In this blog I’ll be focussing on helping you to grow the number of subscribers you have in your Sign-Up.to account. This blog contains helpful advice, hints and tips on how to go about this using Facebook, Twitter and other forms of advertisement to grow your subscriber base.

Buy advertising space – not lists

Instead of buying lists of email addresses, buy advertising on either Google or Facebook to gain more traffic to your website. Advertising on Facebook offers powerful targeting tools, allowing you to ensure your advert is shown to those Facebook users who would find it most relevant and interesting. If you would like to know more about this, please see my earlier blog entitled “How to use Facebook adverts“.

Give it away

Give something away to entice more subscribers to opt-in to your newsletter. This could be a new single from your band, or writing a guide on something that is relevant to your business like a guide or an ebook. As an example I recently found a website that creates a free website template each month exclusively for their newsletter subscribers. This not only would increase their newsletter subscriptions but each month they send their newsletter out with a screen-shot of their new template and where you can download it from – meaning the subscribers would be more inclined to click the link, in turn increasing their open and click through rates – just what the doctor ordered!

Do you tweet?

Use Twitter to update your followers with either updates of your business or special offers that you are currently running. If you haven’t used Twitter yet fear not, we have an excellent blog on the question that is on your lips “What is Twitter for”.

The next step would be to make your page sparkle, we wrote another blog on “Creating a consistent brand image across Facebook, Twitter and Youtube”. This has some great tips when keeping the brand consistent when designing these pages.

Now you can use TweetDeck to make it simple to contact your followers as you can post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, making this easier to manage these accounts. Another blog worth reading is “How to grow your social media presence“, with tips on how you can grow your Facebook and Twitter followers.

The running man

Catch your subscribers running by creating an auto-responder that they receive the moment they confirm their subscription for your newsletter. This can include a guide, hints and tips, or an offer a voucher for your site.

This way you don’t drop the ball when handling a new subscriber. If someone signs up at 1am they automatically will get the auto-responder immediately. This is also useful as some people could lose interest very quickly or even forget about your company if you don’t stay on the ball!

If you are unsure on how to set this up please see our video guide on how to set up an autoresponder.

Show them what they’re missing

On your website – next to your sign-up form – place a link to previous versions of your newsletter to show the user what they’re signing-up.to! You should place copies of your newsletters onto your webspace so you can refer to more than just one newsletter to re-assure them to opt-in for future newsletters. More companies are doing this now as potential subscribers could become wary of what they will receive and how often, so take this step to ensure they sign-up to your newsletter.

I hope this blog has been helpful for you, please use the comments box below if you have any questions.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our brand new Share section, which now appears between ‘Send’ and ‘Analyse’ in your account.

This new tool allows you to share your message through social media channels like Twitter, so that you can get people talking about you, and measure the results.

We will be adding new features and integrations with services like Facebook over the coming months, but to get you started, check out your Twitter tracking results which are available now. These allow you to measure and compare your tweeted campaign reach and see just how far your message has spread each and every time it was shared. Full results are available for campaigns sent after 7th October.

To learn more about Twitter please see our blog we published when we first launched our Twitter tools back in March this year. This blog will give you lots of useful information about Twitter and the benefits you’ll find from using it when sending your email campaigns.

We hope you enjoy the new feature and if you have any questions about social media please contact us.

Much time has been spent discussing the subject of user engagement lately as it becomes more and more obvious how much of a key role it plays in the current email marketing landscape. For your edification – a few recent related posts from the blogging world:

• Engagement: The New Frontier In Deliverability? – George Bilbery from Return Path weighs in
• How to attract customers, engage them & keep them coming back – backyard birding as a study in user engagement
• Email Marketing Today: Episode 29 – “Lessons learned from WWD New Rules of Consumer Engagement”
• How Engagement Metrics Influence Deliverability – key points
• User Engagement & Email Delivery – a few quick notes
• Using Personality To Help Drive Engagement – why it’s important to show you’re not a faceless corporation
• Future of deliverability: 1 – the role of user interaction (see also part 2)
• How Can Non-Profits Send More Engaging Email? – a new study with some interesting statistics

Twitter have in the past week or two made several important changes that I think are worth mentioning, particularly because of the launch of our new Share section. One thing that I noticed this morning (being one of the lucky 5% of users getting a sneak preview) was the new ability to set up lists (apologies for the link to a slightly out-of-date post, but there’s no more recent information available that I know of, yet) – which for me is a very cool feature I have long wished for. Our own Mr Gareth Langston will be posting more about this later, so I’ll leave the details for him to describe.

