or contact emails to the Email Parser, then teach the parser which parts of the email messages are important, and then connect it to your email newsletter with Zapier. That way, you can add subscribers to your lists even if their email address is buried in a message.

Zaps:

- Parse Emails into Drip for Easy Drip Campaigns

- Send Emails from the Email Parser to Campaign Monitor

- Create New Mailchimp Subscriber from Mailparser Processed Email

Turn New Sales into New Contacts

Whenever you sell stuff online, you have the perfect opportunity to stay in touch via email. It's likely your payment processor already asks for email addresses during checkout, so all you have to do is have Zapier send your customer's info to your email list. Add some drip emails for new contacts in your email app, and you'll have an automated way to welcome new customers and help them get started with your products.

Stacey Berriman at Why Weight Solutions uses Zapier's PayPal integration to give them an easy way to email their eBay customers through their email marketing app, rather than emailing each directly in eBay's interface. Without Zapier's automation, says Stacey, "it would take many hours to process this simple task for every customer every day."

- Zap: Create New GetResponse Contacts from PayPal Sales

You can do the same with your own PayPal, Stripe, Recurly or other payment system integrations, using these or your own Zaps.

Zaps:

- Automatically Subscribe PayPal Customers to a MailChimp List

- Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

- Send an email to Stripe customers with invalid credit cards via Mandrill

Connect Your eCommerce Platform to Your List

Or, if you're using an eCommerce system—including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Gumroad and more—you can have it send your new customers directly to your email newsletter without having to add each individual purchase.

The Think On! Productions team does something similar with their Gumroad to AWeber integration, which adds new customers to their email list automatically. "I have had a couple customers that thanked me for the ease of adding them to our update list," says Jarrad Markel. "They really appreciated the fact that they did not have to enter the same information more than once."

These Zaps or your own integrations with your payment or shopping cart platform can do the same for your customers.

Zaps:

- Create Mad Mimi Customers from Gumroad Sales

- Add New Shopify Customers to ActiveCampaign

- Add New Customers from Magento to Campaign Monitor

Tip: Add an email signup form to your product pages to let people sign up for email updates about products. That way, even if they don't buy anything today, they'll still start getting your email updates.

Copy CRM Contacts Into a List

Or, perhaps your sales process is more involved. When you're selling services or customized products, or are dealing with enterprise-sized customers, then your sales aren't as simple as having your customer click a "checkout" button. Instead, you'll need to lead your customers along a process, weed out the people who aren't really interested, and focus your marketing on the leads that are most likely to buy.

Any of these steps offer a perfect spot to start your email marketing. You could add new leads to your email newsletters, or only start sending messages once a prospect is close to closing the deal. Or, you could wait until you've sent an invoice, and then add your new client to your email list. Either way, Zapier can automate the process so you can focus on your sales.

Zaps:

- Send Highrise Contacts to Campaign Monitor

- Send Pipedrive Contacts to Mailchimp Subscribers

- Add Base CRM Contacts to MailChimp Automatically

Related: "The Ultimate Guide to CRM Automation"

Add Invoice Recipients to Your Lists

You've finally closed a deal, and have sent an invoice to your customer. Don't let the conversation there. Just have Zapier add your new customer to your email newsletter whenever you generate a new invoice.

You can add them to a new list specifically for your customers where you send onboarding info, or you can just add them to your standard list where you share company news. Either way, you'll keep the connection going long after their payment's cleared.

Zaps:

- Save New Freshbooks Clients to a MailChimp Client List

- Add QuickBooks Contacts to Campaign Monitor

Keep a List Updated with Automation

Now that new contacts are automatically being added to your email lists, you might soon find that your subscribers list becomes overwhelming. With everyone subscribed to the same email newsletter, and with scant details about each one, you'll be broadcasting your emails but will have little insight about the people you're talking to.

Automation can help here, too. Whenever you're creating a new Zapier integration to add contacts to your email lists, be sure to take advantage of all the contact fields, so you'll have as much info about your subscribers as possible. Then, here are some other ways to keep your email lists up-to-date.

Add Contacts to the Best List

No two contacts are alike, and the same email list might not be the best for each of them. All you need is a system to see what your new contacts are interested in, and then add them to the appropriate email list. That way, everyone will get emails that target their interests, and will be far more likely to open the emails.

If you're using forms, you could have different forms for different interests, and send each to their own email newsletter. Same for sales: have a list for each product category, and add customers to the appropriate lists based on what they've purchased.

For everyone else, you'll need something smarter: a marketing automation app. These apps will watch customers on your websites, see what they're interested in, and tag them appropriately. You can then send those contacts to the correct email list confidently based on their browsing habits.

With this much info about each contact, you should be able to add them to the right list

ORBTR founder Erik Wolf finds this type of targeting especially crucial for some businesses. "We have a customer who runs a technology conference," explained Erik. "When someone comes to their website or opts in to some general marketing list, that individual could be a potential attendee, sponsor, vendor, or speaker and our customer may not know what bucket that person belongs in straight away."

"Each of those categories requires a different type of messaging," Eric continues. "If they see an individual that is looking at all the pages in their sponsorship section, that's a cue that they should be using to trigger a sponsorship-related email message."

So think through your own customer acquisition flow, and then use your marketing automation tool to direct people to the correct list based on what they've browsed on your site—and more.

Zaps:

- Add a new Intercom user to AWeber

- Add Jumplead Leads to Campaign Monitor Email Lists

Tip: If you're not yet using a marketing automation tool, be sure to check out our roundup of the best options.

Know Where Contacts Come From

One contact came from your form, while another bought a product, and yet another was added from a business card. They're each different—and yet, if you only add their names and emails to your newsletter app, they'll all seem the same.

So don't just do the basics when setting up your automations. Most email newsletter apps with Zapier integrations let you add notes about a customer, tag them, or put them into a group. Use those features to know where your contacts come from, and to store any other info about them that you can.

That's marketing consultant Claire Pelletreau's trick to gauging how many new contacts come from her ad spends—and how much they've spent on her site.

"Facebook's conversion tracking is limited to a short period of time, which makes it difficult to track the ROI of list building campaigns I ran months ago when people are converting now," explains Clarie. "But since Zapier 'tags' my main subscribers list with any products people have bought as well as their opt-in source, I can see which of my customers came from that investment in paid traffic. It makes decision-making about ad spend extremely simple, by automatically segmenting my subscribers when they buy something something from me with Gumroad."

You can accomplish similar things with your email newsletter contacts. All it'll take is a bit of time to tweak your Zaps that bring in new contacts, and make sure they're adding as much info as possible to your contacts. Then, connect your sales platform and have it update your contacts when they purchase your product, and you'll have a similarly detailed view of your marketing efforts.

Zaps:

- Send Gumroad Customers to AWeber

- Send Gumroad Customers to Campaign Monitor

Move or Remove Subscribers from Lists

You'd like to be able to send your emails to as many people as possible; that's the whole reason you're trying to add subscribers automatically. And yet, sometimes it's best to stop sending emails to a subscriber. Maybe they never open your emails, or perhaps your list is just aimed at customers and they've never purchased anything.

In that case, it's time to either remove them from your lists entirely, or just move them to a new list and then remove them from the old list—and it's easy to do that with Zapier. Most of your Zaps likely connect two different apps together, but you can actually use Zapier to automate actions inside of individual apps, which is the perfect way to keep your email lists in order. ORBTR founder Erik Wolf lists this as one of his favorite Zapier features.

"One of my favorite ways to use the MailChimp/Zapier integration is to actually create zaps that integrate MailChimp with itself," says Erik. "For example, I will often create Zaps that will remove a subscriber from list X if they are added to list Y."

Marketer Claire Pells uses the same feature to make sure people are only subscribe to one of her lists at a time. "Zapier also keeps my monthly payment to Mailchimp low because I can automatically delete subscribers from the different lists once they're moved to my main subscriber list," Claire explains. "Each subscriber is only counted one time in Mailchimp's book (which is important when you have a number of lists and fast growth)."

Be sure to experiment with your own email marketing app's Zapier integrations, and see what internal actions you can automate. It'll keep your lists orderly, save you money, and make sure your contacts aren't bombarded with emails from all of your lists.

Zaps:

- Copy MailChimp subscriber to new list

- Copy AWeber Subscribers to a New List

- Copy ActiveCampaign Subscribers to a New List

Take Subscribers Beyond the Email List

Email marketing is great, but it isn't everything. If your only marketing efforts are sending emails, you'll miss out on a lot of other opportunities to interact with your fans, showcase your products, and help out your best customers.

Here are some great ways to move your contacts from your email app to the other tools you use, so you can keep your efforts marketing running beyond the inbox.

Invite to Events

Whether you're scheduling a local usergroup meeting, planning a conference with leaders from your industry, or just running a Google Hangout to help people understand how to use your product, events are one of the best marketing tools. They give you the chance to talk directly to users, while letting you broadcast your message to as many people as are at your event.

You may have added new email subscribers from previous events, so why not market your next event directly to your other email subscribers? Sharing each meeting individually from a list of contacts would take forever, but your email newsletter is the perfect place to spread the word quickly.

That's how the Christopher Harring, director at the office of graduate admission at Maryland Institute College of Art, streamlined the online webinars his team runs each month. "Before our Zaps were running, we would need to manually export email addresses from our inquiry forms, import them into Emma and then distribute invitations," says Harring. "That lead to huge delays, and often we wouldn't be able to invite everyone before the event took place."

Zapier's automation changed the game. "Now we can Zap that data straight from the form into Emma and get that invitation out immediately," Christopher continues. "Our online event attendance grew overnight as a result."

Zaps:

- Use Gravity Forms Entries to Create New Subscribers in Emma

- Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor list

- Add Your GoToWebinar Attendees to Your Benchmark Email Newsletter

Add Contacts to Your CRM

For marketing that takes a personal touch, you'll want a better place to keep track of your contacts than your email newsletter lists. But there's no reason to manually add people to your CRM: Zapier can do that for you automatically.

That integration helped the Sagsa team follow up with their contacts after attending an exhibition. "Last October, we participated in an important exhibition and received more than 200 visits from potential customers," says Andrea Perini, Sagsa's sales and marketing manager. "Back at home, we inserted all the contacts in our Nutshell database, and immediately sent a "Thanks for visiting email" to everyone with Mailup."

- Zap: Add New Nutshell CRM Contacts as Mailup Recipients

"All the contacts had been immediately updated, allowing us to provide an immediate answer without distracting people from their work," continues Andrea. "A few of them have replied, congratulating us for the fast and quick response!"

Whether you're adding customers to your CRM first, or to your email newsletter first, the same principal applies. Just have Zapier add each contact to both apps, and you'll be able to continue your automated and personalized marketing at the same time.

Zaps:

- Create new Pipedrive Deals from Mailchimp subscribers

- Send Capsule CRM contacts to Campaign Monitor

- Create Contactually Contacts From AWeber Subscribers

Invite Contacts to a Meeting

If you have a small email list—perhaps aimed at one particular niche, with only a dozen new subscribers a month or so—you might want to take your marketing beyond the inbox and reach out to your readers in person. One-on-one meetings are a great time to close the sale or ensure new users are taking full advantage of your products, and Zapier can schedule those meetings for you.

Just create a Zap that adds a new appointment—perhaps at some time in the future—with each new contact on your lists, and you'll be able to focus on your meetings and not worry about setting them up.

Zaps:

- Create Google Calendar Events With Your MailChimp Contacts

- Make Appointments With Your Campaign Monitor Contacts

Organize Contacts in a Spreadsheet

Sometimes it's not about interacting with your contacts more. What's needed most is a way to analyze your marketing efforts, organize your contacts, and see where everyone came from. For that, the most abused business app is still one of the best: a spreadsheet.

"It's a helpful way of quickly seeing new signups alongside helpful custom field data like location, postal code, Google Analytics UTM variables, and my own custom tracking (see the last column in the spreadsheet attached)," says content marketer Ronnie Nijmeh about his own contact spreadsheet. "This lets me us the power of filtering and sorting in a spreadsheet that I can't easily do in AWeber."

He uses his spreadsheet both as a way to analyze his marketing efforts and contacts, and as a way to connect his newsletter subscribers to other apps in his workflows. "One Zap moved the customer from AWeber to a spreadsheet and another moved the spreadsheet to GoToWebinar—and my customer service staff easily kept track by looking at the spreadsheet," Ronnie explains.

- Zap: Add new AWeber subscribers to a Google Sheets spreadsheet

Add your own contacts to a spreadsheet, with rows for any data you'd like to track, and you'll find similar ways to optimize your workflow with the world's most flexible app.

Zaps:

- Add New ActiveCampaign Subscribers to a Google Docs Spreadsheet

- Add New Mad Mimi Subscribers to a Google Docs Spreadsheet

- Automatically Add New Constant Contact Contacts to a Google Spreadsheet

Get Notified When Your List Gets New Subscribers

Getting a new subscriber is a big deal—at least when you're first first starting out your email marketing efforts. Instead of checking your email list everyday to see who's signed up, you can have Zapier send you a notification in your favorite app. Connect it to SMS or a notifications app like Pushbullet to be the first to know when anyone signs up, or send the notifications a team chat app like Slack to let your entire team know.

Or, you could use filters on your Zaps to have Zapier notify you only when specific people sign up. That way, you can watch for VIPs, premium customers, or anyone else you're hoping will signup for your emails.

Zaps:

- Get an SMS Message When You Get a New Mad Mimi Subscriber

- Get a Pushbullet Notification When You Get a New Emma Subscriber

- Notify Your Team in Slack When You Get New Campaign Monitor Subscribers

Add Contacts to Your LinkedIn Network

Those VIPs that have just signed up for your email newsletter are people you should keep in touch with beyond emails. They might be a valuable connection in the future, or they might just keep up with the posts and content that you share on LinkedIn.

All you have to do is let Zapier send each of your new subscribers a LinkedIn invite, and you'll turn a subscription into a connection. You can even use the same filters to only send an invitation to new subscribers, say, from specific companies to build your network and market your products more directly.

- Zap: Invite Your Aweber Subscribers to LinkedIn

Publish Your Email Newsletter

For all of the good things about email, it's still not the only place to reach your contacts. There's people who only check Twitter for news, or rely on LinkedIn InMail for their most important messages, and they'll fall through the cracks with your marketing if you're focused only on email.

You might not have time to make a blog post after spending time on your email newsletters, but that's ok. Most email newsletter apps let you share your newsletter with a link, and Zapier can then share that link with your social networks. That way, your message will get shared with everyone, and you'll only have to focus on writing amazing emails.

Zaps:

- Share Your MailChimp Newsletter on LinkedIn Automatically

- Share Your ActiveCampaign Campaigns on Twitter

- Share Your MailChimp Campaigns on Twitter

Backup Your Contacts

Disaster strikes, your favorite email newsletter app dies, and your meticulously crafted contact lists are gone forever. Unlikely, but there's no reason to risk it. Plus, it's always nice to have another copy of your contacts, whether for quick reference or to easily be able to import them into another app in the future.

The good thing is, backing up your contacts is easy. Just have Zapier copy each new contact in your email lists to your favorite storage option: a Dropbox text file, Evernote note, or have them appended in a contacts spreadsheet for the most flexibility. Or, if you want an easy way to contact everyone on your lists, you could have them added to your address book automatically. Just be warned: your address book might get overwhelmed.

Zaps:

- Add New MailChimp Subscribers to an Evernote Note

- Update a Text File in Dropbox with New Campaign Monitor Subscribers

- Add New ActiveCampaign Subscribers to a Google Docs Spreadsheet

Next

You've learned about the best email newsletter apps, found ways to grow your newsletter lists, automate your work, and make sure your emails stay out of the spam box. But email newsletters are far from the only way email marketing messages. In the next chapter, we'll look at what drip emails are, and help you decide which types of drip emails are right for your business—and then, we'll help you pick the perfect app to send drip messages as well.

Written by Matthew Guay, with contribution from Nat Eliason and Marissa Daily

Image credits: Bulk Mail photo courtesy Nate Grigg.

Chapter 6: What is Drip Marketing?

The Complete Guide to Drip Campaigns, Lifecycle Emails and More

Email newsletters are a great way to send out your team's latest announcements, but they have a major problem: new subscribers only see new emails, and never get the first emails you’d sent out to your list. All they’ll see is the stuff you send after they sign up.

Often called drip campaigns but known by many other names—drip marketing, automated email campaign, lifecycle emails, autoresponders and marketing automation—the concept is the same: they’re a set of marketing emails that will be sent out automatically on a schedule. Perhaps one email will go out as soon as someone signs up, another will go out 3 days later, with one more going out the next weekend. Or, the emails can be varied based on triggers, or actions the person has performed like signing up for your service or making a purchase, which is why they're also sometimes called behavioral emails.

Setting up drip email campaigns might seem daunting, so in this chapter we've broken down what drip campaigns are, when they’re effective, and how you can use them to cultivate a customer from a disengaged user. Then, in the next chapters we'll dive into the apps and tools you need to make your drip campaigns successful. Let's get started.

Did You Know? Drip campaigns aren’t limited to email—the term also applies to direct mail and phone-based marketing, too. But in this primer, we're focusing on email, since it's efficient and cost-effective.

In This Chapter:

- What is a Drip Campaign?

- When Should You Use a Drip Campaign?

- How to Set Up a Drip Campaign

- How to Measure Drip Marketing Results

- Apps to Run Drip Campaigns

What is a Drip Campaign?

Marketing automation company Pardot shows an overview of a drip campaign. See the full inforgraphic.

Drip campaigns, as mentioned above, are automated sets of emails that go out based on specific timelines or user actions. They enable you to stay in touch with groups of people based on events like when a user signs up for an account or how often that user visits your site. Each time a drip email is sent out, it comes from a queue of already-written emails—there's no need to manually write and send each one. They can even be personalized with your contacts' name, company info, and more.

Put simply, drip marketing is all about giving people the right information at the right time. If someone just subscribed to your blog newsletter, for example, a drip campaign could send a welcome email right away, and two days later, an email that shows off some of your most-read content. Or if a potential customer has been hovering around your "premium upgrade" page for a few weeks but hasn’t yet pulled the trigger, a drip campaign could send them an email with five reasons to purchase the premium plan.

The beauty of drip emails is that this all happens automatically based on triggers and user segments that you define.

But do drip campaigns really work? Yup: According to research collected by the team behind the email-marketing suite Emma, relevant targeted emails produce 18-times more revenue than globally-broadcasted ones. Perhaps that's not so surprising, since they also found that people who read your drip emails are far more likely to click the links in them, with a 119% increase in click rate from drip emails.

That’s huge, especially considering that you can reuse content, and everything is sent out automatically. You can have specific drip campaigns for educating users, rewarding your best customers, helping people who hit a certain page on your site, and more. Most importantly, though, is that you can pin-point user groups with drip emails, segmenting your email list, and reaching the right people when they're ready to buy. As email marketing tool Sendloop points out on their blog, you can segment your list based on demographics, purchase history, and which emails that user has opened in the past, leading to more conversions and fewer unsubscribes.

Like any good thing, you don’t want to overdo it. Too many drip emails will only annoy your customers. But a thoughtful set of drip emails can be the perfect way to remind people to buy your product, teach them how to use your tool once they’ve purchased it, and get new subscribers up-to-speed on your email newsletter. And the more specific your segments, the more likely you are to get interaction and interest from your subscribers—we’ll do a deeper dive into building segments later in the post.

Did You Know? Drip marketing gets its name from irrigation—you're slowly developing a relationship with your user by nurturing them with info, like a farmer would do with a sapling. I could sit here all day and write farming metaphors for marketing, but for your sake, I won’t.

