Recently I came into the office to find that one of my two workstation monitors was getting no juice–it was completely blank. I’m pretty sure an automatic Windows update blew out the driver for my dual-monitor controller. After a restart, Windows told me it couldn’t find any driver for the video controller, and wasn’t able to find any compatible controllers online either. Tragedy.

It had been a very long time since I had done this job with only one monitor, and it was fairly amazing how difficult it was to go back to it. As you can see in my screenshot below, there are quite a few things I need to have at close reach while I’m working, and there’s no way to deal with them all on a single monitor without constantly switching between windows to see what’s going on.

Which got me thinking: you guys aren’t doing all your work on just a single monitor, are you? The difference in productivity between a single and dual-monitor setup is definitely significant for anyone who is consistently working with a number of different tools. But I think there’s also a health issue here: I felt much more stressed out working that way. I felt cramped up and twitchy. By the time I left, I was a little burned out. And it was much tougher for me to unwind than is usual, even after a long day.

Working with computers all day can be much more stressful than a lot of folks would imagine. And it’s usually not an all-out assault of stress that you could point to as something that was definitely doing you harm. Rather, it’s a slow and steady trickle of stress that comes from paying attention to lots of little things for prolonged periods of time. Most of us are already only too aware that chronic stress can ruin your health, so you should take every possible precaution to ensure that your workday is as relaxed and pleasant as possible.

One of the very simplest things you can do to reduce your stress level is to reduce visual clutter. Allow yourself a little room to move around in, and you’ll find you feel less… imposed upon. This most definitely applies to what you see on your screen(s). I usually even go so far as to keep all of my windows just a little smaller than they could be so that I can see the space behind and between then more clearly. This establishes a sense of depth and expansiveness on your desktop, which not only gives you the visual impression of having more space for yourself, it also makes it easier to feel like each piece of work is a solid and graspable object, not a vast expanse of overwhelming workload.

So if you’re not already using at least two monitors, and organizing your workspace in such a way as to create a sense of natural simplicity and calm, then why not take a break from whatever you’re doing and get it set up right now? Not only will the increase in productivity easily earn back whatever time and money you spent on the setup, you’ll probably also notice an increased sense of well-being and improved overall health.

It seems counterintuitive that you should want to offer your customers a money-back guarantee. After all, the customer’s money is really what you came for. Once you’ve got it, and you’ve delivered your product, it makes sense that the transaction should be finished, right?

But this idea makes customers nervous. What if they buy the product only to find out that they can’t make it work for them the way they had hoped? What if they misunderstood the promotional literature and come to find that a critical feature is missing? What if they just plain change their mind? We’ve all experienced these worries when making a purchase, and your customers are no different. Your job is to put their minds at ease. Because nervous people don’t buy. They put it on hold and then forget to get back to it. It happens. You can probably think of plenty of times when you did this yourself.

Enter the money back guarantee. If you know you can get your money back, you worry less. You feel less pressured. You have some breathing room. So you go for it. As a business owner, you’ve told your customer that you are willing to shoulder the burden of their potential buyer’s remorse.

This is actually a win-win situation, because if you know that you’ve represented your product accurately, and that it is of a high quality, you can already predict that the vast majority of people who buy from you will not ask for their money back. You have the advantage in the situation: you already know that your customer needs what you are offering. As long as you are actually delivering what you promise, the only people who will ever take you up on the offer are the ones who simply misunderstood. And, frankly, you want them to return the product to you for a refund. Otherwise you’ll have a dissatisfied customer out their talking about all the things your product can’t do. This build up a perceived deficit in what may otherwise be a great product. The moral of the story is that you only ever want happy customers who will tell people nice things about you.

Offering a money back guarantee not only alleviates your customer’s anxiety about purchasing, it also conveys confidence. If you’re willing to give them 30 or even 60 days to make up their minds about whether the product is worth it, they know you mean business. If you’re selling crap, this strategy is not going to work for you. But when you’ve worked hard to produce a product that meets your clients’ needs, the sales you will gain by using this strategy will vastly outweigh the refunds you end up paying out.