Also, as many people are aware, Twitter searches will soon be incorporated into Google search results. What hasn’t been as widely discussed is Microsoft already have a Twitter search up and running – at least for part of the world (NB: I finally got it working by tweaking the URL). Finally, on a technical note, they’ve also introduced support for API versioning, which will allow the introduction of new features more easily than previously, and makes my developer side a happy little geek.

Special mention this week to Marketing Sherpa‘s recently announced 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. It’s not free ($297 for the PDF-only version), but to whet your appetite there is a fairly large executive summary slash excerpt available (16 pages, including several pages for the index). The report itself contains research from 1,493 “real-life marketers” with a plethora of charts, tables, statistics, and advice totalling 283 pages of content: quite honestly the most comprehensive research on email marketing that I know of, especially when complemented by our very own UK email marketing benchmark report. Good stuff, Sherpa!

A bumper roundup this week due to the last two Fridays having been taken up with development work for our shiny new Analyse section with all its lovely new charts and tables. Crunch time is finally over however, so please expect normal service to resume – for now.

So, what have people been talking about over the last couple of weeks? One particularly well covered topic has been social media, particularly with regards to how people use it for sharing content:

• Reportlet: FTAF vs. SWYN – some facts and figures from RetailEmailBlog.com
• Yahoo Points the Way to the ‘Social Inbox’ – Y!’s attempts at integration
• You know social media is pervasive when … – “Trapped girl calls for help on Facebook” (!)
• Inspire Interaction with Promo Emails – “4 Tactics to Boost Clicks, Encourage Social Sharing”
• Social Media Integration Survey – interesting results, but no real surprises
• Social Sharing: Who Cares?! – why should people want to share your content?
• Email Share-to-Social: Not Just About The Links – sensible advice from MediaPost’s Loren McDonald

Also of note is our very own Gareth Langston‘s ongoing series of posts on how to leverage social media:

• Join the Twitter Conversation
• The Facebook Platform Revisited
• Create a consistent brand image across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
• Adding bespoke content to Facebook Pages
• Social Media Insights

The above links are only a few highlights from the series – and Gareth’s got plenty more to say, so stay tuned for more insights.

Another perennial talking point that’s been discussed recently has been the maintenance, management, and proper use of your email lists:

• 20 Ways to Build Your Email List – sensible, and practical, recommendations
• How to Build a Good Email Newsletter List – the basics (and most important!)
• Email Marketing Minute: Hand Written Email Optin – short video with advice for retailers
• Opt-In, Opt-Out: Confusion Reigns – clarification and edification
• How to Overcome Email List Fatigue – keeping your lists fresh
• The (Hopefully) Final Word on Purchased Lists – in a nutshell: don’t buy lists

Not news, but still worth covering: testing remains one of the most powerful and, sadly, underused methods of optimising the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Thankfully however, it’s not being ignored by the email marketing sites out there, with plenty continuing to provide sage advice on the subject (including one of my favourite sites, Anne Holland’s Which Test Won?).

For our now-regular mention of activities in America, a quick note to say that in fine litigious tradition RPost have sued Goodmail for patent infringment. Interestingly, I came across a great collective noun proposed the other day: a fleece of lawyers – perfect.

Lastly, this week’s special mention goes once again to Mark Brownlow for the third addition to his series: Famous inboxes #3: Sauron, offering some rare proof that humour can exist alongside useful and insightful information.

Hello! This is the first in a series of posts where we take a short look at what the email marketing industry has been talking about in the recent past.

Big news this week with Google’s announcement of two quite major changes to their Gmail service: auto-loaded images for certain senders, and the new one-click unsubscribe feature. This has huge impacts on the email marketing industry, so pretty much every blog out there has had something to say about it.

Elsewhere, social networking has remained in the email marketing spotlight:

• Twitter bring SMS back online for O2 customers
• Social Media Events – How things have changed!
• Facebook for All Ages
• Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation: 6 Lessons

That’s it for now, but check back soon for another roundup of what people have been posting about in the email marketing blogosphere.

If you have been reading my blogs over the last few weeks you will be familiar with the basics of Twitter and how the platform can be used. In this blog I’m going to use a real life example of one Twitter user who I feel is doing everything right to show how you can take Twitter a step further.

@lilyroseallen has over 430,000 followers and has posted almost 800 updates. Lily succeeds not only in engaging her audience but achieving column inches with her tweets and she does it all by just being herself.

During her recent US tour Allen hid tickets for each show in the vicinity of the venue and tweeted clues for her followers to decipher in order to find the tickets. This was not an entirely original idea but it created a buzz around each event, gave Lily a legitimate reason for tweeting about each show and allowed her to engage with her fans in person and online.  She used TwitPic to post up pictures of her handing over tickets to her followers. Twitpic integrates with Twitter and allows her followers to view and comment on each picture.