When Should You Use a Drip Campaign?

"Drip marketing" is a blanket term that covers several different marketing strategies. But the goal remains the same: keep users engaged with your product.

Let's look at 10 use cases where setting up an automated drip campaign could help you get relevant information to targeted readers, and convert them into customers. You might want to try a few of them with your users, or perhaps they'll spark your imagination for other ways you could use drip campaigns for your product or service.

Nurturing Leads

Zapier sends new users a nurturing drip email to help them brainstorm automation ideas.

Leads—a term you may remember from our Introduction to CRM Apps—are prospective customers, people who you think just might buy your product in the near future. They just might need a bit of hand-holding, or nurturing—sticking with them until they’re ready to purchase your product. Lead Nurturing can take many forms, like educating users on your service, helping them use certain features, or offering them free trials.

The folks behind marketing automation app Drip say that when brands nurture leads, they get 50% more sale-ready customers; Emma noted that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases.

You can't personally hand-hold every user through discovering and purchasing your product, but drip emails can do that work for you. You can use welcoming, onboarding, engagement, or abandoned shopping cart drips—along with other drip email campaign ideas which we'll look at below—to nurture your leads and get them ready to turn into paid customers.

Welcoming

Meditation app Headspace welcomes new users with a playful drip email and a brief explanation about what they offer. See full email.

You've done a great job at marketing, and have attracted a ton of new people to sign up for a trial or request info about your products. But how are these new users going to learn about your product and why it's so outstanding?

That's where welcome emails shine—they act as an immediate intro to some of your company’s top content, and as a primer on using your product.

If someone subscribes to your newsletter, you could use a welcome drip to automatically send that user some of your most-shared blog posts. Or, if you get a new trial-level signup for your service, try a drip featuring case studies on how other customers are using your product.

At the very least, welcome emails are a nice way to say, "Hey there, nice to meet you!"

The stats show that users actually expect—and like—welcome emails when they sign up for a new service or newsletter. Experian's white paper on welcome emails shows that these autoresponders enjoy a 58.7% open rate on average, while normal emails sit around 14.6%. When that welcome email is sent instantaneously (i.e. right after the user signs up), the open rate jumps to 88.3%. So craft a great welcome drip campaign, and you'll get the amazing engagement welcome emails recieve and then keep the momentum going with followup messages.

Onboarding

Cloud storage app Box employs drip campaigns to teach people how to use their product. See full email.

Pageviews and trial users are nice, but eventually you need your users to sign up or purchase something from you. That's where an onboarding drip strategy would come in: in conjunction with welcome scenarios or scheduled newsletters, which introduce the customer to your brand and your values, onboarding emails offer targeted "sells"—or small goals in getting them using and paying for your product—to that customer.

These "sells" could be downloading your company's mobile app, signing up for a webinar, or purchasing a premium subscription. Chris Hexton, the CEO and co-founder of email marketing app Vero, shared some helpful advice on Unbounce's blog about getting your users to that activation stage:

By using automated emails, you can setup a system that helps to drive customers toward activation in your product.

The first step here is to identify what counts as activation. In Vero’s case it's the sending of a customer's first live behavioural email, in Unbounce's cases it's the creation of their first landing page….What you really want to do here is encourage new, inactive users to take this activation step as soon as possible.

For another example, Hexton points to Dropbox's effective drip campaign that targets users who haven’t downloaded the desktop app, and prompts them to install. Vero also breaks down how Trunk Club uses automated (but personalized) emails to reach out to unengaged trial users and put the premium service at top of their mind.

Abandoned Shopping Carts

Online clothing retailer Gilt delivers automated drip emails to users who put an item in their cart, but did not buy it. See full email.

You crafted enticing newsletters, offered flash sales, and finally coaxed your user into clicking that gilded "add to cart" button. Then: your hard-earned sale vanishes. Huh?

Actually, ditching a fully loaded shopping cart is more common than you think. Mark Macdonald, the content manager at eCommerce empire Shopify pointed out that around 67.45% of shopping carts are abandoned (check out that link for a great breakdown of how that affects your bottom line, too).

But with an automated drip campaign, you can re-engage those waivering customers and lead them back to the "buy" button. Whenever users leave an unpurchased product in their cart, use a drip to follow up and confirm that it’s still available. You don't even need to be selling physical products for this to work. With an app, for example, use a specific sales page—perhaps one that breaks down the benefits of your pro-level plan compared to the basic one— as a trigger, and send some follow-up info to anyone who visits that page but doesn’t convert.

HubSpot—an inbound marketing suite that offers everything from email automation to analytics—featured research on its blog showing that when cart-abandoning users do return to make a purchase, 72% of them do so within 24 hours of abandoning the product—that’s likely due to strong automated prompts from the seller, designed to pull the customer back in. So perhaps wait a bit after the potential customer visits the page, then send a drip at a time when they're likely to see the email and act on it—maybe at lunch time, or in the early evening.

Your drip emails then have a pretty good chance of closing the sale. According to SaleCycle, abandoned cart emails average a 46.1% open rate, a 13.3% click rate, and $5.64 per email in extra revenue.

Need inspiration? Shopify also broke down 13 well-designed abandoned cart emails.

Recommendations

Music streaming service Spotify suggests new music based on your listening history. See full email.

"You might also like" isn't just for Netflix bingeing—recommendation engines are a cornerstone of nearly every giant online retailer (ahem, Amazon). The more a company knows about you and your buying habits, the better they can predict what you will and won't like. With that info, they can send you targeted drip emails that contain products or coupons specific to your purchasing tendencies.

For example, if you buy a Keurig coffee brewer online, that retailer might send you a coupon for 20-count K-cup packs or other Keurig accessories, because they already know you own the brewer. They could even recommend your favorite K-cup flavor just about when they think you'll run out of it, making a sale almost guaranteed.

The same goes for an entertainment app like Spotify—its team knows what music you listen to, and they can create targeted drip campaigns that email you whenever a frequented artist releases a new single, or when a new band in your favorite genre signs on with Spotify. Airbnb goes even further. Vero dissected Airbnb's automated emails that go out based on your browsing habits, and found that when Airbnb knows more about where you want to travel, its emails get more personal, and in turn more useful.

You don’t need to be a billion-dollar business to put that knowledge into action, though. Try targeting user segments with drips based on which aspects of your service they use most, or what kinds of content they’re most interested in.

It's easy to see why Amazon and others put so much work into their recommendations emails, especially when you look at the potential returns. David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance—which provides a recommendation engine infrastructure for some of the nation’s top online retailers—said that his software can increase revenue by 3-15%.

Renewals

Cook's Illustrated alerts users before they automatically renew a year-long subscription.

Whether your user extended their subscription or it's about to run out, you can leverage drip campaigns to engage customers during the renewal process.

For automatic renewals, try using an autoresponder that sends users an alert that their account is about to be charged. You can load these notification emails with contact information for your customer care team, or links to pages where users can update their billing or shipping information. If your subscriptions don't autorenew, craft your drip campaign with a clear call to action, prompting users to re-up with your service. And for the users that do renew, be sure to send them a drip thanking them for staying with your service and perhaps prompt them to share your product with their friends.

Confirmations

Fairfield uses drip campaigns to confirm user reservations, and show off some of the hotel amenities. See full email.

You've closed the sale, or better yet, convinced a user to stick with your product for another year with a renewed subscription. But your drip email work isn't done. You can also use a drip campaign to confirm your user's purchase renewal—just set up a "thank you" autoresponder that goes out right after they hit the "purchase" button. In that confirmation drip, you could include some links to your product's newest features to re-engage them with your brand.

It should be a no-brainer to send your users an email receipt after they make a purchase, but you can also leverage that communication with related products and upsells. And with confirmations for things like plane tickets and hotel rooms, send a quick email a day before the event to put any important confirmation codes at the top of the user's inbox. Then, perhaps, that same drip can send another email a few days later, asking them to review your product or service and offer a coupon for future purchases.

Engagement

RunKeeper sends users who have not logged a workout in a while a re-engagement drip email. See full email.

The math here is pretty simple: the more often someone engages with your site, the more likely they are to convert into a paying customer. Engagement emails are a type of drip campaign that invite the recipient to return to your site and look around, triggered either by some on-site activity or a general lack of activity.

Social sites are a great example of how to use activity-based triggers. If someone on Twitter mentions you in a tweet, Twitter can send you an alert-style email, encouraging you to visit Twitter and respond. Messages like this can be a big boon for engagement. Vero's Hexton highlighted LinkedIn's use of autoresponders for skill endorsements in an article on Marketing Land, in which he argued that these drips are effective because they give you a warm, fuzzy feeling and encourage you to go endorse someone else.

But it doesn't have to be just happy feelings; guilt can work as well. If you don’t log an activity in fitness app RunKeeper for a while, they’ll send an automated “We miss you!” email. It's a subtle way to remind you that you should work out, combined with a touch of nostalgia for the app they hope you'll use while exercising.

If you're still seeing less-than-ideal engagement with your email marketing efforts, you might need to tweak your strategy and experiment. Sendloop suggests offering incentives, changing up your schedule, and rewriting your call to action.

Courses

People like to know what they're getting with emails. So if you can offer a planned set of drips—say a six-week course on how to double your blog traffic—subscribers won't just flow in, they'll interact with the content at an incredible rate. Send stuff at random, and they may just ignore it.

Setting up a drip campaign that acts more like a multi-part crash course is simple, especially if you’re repackaging old content, and it provides a steady flow of traffic from a super-engaged audience. Plus, once the last email goes out and the user knows your product from front to back, you can close the deal on a premium-level subscription.

When you produce great content and people actually anticipate seeing it in their inbox, you have a major win. The numbers back that theory up, too: Vero says that course emails—or emails that are part of a series—have an open rate 80% higher than regular emails, and a 300% higher clickthrough rate to boot.

Unsubscribes

When we're talking about automated emails, there are opportunities everywhere—even when a user is about to slip away through the "unsubscribe" button. Instead of cursing that email address and blacklisting the IP address from your site, use an autoresponder to take one last shot at pulling the user in.

Along with a little "we're sorry to see you go!" message, you can use your automated drip campaign to push other channels like Facebook or Twitter. Remember: Users aren’t necessarily unsubscribing because they hate your brand—they might just prefer to interact with you in a different way.

There are many marketing-savvy brands out there that are putting this tactic to use, and Vision6 put together a roundup of some of the best unsubscribe emails. My favorite comes from Bonobos, which directly asks the user if they were sending too many emails, and offers to decrease its communications to once a week or month.

How to Set Up a Drip Campaign

Now that we've studied some of the best ways to use drip campaigns to convert more sales and engage your customers, how do you actually map out a successful automated drip campaign?

Turns out, it's actually not that hard. Here are five steps that you could use as the basis for building our your drip emails, including examples of how to target your audience, write your emails, tweak for best results and more.

Just to note: It’s never too late to get started with a drip-based strategy. But make sure you aren’t sending current users a bunch of emails that they didn’t sign up for—if they don’t understand why they're getting an email, they could unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Drip campaigns are all about breaking your subscriber list into subsections, and targeting information to niches of customers. So the most important piece here is determining which triggers and groups you're going to use for your drip campaign strategy.

Drips are usually based on one of two types of triggers: either an action in your app or on your site, or an added piece of user demographic information.

Action Examples

- A user subscribes to your company newsletter, and you send them a welcome email via your drip campaign

- A user makes a purchase, and you automatically send them a receipt with shipping information (plus a few upsells)

- A user downloads the trial version of your app, and you send them a series of six instructional emails over the course of the trial, which offer helpful tips on making the most of your app

Demographic Examples

- A user signed up for your service a week ago, but hasn't returned since, so you send them an automated email asking if they need any help

- A user started building something with your app, but stopped halfway through the process, so you send them a drip that offers a walkthrough and some other tips

- Last year around the holidays, a user bought products from a specific category of your shop, so you send them a list of new items in that category in early December (plus a coupon code)

In their email marketing cheat-sheet, Vero highlights user behavior tracking as a great way to personalize your drip campaigns and hit customers with the information that they need at the right time.

By tracking behaviour you can build up a 'profile' on each individual user that allows you to better serve their needs. Are they a loyal customer? Do they shop once a year? Are they looking for a bargain or a fan of a particular brand in your store? Do they login weekly or rarely?

Figure out the target audience and the problem that you're solving for them. Your drip campaign needs to be targeted to a specific behavior for it to be effective.

Try targeting audience segments based on use characteristics like visit frequency, likelihood of clicking on certain content subjects in a newsletter, how long ago they signed up, how often they visit your premium services page, or how long they’ve been paying customers.

Email marketing app Drip also points out that great lead nurturing campaigns use evolving profiles and segments: ask your users for more data, track how they interact with your current drip campaigns, and adjust or create new segments using those figures.

2. Craft Your Message

Now that you know whom you're targeting, you need to generate a message that's helpful and grabs their attention. What do you want the user to do? Or, what do you want the user to learn?

Based on your answer, write copy that's clear, actionable, and attractive. Maintain the voice that you've built for you brand, but make sure that your message is clear. Over at Vero, content editor Jimmy Daly broke down a promotional email campaign from Evernote, highlighting the importance of explaining benefits, using action verbs, and making the next steps unmissable.

Tip: At this point, don't get hung up on design—heck, you could start by sending plain text emails. But if you're looking for ways to optimize your email layout for conversions, check out this post from Emma, which outlines some great user interface considerations that have increased the effectiveness of their drip campaigns.

3. Plan Out Your Campaign

Next you need to figure out the logistics of your drip campaign—what the workflow looks like from first contact to sale to support. This is also when you set the goals of your campaign, make sure that the copy in each email flows together with the others, and decide how you're going to measure your results.

To do this, think about these questions:

How many emails am I going to send, when, and in what order?

Whether you're onboarding a new customer or keeping a user engaged, the sequence of your sends plays a crucial role in the success of each campaign. Consider how much information your target user needs, when he or she might need it, and why. Over on his blog, Jason Delodovici wrote a great post about a drip campaign that he spearheaded, noting the order he chose for each email—from signup to sale—and why.

Do my triggers line up with my message?

Nothing's worse than getting an emailed coupon for something you bought last week, or an over-the-top sales pitch seconds after signing up on a site. Make sure that your triggers are all laid out (based on the list segments in step 1), and that each email in your campaign is directly related to a trigger. Users should always understand why they're getting an email.

How am I going to measure success?

Hopefully at this point you know why you’re setting up a complex drip campaign—maybe it's for customer acquisition, engagement, or education for product releases and updates. Whatever the case, you need to set goals for your campaign, and choose the metrics to measure your success against. Depending on your analytics capabilities (we’ll delve into one example below, you could look at bounce rate, click-through rate, conversions, or time on site. Just make sure your measurements loop back to the "why" of your campaign.

Tip: If you’re looking to increase open rates, check out Sendloop’s guide to writing better subject lines.

4. Start Your Campaign

Once you've decided on a strategy, start sending. To do this, you can either implement your own custom drip software or buy an off-the-shelf product that'll have you up and running in minutes.

Before making a decision, I'd recommend reading our drip marketing app roundup, in which Matt Guay breaks down the best tools for managing your automated drip campaigns, plus the killer features that each app offers.

5. Evaluate and Adjust

Just because your drip campaign is automated doesn't mean you can let it run unsupervised. You spent a bunch of time researching user segments, and it's important to readjust those segments and your strategy based on the results. If you aren't getting as many clickthroughs as you want, try rewriting your calls to action; if you aren't meeting your conversion rate goals with your sale-closing email, try more educational communications before asking any user to pull the trigger. Evaluate, adjust, repeat.

How to Measure Drip Marketing Results

In the set up section above, I touched on the importance of determining which metrics you were going to measure your drip campaign’s success by. But what’s the best way to track how users are interacting with your content?

One of the most widespread strategies involves UTM codes (or URL parameters)—small text strings that you can paste onto the end of a URL without affecting the destination.

UTM stands for "Urchin Traffic Monitor" (after the company that initially created Google Analytics) and these codes are used specifically by Google Analytics to track web browsing via cookies. Using UTM codes, Google Analytics can tell you where a user has been, and whether or not they've visited your site before, among other metrics. Google even offers a custom URL builder to help you create UTM codes.

Sites signal the beginning of a UTM code with a question mark ? —below, the UTM code is everything after the question mark:

https://www.zapier.com/blog/app-audit?utm_source=dripintro

To get a better sense for how this works, try opening these two links and looking at your browser's address bar:

- "10 Plain Text Files You Should Have on Your Desktop for Higher Productivity"

- "10 Plain Text Files You Should Have on Your Desktop for Higher Productivity"

You should reach the same page even though the URLs are different. But note that the URL with the UTM code is tracked separately from the URL without. The difference is that with UTM-tracked URLs, you get signals about how the user got there—all you need to do is check your analytics platform for the specific URL string.

Note: You can also string UTM codes together if you separate them with ampersands & like this: https://www.zapier.com/blog/app-audit?utm_source=blogpost&utm_content=dripintro

If you're using an analytics suite other than Google Analytics, you can still use parameters to track unique URLs—for example, I could use https://www.zapier.com/blog/rescuetime?socialsource=fb&posttime=nov141123p instead of a classic UTM. That would simply trigger a unique traffic report for the parameter I specified.

There are a bunch of use cases for UTM codes:

- Test link placements for the same page in a newsletter by adding different UTM codes to the URLs

- Track whether email, Twitter ads, or a placement in your header performed better for a coupon code by giving each link a unique UTM code

- Compare whether a Facebook share button at the bottom or the top of your blog post produces more interaction by making the buttons share links with two different UTM codes

Ginny Soskey, the senior editor of HubSpot's marketing blog, wrote a thorough guide to UTM codes—complete with example UTM parameters—that can serve as good inspiration. But a lot of the time if you’re using an app to manage your drip campaigns, it will track results for you.

Just remember: UTMs are great for tracking what works for clicks, but as Vero points out you still need to focus on conversions and the value that each conversion brings to your company (in fact, they wrote an entire guide to tracking conversions via Google Analytics).

Apps to Run Drip Campaigns

There are dozens of different tools available for managing your emails and crafting an effective drip campaign—Vero, Sendloop, MailChimp, and Emma are a few that come to mind. But each of those apps has a different set of features, limitations, and price points, so you'll want to evaluate them thoroughly before committing.

Lucky for you, the next chapter breaks down 25 such email marketing tools—you'll learn which apps are best for drip campaigns, which ones offer a broader suite of marketing automation options, and which apps are the simplest to set up. In it, we cover:

- Drip email apps

- Marketing automation software

- Apps that send email newsletters and drip emails

- Build-your-own drip email app options

Whichever tool (or tools) you choose, marketing automation through drip campaigns can help you nurture leads without monopolizing up your time. When you stick with your users—and help them use your product—they’ll grow to love your brand.

Further Reading

On top of the resources linked throughout this post, check these blog posts and eBooks out for more info:

- How to trigger autoresponders from Mailchimp based on web traffic

- Using drips to convert trial users

- Vero's top marketing hacks

- Contactually has a four-part series on running a drip campaign

- How to use lifecycle emails to grow your business

Next

Now that you now everything about drip emails, it's time to find a drip email app that's perfect for your needs. We've rounded up the 25 best apps to send drip emails, and will look at them in-depth in the next chapter.

Written by Joe Stych

Image Credits: Drip photo courtesy LadyDragonflyCC via Flickr.