In my previous post, I talked about some of the reasons to start doing web surveys. Of course, for someone who has no experience with this way of gathering information, starting to run surveys can be a little daunting. As always, you’ll want to make the user’s experience your first priority. This means taking a little extra care in crafting the surveys themselves and the ways that you promote them.

Survey early, Survey often

Don’t go back through the last 5 years of business data and figure out everything you’ve ever wished you knew about your clients and their habits and dump it all into one survey. It would be great if all of your customers were willing to spend 30 or even 60 minutes answering your questions, but they are not. In fact, if you ask them to do this, they’ll probably lose a lot of respect for you and be less likely to do business with you again. You’ll probably have better results doing a short 5-6 question survey every few months.

Mix it up a little

Since you’re adding frequent, short surveys, why not hook them into different actions that your site’s visitors are usually taking anyway? If you have a membership area, you could add in a quick survey between the login page and the member’s area. If you offer something for download, you could stick one in before the download is served. Make it feel like a quick, relatively unobtrusive extra step in the middle of an action that your clients are used to performing anyway. If you play this right, you can actually gain an extra layer of data that might tell you about the different types of answers you get from users engaged in different types of activity on your site. Continue reading →

Since we started giving away fully-functional, free versions of our most popular software products with no strings attached, we’ve been fielding some phone calls from disgruntled users of other people’s services.

You see, if you download and install a free copy of SupportTrio, for example, the bottom of each page of your support center will have a tasteful “Powered by SupportTrio” message with a link back to our site. To be honest, I’ve actually been a little surprised by how few disreputable vendors have ended up using our free software. For the most part our clients tend to be extremely upstanding members of the web community. But there are a few companies using free versions of our products who have failed to meet their clients’ expectations and have been generally unreachable.

So these hapless clients follow our “Powered by SupportTrio” link in hopes of finding anyone who might be affiliated with the company that is ruining their day. By the time they do that, they tend to be pretty upset, and so it can be difficult to help them understand that we really don’t have any affiliation with sites that use free versions of our products. After all, we only use full versions.

Now I’m going to tell you a secret. If you follow this simple principle, you can reasonably expect that 99% of the people you speak with will love you by the end--especially the ones who start out by feeling and acting upset.

The secret is that people are not barbarians; people genuinely want to be reasonable. The only time that people behave unreasonably is in the face of a situation that they experience as unreasonable. So, let them know that their experience and their reaction both basically make sense. Empathize. Tell them you know how they feel. Say, “Wow, that sounds really frustrating, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

That’s it! That’s all you have to do, and everyone you talk to will feel comforted and taken care of, and they may even keep you in mind for when they need some web-based software of their own!

A lot of people wonder if they can really make web-based support work for their business. Will clients tolerate having to do everything online, waiting for replies to their tickets, wondering about the response time? Don’t people just want to talk to you on the phone?

When it comes right down to it, web-based support is often simply the most cost-effective and efficient way to assist your clients. But there are some things you’ll need to do to make sure that your online support center is convenient, friendly, and responsive from the client’s perspective. Continue reading →

In the last episode, I described in some depth the types of considerations that can help you maximize your chances that your messages will make it into your subscribers’ inboxes. The next question is how to maximize your chances that your content will make it into your subscribers’ brains.

The answer to this problem begins not with your e-mail messages, but on your web page. Your subscription form itself is the first step in ensuring targeted delivery. The form should make it clear exactly what your subscribers are signing up for: what type of content and how often. If there are several different types of content you want to send out that are not likely to interest the same people, consider splitting up the information into separate mailing lists and offering your visitors the option of subscribing to one or more of them.

Next, when you send out messages, make sure the From e-mail address, the sender name, and the subject line are all recognizable. Every message should make it completely clear to the recipient where the message is coming from and why before they open it. When we send out newsletters, for example, the sender name is “ActiveCampaign, Inc.” and the title always begins “ActiveCampaign News.” If your recipients don’t recognize where your message is coming from and why, they may not know they want to read it. Worse, they may flag it as spam, thereby preventing your future mailings from getting through to them.

