Our love for email, our thoughts on it as the amazing channel it is - if only used right.
Sarah and Christopher
Sunday, 20 March 2011
I like this email from Google, it’s very transparent. It’s always nice to know what’s happening behind the scenes. Frankly, I had no idea my phone was relaying my exact location in the background – and I must say, I’m a little surprised at how exact it really is. I wonder how many of us are wandering around right now, oblivious to how much of a blabbermouth our cell phone is..
Monday, 14 March 2011
If you don’t know who Gary Vaynerchuck is, click here.
Comment if you plan on coming too!
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Do you love Mozilla Thunderbird? Then you may really love Postbox. Imagine this…Thunderbird…but more organized! In fact, it’s built for Thunderbird.
If you can’t imagine this, check out the Mashable review here: Review
And their website here: Postbox
Oh, and the express version is for free.
Let us know how much you love or hate it in the comments…we want to know.
Monday, 14 February 2011
Ousting the ugly and ineffective and ushering in the new and effective is sometimes what you have to do to see a little newsletter growth. That’s exactly what we did in the last six months, and it’s what spurred some notable subscriber growth. I bet you want to know what we did…and you shall.
You know that moment when you do something just right and seconds later you realize how wrong it was before? I’ve coined a phrase for this – I like to call it “learning from your mistakes”.
Sometimes, make-shifting a sign up process is something you have to do. Thinking that our sign up process would do for now, Sarah and I realized that it didn’t really do anything. It was time for a little self criticism – we took a closer look at our registration process.
For the sake of attention span and simplicity this will be a three part lesson brought to you by I-Love-Email:
Part 1: Evaluate present registration process
Part 2: Simplify the registration process
Part 3: Optimize the registration process
With our makeshift sign up process, we simply didn’t get enough people to sign up – specifically from our homepage. A fairly large icon in the column on the right hand side, a tad on the low side but still fairly high up, seemed like it should have worked…
But like I said, it didn’t work. Our registrations were minimal – except the week we introduced the newsletter.
So the question was: Was it not obvious that we have a newsletter? Our visitors increase,d but our newsletter subscribers didn’t!
The answer to our troubles lay in Google Analytics, namely, the visitor statistics. We noticed a few interesting trends. This is what we found: At least 35% of our visitors use smaller widescreen computers – probably laptops. Remember when I said that the newsletter icon was a tad on the low side? That was the problem! With a widescreen laptop of a certain size, the icon is invisible! You would have to scroll down to see the newsletter icon. Well, if only we had listened to Analytics sooner.
We also reviewed the design we used at the time. It was an icon for signing up that linked to a page with a registration form. This was neither obvious nor simple.
In part two of I-Love-Email school, we’ll be learning how to simplify our registration process.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Three words can account for the sleepiness on planet I-Love-Email: Nordic eCommerce Summit. This may not come as a surprise, but it’s a hefty task to organize this annual event, and a whole lot of fun.
Brace yourself, I have some fantastic news: Gary Vaynerchuk is visiting us this May for the Nordic eCommerce Summit! Gary decided to take a break from traveling some time ago, so this isn’t something to take for granted. Gary is absolutely phenomenal with customer contact. He takes pride in responding to every single email that lands in his inbox. What happened when we emailed him? He answered.
With a popular guy like Gary V., I know that being brief and concise is important. Thats’s why I wrote this in the subject line:”Please, come to Sweden and help the Nordic e-retailers.”
Literally, the first sentence said that we want him to come to Stockholm on May 4-5, 2011, and what we want him to talk about. The second sentence contained cliff notes for Nordic e-commerce and why I believe Gary could inspire our audience in a large way. In the third sentence, I explained how we want to change Nordic e-commerce, to focus it around the customer rather than the technology. This is when I attached a link showing earlier events and presentations of other lecturers.
The last sentence was part plea, part question: ‘Is there anything at all we can do to make you consider visiting us?’
9 hours later, Gary Vaynerchuk was in my inbox! You know, there’s a six hour time difference. I must admit, that’s impressive.
The lesson: The subject line and text should be as precise and clear as humanly possible.
Oh, one more thing…We’re having a pretty awesome wine tasting May 4th, Gary Vayner style.
Sarah@@@@@
