I’ve always recommended that companies send their email newsletters using a role account for their reply-to. For example, instead of using my personal “ben@” email address, I’ve always used “newsletter@.” Mostly because I might get hit by a bus or something, and somebody here might have to replace my role (hence “role address”).

But today I changed all that, because of an email newsletter I got from Jon Swanson. I subscribed to his blog updates a long time ago, because he was one of the first people to try our RSS-to-email tool.

All I wanted to know is whether or not our tool was working properly for people. But I ended up staying on his list, because I like his writing and his content. Heck, I’ve ended up purchasing books he’s recommended (that’s what’s so interesting about influence, and the social web).

Anyway, in Gmail, since I have Rapportive installed, I saw Jon’s face right next to his newsletter (that’s him over to the right). I can also see some of his recent tweets, which  include links to more photos.

This makes his email newsletter really personal, and really human. So if you have Rapportive installed in your Gmail, and you got my most recent newsletter, there’s me:

When I first wrote about MailChimp’s integration with Rapportive, I was only thinking about how you could use it to learn more about your customers. Never even thought about using it so that customers could learn more about you(r brand).

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A lot of companies (apparently) look at their email marketing stats and say, “Hmm, we should jack up our send frequency and milk more out of this subscriber list!” I mean, how many times have you signed up for a retailer’s email list, and it all started out okay with monthly(ish) emails and specials, then over time, it turns into daily blasts to your inbox? That initial feeling of, “Hey, now I get these neat offers from my favorite store” always seems to turn into, “When the hell did I sign up for this junk?!?”

Okay, in some cases, the frequency just increases as the company’s experience with email marketing increases (in other words, “now we have more to say”). But you can’t just go from casual email newsletters to daily hyper-marketing. Not without the right approach.

Here’s an example of the right way to increase your frequency…

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Here’s an interesting idea from GetElastic (an ecommerce blog worth bookmarking, btw). It started with a case study of how TigerDirect replaces product photos on their servers to indicate when something has been sold out. GetElastic’s Linda Bustos asks,

‘what if you deliberately included sold out product photos in your emails?’

This is a much more subtle (but no less powerful) way to add urgency than using text like, “hurry! act now! buy now!” That kind of text is typically not appreciated by spam filters. Or humans. I like the way you think, Linda.

Not convinced? I like the way you think, too. A/B test your content, then.

Someone over in the MailChimp Jungle asked, “Do spam filters read Alt-text descriptions?” I honestly had no idea, so I took my most recent MonkeyWrench email newsletter, replicated it, and I typed in the most awful, disgusting alt-text descriptions that I could think of.

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

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Click to see the winner

When I created this email newsletter, I had two different subject line ideas:

A) MonkeyWrench – Autoresponders, Turks, Freshbooks, and Webhooks

B) Turks, Freshbooks, autoresponders, and webhooks

Quick – Can you  guess which subject line got more opens? Turns out it got more clicks and fewer bounces, too!

Luckily, there’s no need to guess with MailChimp’s patent-pending built-in A/B testing tool. It’s totally automatic. I’ll show you how it works…

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