It’s a good idea to personalize your messages to enhance this effect. The possibilities of message personalization range from simply opening the message with a personal greeting to much more effective techniques like splitting your subscribers up into groups based on their location or click-through activity. For example, imagine you’re running a mailing list about changes in local laws that affect business owners. If you’ve collected the zip code of each of your subscribers, you can target your messages directly at business owners within an affected area for a given policy change, and spare all of your other subscribers from having to scan through messages that don’t have any relevance for them. The perceived usefulness of your mailing list is likely to be far higher, the perceived annoyingness is likely to be far lower, and your overall retention rate and success will very probably be positively impacted.

Also, don’t forget to include an unsubscribe link in every message. You may also want to give them a link to update their account information, if you collect any special information or if you offer multiple lists, but always include an unsubscribe link. Why? Because if you don’t, people that want to unsubscribe probably won’t contact you, or e-mail you, or call you, or just delete every message that comes in: they’ll probably mark your messages as spam. If they use any of the popular e-mail providers, that could affect the likelihood that your messages will be delivered to other users of those e-mail hosts.

The next thing to think about is the content itself. Be honest with yourself now–is it boring? filled with editing errors? is it all whacked out? There’s only one way to know for sure: have a few people read it beforehand. In the previous article I mentioned some reasons why it is a good idea to set up a test mailing list including all of your own addresses and any colleagues who are willing to help you with your newsletter. Now I will tell you about a great big reason to do so. If you don’t, your dreams will be haunted by the mistakes you failed to catch in proofreading, the opportunities you lost by mistyping a link, or the subscriptions you lost by sending out substandard content.

Once you’ve got everything proofread and okayed by multiple readers, you can start thinking about how to maximize the effectiveness of what you’re sending. A/B Split testing your e-mails is an excellent way to do this. For those not familiar, A/B Split testing involves randomly assigning your site visitors or e-mail recipients into 2 group, and delivering different versions of your content to each of the two groups. You then compare the response rates (click-throughs, read/open, forward-to-friend, etc.) of the two different versions to determine which one worked better. If you’re using 1-2-All, then you have a convenient piece of software available to manage this process available to you in the form of the A/B Split addon. Otherwise, you can split your list into two smaller lists and try to do this by hand. Either way, it’s an incredibly smart way to leverage your existing audience and improve the content you’re providing. You can use this technique, for example, to test the effectiveness of different subject lines, to see what types of subject lines your subscribers are more likely to open and read. You can also try different layouts within the e-mail content itself in order to determine what format produces the highest click-through rate.

Finally, be sure to keep your recipients in mind with everything you do. Imagine what it will be like for them to receive your message. What time of day will it arrive in their inbox? If you send a message outside of business hours, it will be much more likely to get lost among the list of messages which accumulated overnight. Also, people feel much more pressured to get through their list of e-mails in the morning so they can begin their day; this means that if your e-mail does get opened, it’s less likely to be fully read. Also consider how their e-mail reader will respond to the attempt to open the message. If you’ve included multimedia elements like Flash or Javascript, at best they will simply be excluded from the opened message and at worst your recipient will have to see an error message. It will not benefit you to become associated with error messages.

It comes down to anticipating and managing the experience that you’re giving your subscribers, just like any other type of business activity. If you want people to enjoy their experience, become more involved in what you’re doing, and come back for more, you can. All it takes is a little extra time and consideration.

Let us know what you think about these ideas, what types of things you think about when you’re sending to mailing lists, and what you’ve had success with.

One of the most frequent questions we hear from people who are looking into or using 1-2-All for e-mail marketing is how to ensure that their e-mail reaches its intended audience and gets looked at.