Chapter 7: The 25 Best Email Marketing Apps to Send Drip Campaigns

Email's crazy. Every new communication app claims to be an "email killer", and yet email outlives each one. Love it or hate it, you still likely check email first thing every morning, and pull your phone out every time it vibrates in your pocket with a new message.

That's why email's still a great place to reach your potential customers, and why newsletters have found a sudden resurgence in popularity. It's also why you need to be using some kind of drip marketing software to get your audience the info they need.

Drip emails are a great way to give your customers and contacts the right information at the right time, as we just saw in the last chapter. Now, it’s time to find a drip email app for your team. Here are some of the best.

Note: We're partial to the term "drip campaign", but this marketing tactic goes by many names, including automated email campaigns, lifecycle emails, autoresponders and marketing automation.

Picking a Great Drip Email Tool

Drip email apps come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from tools that just send emails to full-featured CRMs with marketing automation that also include drip email features. There are even ways to send drip emails from your favorite email newsletter tool, and tricks for creating your own drip automation with just an email sending service.

We’ve rounded up over two dozen of the very best apps to send drip emails—plus ways to build your own drip email app. Each of these tools:

- Work great for sending drip emails

- Are relatively easy to use

- Work with Zapier so you can integrate them with the rest of your apps

You’ll find enough info about each app to whet your appetite and help you find a tool that fits your needs, along with its base pricing and a screenshot. Then, there’s a link to our in-depth review page for many of the apps, including an extensive look at their features, a walkthrough of how each one works, more screenshots and a full lists of their pricing plans.

It’s time to find a drip email app that’ll work great for you. Here are the best, broken down into four categories:

In This Chapter:

Drip Email

Apps that focus on helping you send drip emails, including Drip, Sendloop, Customer.io, BombBomb, Vision6, Quickmail, Vero, SendWithUs, ConvertKit, Gumroad, and Knowtify.

Marketing Automation

Apps that help you manage your contacts, track what they do on your site, and send them drip messages, including Contactually, AgileCRM, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Interakt, Intercom, Jumplead, Hatchbuck, and LeadSimple.

Email Newsletters & Drip Emails

Apps that are designed for sending email newsletters and also let you send drip messages to new subscribers, including Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Aweber, Benchmark Email, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Emma, MadMimi, and Active Campaign.

Build Your Own Drip Email App

Roll out your own drip email solution using Zapier and any email appor Django Drip, Zapier’s open-sourced email drip tool.

Drip Email Apps

Want an app to send drip emails and nothing more? The following apps are built for just that: they each have unique features beyond just sending drip emails, but they’re best at that one most important task. You’ll likely find these apps to be the easiest way to start sending out drip emails.

Drip

It only seems right to start this roundup out with an app named for the very thing this chapter's about: Drip. Drip is, as you might guess, an app designed specifically for sending out drip emails. It offers a simple tool that lets you gather email addresses from your website, and can pull in your customer email addresses from a variety of sources. Then, it’s all about email.

Drip lets you quickly create drip campaigns using Blueprints: pre-made sets of drip campaigns with text the Drip team has tweaked to perform as well as possible. You’ll replace the filler text with your own product names and relevant info for what you’re selling or promoting, and set the timeframe for sending the emails that you want. Then, just sit back and watch your casual signups turn into real customers.

Price: From $49/month for up to 2,500 subscribers and 20,000 sent emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Drip review

Sendloop

There's more to drip emails than just sending pre-made messages. You'll need a way first to add people to your drip campaigns, and Sendloop is designed to make that easy. With a Facebook app, plugins and code snippets that make it simple to integrate with your website, plus sign up forms and hosted landing pages, Sendloop is packed with helpful ways to funnel contacts into specific drip campaigns. It'll then let you watch their moves on your site and more to further hone your message in subsequent drip campaigns.

That data then lets you construct the perfect drip campaigns. Just as simply as writing an email to your coworker, you'll be able to set up personalized drip emails and have them sent to specific contacts based on the variables that matter to you—perhaps targeting people who've been on your site most recently, or those who looked at a specific page. It's easy to do that when your drip app is integrated so closely with your site.

Price: From $24/month for up to 2,500 contacts with email automation

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sendloop review

Customer.io

You should space your drip emails out to avoid overwhelming your contacts—who wants a dozen emails the first day they sign up for a new app? You could just set up a simple schedule where emails go out every 3rd day, or you could be even smarter about your timeline—Customer.io monitors your site in real-time, then sends precisely timed drip emails for the best results.

Customer.io sees when people view your pricing page, or perhaps check out one of your upgrade options, and then refers to your pre-set schedule to send them an email at the best time possible. Your potential customers might be spooked if you email them right when they click your pricing page, but you just might close the sale if you email them the next day at lunch time when they're bored anyhow.

And then, if you want to send another email to people who already received drips, Customer.io lets you make another message and send it out to the group of people you want, even if the drip campaign they were on is already over. Better late than never!

Price: Free for up to 200 contacts; from $50 for up to 5,000 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

BombBomb

Tired of only seeing text and images in emails? Your potential customers likely feel the same way. Most emails live and die by their copywriting, but BombBomb turns that on its head with video-powered drip emails.

You can shoot videos professionally or just take a quick video with your phone, using the footage to show off your product, introduce yourself to your readers, or get them excited about an upcoming offer. Then, you'll use BombBomb's designer to make the videos look great in everyone's inboxes, and get your email automation started. Now, all you'll have to do is watch the real-time alerts to come in as your contacts start watching your videos and hopefully buy your products.

And if that's not enough, you can even include PowerPoints, mp3s, and other files and documents in your emails. Who said drip emails have to be boring?

Price: From $25/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our BombBomb review

Vision6

Plain text emails can be ordinary, and video emails take a ton of effort—or might not even work well for your audience. Instead, you might like something that makes it easy to create beautiful emails. That's Vision6's goal.

Packed with dozens of pre-made templates—including seasonal options—and a drag-and-drop editor, Vision6 makes it easy to set up well-designed drip email campaigns. It also makes it easy to know who will receive your messages. Instead of just listing the criteria for who will receive which drip message, you'll be able to drill down through your contacts in a spreadsheet view and select the contact categories you want to reach. You can even go beyond emails by sharing your drip messages on social media and via SMS.

Price: From $9/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Vision6 review

Quickmail

Taking on any new project can be difficult, and sending drip emails is no different. Quickmail relieves some of that pain by working with the tools you’re already using, and breaking drip campaigns down into simple steps complete with videos to help you along.

All you’ll need to start out is a Google account. Sign in with it, and you’ll be able to import contacts from a Google Spreadsheet. Then, you’ll make drip emails that are sent right from your Gmail account, as though they’re personal emails. That makes it easy to reply, and Quickmail is smart enough to take people out of your drip campaign once they reply so you can continue your conversation on a more personal level. It’s a simpler way to do drips.

Price: From $37/month for up to 20,000 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

Vero

Too often drip emails are just mass-mailed messages sent out in a series, but they can be so much more. Many drip apps let you personalize your emails, perhaps with your contacts' names, and let you send drips based on their interests. Vero, though, lets you go much further, making it easy to create emails that are as customized as Amazon's recommended product messages.

The basics of Vero are simple: you can make your drip emails with your own HTML templates, craft your emails online, and have them sent out automatically or based on triggers. But its real power comes from the ways it can tie in with your site. It can use your Google Analytics code to let you track stats where you're already tracking everything else, and even lets you personalize emails with data from your server using HTML or JSON.

Vero's not as simple to set up as other drip email campaign apps, but you should see far better conversion rates from the more personalized messages you'll be sending out. And Vero has enough guides to help you learn the ropes and get even more out of your drip emails.

Price: From $99/month for up to 12,500 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

SendWithUs

You've built your own app, and even have a transactional email service like Mandrill or Amazon SES that you're using to send emails. But you still need a way to make beautifully designed emails and send out drips. SendWithUs is designed for you: it's a drip email provider that works with your app and email sending services.

Instead of hiding your email templates inside of your internal apps, you can import your newsletter templates and tweak them in SendWithUs. You can even tap into contact lists from your site, and use SendWithUs to segment those users into groups for targeted drip campaigns. Then, you can set up your drip workflows, send your messages using your favorite email service, and monitor the stats back in SendWithUs. As an added bonus, it even has a translation service so you can stay in touch with your international users.

Price: From $79/month for up to 10,000 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

ConvertKit

Writing a book is hard work. And even if you have Hemingway-level composition skills, there's more to a successful launch than top-notch content—you also need to market your book effectively.

Drip emails are an especially great way to share snippets of info from your book to whet your audience's appetite. Any drip email app could work to market your writing, but ConvertKit is built specifically with writers in mind. It'll help you create landing pages with teasers from your book, and turn your written content into drip emails aimed at drawing your readers in and turning them into buyers when your content launches. ConvertKit makes scheduling emails incredibly simple, with a drag-and-drop editor to change your emails' order and a broadcast tool that can send a message to everyone or just a segment of people—say those who never bought your book.

Price: From $29/month for up to 1,000 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

Gumroad

Best known as a simple place to sell your digital goods, Gumroad now also includes features to help you market your products via email. Gumroad includes an updates feature to let you gather prospective customers' email addresses, and store them alongside your existing customers' addresses in Gumroad. Then, you can send updates to all of them about your products and your ongoing progress with new products.

Or, you can automate your marketing with Gumroad's new scheduled updates and workflows. Scheduled updates let write an an email to your customers or fans ahead of time, and Gumroad will send it right at the time you've set. Workflows work much like any other drip app; they give you the essential tools to write emails that'll go out to new users over the hours, days, and weeks you pick. It's a great way to combine your marketing and sales in one app.

Price: Free for emailing customers; Gumroad charges 5% plus $0.25 on each sale.

Knowtify

There's so many ways you can use drip emails: to welcome new customers, remind people to use your product, teach them how to use it—perhaps with special tips as they use more advanced features—and to share deals and new features. Knowtify is designed to help you send these and more automated emails, with features to send transactional, behavioral, and digest emails. Transactional and behavioral emails will cover your standard drip email needs, with scheduled emails that welcome users to your product and guide them as they use specific features, while digest emails will help you keep people coming back to your product by reminding them what's happened and sharing latest news.

Knowtify makes it easy to build rich emails with pre-made email sections that you can easily add and customize with your own style and content. Then, you can use rules to send the emails to the users you want, and personalize the emails with content from your app and user profiles. All that's left is to schedule each email individually, and all of your app's emails will be sent out automatically from the same place.

Price: Free for first 1,000 emails; from $19/month for sending up to 2,500 emails

Zapier support coming soon

Marketing Automation Apps

Drip emails are great for reaching both potential users and existing customers, but sometimes you need a bit more to nudge one-time visitors towards becoming real customers. Perhaps you’d like to track more info about each contact, and market directly to each person’s interests and needs. That’s when a marketing automation tool can save you a ton of headaches.

We recently reviewed 10 of the best CRM apps with marketing automation features—some are great at building profiles about your contacts, while others are better for reaching people on the phone or by text. Then there are the marketing automation tools that are best for drip emails. They’ll give you more information about the people who receive your drip emails, so you can customize your campaigns and make them even more effective.

Note: While the pricing of other apps in this roundup account for the number of contacts you can add to your drip lists, most marketing apps are priced by number of users on your team, so that’s reflected in the prices mentioned below.

Contactually

You may be focused on sending emails, but the people behind those email addresses are the key to your success. Contactually is a CRM that’s focused on your contacts first, helping you gather them from your email inbox and your social networks with any info about them it can find. You’ll see who you need to follow up with on your dashboard, and its email app integrations will help you know more about people when they email you.

Contactually is also great at sending out automated emails with its Programs feature. This feature lets you automate your CRM, which could help you keep your contacts organized and up-to-date but also can be used for sending out automated drip emails. You can easily send emails to any new contact, or use emails to invite them to your social networks and more. Email marketing may not be Contactually’s focus, but if you want a contact-focused tool plus a way to send drip campaigns, it’s a great CRM to check out.

Price: $18/user/month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Contactually review

AgileCRM

Drip email campaigns are complex, ever-evolving marketing efforts. But there are two key components to setting each one up: writing your actual email content, and figuring out the order and timing in which the emails will be sent.

Agile CRM simplifies the latter by letting you drag and drop your marketing automation messages into your preferred order. That makes it easy to visualize your drip campaigns along with the rest of your marketing efforts.

Drag-and-drop interfaces sound simplistic, but Agile CRM packs a lot of power into theirs. You can customize your drips so they only go out to certain people, create drips that only send deals to people who haven’t visited your site, or craft campaigns targeted based on which pages they’ve visited. You can even use Agile CRM to keep the conversation going via social media, if email’s not enough.

Price: From $14.99/team member per month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Agile CRM review

HubSpot

Drip emails are only part of the marketing puzzle: you’re also writing blog posts, sharing social content, and tweaking your site for your prospective customers. HubSpot lets you combine all of your efforts through automated workflows and other tools to help you manage your contacts and content together.

Using HubSpot, content for drip emails can be easily pulled from your blog posts and sent on a schedule that's tweaked over time based on user behavior. You can even have your site’s content change for each type of contact, so they’ll each see consistent marketing even as you’re customizing it for different customer segments.

Price: Around $800/month for unlimited team members and up to 1,000 customers; $50/month per additional 1k customers

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Hubspot review

Infusionsoft

When you set out to find a drip email tool, you likely didn't expect to find a personal task manager. Yet Infusionsoft can do just that, while still keeping track of your contacts’ info and what they’re doing on your site, sending your drip emails and other marketing campaigns, and even helping you sell stuff online with its eCommerce tools.

Infusionsoft is built around a "My Day" view that shows you the tasks and appointments you have, along with the contacts you need to followup with. But drip campaigns are never far away; they’re the first thing in the app’s toolbar. You can lay out your campaigns with a visual builder that lets you organize your drip emails along with customized landing pages and even voice messages or paper mailings to share more info with your potential users. It’s great for drip emails, but you won’t want to stop with just emails in Infusionsoft.

Price: Around $75/team member per month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Infusionsoft review

Interakt

Want to run a data-driven drip campaign where you'll easily be able to see how your drip emails are performing? Then an app like Interakt might fit the bill. Interakt it's built around a dashboard that shows all of your most important stats—emails opened, site visits, converted leads and more—right when you open the app.

Interakt's Auto Campaigns feature also makes it easy to create drip campaigns where each stage is customized for your audience. You can use use this tool to target a filtered subsection of your audience, giving you an easy way to create follow-up emails based on a variety of factors.

Price: Free for personal use; around $10/team member per month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Interakt review

Intercom

You want to teach your users how to use your app and get the most out of your service. So reach them where they are, exactly when they need help. That's the idea behind Intercom's auto conversations: you can them to send emails or in-app messages to your users on an automated schedule, giving them help where they're most likely to see it. And if you don't want to bombard everyone with the info, you can set up subsequent drips so they only go to users who, say, haven't visited your site again recently.

If you aren't sure what to put in your drip emails, don't worry: Intercom helps you A/B test your emails easily, so you can send out different drip emails to different segments of your audience, see which one performs better, and then standardize on that one—or customize further from there. And you'll always know exactly how your emails will look to your user with Intercom's rich email composer, which makes it easy to add buttons, section breaks, and more to your messages.

Price: Free event tracking and customer profiles; around $20 per 1k customers for full features

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Intercom review

Jumplead

There are two ways to look at your email list: as a static list of people interested in your product, or as a dynamic list of people who are each at their own level of understanding about your product. Some folks are new to your product, and need all the help you can give them, while others have already checked out several pages, and perhaps need some more advanced guidance.

Jumplead helps you customize your drip campaigns for users at every stage. It's a CRM that lets you identify your customers in real-time, then apply that knowledge to your drip emails. You'll be able to send customized emails to your potential customers depending on what they've seen, where they live, and more. You'll then get notifications on the most promising people you should follow up with.

Price: Free for 1 user and up to 100 customers; around $16/team member per month for basic plans

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Jumplead review

Hatchbuck

Folders and static lists are equally dated metaphors today—they each only let you put a file or item in one spot. That's why Gmail uses tags for organizing messages, and Hatchbuck does the same to your contacts. You can add all the tags you want to a contact so you can market to their personal interests while still automating your campaigns.

Hatchbuck also helps you create emails easily with hundreds of templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Combine that with a simple email campaign tool that lets you pull in your pre-built emails, target them to a tag, and set a timeframe for each, and you'll have a drip campaign that'll turn leads into sales.

Price: Starts at $99/month for 1 team member up to 2.5k customers or $299/month for unlimited team members and customers

Zapier support coming soon

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Hatchbuck review

LeadSimple

Sometimes you need a tool that's designed specifically for your job. If you're in the real estate business, LeadSimple is one such app. It's a real estate sales management app designed to manage everything about your properties and leads, so you can focus on giving your prospective customers the best house hunting experience ever.

The personal touch is necessary, but a little automation won't hurt, either. That's why LeadSimple recently added SimpleDrip, a simple way to send drip emails from LeadSimple. You'll just setup a sales workflow, and right along with the features that'd remind you to call leads, you can schedule template emails to be sent to them right when they'll be most impactful.

Price: From $49/month for unlimited contacts and up to 2 team members

Email Newsletter Apps

Chances are, you’re already subscribed to a number of email newsletters—you may even have one of your own. Email newsletters are a great way to share your latest news, publish semi-private publications, and announce deals and promotions. The only problem is that new subscribers only get your new emails.

Not anymore. Many of the most popular email newsletter apps now support drip emails, giving you an easy way to ensure that your new subscribers get your most important emails and your latest updates. They even work great for sending drip emails if that’s all you want, leaving you the freedom to add a newsletter in the future.

MailChimp

MailChimp may be best known for their email newsletter app's fun design, their sponsorship of podcasts like Serial, or their monkey-themed tees and hats. But MailChimp is also a great place to run your drip campaigns. Its new Automation features include pre-made drip campaigns for welcoming new customers, following up after sales, and more, or you can create your own completely customized drips.

MailChimp's easy-to-use email designer will come in handy when making your drip emails, and its subscriber profiles will give you the data to show who opened your emails and what they did next. Plus, you can continue your connection by sending your MailChimp email newsletters to the people on your drip campaign lists once the drip's complete.

Price: From $10/month for up to 500 contacts; paid plan required for automated drip emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our MailChimp review

Campaign Monitor

Dates are important. There are holidays, the anniversary of when the user signed up, your company's birthday, and more. There's no need to write an email newsletter manually on those days; Campaign Monitor can send them to your contacts automatically.

Right along with your normal email lists, you can set up automated emails that will reach your contacts on those special days or based on any other triggers that you set. Or, if you'd like, you can make a drip campaign that every new subscriber receives. It's drip marketing blended perfectly with standard email newsletters.

Price: From $9/month for sending up to 2,500 emails to up to 500 contacts.

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Campaign Monitor review

Aweber

Your newest email newsletter subscribers know little about your work, and they don't have the wealth of information that you've already shared in your newsletter over the years. Aweber's Follow Up emails are the perfect way to let your new subscribers get up to speed quickly.

Just write emails using the same interface you'd use for sending your normal email updates, and make them look great with hundreds of templates and free stock images. You can even automatically personalize messages with your contact info and more. Then, schedule when your emails will be sent, perfectly timed to make sure people really pay attention. Then, once the drip campaign's done, subscribers will get your newsletters like everyone else.

Price: From $19/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Aweber review

Benchmark

First impressions matter, and the way your email looks is the first thing people will notice when they open your drips. Your email may look great on your screen, but you can't possibly check every app on every device. How can you be sure that your messages look great everywhere?