During the tour Lily also tweeted asking for restaurant suggestions in various cities and at one point her blackberry was hijacked by a friend who posted up uncharacteristic updates, which lily later apologised for in her own way. She also posted pictures of herself in bed, hungover eating ribs.

Throughout this Lily comes across as genuine and authentic. There is never any doubt that what you are reading is coming from the lady herself and does not appear to be courting the attention, despite following very few people she responds to her @replies and has conversations with her follower base.

After returning from her tour she continues to interact with her fans from home and even on safari, where she posts pictures of herself with elephants as well as commenting on the long lens she is using and the paparazzi it reminds her of. She tweets about popular topics such as Britain’s Got Talent’s  Susan Boyle and offers an honest opinion. Both of these tweets were mentioned in the daily newspapers the next day.

By engaging her followers, posting as herself and being involved in topical discussion Lily gives her followers value, exclusive content, free giveaways and a chance to read what she writes before it hits the newspapers.

If you would like to know more about engaging your follower base on Twitter send a message to @signupto

Another article from Mashable, but it is one which highlights the importance of having a brand presence on these social networks.

Facebook and Twitter have each seen a huge number of unique visitors to their services over the last month, showing a month by month increase which is a trend which seems set to continue. The people that use these services are talking to each other on a daily basis. There is a conversation going on and if you are not part of it you are missing out on a huge amount of exposure.

You can already alert people to your newsletters over Twitter using Sign-Up.to but what about Facebook?

An example of Email / Social networking crossover I noticed recently was this campaign by Neutrogena. They have sent out an email campaign which alerts users to the existence of the Neutrogena Facebook Fan Page, more importantly, it gives an incentive for the email recipient to become a fan by offering a 10% discount.

This seems to be working for Neutrogena who now have 1,151 fans receiving updates directly to their Facebook feed. Each time one of these fans interacts with the page, their friends will see this in their feed, giving further exposure to the brand.

Of course, there are other ways to entice your mailing list members into becoming fans on Facebook. You could offer Q-jump passes to all Facebook Fans, money off their food bill, a free bottle of wine with a meal or access to a VIP area.  Anything you can think of that can be redeemed with a voucher can be offered to your Facebook Fans.

If you want to get involved with Social Networks, contact us for a bespoke solution.

In my last blog about Twitter I mentioned @name replies and how they are used. You may have noticed on Twitter today that there has been a lot of talk about #fixreplies. Not only does this highlight the usefulness of a good hashtag, it also brings to light two important points about Twitter.

• Twitter is evolving incredibly quickly
• Different people use Twitter in completely different ways

The blog I posted last week explained the @name system as it currently is but what I failed to mention is that there was, until today, an option to view all @name tweets from people that you follow in your own feed. The #fixreplies campaign is trying to convince Twitter to re-instate this option.

These people would prefer to see all replies in their feed rather than only those directed at people they follow. They argue that it allows them to see everything a celebrity says, regardless of who it is aimed at and that it also allows them to find new people to follow by seeing who their friends are talking to.

Personally I feel that it is preferable not to see every @reply in my feed, particularly for celebrities who may tweet several @replies at once, catching up on the messages they have received while they have been offline. There is, however, a way around this change. To view all of the tweets from a particular person, regardless of who they are directed at, you can simply view their twitter profile page.

If you are sending an @reply which you think all of your followers should see, you can simply append the tweet with the @name rather than starting with it. As I explained in my previous post on this subject any @name mention will be seen by the person it is intended for, but also all of your other followers, as long as the tweet doesn’t begin with their @name.

Whether you chose to keep your @replies out of your followers feeds or not is up to you and should be taken on a per-tweet basis. Know your followers and be aware of how they will react. If you are unsure I would advise keeping @replies in their intended form unless you feel that the reply is relevant to the majority of your followers.

If you have any questions on this, or any other topic related to Sign-Up.to tweet it @signupto.

Thanks,

Gareth.

Last week I asked the question “What is Twitter for?” and explained the ways that Twitter can be used passively. Hopefully that peaked your interest and you now have an account of your own, maybe even collected a few followers and started following a few people yourself. Today I’m going to go through a few things you may have come across which are crucial to the Twitter experience.

#FollowFriday @signupto @seal @alexroots

RT @signupto http://www.tweepular.com/ Brilliant tool for monitoring your twitter followers.