The first thing to look at, obviously, is spam filtration. If your message is filtered as spam, it will probably never be read, so preventative measures are definitely in order. The single most important thing you can do to make sure your messages don’t get marked as spam is also the simplest and most logical: don’t send spam! Send quality content at reasonable intervals. If the message you’re sending contain a sufficient quantity and variety of original text, you’re not likely to have to worry about trying to do anything sneaky to get past the spam filters.

You can also improve the delivery rate of your messages by improving the ‘relationship’ between your own server and those of the receiving servers by setting up a Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which reduces the chances that spammers will be able to use your domain name by specifying which computers are allowed to send e-mail from your domain. Instructions for setting up an SPF for your domain can be found in our knowledge base article on the subject.

A second line of defense for avoiding spam filtration is to run your message through some spam filters before you send it out to your subscribers. If you’re using 1-2-All, you can use our EmailCheck addon to run your message through an up-to-date copy of SpamAssassin that we maintain on our servers. SpamAssassin is the most popular spam filter on privately maintained servers, and the addon willgive you a list of any specific problems it finds so that you can correct them before sending the message. You can also test your messages against the major webmail services’ spam filters by simply sending a copy of the message to your own accounts on those services. It’s a good idea to maintain a test mailing list consisting of all of your own e-mail addresses and those of colleagues working with you on your marketing efforts, and to send a copy of each message to this list prior to sending to your main list. That way you can anticipate and correct most problems before they happen.

The third way to prevent your messages from being filtered as spam is to prevent your subscribers from marking your messages as spam. This means always enabling double opt-in features in your mailing list management software. It may seem like you’ll be losing a few subscribers who can’t be bothered to confirm their subscription, but in the long run those subscribers probably weren’t that interested in your mailing list anyway, and likely wouldn’t have remembered signing up in the first place. That translates into more spam complaints.

In my next post on this topic, I’ll be discussing ways to keep your hard-won subscribers, and maximize the effectiveness of your mailings.

Email Marketing succeeds as a form of direct marketing because compared to printed mail or printed newsletters it delivers immediate results, statistics are easily tracked, and it is inexpensive. Email marketing not only receives quicker response rates,  it also saves a significant amount of time.  Unlike mailed advertisements there is little delay and unlike web sites which rely on site traffic to generate sales,  advertisers can push sales without waiting for someone to visit their web site.  Mailings that are regularly sent out on a lets say weekly, bi-weekly, or a monthly basis are an affordable way of automatically attracting repeat business.  Mailings that are properly formatted and contain brand logos reinforce brand identity and product awareness.  

The immediate impact of email marketing can be seen in generating web site traffic.  This represent a golden opportunity for marketers to make money through advertising.   This is all the more true when taking into consideration that ideally you will be reaching out to a vast pool of subscribers who have opted in to receive mailings based on subjects that are of genuine interest to them.  You can use embedded links in your mailings to direct customers to areas of your site that hold their interest.  Then you can follow up with personalized mailings that contain targeted content.

Newsletters afford marketers the interactivity and personalization that print based marketing never had any way of achieving. Managing your list of subscribers with a database that may include any number of subscriber fields allows you send mailings in bulk and at the same time keep a high level of personalization. You can generate subscription forms that contain any number of subscriber fields with customer data such as address, zip code, gender, and country.   You can then include this information in mailings by using personalization tags or you can create sending filters to send to groups of subscribers based on subscriber fields.

Email marketing is especially attractive to marketers because it delivers results that are measurable.  Newsletters allow advertisers to track users through statistical tracking which can include bounces, unsubscribes, read opens which track which subscribers have opened and read a mailing, and link tracking or click through rates.  These statistics can be used to correlate   Marketers can then employ new strategies in order to strengthen response rates.

Email marketing has been widely hailed as second only search marketing as an effective online marketing tactic.  Unlike mailed advertisements there is little delay and unlike web sites which rely on site traffic to generate sales,  advertisers can push sales without waiting for someone to visit their web site. There’s also an eco-friendly reason for going with email marketing route.  Unlike its print based cousin email marketing is green friendly as it is paper free.   