Benchmark simplifies that process with its Inbox Checker, which lets you see how your emails will look in a number of different email apps and on mobile devices. It'll even make sure your emails won't get snagged by common spam filters. Benchmark also offers the tools you need to send out email campaigns, along with hundreds of tried-and-true templates that look gorgeous on any screen. You can use those templates to create great drip email campaigns, and then use them to send out email newsletters as well.

Price: Free for up to 2,000 contacts; paid accounts from $11.95/month for up to 600 contacts with custom branding, sub accounts, and more.

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Benchmark review

GetResponse

You schedule everything else using your work on a calendar, why not your marketing emails? GetResponse's new Autoresponder tool can handle that: put together the emails you want send out, then drag-and-drop them onto a calendar to assign each one a date and time. GetResponse makes it incredibly simple to lay out a drip campaign that keeps going, covering holidays and special events so you don't need to double-check your schedule.

Then, you can also send action-based messages, letting you kick off drip campaigns based on clicks, transactions, birthdays, and other important dates. It's a full-featured drip campaign system that just happens to send email newsletters, too.

Price: From $15/month for up to 1,000 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our GetResponse review

Constant Contact

You've already sent out so many email newsletters, so duplicating your work to spin up a drip campaign for new subscribers would seem a waste. Constant Contact lets you copy your existing emails or survey introductions, and turn them into a scheduled list of emails that will go out to new subscribers.

Then, all you'll have to do is decide how to space out your messages, and organize a set of up to 20 emails into a drip campaign. Repeat that for each of your email lists, and you'll have a great way to introduce new subscribers to your brand without much extra work. You'll also be able to check your stats and quickly see how many of your drip emails were opened and sent people to your site.

Price: From $15/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Constant Contact review

Emma

There's more to a successful newsletter than a massive list of contacts. Emma ties into Salesforce, Shopify and more to pull in all of your CRM and sales data, and then lets you use that information to personalize and automate your emails. You can start drip campaigns when a sale is completed, then personalize subsequent emails based on what your customer purchased.

Making a drip campaign with Emma is incredibly simple, too: you just pick the group of people you want to target, along with the triggers that you want to watch for, then select an existing email and save it as a drip. That's it. You can use that to onboard new people, or perhaps to send out special offers to subscribers once they've purchased something and have been around for a long time.

Price: From $45/month for up to 2,500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Emma review

Mad Mimi

Email apps don't have to be stuffy and boring. Mad Mimi's simple interface makes sending email newsletters fun, and its app integrations make sending those newsletters to all of your contacts a piece of cake.

Plus, in its Addons page, you can even set up a basic drip email tool. To do that, select an existing email list, and then put together a simple set of emails that'll be sent out on a schedule. You can then have those drip emails go along with your normal newsletters, or have them send automatically as soon as someone is added to your lists.

Price: From $10/month for up to 500 contacts; paid plan required for drip emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our https://zapier.com/zapbook/mad-mimi/review/

Active Campaign

Drip email tools empower you to target relevant emails to specific groups of people. But once your drip campaigns start piling up, figuring out who gets which emails turns into a confusing mess. Active Campaign solves this by letting you organize your drip email campaigns using a standard flow chart.

Using simple yes-and-no questions, Active Campaign funnels your contacts into groups based on the actions they've taken—like emails they've opened, pages they've visited, whether or not they've subscribed to your blog newsletter—and sends drip emails accordingly. It's one of the simplest ways to make a detailed drip email campaign that still fits with your normal email newsletters.

Price: From $9/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Active Campaign review

Make Your Own Drip Campaign App:

Perhaps you're more adventurous, and would like to build your own drip campaign app that integrates the tools you're already using. Turns out, there are several ways to do that. Here's a simple way to build your own code-free drip app using Zapier, plus info about Zapier's open-sourced Django Drip app, which developers can use to add drip email functionality to any Django site.

Zapier + Any Email App

Zapier's your go-to tool for automation, and it can even be used to build a complete email drip tool. All you'll need is a form tool—or any other app that can be used to collect emails for your drip campaign—along with a tool to save your drip list and an email app to send out your messages.

No matter what drip email app you use, you'll still need a way to collect emails, perhaps from a form or by copying your customers' email addresses when they purchase your products. Here, instead of sending those email addresses to a drip app, you need to save them to a spreadsheet, database, or anywhere else that can add some structure to large amounts of data. Here are some of the Zapier automations that you could use (see more apps on Zapier):

Zaps:

- Save Your PayPal Sales to a Google Docs Spreadsheet

- Save Typeform entries to a Google Sheets spreadsheet

- Save Gravity Forms submissions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet

- Save new Wufoo entries to a Google Sheets spreadsheet

- Log Gumroad Sales in a Google Spreadsheet

Then, you'll want to decide on the messages you want to send, and the intervals at which you want to send them. First write the copy and create templates using your email service—you could even use plain-text messages to get started. Then work on your schedule. Perhaps you'll want to send one email immediately after a new user is added to your list—just connect your spreadsheet to an email app, and have that message sent directly. The others you'll want to delay, perhaps sending new messages three and seven days after they first signed up.

There are two ways to handle the delay. The easiest way is with the Zapier Delay Trigger: You'll connect your spreadsheet—or any other data source—to the Zapier Delay Trigger, give that trigger a name, and then set the length of time you wish to wait (up to one week). That Zap will watch your spreadsheet for new entries, and when anything's added it'll copy it and wait for the time you specify to do anything.

- Zap: Send Google Spreadsheet Data to the Zapier Delay Trigger

Then, you'll make another Zap using the delay trigger you just set up along with an email service of your choice—anything from Gmail for plain text emails to services like Mandrill or Amazon SES for template-enabled emails will work just fine. You'll just enter your delay trigger's name, format your email, and pull in the data from the original delayed Zap.

Zaps:

- Send Emails via Gmail after a Delay

- Send Emails via Mandrill after a Delay

- Send Emails via Amazon SES after a Delay

Or, if you want to specify a more precise time period, you could use Google Calendar to delay the Zap instead. That method is a bit more complicated: you'll have to set the length of time to wait by modifying the calendar date, along with putting the recipient's name as the event name and their email as the description so you can easily reuse it.

- Zap: Send Gmail Emails from Google Calendar

Now, you've got one drip email scheduled—or two, perhaps, if you took the original suggestion to send out an email as soon as a new contact was added. You can then add more delays and email actions for each additional drip email you want to send out. With a handful of Zaps, you'll have your very own drip email system that runs automatically, and you'll still have a list of all your contacts and their email addresses to use elsewhere.

Django Drip

If you're a developer using a Django-based app, you can add drip email functionality to your own app using Django Drip. Built and used internally by the Zapier team, Django Drip is a simple app for creating drip email campaigns. Just install it on your Django app, and it'll tap into your app's user list and let you send automated drip emails from your Django admin.

It's more technical and complicated than anything else in this chapter, but Django Drip a great way to bring your drip email app in-house. Be sure to check out the documentation before you get started.

Whether you want to send a set of emails to every new subscriber you get on your email list, or would rather send customized marketing messages to your new customers, there's a tool for you to get started with drip email marketing. That tool might be part of the email newsletter app you've already been using, or it might be worth switching to a new CRM just for the extra marketing features. Or you might even find out that Zapier with your favorite email services = Zapier with your favorite email services is enough.

Either way, it's time to start doing more with emails.

Next

You've learned everything about drip emails, and have found a great app to send your drip messages. Now, it's time to start setting up your drip email campaigns, and integrate your drip email app with the other tools you use. You'll learn all that and more in the next chapter.

Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Rain picture courtesy 55Laney69 on Flicker

Chapter 8: Successful Drip Email Campaigns

How to Pick the Best App, Add Advanced Automation and More

You’ve built a great product, planned your marketing well, and have successfully launched it. There's a ton of people interested in your product, and you’ve even sold it to a handful of customers already. Now, it’s time to prompt those potential customers to buy, and make sure your new customers know everything they need about the product they just bought.

You could email each new person manually, but soon you'd be spending more time sending emails than building your product. That's why drip emails—also know as automated email campaigns, lifecycle emails or autoresponders—are such a great marketing tool. They let you write a series of emails once, then have them sent to every new contact automatically.

We've already looked at the basics of drip email marketing, and explored some of the best apps to send drip emails. Now, it’s time for you to select your drip app, set it up, integrate it with your other tools, and hone your drip strategy. Here's how.

In This Chapter:

1. Find the Perfect Drip Email App

2. Build Your Own Drip Tool

3. Automate Your Drip Emails

4. Hone Your Drip Strategy

5. Use Drip Emails to do More

6. Stay Human

Find the Perfect Drip Email App

"I chose Drip [app] after using a dozen other email platforms."

~ Elliott Kosmicki, entrepreneur

Sending a series of emails to your customers doesn’t have to be difficult. At a minimum, all you need from a drip email app is a way to make template emails that’ll be sent out on a schedule to your contacts. There are more advanced tools, as well—apps that will let you customize your drip emails based on contacts’ info, interests, and their interactions with your site. And, of course, there’s the marketing automation apps that can send drip email, manage your contacts in a CRM, and much more.

But you don’t have to start out with something advanced. You’ll send drip emails to your new contacts, primarily, so switching to a new service in the future wouldn’t be too difficult. That’s why StoreMapper founder Tyler Tringas recommends starting out with MailChimp before graduating to a more advanced drip email app—in his case, Intercom.

“If you want to start regularly emailing your users with announcements, you should use MailChimp,” says Tyler. But then, he continues, Intercom is “super powerful, but not worth the setup until your app really gets off the ground.” Now that his startup has grown, he’s using it to send automated lifecycle emails, drip campaigns, follow-up emails and more. They’re a powerful extension of a standard drip campaign, but perhaps too much to take on when you’re just getting started.

Your best bet is to find an app that looks like it has the features you want right now, and then give it a try to see how you like it. If you’re already using an email newsletter app, or a CRM that offers marketing automation, your best option might be to try out its drip features. Otherwise, look for an app that works well with the other apps you use. That’s what prompted the Influence & Co. team to choose Contactually: it works with Zapier, and so by extension integrates with the other apps they use.

- Zap: Add new HubSpot contacts to your Contactually database

It might take a few tries to find one that fits your needs, but there’s bound to be a drip app that meets your requirements and budget. Bright Learning marketer Lisa Renneisen found this after trying out a number of new drip apps and coming back to their original pick, Vision6. “Vision6 honestly remains my software of choice, largely due to the advanced functionality and features that it offers,” Lisa says.

Entrepreneur Elliot Kosmicki noted that he tried a dozen apps before he settled on Drip after it ended up being the perfect drip app for his work. “Drip, for me, is the perfect balance between full-blown (and expensive) marketing automation, and a basic email autoresponder,” says Elliot.

Zaps:

- Add Unbounce leads to a Drip subscriber list

- Add Subscribers to Drip from Gmail with Labels

So open up our drip email app roundup, look through the options, and try a few of the apps that look most promising. One of them is likely to be the tool you’ve been waiting for.

Build Your Own Drip Tool

Or, there just might not be one absolutely perfect tool for your team’s needs. In that case, it’s time to build your own drip campaign app—and it doesn't even have to be that difficult.

The drip email apps post details how you can use Zapier to send drip emails from any app, and there's quite a few teams who are doing just that. Oval Business Solutions uses Podio forms for client inquires, but the app doesn't include a drip email tool. "This is where the ever-evolving box of tricks, Zapier, comes to the rescue," says Adrian, managing director at Oval Business Solutions. They use Zapier to send drip emails to these potential clients using a combination of Podio forms, Gmail and Zapier's delay trigger.

Zaps:

- Send an Email From Gmail to Contacts Who Fill Out Your Podio Form

- Send Podio Form Data to the Zapier Delay Trigger

- Send Emails via Gmail after a Delay

Zapier lets you tie as many apps together as you'd like, to make the perfect app setup for your team. The EviRental team, for example, uses their own app in Knack, a database tool, to gather leads, then uses Zapier to send the leads to Zoho CRM and send the contact an email in Mandrill, a transactional email app.

"Zapier filters the customers [from Knack] for specific criteria, sets an email delay and then sends all the information to Mandrill for delivery a week or so later," says Rick Maggio, EviRentals' marketing director. "We are able to get customer feedback in an automated and scalable way using Zapier, [and] we've been able to get the feedback we need to improve our users' experiences."

Zaps:

- Send Knack Form Entries to the Zapier Delay Trigger

- Send Emails via Mandrill after a Delay

Or, perhaps you have an app that works great for managing your contacts, but isn't quite as great at sending emails. Then "making your own app" might turn into just combining the best features of two apps. That's why DeedGrabber's Rick Dawson uses Infusionsoft, but then supplements its email features with Mandrill. He wanted more control over his emails and their deliverability than Infusionsoft offered, so he set up a Zapier integration that lets him use Mandrill to send email instead.

"I can just apply a tag in Infusionsoft when I want an email to be sent, and when Zapier sees this, it tells the email provider to send that email," Rick says. "All the contact fields are available in Zapier to personalize the email too, which is great."

Zaps:

- Send an email from Mandrill by tagging an Infusionsoft contact

- Send an email from Mailgun by tagging an Infusionsoft contact

For the most customizable drip setups, though, you still might end up wanting to construct your own drip email app from the ground up. That's why we built our own Django Drip tool at Zapier. "We tried a bunch of drip email tools back in 2012, and found them a bit narrow on segmentation abilities," says Zapier CEO Wade Foster. "If you wanted to do any segmentation you had to replicate your user data in a third-party system which is both challenging and scary."

So, the Zapier development team set out to make something better for their needs. “Django Drip lets us set up complex segments based on all the data we have about users in our database," says Wade. "Finding things like what apps a user uses, how much they've used it, and when they did certain actions are a breeze with Django Drip.” If you find yourself with similar needs, you might also find that building your own tool or using a customizable self-hosted tool like Django Drip is the best solution.

Automate Your Drip Emails

"Email automation is a must-have for my type of business. It takes time to set up, but it's a fantastic marketing approach."

~ Fard Johnmar, Founder of Enspektos

Drip emails are, by definition, automated emails. But you can automate far more than just your email sending schedule. With a bit of work, you can automatically find new contacts, add them to your drip emails, and even customize your drips based on your users' needs.

The most obvious way to add contacts to your drip email lists is via a sign-up form, but there are plenty of other ways, too. If you're selling products, your shopping cart may well be your best source of leads—and ideally, it'll add the lead's contact details directly to your drip app.

“If your shopping cart doesn't integrate with Drip make sure to set up Zapier," recommends WordPress developer David Hehenberger. "This way, you can track events such as 'made a purchase', 'refunded' or 'abandoned cart' (assuming your shopping cart can send these Triggers to Zapier)."

Zaps:

- Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

- Nurture Bigcommerce Customers via Email with HubSpot

If your shopping cart doesn't work with Zapier, there still may be a way to get your customers automatically added to your drip email lists. One easy way is by using Zapier's email parser—which can copy data from any email you send it, including sales emails. Just have your email app forward the emails you receive after you make a sale, and Zapier can automate everything else. Elliott calls this his favorite feature in Zapier.

"When I sign up a client or make a sale, I simply forward the email to one of my parsers," Elliott explains. Then, "I let Zapier add the user to the correct Drip series, tag them as clients in Drip, add them to Google Contacts and Sendhub groups, as well as schedule a to-do on my task manager to call the person!" All of that, just from one email.

Zaps:

- Parse Emails into Drip for Easy Drip Campaigns

- Add Contacts to Google Contacts from Parsed Emails

- Add Contacts to SendHub via Parsed Email

- Parse Emails into Podio

Events are another great source of leads. You could go around with a sign-up sheet and manually add people's emails to a list, but there's far better ways by integrating your drip list with event tools like Eventbrite or GoToWebinar. That's how Lisa Renneisen, marketer at Bright Learning, sends drip emails to their organization's event attendees.

"Eventbrite is brilliant for event registration, but I don't love their email formatting," says Lisa. "So by plugging in to Vision6 I can automatically populate the database and send wonderful emails that reflect my brand. It also allows me to do away with horrible data extraction and import tasks that everyone hates!”

Zaps:

- Add new Eventbrite attendees to a Vision6 contact list

- Add contacts to a Vision6 list from a Google Sheet

Hone Your Drip Strategy

"We send Drips because it's a great way to engage with users based on specific things they do in our app."

~ Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier

You've poured your heart and soul—or at least countless hours—into creating your drip campaigns. Don't stop there. No matter how good your emails are right now, there's surely ways you can improve them.

One of the simplest ways to improve your drip emails is by A/B testing them. Many email apps will let you write two different subject lines and even email bodies, and then test to see which one performs better. Repeat that as much as you want to continuously perfect your emails.

But then, you can use your apps to improve your drip emails for each of your customers. Depending on your email app, you might be able to move contacts to a different list or send them a separate set of emails based on their interactions with your list. Rick Dawson does this with Infusionsoft with his drip emails at DeedGrabber. "Trackable links in Infusionsoft allow you to move people to different lists if they click on emails, and perform other actions on them," Rick explains.

Even if your app doesn't directly let you move contacts to another drip list based on events, there's likely another way to get it to work. For example, Elliott uses Gmail and Zapier to move contacts to a new list in Drip.

“I use Gmail tags to trigger Zapier to move a sales prospect from one list to another inside of Drip, or mark events and tag contacts in Drip," Elliott says. He then uses Drip's own features along with Zapier to customize drip emails based on contacts' interactions with his site. "Drip watches your web events, so I can also trigger actions through Zapier when a lead does something on my website. Then, through the Drip integration with Zapier, you can add a user at a specific point in a Drip email series."

Zaps:

- Add Subscribers to Drip from Gmail with Labels

- Add MailChimp Subscribers to Drip

- Remove MailChimp Unsubscribes from Drip Campaigns

Or, you can combine two drip tools to achieve something similar. The Enspektos team uses both MailChimp and Drip, the former to send email newsletters and the latter to send drip emails. They then use Zapier to automatically add contacts to drip email lists with bonus material in Drip based on their interactions with MailChimp email newsletters, such as clicking a link or forwarding the email. "These emails have reduced my churn rate significantly," says Enspektos founder Fard Johnmar. "People know that they are receiving secret bonus content and this makes them feel special (because they are)!"

Use Drip Emails to do More

"Be clever and think laterally. It's amazing what you can achieve if your just plan out your integrations carefully!"

~ Lisa Renneisen, marketer at Bright Learning

There's a number of common types of drip emails, from welcome emails and timed training courses to prompts to finish checking out or reminders about upcoming events. Beyond simply making the best possible traditional drip campaigns, though, there's a wide range of ways you can use drip emails.

For example, you could sell drip emails. No, really—instead of making a course and selling it as a download, you could sell a course and deliver the lessons as drip emails. Author Nathan Barry did just this in his recent 10 Days to Better Design project. "I set the product up in Gumroad, then linked it to ConvertKit through Zapier," wrote Nathan. "When a person buys the course, they’ll automatically get enrolled and start receiving the content they just purchased right away."

- Zap: Add Gumroad Customers to a Drip Email Sequence

Drip emails can also be an easy way to make a self-paced course, whether paid or free. Author Paul Jarvis used Gumroad, MailChimp, and Zapier to make a self-paced course with his free "Write and Sell Your Damn Book", which you could get via email for free or download as an eBook.

"The course was about writing a book," explained Paul, "and some of the lessons were slightly onerous — like 'Write a first draft.' So, setting a fixed time delay wouldn’t work because some people complete things like that much more quickly than others." That's why he used MailChimp's autoresponder feature to only send the next email after readers clicked a button in the email they'd received. And if you'd like to make a similar self-paced course, but charge for it, he recommends charging via Gumroad, then using Zapier to send the customers to your email list.