The bottom line for Twitter participation is to be friendly, be useful and be a person. Its very easy to set up automatic feeds to your twitter profile from your email newsletters or blog but if this is all you tweet it won’t gain you many followers, and if nobody is seeing your tweets, is there any point making them? Remember to ask questions, answer questions and generally be involved in the conversation around you. If your followers like you they will not only accept you advertising your wares, they will also help you to do so.

Twitter may seem like a fad, but try to think long term. You are building relationships with your existing and potential customers which could last a life time, so it is important not to abuse or take advantage of this relationship by speaking without listening.

Check back soon to find out how to maximise your Twitter potential.

Thanks for reading,

Gareth.

The first tweet many people make is “Wondering what Twitter is actually for”. This is often a tweet that goes unanswered because there is nobody following them yet to be able to read it, and at that point Twitter isn’t much use at all, or is it?

Before I speak about what Twitter is for I’ll try to explain what Twitter is. Twitter, for me, is a window into the inane conversations that each of us have on a daily basis. It is the opportunity to eavesdrop on a huge number of conversations at once, and whilst the vast majority of what is said will be of no interest to you there is no denying the value of being able to hear the honest opinions of your current and potential customers or clients.

This is just the beginning, however, even more valuable than listening is the ability to have a two way conversation with people you ordinarily wouldn’t. I’ll speak more about that in the next blog post, for now I’ll focus on some of the ways Twitter can be useful for the passive user.

There are many ways to use Twitter that don’t even require a Twitter account. Monitter, for example, allows you to follow what people are saying on Twitter. By searching for individual words or terms you can see a live stream of everything being said about that particular subject. This is useful for keeping up to date with an event or for market research.

Try popping in your company name to see who is talking about you and what they have to say, or enter keywords which are relevant to your business to see who is making the most noise in your field and what the latest buzz is on the scene. You can even limit your search to a particular location.

Personally, I use Monitter to find people who are tweeting relevant information to me, I then follow those people and use desktop software to be notified of new tweets. For me this means I get to see blog posts about Web Design and Social Networking but the beauty of Twitter is that you are guaranteed to find somebody talking about something that will interest you.

Another useful site is Twit Scoop which allows you to see which words are being mentioned most in the Twittersphere. At the time of writing the most mentioned word is Comedy (when I started the article ‘Hangover’ was the most popular word in use) and delving deeper I can see that several people are talking about Ealing Comedy Festival. This is where Twitscoop can be useful. In terms of tracking conversations: you can see in real time as topics gain momentum through ReTweets or discussion. If you wanted to check the viral success of a youtube video, product launch or even a real life event such as the first showing of a television advert, this would be a good place to start.

One of the things that had pushed Twitter firmly into the limelight is the number of celebrities using the service. Celebrity Tweet lets you stalk your favourite personalities online. Their tweets give you an insight into the mundane parts of their lives you wouldn’t usually see. For instance, I am now aware that Lilly Allen came home from her US tour this morning, went through her post ignoring all the bills and had her mom make her some breakfast. How useful this is to your business is for you to decide but for anyone interested in celebrity gossip Twitter should be your first stop. You can choose to follow any celebs you want to see all the updates for, but beware, some celebrities such as Russell Brand are so popular that they spend a vast majority of their tweeting time sending replies to people, and these can quickly become annoying as they start to crowd your feed.

If you are interested in finding local Tweeple, perhaps you run a local business and want to see what other companies in the area are saying, or maybe you want to market yourself directly to those people who live nearby, you can use Nearby Tweets to find people within your postcode or a set radius. A quick search for everyone tweeting within a 10mile radius of the office not only finds users in the office, but also old colleagues from my previous company, and several local businesses. Who do you think you will find?

If you feel up to it you can start following some of these people and receiving their updates. If following them all through the web interface starts to get a little confusing try installing Tweet Deck. This handy piece of software will split your updates, replies and direct messages into separate columns and you can even add a custom column to monitor a particular search term, such as your company name. Tweet Deck allows you to view peoples profiles, reply to their messages and follow new users all without even opening your browser.

Once you start following people you will start to collect a few followers of your own, be they existing contacts who have found you by your email details, new people that you have started to follow or just people who have found you along the way. This is where things start to get interesting, and also where I will continue next time.

Thanks for reading,

Gareth.

Glossary:

Twittersphere – Everyone on Twitter and everything they say.

Tweeple – Twitter users, People who use Twitter.

ReTweet – To re-post another users message to your own followers. eg. RT @signupto: Dreams (New Templates Available!): Sign-up.to are pleased to announce three brand new templates for use in your.. http://tinyurl.com/cgr7t2