While email marketing is legitimately used by reputable businesses in order to market to their existing client base, unsolicited mailings known as spam continue to cloud the industry by infuriating about anyone that has ever had an email account anywhere.  As previously mentioned this is not only disruptive but it also cast a shadow over anyone that email markets as sometimes even legitimate permission based mailings are misidentified as spam.  

Because the medium has been pervasively exploited legislation has become necessary in order to combat spam which has universally become a headache for individuals and businesses alike.  Businesses interested in email marketing should thouroughly investigate anti-spam legislation such as the United States’ CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act).  The name itself points to spams seedy nature in delivering mailings that our not only unwanted but offensive in nature.   Also be sure to study the European Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 or your Internet provider’s acceptable use policy.   Some ISPs have restrictions on the  mailings that you are allowed to send so that is also something you will need to check before hosting your own email marketing solution. 

How often to send mailings is a question that every email marketer asks at some point. You may feel hesitant about sending too often because you are fearful of irritating your subscribers. Your first consideration should be to establish regularity. Having regularly scheduled mailings is important for effective email marketing. As a rule of thumb you want to establish a frequency of no less than once a month. If you mail less than a month you risk being forgotten about by your subscribers. How often you send mailings also depends on the content that you are using. Why are you doing this? Are you promoting goods, updating clients, disseminating propaganda for special interests, selling a politician or a political party, etc.? Ask what’s in it for your readers. How often does your newsletter’s content change and how long do your readers take to react. The A/B split add-on is a good tool for segmenting your audience to see what content your subscribers respond to. The A/B split add on sends out two separate versions of a mailing which you can use to measure what gets a better response. Furthermore, you may want to segment your audience based on frequency. Some of your audience may respond to more frequency while others are more comfortable with a monthly mailing. This underscores what we have been talking about all along, know your audience.

You can let readers decide for themselves what they feel most comfortable with. Some newsletters give readers the option to opt-in for daily or weekly delivery during sign up. Which brings up the next question you need to ask yourself. What can you handle? A daily newsletter is very resource dependent when compared to a monthly. It may be best to start with a monthly newsletter and work from there. You do not want to rush out poorly written daily material when a monthly newsletter that is well written is more likely to captivate your audience. Are you mindful of the latest trends? This is where it becomes important to look at statistical tracking in your message archive. Check to see that your open reads haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. Or, that your unsubscribes haven’t gone through the roof. There are many considerations when choosing a frequency. Remember to use your audience as a guide and the rest should follow.

A mailing list is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to deliver content to a large audience with a few simple clicks. After you’ve sent your mailing list you are going to want to measure how successful your campaign was.

The first place your eyes are going to focus on is how many people opened and read your mailing because its natural to measure success in terms of how many people read your mailing. Just as natural is to measure failure by how many people unsubscribed to your mailing. There’s no reason to feel rejected, the fact that a subscriber is unsubscribing from a mailing means that they are simply exercising their right not to receive mailings and you should applaud their effort to have themselves removed from your list.

They could just as easily filter your mailing into a spam folder which would do you a disservice by depressing your results. Worse, they could flag you as spam and if enough people do this then you can easily be blacklisted by your ISP.

You may very well expect to have a few unsubscribes but what if you notice a spike in the total number of unsubscribes? Do not be alarmed, this is an indication that something needs to be addressed. This could be due to faulty marketing material which gave your new sign-ups false hope, the material itself may need work, or you may have done something to otherwise alienate your readership. Unsubscribes can be an indication that you need to change the direction of your mailings.

Even if your direction is solid and your marketing is not misleading then people are still going to want to unsubscribe with every mailing. Nobody lives in a static vacuum. People’s needs evolve whether it is through their careers, education, lifestyle, or relationships. Some people refuse to unsubscribe from mailings because of the fear that it alerts spammers that an email address is active. Someone that unsubscribes from your mailing is telling you that they trust you but do not wish to receive further mailings.

Unsubscribes are proof of the legitimacy of your permission based mailing and as such you should regard all unsubscribers as your friend.