Zaps:

- Send Gumroad Customers to MailChimp

- Send Gumroad Customers to Campaign Monitor

- Send Gumroad Customers to Infusionsoft

Or, instead of sending stuff to help out your contacts, you could ask them for help. The Dotted Music team does this with their drip emails. Whenever anyone's added to their drip emails, the first email they receive asks them to fill out their profile. That helps the Dotted Music team market directly to their customers needs, and keeps people engaged right from the start.

- Zap: Create MailChimp subscribers from Typeform entries

Sometimes the help you need is actually something that'll help the customer out. For example, if your user's credit card expires, their subscription to your service will die—which means you'll lose revenue and they'll lose access to your app. A simple drip email, prompted by your billing service, can help you both. The Moonclerk team uses Stripe, Zapier, and Mandrill to accomplish this, reducing churn by 25% and saving hours each week.

- Zap: Send an email to Stripe customers with invalid credit cards via Mandrill

You can even use your drip emails to attract new customers who've never heard of your brand, by getting your email recipients to share your emails and refer new users. Odds are, very few people will forward your drip emails unless you give them a reason to do so. That's why entrepreneur Sacha Greif added an incentive to drip emails for his startup Sidebar—if you forwarded the email and the recipient signed up, you'd both receive a free eBook or credit for Creative Market.

The setup was a bit more complicated than most drip emails. He had subscribers sign up via Wufoo, and the normal drip emails were sent via MailChimp. The trick is that the Wufoo form contains a hidden referral field that contains the email of the person who directed you to the form. That way, if you signed up after clicking a forwarded email, the form would now trigger Zapier to send the incentive in a new email via Mailgun.

Zaps:

- Use Wufoo Entries to Create Mailchimp Subscribers

- Implementing a simple referral program with MailChimp, Zapier, and Mailgun (part I)

- Implementing a simple referral program with MailChimp, Zapier, and Mailgun (part II)

And just that, you'd have drip emails that could help your startup go viral. Be sure to check Sacha's full tutorial if you'd like to set up something similar on your own, and think of unique ways that you can use your drip emails to do far more than you'd ever imagined.

Stay Human

"We don't automate communication. We automate the little things. That allows us to save time, in order to spend more time on communication."

~ Andrew Apanov, Founder of Dotted Music

Of course, all the automation in the world won't replace human touch. You can automatically add contacts to list where they'll receive automated emails—and that'll convert on its own many times—but there's plenty of times when people will have extra questions. Perhaps you could automate that, with some nifty scripts, but you're far better off to reply by hand to those inquires.

Many drip emails are written to sound personal, using your contacts' name and perhaps being signed with your team's names. That's great—but only if you really have people behind those emails.

"If you do decide to send out these personal emails, make sure you’re actually going to respond to each reply," suggests Dan Goldin, data scientist at TripleLift. "Otherwise you’re better off not sending that email in the first place."

Designer Brian Casel takes the personal touch even further—in addition to having drip emails automatically sent to people who fill out his Gravity Forms contact form, he also has Zapier send the data to Trello so his team can followup with a phone call or email. "The key component that makes this entire sales system work is not any app, or metric, or magic sales script," says Brian. "It’s the simple act of following up."

Zaps:

- Send Gravity Form leads to MailChimp

- Create Trello Cards via Gravity Forms

So use these tips to make the best drip emails you can, and automate as many of the tedious tasks as possible. Then, use the time you've freed up to add a personal touch to your communications, and you'll have an unbeatable email marketing strategy.

Next

Sometimes you won't want a new app just to send your email messages. Perhaps you have your own in-house tools that can send emails, or you'd rather build a drip feature into your own software. Either way, you'll still need a service to send your messages, and for that, we'll look at the best transactional email services in the next chapter.

Or, if you're happy using a pre-made app to send your drip and newsletter emails, perhaps with one of the tools we just looked at, then you might want to jump ahead to chapter 10 to learn about ways to A/B test your email messages to make your email marketing more effective.

Related: Check out our "Ultimate Guide to CRM Apps, a free eBook that'll teach you how to effectively use a CRM and pick the perfect one for your business.

Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Water Droplet photo courtesy Nithya Ramanujam via Unsplash. App dev photo courtesy doctype.me/ via Unsplash. Work photo courtesy Startup Stock Photos.

Chapter 9: Transactional Email

The 7 Best Services to Send 1000s of Emails Daily

Have you ever stopped to think about what happens to your email message after you press "Send"? If you're just sending your own personal emails through Gmail or your email app, your emails likely get routed through your email service's Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service to your email recipient's email service's SMTP service. It typically just works, and so most of us just ignore it.

But, if you're sending thousands of emails a day through your app, or are delivering your company's newsletter to millions of people, suddenly you need to think a lot more about how your emails get sent. You'll very likely need a transactional email service, a dedicated email sending service that'll make sure your emails get delivered no matter how many you need to send.

Here's a primer to getting started with transactional email sending services, with tips to help you pick the perfect app for your need and integrate it with your apps and workflow.

Beyond smtp.google.com

Sending an email—even a handful of them at the same time—isn't difficult. Your standard Gmail account will let you send up to 500 emails per day, while hosted Exchange accounts will let you send up to 30 messages per minute. That's plenty for most personal uses. It's when you need to send hundreds of emails a minute, or thousands a day that you need another solution.

For most needs, the best other solution is to use email marketing apps or drip email apps to send your bulk emails and marketing messages. If you want a quick and simple way to email thousands of people a day, and even make your emails look great with templates and more, those are the apps for you.

But, they're not for everyone. Perhaps you have your own app, and you want to send emails through it. Maybe you like to self-host all of your business tools, or you'd rather be able do more with your emails than what a standard email app will let you. That's when you'll want to consider a transactional email sending service—the services like Amazon SES, Mandrill, and Mailgun that deliver most of the notification emails you receive in your inbox each day.

The Case for Transactional Email Sending Services

"Don’t reinvent the wheel. The internet is full of wheels… and most of them have APIs."

~Andy Chung, Entrepreneur

Today, there's a service for everything, it seems. You can run your application on Heroku, accept payments with Stripe, call phones and send SMS messages via Twilio, and add just about any other feature to your app with any number of other services. These "feature-as-a-service providers", as entrepreneur Andy Chung calls them, give you the pieces you can use to build your app in less time. Instead of working out payment deals with banks and figuring out how to code a working internet phone system, you can spend your time making the app you want to build and let other teams focus on those problems.

Email's the same. There are a number of services—including Amazon SES, Mandrill, Mailgun, Postmark and more—that let you send email messages via an API. Instead of building your own system to send email messages, you can add a few lines of code and then never worry about email again.

Or, of course, you could run your own email server. There's an email server built into your Mac and many Linux distros, and plenty of other email servers like Exchange you can run for free or license. It might look cheaper at first, but running your own email service—just like running your own payment service—is likely not your best strategy.

Here are the three best reasons why you should outsource your emails:

1. Send More Messages, Faster

Gmail's limit of 500 emails a day might be the first reason you'd look for another way to send emails, but you might face similar limits with your own email server. Many shared hosting services will limit how many emails you can send per day, as detailed in this list by MailPoet, so you'll soon have the same problem you would with Gmail or Exchange.

Even on your own private server, sending thousands of emails at once can be a technical challenge you're not ready for—or simply more trouble than it's worth. That's why you'll find logos of popular companies of all sizes on transactional email sending services' sites: it's easier and often more efficient to use a service that's solely focused on sending emails well. As Tom Cook, former Quora employee said about Quora, "they use (Sendgrid) because setting up mail delivery infrastructure is a real headache at their size."

If you're running your own email infrastructure, sending out double or triple your standard number of emails might mean you need a new server or significant developer time. With an email sending service, on the other hand, it'll at most take a few changes to your integration as the KnackForge team found. A few tweaks to Mandrill's Drupal integration later, and they were able to send 75,000 emails an hour.

Maybe you need to send 7 emails a minute, or 7 million a month. Either way, the email service will be ready for your load, with little to no work on your end.

2. Ensure Your Messages Get Delivered

"Sending emails from your app can suck. Half the time, messages that get sent from your own server just get dumped into the recipient’s junk folder."

~ Cory LaViska, Surreal CMS developer

Even if you're running your own servers, and have the infrastructure to send the messages you need, there's another catch with running your own email sending server: deliverability. You might technically be able to send emails on your own, but the chances of those emails showing up in your recipients' inboxes are slim to zero.

Most email apps today strictly scan emails to eliminate spam, and one of the many things they use to weed out spam messages is the IP address that's used to send the emails. They check against both blacklists—IP addresses known to send spam—as well as whitelists—IP addresses know to be good in general. If you're sending emails from a shared server, there's a possibility your IP address is already on those blacklists.

If you have your own IP address, your mail still may get marked as spam if you're not on a whitelist. As the Koomohost team related, "If your site is not associated with a reputable or identifiable IP address and domain name, most email providers will mark it spam or not accept delivery." You'll also need an SPF or DMIK record, email validation tools that may be difficult to implement on your own but are included with most email sending services.

You could test your server first to see if your emails get marked as spam, but your test emails to your own address just might come through with the problems only showing up once you're sending thousands of emails. Or, if your company's the size of Google, it might make sense to get your own IP whitelisted. For everything in between, an email sending service makes the most sense.

"Leveraging email deliverability tools seems like an unnecessary upfront cost and waste of time (especially if you are small or just growing your lists), but ironically this is when you need these services the most," explains entrepreneur Jeremy Vandehey. There's no point in sending emails that don't get delivered, and there's no point risking it when you're just starting out and every email really counts.

3. Do More With Your Emails

Add deliverability onto the trouble of running yet another service—one you're likely inexperienced at managing—and email sending services start looking far better. But there's also another reason to pick them: the extra features they offer.

Some transactional email services, such as Amazon SES, are barebones and focused only on sending emails—and priced accordingly. But most others include advanced stats, notifications, filtering and more that let you do far more with your emails. With a bit of coding, or just some clicking around in stats dashboards, you can accomplish amazing things.

Karl Seguin, for instance, put Postmark to work not just in sending emails, but also to make it easier for customers to signup. That's something that would have been difficult or impossible to do with a self-hosted email service—and the ironic thing is, Seguin wasn't initially convinced of the benefits of a transactional email service.

"Why would you outsource and pay for something as basic as sending out email?" wrote Seguin. But then it clicked. Not only did Postmark help them send emails easier, its bounce API helped them automatically update users' profiles with their valid email address without having to click an activation link. "The end result is that our website flow is friendlier. Users can start using the site right away and our welcome email is just a welcome email—no special activation instructions, no huge deal if it get marked as spam."

Once you have users and are sending them emails, the stats and insights you can get from them can be invaluable. Nathaniel Eliason, Zapier's marketing intern this year, used Mailgun and its stats when building his own startup. With some custom coding, it enabled them to see if people didn't accept their email invite within a week, or if they signed up then bounced, and more. Email services give you the ability to customize your email flow, keep people coming back, and more, without having to code detailed email analytics on your own.

Picking the Perfect Email Sending Service

Picking a service to send emails is similar to picking between different cell service providers. At the end of the day, they all offer a very similar service, all of which work in similar ways and are very competitively priced. What makes the difference is the small things: the libraries and integrations that make them easier to use with your app, and the stats, dashboards, and other extra features they include.

Amazon SES is the most barebones transactional email service, and also the cheapest: it sends emails, and little else. Other services are often more expensive, especially for sending smaller numbers of emails, since they include features like SPF and IP address mapping, template hosting, reports and analytics, and more. Depending on the features you need, one service may be better for your needs—or, as always, you can try out the most promising ones, see which work best with your apps and workflow, and then standardize on it.

With that in mind, here are some of the most popular transactional email services, each of which are supported by Zapier today or will be supported soon. You'll find a quick description of each service's offerings, along with a link to its status or uptime page and an explanation of its pricing.

Amazon SES

Amazon may have started out as the world's largest bookstore, but today they're also one of the world's largest web services company. Best known for S3—file storage in the cloud—and EC2—their servers-in-the-cloud—Amazon also offers CDN services, online databases, DNS server and more. Among the offerings is Amazon SES, or "simple email service", a transactional email service that's also one of the cheapest and most barebones offerings available.

Amazon SES is designed to work with Amazon's other hosted services. Rather than supporting everything in one place, you'll use SES just for sending emails via its API or SMTP server. Then, you can track bounced emails with Amazon's SNS notifications system, setup DKIM records with Route 53, and store files with S3. There's no advanced analytics, but you will find stats on your successful deliveries, bounced or rejected messages, and complaints.

It's just an email sending service, and if you already use Amazon's other email services or are fine filling in the gaps with other tools, then it's a simple and cheap way to send bulk emails.

Amazon SES Pricing

Check Amazon SES Status: http://status.aws.amazon.com (includes uptime for all Amazon cloud services)

For more info on features and pricing, see our Amazon SES review.

SendGrid

One of the largest transactional email sending services, SendGrid delivers over 14 billion emails each month for companies like Spotify and Uber. It's designed to be simple to integrate into your app, with a number of different APIs and supported client libraries. You'll find built-in support for email authentication and reputation scoring for your IP address, to make sure you emails get through, along with a library of online documentation and videos to help guide you along.

In addition to sending standard transactional emails over its API, SendGrid also includes a marketing platform with a drag-and-drop email template editor and online list management. You can create your templates and manage your lists in SendGrid, then use that data through SendGrid's interface or its API—or you can handle everything yourself. And, if anyone replies to your emails, SendGrid can parse those emails and any attachments they may contain, and send them along as you'd like.

SendGrid Pricing

Check Sendgrid Status: http://status.sendgrid.com

For more info on features and pricing, see our Sendgrid review.

Mandrill

The company that makes MailChimp wasn't content to just send beautiful email newsletters; it also uses its email sending expertise to ensure your app's emails get delivered. That's what Mandrill is designed for.

Originally a project to integrate MailChimp with Amazon S3, Mandrill was born because they couldn't get the features they wanted to offer using that service. So, they built Mandrill as an email sending service that could also include reporting, templates, inbound email processing and more. They've already worked hard to ensure MailChimp emails will be delivered to any inbox, as quickly as possible, and Mandrill is infused with that same technology and care.

Mandrill includes almost every feature you'd want, in all of its plans: dedicated IP addresses, in-depth analytics, template hosting, inbound email parsing, and more. There's also a split testing tool so you can use different templates and test their results, as well as email scheduling for $0.05 per thousand scheduled emails. That way, you can handle your own emails but still get some of the conveniences most often found in email marketing platforms.

Mandrill Pricing

Check Mandrill Status: http://status.mandrillapp.com/ (includes uptime and deliverability stats)

For more info on features and pricing, see our Mandrill review.

Mailgun

Built by the Rackspace team, already known for reliable hosting, Mailgun is designed to be a reliable email service for developers. Not only can it deliver your emails well, it even includes email validation features to check and make sure you're sending emails to valid addresses.

You can send emails the way you want in Mailgun, with isolated sub-accounts for each domain you add, giving you an easy way to manage all of your email lists separately or manage client emails along with your own. There's batch sending features to personalize emails, detailed analytics and logs, and a powerful parsing engine to turn incoming emails into JSON and route it where you want.

All transactional services will help you not have to worry too much about email, but there's still some things you'll want to think about: your delivery rates, email reputation, and more. If you'd rather let someone else take care of those, too, Mailgun also has a managed service that can take care of the rest of your email solution. That way, you can just focus on your code and never worry about email, even if you're sending millions of messages a month.

Mailgun Pricing

Check Mailgun Status: http://status.mailgun.com

For more info on features and pricing, see our Mailgun review.

Mailjet

Picking a transactional email service doesn't have to mean you leave behind the features other email marketing apps offer. Mailjet brings the best of both worlds to the table, as a full-featured email marketing and transactional email sending service.

You can customize Mailjet's email templates, store your customer's data and use it to personalize your emails, then use that data to segment your lists and send the perfect emails to your audience. Or, you can do the heavy lifting on your own, and send emails using Mailjet's API.

Then, you can test your campaigns and improve them using Mailjet's A/X testing, which lets you test up to 10 variations of your campaign and then send the best version to the remainder of your recipients. There's also real-time analytics and data on your emails, and tools to compare each set of messages to your last, to see how your marketing is going over time. That, alongside your transactional email sending, so you can keep all of you email work together in one place.

Mailjet Pricing

Price quoted is for Premium plans; Basic plans without segmentation, A/X testing, and campaign comparison are around 25% cheaper

Check Mailjet Status: https://mailjet.statuspage.io

For more info on features and pricing, see our Mailjet review.

SendinBlue

Want to send transactional SMS messages along with your transactional emails? SendinBlue might be the email service for you. It's another app that includes email marketing along with a transactional email API, and it also includes SMS marketing to give you one more way to get in touch with your audience.

Using the same REST API, you can create campaigns using SendinBlue's marketing platform, or you can send transactional email and SMS messages. You'll be able to keep up with all of your customer's data with SendinBlue's integrations with eCommerce and CMS platforms, and can simply trigger campaigns from your app. Or, you can send receipts and other transactional messages directly through its API. Either way, you'll get the same reports, with full details on your open rates, click-throughs, and more, and can export it to analyze on your own.

SendinBlue Pricing

Check SendinBlue Status: https://apidocs.sendinblue.com/api-status/

Zapier support coming soon

Postmark

You don't need to buy stamps to send letters anymore, but you might need to pick up some Postmark credits to start sending emails simply from your apps. Instead of having to subscribe to a certain plan or figure out what your price will be once you're sending a certain number of emails, Postmark lets you purchase email credits at the rate that works best for you and use them as you need. That gives you a chance to get the bulk rate, even if you're just starting.

That bulk rate will get you a lot with Postmark, too, since everyone gets the exact same features. You'll get 45 days of searchable history, so you can see the full contents of the emails you've sent and pinpoint why they bounced. You can also see full profiles of each of your email recipients, complete with info about which emails they open, their location and more. And if those users reply, you can put those replies to work after Postmark turns them into JSON and sends them to you with its API.

Postmark Pricing

Check Postmark Status: http://status.postmarkapp.com

Zapier support coming soon

Knowtify

All transactional emails are not created equal. There's the notification emails that let you know you've made a purchase or have been contacted inside an app, along with behavioral (or drip) emails that are sent when you do something in the app to help guide you along. And then, there's digest emails from social networks and more that let you know what's happened while you were away. Knowtify is a transactional email service designed to handle them all.

You'll find marketing-focused tools like a rich email template designer, list segmentation and email personalization tools, behavioral triggers, and a schedule for your recurring emails. Set all of that up, then you can integrate with your app to send detailed transactional and behavioral emails based on things your users have done. Then, with most Knowtify plans, you'll be able to send automatic digest emails to your users with your service's latest news, the things that user's missed from the app, charts and graphs about how your app's helped them, and more.

Sure, you could create these emails on your own and use any service to send them, or you could just let Knowtify build them for you so you can focus on your product while still sending more informative and engaging emails.

Knowtify Pricing

Zapier support coming soon

Get Started Using Your Transactional Email Service

Now that you're convinced not to run your own email server, and have picked out a service to send your messages, it's time to actually start using it to send emails. Unlike most apps, you can't just fire up your new email sending service, click three buttons and send out a bulk email. You'll instead need to integrate them with your apps and tools, or fire up terminal to send messages manually.

Here's some of the many ways you can put your transactional email service to work today.

