Just attended a webinar on “Email Marketing Secrets”, hosted by Jason Falls of Social Fresh Media. Actually, there were no secrets, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to repeat the obvious. Following are their Four “Secrets”, mixing their – and my own – commentary:

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1. Make it easy and obvious to sign up. Your business need to grow/maintain your list, since normal churn means a significant number will drop out over the year. Don’t hide the sign up form, and give reason why they should sign up. Also, don’t forget to use off-line methods to gather the lists, as long as it is permission based. As another speaker once said two years ago, “Growing your list should be most website’s 2nd priority.” In this new Facebook-centric era, this could also be your Facebook pages second priority as well.

2. Use follow-up “Remails”. That is to say, if people don’t respond to your email (e.g. non-opened, or no purchase) send them a second email a few days afterwards. Change up the Subject line. In the sample they gave, “Just for you, save 15%’ became “Last Chance, save 15%”. You can also look to change the content somewhat, since people often preview emails without officially opening them.

3. Send Timely,Targeted and Valuable Content. As another speaker once declared: “Deliver to the promise of why they signed up.” If your website and Facebook sign-up say that that subscribers will receive special offers, send special offers. If it promises news, send newsy items.

4. Break the rules. There is a lot of collected knowledge on what emailers should and shouldn’t do to gain addresses, and what should be done in the emails. However – as long as it is legal – your company might want to experiment with currently unpopular methods such as pop-ups, using a different ”voice” in emails etc.

Not mentioned in the webinar is that it is good to experiment with a small subset of your visitors / subscribers before doing this. You don’t want to accidentally irritate subscribers. This is just another way to use A/B testing to increase results.