Send Emails From Your Software

Whether you have fancy online apps that want to send emails, or are still using traditional desktop software, many programs will let you configure your SMTP server to send emails. There's no need to put in your Gmail credentials anymore. Instead, put your transactional email service's SMTP server info into your app's settings page.

Then, just keep using your app as normal, and it'll now send emails using your transactional email service—complete with your default template if you're using a service that adds a template to your messages. That's how the Digital Fusion team sends emails from their Filemaker database. They've integrated Filemaker with Mandrill's SMTP server so they can get all the advantages of an email sending service from a traditional app.

"Even if you wish to use (Mandrill) just via SMTP alone it makes sense," says Digital Fusion developer Daniel Wood. "The Mandrill SMTP credentials are reliable, secure, and work anywhere (subject to firewall restrictions of course). In addition, you get all the benefits of comprehensive email tracking and settings to help customise the experience."

Add it to Your Site and App's Code

The most obvious way to start using a transactional email service, of course, is to integrate it with your app. Right from the front page of most of these services, you'll find code snippets to integrate them with your app using PHP, Python, C# and more. Typically, it'll just take a couple lines of code to get their API working with your code base, so just look at the documentation for each service before you dive in.

Beyond that, there are modules, plugins, and libraries to integrate many of the popular email sending services with apps that you're likely already using. You can find WordPress extensions and Drupal modules that'll let you send emails with the service of your choice, and more. Look around and see what's available for your tech stack, and that might be one of the things that helps you decide which service to use.

Get New Apps for Email Sending Services

There's plenty of apps that are great for email marketing, but if you'd like the features and performance of a transactional email service but don't want to do all the coding on your own, perhaps some new apps are in order. There are a number of apps out there that are designed to work with transactional email services. They'll handle the code needed to create your emails and make them look nice, and use the service of your choice to send the emails out, giving you the best of both worlds.

SendWithUs, one of the apps included in our roundup of great email newsletter apps, is one such tool. It helps you create beautiful templates for your emails, and even includes tools to translate your email content so you can reach your audience anywhere. Then, it includes analytics, A/B testing, customer profiles, segmentation, and automatic drip campaigns, so you don't have to code anything extra. All you'll have to do is add SendWithUs' API to your site to have it send emails or add new contacts.

For an even less geeky experience, Sendy is a self-hosted email newsletter app that sends your messages via Amazon SES. You'll just install your copy of the app, add your SES account info, then create and send apps without ever having to touch a line of code. It's one of the simplest ways to send emails with a transactional email service.

Automate Email With Zapier

Even if you can't code, you can still make your own apps and integrate your email service with any other program using Zapier. Just connect your transactional email service to Zapier, then you can send emails automatically from any of your other apps.

Send Emails From Your Favorite App

Everything from your website to your CRM can send email messages, but they likely won't send them with the templates you typically use. If you'd like to customize your automated app emails, your transactional email app is your best friend. You can connect your apps that typically send emails to Zapier, have Zapier trigger when you need an email sent (say, by adding a tag to your contact), and then Zapier will have your email service send out a perfectly formatted email. No need to look for a new app: you can put your apps together and use each of their best features.

Zaps:

- Send a Welcome Email to New SugarCRM Leads via Mandrill

- Send an email from Mailgun by tagging an Infusionsoft contact

- Trigger an email from Mandrill from a webhook

Contact Your Customers

When someone's just purchased your product—or attempted to purchase it—that's the perfect time to get in touch via email. You may need to send them an email receipt, or a detailed email with a PDF guide attached to help them get started using it. Or, if their credit card was rejected and they couldn't complete the purchase, you might want to get in touch and remind them to try again. Either way, all you'll need is your payment tool, Zapier, and an email sending service.

Zaps:

- Send an email to Stripe customers with invalid credit cards via Mandrill

- Add your Chargify Customers to your SendGrid Newsletter Subscriptions

- Automatically send an email to your buyer with Zapier and Mandrill

Build Your Own Email Powered App

Need to build a tool that'll collect information then send it out in an email? You could have a custom app developed for it, or you could just pull out your handy spreadsheet or form tool and put the basics together. Connect it to an email sending service with Zapier, and suddenly it'll be a simple app of sorts—all without any coding.

Zaps:

- Send Email via Amazon SES to new Google Docs Spreadsheet Entries

- Send Sendgrid email for new Wufoo form entries

Or, if you're a bit more technical, database apps give you the most power to build a system you want and then use it to trigger your emails. You could have an email sent out to new contacts once you add them to your database—or have it email them once you've updated their profile with a particular tag. Almost anything's possible with Zapier, a database, and an email server.

Zaps:

- Trigger an email via Mandrill for new MySQL rows

- Use Mailgun to create an email queue to send a drip email campaign

- Send email via Mandrill for new SQL Server row

Get Notified

APIs typically work both ways: you can use them to trigger actions, but they can also send you information back. Depending on your email service, you should be able to get notifications whenever your emails are sent, when a message bounces, or perhaps even when you get a new reply to your messages. Plug those notifications into Zapier, and you can then have your email server notifications show up on your phone, in your team chat, logged in your notebook or anywhere else you want them.

Zaps:

- Mandrill email message to new HipChat message

- Post emails sent to Mandrill into a Slack Channel

Sending bulk emails—whether directly from your app, with a bit of code in terminal, or through any app that lets you send emails—doesn't have to be difficult. With a transactional email service, you can send all the emails you need, from the apps you're already using, and you might even be able to do more with them than you've ever done with your emails before. And if you're only sending a couple thousand emails a month, it might even be free.

Next

Whether you're sending emails from a drip or newsletter app, or are using one of these transactional services to send your messages out to the world, you'll want to make sure your emails are as effective as possible. For that, you'll want to A/B test your messages, crafting separate versions of your messages and automatically testing to see which version performs best. We'll learn all about how to A/B test emails in the apps you're already using in the next chapter.

Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Mail truck photo courtesy Thomas Hawk.

Chapter 10: A/B Test Your Email Marketing

How to Get Started, What to Test and 20+ Apps to Help

A/B testing. The phrase itself sounds complicated and time-consuming—something that can really wait for another day. But it doesn't need to be that way. Modern web tools, like the 25 email marketing apps we recently reviewed, are often equipped with features that make A/B testing (also called split testing) as simple as scheduling a campaign or customizing a template.

Though there are all sorts of A/B tests you can run—mainly on the pages of your website—this post focuses on tweaking what ends up in your customers' inbox. Specifically, how to A/B test with the help of an off-the-shelf email marketing app such as MailChimp, AWeber or Campaign Monitor.

Before we show you exactly where to access testing features in your email marketing software—including A/B testing links for 20-plus apps—let's examine the basics of A/B testing: how it works, guidelines to follow, and email characteristics to test.

In This Chapter:

- What is A/B Testing?

- How A/B Testing Email Works

- 10 A/B Testing Rules to Follow

- 10 Email Characteristics to Test

- 20+ Email Marketing Apps that Offer A/B testing

What is A/B Testing?

Pretend you own a restaurant—the Chatterbox Café—and after a few months of flat revenue, you're tempted to change up your menu to see if has an impact on sales. You create a new menu where instead of just text, you include five pictures of your highest-priced items. That's the only change—everything else about the menu stays the same. You then make 25 copies of the new menu, placing them alongside the 25 copies of the original all-text menu, and then split your café down the middle—patrons on one side get the new menu, and everyone else gets the old menu.

After two days, you tally up the revenue and compare the two sides, pleasantly finding that the menus with the five pictures increased the average table ticket by 15%. You have a winner. Next stop: the copy machine.

That is an A/B test. You have variant "A", the menu with text only, and variant "B", the menu with the five pictures. Variant "A" is also often referred to as the "control"—the variant you've been using and keeping stats on. Returning to the example above, it's only because you knew the historical sales of your café's control menu that were you able to confidently say the new picture menu increased sales by 15%.

That example is an A/B test in a café, probably the last place internet marketers would think to apply an A/B test today. You're likely more familiar with testing your company's homepage—slightly changing the copy, picture or button color—with an aim to increase sign-ups or sales inquiries. The same can be done for your marketing emails, too, and it's not as complicated or laborious as it might seem.

How A/B Testing Email Works

MailChimp's A/B Split Campaigns find the better variant for you and then use that version for the majority of your email list

Let's start with an honest admission: Before I dug into the A/B testing features provided by email marketing software, I fully expected I'd be manually setting up, executing and analyzing A/B tests. That is, I'd split my email list down the middle, send a control to one group, a variant to another, then watch the results come in.

But it's not like that at all. A/B testing just takes applying an extra bit of text to your email body copy, using an extra subject line field or setting up a second email and marking it as variant "B". Once you do that, your email marketing service takes care of the rest.

Here's a brief look inside three popular email marketing tools—MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor—to demonstrate just how easy it can be to get an A/B test up and running.

A/B Split Test From Names in MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most widely-used email services in part because of its friendly brand that permeates the software. Its A/B testing tool, officially called "A/B Split Campaign", falls right in line with that branding: it's a convenient shortcut to better versions of your emails.

While some tools will make you conduct an A/B test on your full list, MailChimp lets you pull aside a sample—say, 3,400 emails from your 10,000 subscribers—and conducts an A/B test with just those folks. What percentage should you test? After seeing 7 years of testing results, the team at MailChimp recommends a test segment of 20%-50%—the smaller the list, the higher the percentage, too.

Once you've selected a percentage, MailChimp has you choose which metric it'll use to select the best version, which will be sent to the remaining email addresses on your list after your test reveals a winner.

Finally, you need to enter the details of your test. For this example, let's test the from name (the email sender's name). We want to find out which is better: using the company's name or a person's name?

After you've filled out the fields, send the test and let MailChimp take care of deploying the winning email—or use the "Manual" option to pick it yourself. Remember, the only difference between the two emails you've sent will be the "From Name"—a small but possibly important variant. If you had changed up anything else, such as the subject line and the from name, the results would be a mix of those two changes. This is commonly called an interaction effect (or confounding effect). Your stats are only good for that specific setup.

For more on MailChimp's A/B Split Campaign tool, which also allows you to test subject lines and send dates and times, read this MailChimp Knowledge Base article.

Split Test Call to Actions (CTAs) in AWeber

AWeber is another popular email app among marketers because of its ability to easily add contacts via WordPress, PayPal and Facebook. Once you've accumulated a list of more than 100 contacts, the email marketing tool lets you start A/B testing your communications—or as they call it, conduct a "Broadcast Split Tests." 100 contacts, they say, is the minimum to get statistically significant results.

Unlike MailChimp where the ability to A/B test a campaign is offered after you've written and designed your email, AWeber has you select Broadcast Split Test before you begin setting up your campaign.

From there, they give you the ability to create up to four variants—since you're A/B testing though, you'll want to select "2 messages"—and then enter the send percentage for each.

After doing so, you'll indicate which message editor you're going to utilize—the app's "drag and drop email builder", "plain text message" or "code your own HTML"—and then click "Save Split Test". You've now set up your split test structure; all that's left is your campaign's copy, design and scheduling.

At this point—writing and designing your email—you'll want to keep everything the same except for your call to action (CTA) link or button. If you're emailing your restaurant patrons about this month's special, for example, and your aim is to have them click-through and make a reservation, one email's call to action might say "Book a reservation" while the other says "Save a table for me!"

After you send the email, you'll see stats for the two versions roll in, and since you're concerned with subscribers visiting your reservations page, you'll want to pay attention to the "clicked" count. You can use these stats to decide which text is more enticing for your next email.

To see their full tutorial and video overview of a Broadcast Split Test, visit AWeber's Knowledge Base.

A/B Test Subject Lines in Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor prides itself on its well-designed and customizable email templates, something you'll get the chance to play around with when using their A/B testing option.

Like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor does the work for you—after selecting what to test, enter the two versions, select the email content, and then decide on a subset of your list to send this test to. Campaign Monitor recommends sending to 20-30% of your list—in the screenshot below, for example, the marketing team plans to send emails to 17,820 respondents before a winner is named.

Testing subject lines with Campaign Monitor is quite easy, too. After selecting it from the interface above, you'll enter two subject lines in the two provided fields. That's it. Everything else about your email—from the sender name to the CTA text—will remain the same.

When you see the results, you'll want to hone in on open rate—in the test below, "Version A" is the winner.

See Campaign Monitor's A/B testing options by visiting their help documentation.

10 A/B Testing Rules to Follow

In their A/B testing documentation, Campaign Monitor stresses that it's best to test your emails by either viewing a preview or sending yourself a campaign email.

"It's very important to test and check for errors of any kind before you start an A/B test because you cannot make any campaign changes when an A/B test is in progress," reads their documentation. With Campaign Monitor, that's an easy step to heed since before they allow you to send the emails, they show you a campaign snapshot—similar to a travel itinerary when you purchase a plane ticket—that includes these test options.

This is a good rule to follow when A/B testing, but it isn't the only one. Here are 10 A/B testing guidelines to consider before jumping into a test of your own.

1. Know What You're Testing and Why

What are you trying to improve about your marketing emails? Ask yourself that simple question before proceeding. At Zapier, we'd like to increase the click-through rate on our blog newsletter emails and amp up the open and click-through rates on our new user onboarding emails. If we hit those goals, we'd likely see more unique pageviews on our blog and a higher level of engagement with our app. So our "what" is increase open and click-through rates, and our "why" is to increase engagement.

What are you testing?

For the "what you're testing" question, you have two options—each has been mentioned in this chapter, but let's clearly define them:

Open Rate: This stat tells you how many of your subscribers open a particular email. It's expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the number of emails sent minus the number of emails bounced—bounced meaning the subscriber's email is no longer valid. A 30% open rate, for example, would mean that if 102 emails were sent and 2 bounced, 30 were opened.

Pay attention to the open rate when you're testing subject lines, sender names and message preview.

Click-Through Rate or Click Rate: Look to this number to learn how many of your subscribers clicked on a link in your body of your email to visit your site. This number is also expressed as a percentage and is calculated by dividing the number of subscribers who clicked a link by the number of emails sent minus the number of emails bounced.

Some email marketing software—such as Campaign Monitor (below)—lets you take this a step further, too, and hone in on a specific link in your body copy. This can be helpful if you have multiple links, such as a text link in the intro and a button link at the bottom, for the same landing page—now you can see which link is most effective. If your email marketing service doesn't offer this feature, rely on Google Analytics to tell you which link gets the most clicks by giving each link unique UTM parameters.

Pay attention to the click-through rate when you're testing call to action text and buttons along with body copy.

Why are you testing?

For the "why you're testing" question, it's really up to you. An increased click-through rate on a call to action in your onboarding email could mean higher revenue next quarter. An improved open rate for your emails could turn into a higher active user count, leading to more feedback on your product. It’s also important to make sure that metric will actually move the needle if influenced.

Also ask yourself what you'd like to learn from your tests. This list of outcomes offered by Campaign Monitor in an A/B testing case study offers some great questions to start with:

- Do long or short subject lines work best for my audience?

- Does including a number in the subject line get my audience to open emails?

- Does subject line personalization work for my audience?

- Should I phrase the subject line as a question rather than a statement?

No matter the objective, just be sure to identify it at the start of your testing.

See the industry norms for open and click-through rates in MailChimp's "Email Marketing Benchmarks" report.

2. Focus on Frequently Sent Emails

Hold up, you want to A/B test your "Happy Holidays!" email? Think again: you'll be waiting 12 months until you can put your results to good use.

A/B testing works best for perfecting frequently sent emails—at Zapier, our frequent emails include blog newsletters, new user onboarding emails, and error alerts. We send hundreds of thousands of those emails weekly; if we can increase the open or click rate by just 1%, that's a major win. So back to that holiday greeting idea—sure you might send it to your full email list of 55,000 email addresses, but what are you going to do with the results? Email services and clients change so frequently, it's unlikely that what you learn can be applied to whatever you send next year. The key challenge with frequent emails is making sure that sample sizes are enough for the inference you’re trying to make, Evan Miller offers a helpful calculator to find your minimum sample size per group.

3. Split Your List Randomly

If your email marketing software doesn't offer A/B testing—or you want to spin up a manual test on your own—remember to split your subscribers randomly. One way to do this is to download your list as a CSV and randomly sort it using Excel. Or, you can simply arrange it alphabetical order with any spreadsheet software, slicing it up from there. Luckily most email marketing apps will handle this step for you.

4. Make Bold Changes

The struggle with A/B Testing in general is having a large enough sample size. However, there’s a lever that can be applied to remedy this problem. The larger the difference in effect between emails, the smaller the sample size can be. Therefore, test highly divergent variants. For example, plain-text versus HTML emails, or "one prominent link" versus "everything is a link." Just try to learn the lay of the land by turning "big knobs"—save finer adjustments for later.

5. Test Just Two Variants

Since sample size is our biggest challenge, we want to avoid things that will explode the necessary participants. Sample size requirements will explode as variants are added, so unless you’re consistently testing over 100,000 in each variant, keep it to two variants.

6. Wait 4-5 Days

In our experience at Zapier, a single email's effect declines sharply, petering out around day 4 to 5 after being sent.* If your email has no effect after 5 days of waiting, it’s not likely to ever have any meaningful difference. 4-5 days is a good rule of thumb, otherwise you might destroy your experiment.

* Statistician's Note: Given the tools being used are Frequentist—they almost certainly are, if not you’ll see the phrase "Bayesian" everywhere—you only get to look at results once. The reason is that the p-value is only valid for one peek at that point it expires (in terms of statistical validity). Zapier’s data scientist Christopher Peters recommends waiting a "representative time," that amounts to the amount of time you’d be willing to wait.

7. Check if Results are Statistically Significant

You dispatch your A/B test to your 65,000 subscribers and it comes back that 5,400 of them opened the "A" version and 5,500 of them opened the "B" version. B's the winner, right? Not so fast. Just as new reporters have a tough time calling a political race on election night, you too should you be slow to call a winner in your A/B test. The best step to check if your results are statistically significant is to use one of the many free calculators online. Visual Website Optimizer, an app for A/B testing your website, has a simple free significance calculator (pictured) that serves up a quick answer. When using it for email, consider "visitors" as "subscribers".

8. Make Sure It's a Meaningful Effect

Statistical significance is a statement about the repeatability of your result, not the extent to which it moves the needle. It’' very important to ask yourself, will this change really impact an aspect of the business that is cared about? It’s possible to achieve statistical significance while having no real effect on the bottom-line. This might mean new landing pages with more relevance for customers or a better UX on the landing page.

9. Act on Your Results

And the significance calculator says… "yes", your results are statistically significant. Moreover, they're meaningful because you were careful to check that they could be ahead of time. Score! Since hopefully your variants were divergent, you might have learned something big about email marketing. Zapier's Peters suggests trying to replicate the experiment to to see if the effect is repeatable. If you reach this point, you're really onto something. You can install your divergent variant —this is now your "champion." Now repeat with a new "challenger" that is again divergent to the new champ. You're well on your way!

10. A/B Test Again

Customer behavior never stops changing, and neither should your A/B tests. If you've increased your click-through rate, challenge yourself to spike your open rate. If you bumped your open rate with a better subject line, consider changing up the message preview. If your message preview is perfected, change up the sender.

Out of testing ideas? That's what we'll cover next.

10 Email Characteristics to Test

1. Change the From Name / Sender Name

HubSpot saw a higher email click-through rate when it sent a campaign using a team member's name as the from name—"Maggie Georgieva, HubSpot"—versus their company name.

"Our control generated a 0.73% CTR (click-through rate), and the personalized version generated a 0.96% CTR. With a confidence level of 99.9%, we had a clear winner," says marketer Bryan Harris in a video on the HubSpot blog. "Our conclusion after conducting this A/B test was that emails sent by a real person are more likely to be clicked on than emails sent from a company name."

From Name / Sender Name Variants to Test

- Company - Zapier

- Company newsletter - Zapier Blog

- Company department - Zapier Support

- Team member name - Wade Foster

- Team member name and title - Wade Foster, CEO

- Team member name and company - Wade Foster (Zapier)

- Team member first name only - Wade

- Team member first name and company - Wade from Zapier

2. Try Shorter, Longer and Simple Subject Lines

CoSchedule, a content planning and scheduling tool, used Campaign Monitor to identify the best title length for their popular newsletter, "The Content Marketing Update". What they found, as told in a Campaign Monitor blog post, is that longer titles received higher open rates. Specifically, the blog post stated, "shorter subject lines were less successful for (CoSchedule) than longer ones, and that around between 40 and 50 characters was their sweet spot."

So 40-50 characters? That's a pretty long subject line. <— this is 47 characters

Subject Line Variants to Test

- Length - "Longer email subject lines work better than shorter, here's why" versus "Longer email subject lines win"

- Simple and straightforward versus detailed versus over the top - "Get to the point" versus "See the A/B test that proves once and for all shorter emails are better"

- Answer versus question - "Red call to action buttons works better than blue buttons" versus "Which works better: red or blue call to action buttons?"

- Non-urgent versus urgent - "Save 50% off your subscription" versus "6 hours left to save 50%"

- Negative versus positive - "10 habits that kill productivity" versus "10 ways to boost your productivity"

- Use of numbers - "9 ways to delight your customers" versus "How to delight your customers"

- Use of an exclamation point - "Thanks for signing up" versus "Thanks for signing up!"

- Use of symbols or emoticons - "How to delight your customers" versus "How to delight your customers :)"

- Use of company name, company newsletter name or company department name - "Five new features for you" versus "Five new Zapier features for you"

- Use of company team member name (first last or only first) "A message from our CEO" versus "A message from our CEO Wade Foster"

- Use of customer name (first last or only first) - "Welcome to Zapier!" versus "Welcome to Zapier, Lloyd Christmas!"

- Sentence case versus title case versus all lowercase - "How Zapier writes copy that converts" versus "How Zapier Writes Copy That Converts" versus "how zapier writes copy that converts"

3. Mess Around with the Message Preview / Preheader

The message preview (highlighted above) is an easy to overlook part of an email campaign, one that I'll admit we've missed making the most of on several occasions. The little snippet of text that shows in your inbox—also called the email preheader—is often customizable using your email marketing client. But beware: your email subject lines and message preview could butt heads, depending on the email client your customers are using. Gmail, for example, puts the title first and then the message preview. Mobile email apps, on the other hand, will list the title with the message preview below. Either way, you don't have too many characters to work with.

A/B testing this could be cumbersome, since it might require manual testing, but it will be worth the effort. Think to yourself: how often do you read that little piece of copy to help decide if a new newsletter is worth reading or not?

Message Preview / Preheader Variants to Test

- Pull in the copy from the first line of the email - "Hello there, welcome to Zapier! You're joining thousands of people who use our tool to automate time-consuming tasks …"

- Offer a very short summary - "Welcome to Zapier, I'm excited to show you how you can start automating your work."

- Supply the call to action - "Here are 101 ways you can start automating your work."

4. Give Plain Text a Go

Sometimes simple is refreshing. That can be the case when you get an email in plain-text format, rather than a flashy, over-designed newsletter—plain-text emails feel like something you would get from a friend.

Unbounce points out that the plain-text format worked best for the Obama 2012 team.

"I think it gave the impression that there were real people writing these emails, that it wasn’t focus-grouped to death. It was something more off the cuff," says Amelia Showalter, the campaign's director of analytics.

5. Personalize the Subject Line or Salutation

Hey reader! If I knew your name, I'd have inserted it there. Unfortunately, I don't, which is one reason I've been cautious of personalizing emails in the past—not all subscribers supply their first and last names. But besides testing emails with names, think about testing personalization in other ways, too.

Email marketing app Vero, for example, personalized an email by employing a term they felt had a better chance of striking their audience.

- A: [Vero] The free trial ending email that works

- B: The free trial ending email that converts

"The word 'converts' resonates more with Vero’s (conversion rate optimization)-focused audience and resulted in a 15% increase in opens and a 50% increase in clicks," writes marketer Siddharth Bharath on the Vero blog.

Personalization Variants to Test

- Use your customer's first and last name in subject line and/or salutation - "Welcome to the Zapier Premium Plan, Jess Byrne!"

- Use your customer's first name in subject line and/or salutation - "Hey Jess"

- A combination of the above

- Use your customer's persona in the subject line - "Why marketers read less"

- User terms that resonate with your audience - "The free trial ending email that converts" (above)

- Use "you" versus don't use "you" - "How you can be more productive today" versus "How to be more productive today"

6. Rework the Body Copy

"Cut the length of your email copy in half. Now cut it in half again."

That's the top-voted piece of advice on a GrowthHackers thread titled, "Ask GH: In two sentences or less, what’s your single best email marketing tip, trick, hack or piece of advice?"—it was offered by Morgan Brown, a marketer at GrowthHackers.

It shouldn't be a surprise to see that recommendation in the top spot. It's a safe bet that you—like the rest of us—don't often care for long emails.

But what else can you do to your email body copy beyond length to start A/B testing it? How about trying a new format? That's what the team from Flightfox did—instead of the usual chunks of copy, they used a question-and-answer format.

The result: Flightfox doubled their conversion rates, according to a case study by Vero, a lifecycle email marketing app.

"The original email had relatively high open and click through rates but was converting at a rate of 1.6%. This was an excellent start but there was certainly room for improvement," Vero states.

"With their new copy, Flightfox have been able to increase their conversion rate to 3.2%. A fantastic result that has an instant effect."

Body Copy Variants to Test

- Shorter versus longer

- Bullet points

- Numbered list

- Question and answer format

- Only one sentence and a call to action

7. Play Around with Images

Which of the above emails draws you in? If you're like the users of Unhaggle, the company behind the featured emails, it's the one on the right. After A/B testing these two, click through rates increased by 378%, according to a case study by Vero.

"Here’s a snapshot direct from Unhaggle’s email provider," Vero's founder Chris Hexton writes on their blog. "The changes they made in the second campaign helped Unhaggle achieve a massive 32.4% click through rate. This is one of the highest click-rates we’ve seen recently"

Hexton credits three items for the success of the email—images that stir up emotions, punchy, short body copy and clear prices to see the savings.

While this is a success story in images, it's also an A/B test case study that can serve as an example of what happens when you change up too many items in an email. If Unhaggle had only inserted images, they could have narrowed in on more images making an impact on click-through rates. Now their results, however, lead them to continue testing to conclude which of the three characteristics impact the most customer decisions.

Image Variants to Test

- One versus multiple images

- Text on image

- Screenshot of a video

- Call to action incorporated in image versus call to action separate of image

- Animated GIF

Pro Tips: Heed the advice of email testing app Litmus: Use JPEG or GIF for the best chance of having your pictures show in your customers' email clients. Be sure to also enter ALT text—what shows up in place of an image—just in case the images don't load in your customers' email clients. For more on image formats in emails, see Litmus' post, "PNG, GIF, or JPEG? Which is the Best Image Format for Email?"

8. Modify the Design

3-4 seconds. That's it. That's the length of time Litmus says you have to grab a customer's attention when they open up your email. So what better way to grab it then with a design that appeals to their eye?

Moreover, your design needs to be ready to be viewed on mobile, too. Email marketing app Movable Ink found that an astonishing 61% of brand emails are now viewed on smartphone and tablets. So testing responsive design is almost a must now; larger text and clearer call to actions are good places to start.

Pro Tip: To test every email client that your marketing campaign could ever be viewed in, try out a tool like Litmus.

9. Tweak the Call to Action (CTA)

Try Zapier Now!

or…

or, maybe…

Which one do you want to click? That's your goal here—how many different ways can you write a call to action. Not only write it, but present it, too: should it be text link or a button? Should it go at the top of the email or the bottom? Or both?

Email call-to-action A/B tests conducted by live chat app Zopim found four factors that were present in winning CTAs. Abhiroop Basu, the company's content strategist explained these characteristics in a blog post.

- More than one call to action helps if your email is longer than a few paragraphs - "Ideally, you want to ensure the reader does not have to scroll up or down to find a CTA. In our emails, the ideal number of CTAs was 2, evenly spaced out within the email."

- Call to actions in capital letters worked well - "We didn’t want to spam our readers with ALL CAPS CTAs, but we found that for some reason these performed the best."

- Call to action text should be easily legible - "Another way to put it is to ensure your CTAs don’t have too many characters (90–150 characters is the sweet spot)."

- Call to actions should be concise and to the point. "In our case having 2 words in the CTA worked the best (i.e., “FREE UPGRADE” and “UPGRADE NOW”). Additionally, MathOffice.com found that adding value to the CTA could increase conversion by 14.79%—so make it interesting."

Call to Action Copy and/or Button Variants to Test

- Shorter versus longer - "Go!" versus "Start Automating Your Web Apps!"

- Sentence case versus title case versus all lowercase versus all uppercase - "Try the new feature" versus "Try The New Feature" versus "try the new feature" versus "TRY THE NEW FEATURE"

- Exclamation point or no exclamation point - "Get started" versus "Get started!"

- Italicize versus bold versus underline

- Size of font or button

10. Switch Up the Delivery Day and Time

What if your received the Zapier blog newsletter every Sunday night at 8 p.m. EST? Would you be more or less likely to open up that message and click the link to read our latest post?

Testing for the optimal day and time is hard—especially as online businesses cater to customers and subscribers around the globe—but the question of when it's best to send emails continues to plague marketers. So there are two routes to take: stick to the stats or follow your gut.

If you listen to the stats, a good place to start is GetResponse's recent look at 300 million messages. It showed that Tuesday is not only the most popular day to send emails, but also the day with the highest open and click-through rates, as well.

If you follow your gut instead, you're in good company. On the Crazy Egg blog, marketer Neil Patel offers this advice:

Everyone wants to know, but precious few actually test it. Save yourself some time, spare yourself some grief, and give yourself a break.

You see, there’s no stock answer to the question “what time is best?” Like everything else in marketing (and life), the true answer is it just depends.

If, for example, you send your email at 7:30 a.m., Patel says, you might think you'll get higher click-through rates because professionals are checking their email. But there's a catch, he warns. "They feel rushed, open your email, but may not have time to respond to your offer. Sure, you get high CTRs, but your conversions are awful."

So instead try 4:30 p.m., when Patel says employees are bored at work, winding down and possibly looking for a distraction. "They may see your email, open it, and be more likely to convert. Fewer opens? Maybe. Higher conversions? Yes."

Delivery Date and Time Variants to Test

- Day of the week

- Time of day

For more testing ideas, see EmailMonday's "150+ fresh A/B email split testing ideas you can use today".

Start A/B Testing Your Emails Today

You should now have the confidence to go out and conquer any customer's inbox… well, maybe not conquer, but at least A/B test for increased open and click-through rates. To get you started fast, here are quick links to A/B testing features provided by some of the more popular email marketing services.

- ActiveCampaign - Split Testing

- AWeber - Broadcast Split Tests

- Benchmark Email - AB Testing

- Campaign Monitor - A/B testing option

- Constant Contact - Email AB Testing

- Customer.io - A/B Test

- E-goi - A/B split testing

- Emma - Subject line split testing

- FreshMail - A/B split testing

- GetResponse - A/B Testing

- HubSpot - A/B testing

- iContact - Email Split Testing

- Infusionsoft - Split Testing

- Intercom - A/B testing

- Mad Mimi - Compare Stats

- MailChimp - A/B Split Campaign

- MailUp - A/B Test

- Mailigen - A/B Split Test

- Pardot - A/B Testing

- Vero - A/B test

- VerticalResponse - Split Test

- Vision6 - A/B testing

Next

Now that you've got an email marketing tool and a strategy to make great emails that get opened, it's tempting to get right to work and stop reading right here. But don't leave just yet, or otherwise you might end up making one of the many common mistakes that are made with email marketing. In chapter 11, we'll look at 21 of the worst email marketing mistakes, and how you can avoid making them in your own work.

Written by Danny Schreiber

Image credits: Screenshots from respective app help documentation pages. AWeber results screenshot via Basic Blog Tips. Unhaggle email screenshots courtesy Vero.

Chapter 11: Experts Weigh In

21 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Send plain text emails. lowercase every word in the subject line. Always put the call to action as a text link and a button link.

Successful email marketing tactics are spread across the web. But even with ample resources available and advanced email marketing software, mistakes are regularly made. These blunders, however, aren't the blantantly mispelled words in the opening paragraph or the misplaced graphics that feature the wrong promotion. These are the little—and sometimes big—mistakes that are easy to overlook, but when made, could cost you email opens and click-throughs.

To prevent you from erring like everyone else, we asked marketers, startup founders and marketing executives to name the mistake that sticks out most.

What's one mistake you see email marketing campaigns make too often and how can it be fixed?

Inbox Mistakes

1. Subject Line is Overhyped

Dan Norris, Co-Founder of WP Curve

The one mistake I see is overhyped subject lines. Writing headlines is a fine art and while the BuzzFeed style baited headlines might get more clicks, people forget about the impact on the trust of their brand. When I see consistent headlines that draw me into an email with very little substance, I immediately associate the sender with spammy IM techniques and it impacts on how much I trust their brand. The style I dislike the most is when the headline implies something and when you click through, you find out that it's not the same thing. This kills trust and isn't worth the click.

It's OK to encourage people to click but if they are constantly let down when they get into your content, it will have a long-term impact. I would rather sacrifice a few clicks to maintain the integrity of my brand.

Dan Oshinsky, Senior Newsletter Editor at BuzzFeed

Anyone can game subject lines, and that's a problem. I did it once with a subject line that read, "Hi, You're Fired." The lead story in the newsletter featured videos of people screwing up on the job, so the subject line wasn't totally inappropriate. But the subject line was super aggressive—plenty of readers opened that email thinking they'd actually been fired! At the time, that was one of the most-opened BuzzFeed newsletters ever. But the relationship between the marketer and the sender is built on trust, and when you send emails like "Hi, You're Fired", you can lose that trust pretty quickly. Since that email, my team's had a simple policy: Always do what's best for your readers and your subscribers, and delight them with every email. Do that every time, and your open rates will be strong in the long run.

"Always do what's best for your readers and your subscribers, and delight them with every email."

~ BuzzFeed email policy

2. Message Preview is Overlooked

Jeremy Smith, Senior Product Marketing Manager / Email Strategy at Yammer

Most clients display some preview text next to or near the subject line. This bit of text is called the preheader, and is usually limited to around 100 characters and will be pulled from the first few lines of text in your email.

MailChimp makes it easy—you just replace the text prompt they provide to make it work. Other platforms, well, they vary. ExactTarget has a bug in their built-in preheader formatting that makes it not render in most email clients, which I’ve developed a multi-client workaround for.

I’ve tested the crap out of preheater efficacy, and it can move open rates quite a bit, as you get a chance to extend your offer from just the subject line into a more detailed call-out.

An email from MediaMath opens with 'You know what they say'…

…but email clients show a very different preview message.

Kristin Bond, Author of Email Marketing Blog Email Snarketing

All of the little details that make up an email—from name, from email, subject line, pre-header, etc., are important. A lot of brands mostly focus on the body of the email and the subject line, and forget about the pre-header. I've seen so many emails where people still don't even have pre-header copy, or if they do, it's "To view this email in a browser, click here." Or even worse, if they're building an entire email as an image (which is bad enough on its own), the pre-header is a bunch of code or a very long URL.

Pre-headers are such a fun part of email—they can supplement the subject line, and give the subscriber more reason to open the email. They're increasingly important on mobile. They're also a great way for brands to show a little personality. For brands that use very short subject lines, they're especially important, since the character space that would go for a subject line is being used by the pre-header. You only have a few seconds to get a subscriber's attention—why not use all of the tools you have?

In this screenshot from a random section of my inbox, most of the brands used pre-header text to add more context to their subject line, but some used almost the SAME text as their subject line, and one (Dillards) supplemented a boring subject line with even more boring pre-header text. Which email would you open?

Ryan Hoover, Founder of Product Hunt

Email marketers often overlook the preview that's often displayed beside the subject in most email clients. This is critical to driving enough interest from recipients to open the email to read more.

3. Email Address or From Name is "noreply"

Rob Walling, Founder of Drip

Using a generic email "from name" such as "admin" or "noreply". People want to interact with people, not mailboxes.

Joe Stych, Marketer at Zapier

When brands send emails from a "noreply" address (or an email address that never gets checked), they're really saying "we don't want to talk to you." It's an engagement opportunity that many teams miss—on one of the largest direct marketing channels out there.

We want to make ourselves available to users who have questions about Zaiper and how to use it. So we send all of our emails from contact@zapier.com, and encourage people to reply if they're confused about how to get started. All of those replies are routed to a Help Scout mailbox, where our awesome support team puts users on a path to success.

When people talk with our support team and get their questions answered, they're much more likely to turn into paying customers. If we used noreply@zapier.com instead, those opportunities would pass us by.

Email Copy Mistakes

4. Email Offers No Value to Customer

Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo

I see people sending follow up emails that have nothing valuable for the reader. It's cliche but anytime you sign up for a service you get a generic, "Oh, go click this and do this and just PAY US NOW!"

Instead, focus on your emails being so valuable your potential customers read them, share them and are excited to use more of your product and pay you money.

Just ask yourself if your emails are valuable even if your potential customer never buys.

"Just ask yourself if your emails are valuable even if your potential customer never buys."

~ Noah Kagan, AppSumo

Luke Guy, Blogger and Entrepreneur

Biggest mistake I see is the fact that people cold sale within an email. Like they'll email this brand hoping they'll buy from them because of one email. Which is crazy! One email and you think you're going to land a $1,000 contract?

Complete newbie move.

Instead, people should build a relationship over time and then offer a service of some sort. So instead of being spammy, be helpful. Outreach and grow your list. You do this by offering something within every email. Content that is. Not a price tag.

Jessica Meher, Head of Marketing, Web Team at HubSpot

Not offering anything of real value. Too many emails are "me, me, me" and don't offer something the recipient actually cares about.

5. Email Focuses on the Product, Not the Customer

Matthew Smith, Creator of Really Good Emails, a Collaborative Effort of the Assembly community:

Emails should serve the customer not the product. Often times the marketing team, not the product team is in charge of the email flow and their directive is to grow. If you get myopic about that task you forget that the most solid growth comes through simple, repeatable, service that is so good it's sharable. Serving customers comes by meeting them in their email client with simple tasks and giving them more than they expect or more than they are paying for with their time.

This email by Squarespace does this well.

This email by Home Depot fails at this.

6. Email is Void of Personality

Paul Jarvis, Bestselling Author and Web Designer

The biggest email marketing mistake I see people are guilty of is not letting their own personality shine through. Just because you're selling something doesn't mean it needs to sound like "Marketing-Bot-O-Tron-3000" wrote it. People probably signed up for your list because they liked your unique voice, your point of view, the way you do things that isn't the same as everyone else. So when you've got something to do sell them, for Pete's sake, keep your personality and voice shining through.

Sandi MacPherson, Founder of Quibb

There aren't enough companies telling interesting, relevant stories to their users. People are interested in hearing about your company, or at least your perspective on what you're best at, along with the people behind the product that they enjoy using. Using social cues and proof in products is a well understood approach, yet people don't take it as seriously in their email marketing strategy. Anand Sanwal at CB Insights does a great job at this, where he shares his personal opinions on interesting news, asks email subscribers to email him directly with their opinions on that news, and also shares interesting tidbits about what him, the company, and other users are up to. Spitfire Athlete's emails are also great at this, sharing the stories of various successful athletes they're partnering with to encourage users to reach their own fitness goals.

7. Email Contains Too Many Calls to Action (CTAs)

Georgiana Laudi, Director of Marketing at Unbounce

Marketers often try to do too much in one campaign email (presumably because they don't want to have to send more than necessary in fear of unsubscribes). Trying to accomplish too much in an email is asking readers to do too much work to decipher if your email is relevant or not to them. One CTA linking to one landing page (too, with one CTA) clarifies your offer and makes it easier to convert.

Ellie Mirman, Vice President of Marketing at Toast

One of the biggest mistakes I see in email marketing campaigns is that there isn't a clear goal or call to action. Too often, email marketing is treated as "something we have to do" without much thought about what goal it's trying to achieve. Email marketing can be used to generate leads, engage customers, drive blog subscribers, or any number of other relevant goals. Email newsletters are often the worst offenders of this—they are crammed with content without much clarity on what the marketer hopes to get out of sending that email. Some of my most successful email campaigns have been simple, with a single piece of content and clear call to action to download.

Here's an image of an email that does this well:

Chris Litster, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Constant Contact

While most businesses send email campaigns with a good idea of what they want people to do, they don’t always make it clear to the reader. Email recipients should know what you want them to do right away. Think about the action you want them to take. Do you want them to visit your website, redeem an offer, register for an event, or visit your store? Make sure they have all the information they need to take that action and make it as easy as possible for them to do it.

Paul Jarvis, Bestselling Author and Web Designer

The biggest email marketing mistake I see is a lack of focus. Just like if a website has 50 calls to action, 30 blinking buttons and a navigation that's longer than "War and Peace", it's not going to convert or retain any visitors. The same applies for each, the more focus there is on ONE idea, ONE call to action, ONE task for a user to complete, the more likely they are take that action.

Kristen Craft, Director of Partnerships at Wistia

Here's one mistake a see a lot: giving people too many calls-to-action in an email. It's confusing to the recipient and dilutes the effectiveness of the email campaign. Plus, it makes it harder to gauge the effectiveness of the email, since you don't have a single metric you can look at (like click through rate).

Instead, give people a single CTA, and ideally, give them one that's super compelling (like watching an awesome video!). A video thumbnail as your CTA is likely to give you 3x the number of click-throughs (versus any other CTA). For example, I'm pasting below an email we sent last summer, inviting people to our office. Very simple, clean, and with just one CTA for a fun video. (Side note: do not include the video itself in your email. This can lead to some bad outcomes! Use a clickable thumbnail image that automatically redirects to a landing page with the video on it.)

Related: "The Surprising Way One Startup Increased Email Click-Through Rates By 300%

8. Email Doesn't Supply a Text Link

Bryan Harris, Founder of Videofruit:

People still like text links. Be sure to include one above the fold and one below the fold. And ALWAYS put them on a line by themselves.

9. Email is Too Long

Dean Levitt, Chief Of Culture at Mad Mimi

I often see people spending hours, even days, crafting long emails filled with many topics, ideas and news that would need a minimum of 10 minutes of uninterrupted reading to get through. While they often look amazing, they simply don’t get the results an email marketer might want. These monster emails lower your engagement and worst of all, they suck up your time and energy and become a chore.

Avoid turning email marketing into a chore by doing the following:

Keep it short and simple! Pick a goal and write a simple, short email that leaves the reader in no doubt what their next step is. It should be engaging, fun to read but most of all, it should take a few moments to grasp and act. If you’ve got a lot to get off your chest, send short emails more often.

Email Formatting Mistakes

10. Email Contains a Personalization Faux Pas

Jason VandeBoom, CEO and founder of ActiveCampaign

I often see basic personalization issues. If you can't get the basics right it's not a good sign. Nothing feels less personal than seeing a personalization tag (such as %PRODUCTID%) within a received email. Already know that the vast majority of email is automated, but there is a certain level of trust that is lost when this happens. Any decent marketing platform will allow you to send test emails that utilize full personalization rendering so that you don't have to risk it.

11. Email is Only Images

Jessica Meher, Head of Marketing, Web Team at HubSpot

Using all images as the entire email. It's typically not mobile optimized. Entire content doesn't appear if someone's settings are "images off"—and what happens if the image links break! Sometimes not clear what's clickable, and image-heavy email can be considered spam by filters. Looks like a giant ad.

12. Email Doesn't Use any Images

Bryan Harris, Founder of Videofruit

Use at least one image inside of each email. Every split test I've done shows that people are MUCH more likely to click and image as opposed to a text link.

13. Emails Miss Out on Power of Plain Text

Diana Smith, Director of Marketing at Segment

Don't underestimate the power of the plain text email! Sometimes nicely designed emails for newsletters and product updates can increase conversion rates. But, for your first onboarding email, try a short, plain text note coming from a real person on your team. Ours has a 60 percent open rate!

Popular style of designed welcome email:

I'd want to test those against something that looks like this:

Email Frequency Mistakes

14. Emails are Sent Inconsistently

James Clear, Writer and Entrepreneur

Simple: Not being consistent enough. I think once or twice per week is perfect, but you can't miss. Show up every week.

15. Too Many or Too Few Emails are Sent

Ros Hodgekiss, Community Manager at Campaign Monitor

Overall, one of the most frequent mistakes we see email marketers making is underestimating, or overestimating the frequency with which their subscribers wish to hear from them. And this is backed up by the numbers - according to a 2013 survey, 53% of consumers reported getting too many emails from retailers, while only 44% said they get the right amount.

There are simple ways to get around this issue. First of all, you can have your subscribers submit their email frequency preferences - either on subscribe, or later, via an email preference center or similar. Once you have sufficient data, you can segment accordingly. This approach puts the power into your subscribers' hands. Secondly, you can periodically survey your subscribers to find out more about them - which I recommend anyway, for reasons beyond simply learning how to become a better sender. Finally, there are some great studies out there on ideal email frequency, including one we did internally that suggests that sending every 2 weeks is the sweet spot for subscriber engagement.

Any which way you do it, you can certainly benefit from less unsubscribes and more clicks and opens if you pay attention to what email send frequency works for your subscriber lists.

16. Email Messages Overlap One Another

Christopher Lester, Vice President of Sales at Emma

Lately, I've noticed a lack of coordination in my inbox. Multiple emails from the same online retailer in the same day, often with contradicting offers — meaning I had to navigate all the messages to figure out how to get the best deal on that lamp I’d had my eye on. This multi-email trend was at its peak during the holidays, and with all the hustle and bustle of the season I found myself unsubscribing from brands that I have known and trusted for years. I think the lesson is to send with your reader’s needs in mind instead of with your own business objective as the goal. It’ll pay off in the long run.

17. Emails are Effectively Pointless

Robbie Mitchell, Head of Marketing and Communications at Knewton

Dumb: vacation properties (e.g. hotels) sending recurring newsletters promoting local deals. I stayed at a hotel once for a wedding, or went on a honeymoon to a remote location, and they keep offering me deals to come back. I am never going back.

18. Email is Rarely—if Ever—Sent

Wade Foster, Co-Founder and CEO of Zapier

Zapier collected 10k emails on a pre-launch list and we didn't send them a single email until we launched. That was 10k stale email addressed that could have been nurtured and loved. Our launch could have been much more successful had the email list been nurtured. So despite my hesitancy to send an email that wasn't a launch email, I should have found something valuable to keep those people up-to-date on at least a monthly basis.

Email List Management Mistakes

19. Emails Keep on Coming

Neil Patel, Co-Founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics

Most companies keep emailing the same people over and over again. Normally this isn’t a problem, but a lot of people won’t open your emails. By emailing the users that aren’t responsive, it will cause some email providers to start pushing your emails in the spam box as they are assuming you are sending junk emails based on your low open rates.

In order to prevent your emails from going into the spam box, don’t keep emailing people who aren’t opening up your emails.

20. Email List is Never Segmented

Tommy Walker, Marketing at Shopify

There isn't nearly enough focus on segmentation or subscriber feedback.

For example, if you're a site that offers beginner, intermediate and advanced level advice and you ask me to sign up for your email list, you should be using what you know about me (like the page I signed up on) to send messaging that is in line with the "skill level" that was indicated by the page I signed up on.

Or, let's say you have a piece of software. At the very least, alter your communications with your low, average, and high use customers. Not all customers or readers are equal, so don't treat them as such.

"Not all customers or readers are equal, so don't treat them as such."

~ Tommy Walker, Marketing at Shopify

Also, it's not uncommon for email marketers to do a quick "getting to know you" survey for new subscribers, but what about a similar survey 3,6,9 and 12 months down the road?

Not only will this give your subscribers the impression you're actually interested in what they have to say, but it also gives you a gauge qualitatively of how you're performing, and how you could be doing better.

Erik Harbison, Chief Marketing Officer at AWeber

If you’re not segmenting your email list, then you’re probably using terms like ‘blast’ and think email is dead.

Getting the email with a discount for the product you just purchased. Receiving updates on a version of software that you didn’t download yet. These are the signs of a poorly segmented list and great reasons you’ll click the unsubscribe button.

Even sending a one-question survey can help gauge an interest, want or need of your subscriber. This can only help you determine a better approach for your content, sending cadence and expectations.

Segmenting on basics like geography or origin of sign up may help with developing the right messages and content, but should only be considered the start.

When you factor in deeper actions like purchase history, activity levels with your product/service and content downloads, then you’re able to significantly strengthen the relevancy and maximize the one-to-one relationship that email provides.

21. Emails Don't Follow Customer Behavior

Jimmy Daly, Head of Content at Vero

The biggest mistake I see all the time is marketers ignoring behavior.

Here's what I mean. You see a lot of promotional email, lots of newsletters, etc. That's the easiest place to start with email marketing so people focus on it. Then, you get lots of content around optimizing subject lines, writing better copy, when to send emails, etc.

We're missing the point!

Email marketing campaigns should be sent as a direct result of data and behavior. If a user is inactive, they get a nudge to come back. If they are active, they get emails about features they haven't tried yet or inspiration to engage at an ever higher level.

Data-driven lifecycle email is so, so, so powerful. And I believe it's where most businesses are missing the boat on email.

For bloggers and information marketers, segmentation is key to data-driven email. If you can't track behavior via an app or e-commerce store, you need to do it directly in your email marketing software. Here are a few ideas to start with:

- Send new subscribers an onboarding email series. Focus on content that you know converts. (In this case, "conversion" could mean encouraging a reader to download an e-book, opt-in to a membership area or simply read more content.)

- Find the people who consistently open and click your emails and send them VIP content or give them early access to new content.

- Send simple (but awesome) behavioral email. For example, if someone requests an e-book and you deliver it via email, you are nearly guaranteed an open. Build on that momentum by moving them a step closer to your next goal (an online course, webinar, newsletter subscription) by including a clear valuable proposition and a strong call to action.

Matt Hodges, Senior Director of Marketing at Intercom

(The mistake of...) Not considering your audience. It's like writing a love letter and then addressing it “to whom it may concern." Businesses do it all the time; I've lost count of the number of emails I've received from a company where I have literally no clue who they are or what they do.

What's the fix? Send well-targeted messages to the right customer at the right time in the right medium. Intercom shows us who our customers are and what they do in our product, and lets us use this live data to segment audiences for campaigns–based on location, in-product behavior, etc. Check out a blog on the topic from our co-founder Des Traynor, "A Simple Improvement to Product Mails".

Rob Walling, founder of Drip

Sending the same email to all of your subscribers. If you aren't customizing individual emails (and which emails people receive) based on a person's opens, clicks and actions they perform on your website, your competition will. The days of one-to-many email marketing are rapidly coming to a close. The future will be won by those who embrace one-to-few and one-to-one email marketing.

The Worst Mistake

Required Login to Unsubscribe

Robbie Mitchell, Head of Marketing and Communications at Knewton

Worst: requiring login to unsubscribe (aka "manage subscription preferences"). As a result, I just mark as spam instead. Bad for everyone.

Next

You're nearly finished—you've picked apps to send your emails, and have your emails optimized and integrated with your workflow. You even know what you should avoid when sending emails.

But how will you keep from burning out after sending so many emails? The tips in our closing chapter will help you keep your email marketing efforts paying off for years to come.

Written by Danny Schreiber

Image credits: Frustrated photo courtesy Oliver Newport. Screenshots courtesy respective individuals. HubSpot email example via HubSpot blog.

Chapter 12: Don't Quit

How to Keep Sending Great Emails

"The work you get to do is the important stuff: planning a robust, exciting, engaging communication plan that isn't an afterthought to endlessly importing email addresses."

~ Christopher Harring, director, Maryland Institute College of Arts Office of Graduate Admission

You've picked an email marketing app, and have new subscribers flowing into it and your other related apps automatically. You might even have your subscribers being moved to new lists over time, automatically. But the well-oiled email marketing machine this book's helped you create isn't worth much if you're not sending emails.

So now, your main job is sending engaging emails that'll actually get noticed. "The work you get to do is the important stuff: planning a robust, exciting, engaging communication plan that isn't an afterthought to endlessly importing email addresses," says Christopher Walker, director of the office of graduate admissions at the Maryland Institute College of Arts. That's the fun part—but it still can be tough.

The most important things in your email marketing are consistency and authenticity, along with feedback from your readers and experimentation. In closing, here's some quick pointers on how to achieve all of them in your email marketing, and hopefully keep the emails coming without burning out yourself and your team.

Authenticity

Just as your social posts can quickly get drowned out by everything else being shared, your emails will also be surrounded by more important messages—and you'll want yours to stick out. For that, Neil Cybart recommends finding your own voice, and being persistent.

"I think the most important thing with producing a daily email is having passion in what you are writing because this enables you to develop your own voice," Neil said. "Having confidence that your level of knowledge or experience gathered over the years in a particular subject or field can provide readers with value they wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere is a key aspect of producing a vibrant daily email."

Consistency

Want your emails to be read? Techcrunch's Jon Russell says that with email marketing, consistency is the secret—just as with any other online publication efforts. "You need to be disciplined about publishing regularly, but that's just like YouTube, blogging and other kinds of online media," says Jon.

Drop the consistency, and your email list will quickly become forgotten—and your name won't jump out at people when they see your messages in their inbox. "If you’re patchy, your audience will suffer and people will become less inclined to open your emails," says The Next Web's Owen Williams.

Experimentation

But don't worry way too much about what your emails say. Feel free to experiment: just be authentic and consistent. That's how Kale Davis approached his Hacker Newsletter, until he found the format that worked best for his readers. "I think of each issue as an experiment, and over time you'll get a sense of what works and doesn't," he explained.

Feedback

And, of course, don't forget to be open to feedback. Private feedback is only a reply button away, so encourage people to let you know their thoughts about your emails. If you're sending too many emails, or the messages aren't relevant enough, people will tell you—and then, you can thank them for their input and tweak your emails to be better next time.

Owen Williams has found this to be one of the most important parts of his experiments with email newsletters. "If you’re building an email newsletter, ask for feedback from your subscribers," says Owen. "When sending out your weekly update, put a note at the bottom asking for people to reply if they have feedback. You’ll be surprised by how many actually love to have a say."

Put it all together, and you'll realize your best option is to jump right in, start sending emails regularly, and tweak as you go. Automate your processes as much as you can, and you'll have time to put back into your email's content. You'll get feedback to incorporate, will find your own voice along the way, and with any luck your emails will become popular enough that people will be excited to have them show up in their inbox.

That's how you can not only achieve the impressive stats at the beginning of this article, but perhaps even surpass them. All with just a lowly email, the one internet communication medium that's stood the test of time.

Keep Learning

You've conquered email marketing—don't stop there! The Zapier team has an entire library of eBooks teaching you everything you need to know about APIs, CRM apps, and the ins-and-outs of our own automation app. There's even screencasts to help you get more out of the apps you love and already use, and more app-focused eBooks coming soon.

Then, there's the Zapier blog, where you'll find articles like those included in the chapters of this book, along with articles about productivity, remote work, and more. Be sure to check out our blog and sign up for our email newsletters to be among the first to know whenever we publish new articles, free books and more.

Thanks for reading! ~ Your friends at Zapier

Table of Contents

About This Guide

Who is This Guide For?

Table of Contents

Intro: On Great Emails

Choosing the Best Email Marketing App, Crafting the Best Email Marketing Strategy, and Creating an Email Workflow that Works for You

Chapter 2: The 25 Best Email Marketing and Newsletter Apps

Why Do I Need an Email Marketing App?

Build Your Own Email Newsletter App

Integrate and Automate Your Email Marketing App

Conclusion

Next

Chapter 3: Grow Your Email List

How to Get Subscribers, Organize Lists and Follow Spam Laws

The Email Advantage

In this Chapter:

12 Ways to Utilize an Email List

3 Steps to Start an Email List

How to Avoid Breaking Email Laws

17 Ways to Rapidly Grow Your Email List

Optimize and Segment Your Email Lists

Conclusion

Next

Chapter 4: How to Segment Email Lists for More Opens, Click-Throughs and Conversions

In this Chapter:

What is List Segmentation?

What You Need: The Basics

How Will List Segmentation Help Me?

Leveraging Data for Effective List Segmentation

When Should I Segment My Email List?

How Can I Start Segmenting My Email List?

Conclusion

Next

Chapter 5: Master Your Email Marketing List

How to Automatically Import, Copy and Remove Subscribers

In This Chapter:

Add Subscribers to an Email List from Any App

Keep a List Updated with Automation

Take Subscribers Beyond the Email List

Next

Chapter 6: What is Drip Marketing?

The Complete Guide to Drip Campaigns, Lifecycle Emails and More

In This Chapter:

What is a Drip Campaign?

When Should You Use a Drip Campaign?

How to Set Up a Drip Campaign

How to Measure Drip Marketing Results

Apps to Run Drip Campaigns

Further Reading

Next

Chapter 7: The 25 Best Email Marketing Apps to Send Drip Campaigns

Picking a Great Drip Email Tool

In This Chapter:

Drip Email Apps

Marketing Automation Apps

Email Newsletter Apps

Make Your Own Drip Campaign App:

Next

Chapter 8: Successful Drip Email Campaigns

How to Pick the Best App, Add Advanced Automation and More

In This Chapter:

Find the Perfect Drip Email App

Automate Your Drip Emails

Hone Your Drip Strategy

Use Drip Emails to do More

Stay Human

Next

Chapter 9: Transactional Email

The 7 Best Services to Send 1000s of Emails Daily

Beyond smtp.google.com

The Case for Transactional Email Sending Services

Picking the Perfect Email Sending Service

Get Started Using Your Transactional Email Service

Next

Chapter 10: A/B Test Your Email Marketing

How to Get Started, What to Test and 20+ Apps to Help

In This Chapter:

What is A/B Testing?

How A/B Testing Email Works

10 A/B Testing Rules to Follow

10 Email Characteristics to Test

Start A/B Testing Your Emails Today

Next

Chapter 11: Experts Weigh In

21 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Inbox Mistakes

Email Copy Mistakes

Email Formatting Mistakes

Email Frequency Mistakes

18. Email is Rarely—if Ever—Sent

Email List Management Mistakes

The Worst Mistake

Next

Chapter 12: Don't Quit

How to Keep Sending Great Emails

Keep Learning