A free guide from your friends at Zapier

Written by the Zapier marketing team, with content from Danny Schreiber,

Matthew Guay, Joe Stych, and Nat Eliason.


Cover by Bryan Landers.

Originally published at zapier.com/learn/ultimate-guide-to-email-market-

ing-apps/

Copyright 2015 Zapier, Inc. All rights reserved.

About This Guide

For all of the social networks and chat apps today, there's one
online messaging system that everyone uses: email. No matter

1
which email service and apps you use, you can send an email
and know your recipient will see it. That makes it the best place
to share your marketing and transactional messages, and make
sure your message will get seen.

But it'll take a bit more than just opening Gmail and sending an
email message. You'll need a tool that helps you send thousands
of emails easily, and the tips to optimize your messages and
make sure they don't get flagged as spam.

That's where this eBook comes in. It includes tips on the apps
you should use to send every type of business emails, along with
ways you can integrate your email apps with the other tools
you're already using, guidelines to make your emails great, and
more.

Who is This Guide For?

Ever send emails to market your products, announce upcoming
events, share news about a non-profit, or just about any other
type of emails that go out to more than one recipient? Then this
guide's for you.

If you're already sending email newsletters, transactional mes-

sages and drip campaigns, you'll find tips in this book to help you

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optimize your messages and integrate your email tools with the
rest of your workflow. And if you're just getting started with
sending bulk emails, you'll discover the tools you need to send
amazing emails from apps that aren't much more difficult to use
than Gmail.

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Table of Contents
1. Intro: On Great Emails

2. The 25 Best Email Marketing and Newsletter Apps

3. Grow Your Email List: How to Get Subscribers, Or-

ganize Lists and Follow Spam Laws

4. How to Segment Email Lists for More Opens, Click-

Throughs and Conversions

5. Master Your Email Marketing List: How to Auto-

matically Import, Copy and Remove Subscribers

6. What is Drip Marketing?

7. The 25 Best Email Marketing Apps to Send Drip

Campaigns

8. Successful Drip Email Campaigns: How to Pick the

Best App, Add Advanced Automation and More

9. Transactional Email: The 7 Best Services to Send

1000s of Emails Daily

10. A/B Test Your Email Marketing

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11. Experts Weigh In: 21 Email Marketing Mistakes to
Avoid

12. Don't Quit: How to Keep Sending Great Emails

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Intro: On Great Emails

Choosing the Best Email Marketing

App, Crafting the Best Email Market-
ing Strategy, and Creating an Email
Workflow that Works for You

Email's important. It's an essential part of our marketing efforts

at Zapier—not to mention the way we communicate directly with

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 our partners and customers. And yet, it can so often be confus-
ing and difficult.

There's dozens if not hundreds of ways to send your marketing

email messages, along with innumerable different ways you can
word your titles, write and schedule your messages, and fol-
lowup on replies. There's plenty of great options, but even more
ways to mess up your entire marketing strategy with one button
click.

That's why we wanted to help simplify email marketing, with a

guide to every part of email marketing: the apps, the messages
themselves, and the ways you can integrate email marketing into
your workflow with automations and more.

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First, though, you'll need to pick out an email marketing app
that'll work great for your needs. There's so many ways you
could send your marketing emails, it can be incredibly hard to
pick the best option for you.

Kale Davis, founder of Hacker Newsletter and MailChimp em-

ployee, picked MailChimp for his emails long before he was a
MailChimp employee. He's quick, though, to say that the same
app isn't the best for everyone.

"There are a lot of apps and integrations out there to help you
build newsletters, so find something that works with your work-
flow and try to make the publishing process as frictionless as
possible," advises Kale. "That will give you more time to try ex-
periment and work on growing your list."

To help you pick the perfect apps to send your emails, we've
rounded up the 25 best apps to send email newsletters, the 25
best apps to send drip emails, and the 7 best apps to send trans-
actional emails in chapters two, seven, and nine respectively.
Those will show you what each app offers, along with their pric-
ing plans, a screenshot, and a link to an in-depth review to give
you the info you need to choose an app.

Before you dig into the app roundups, though, here's some
pointers from successful email marketers on how they picked

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their email newsletter app—tips that are well worth keeping in
mind as you dig into the rest of this book.

Start with Something Free

Starting with a free app is a great option, since it takes away one
of the first things you'd otherwise have to worry about with your
email marketing. That's why marketing consultant Claire Pel-
letreau chose MailChimp.

"When I was first getting started in my business it was difficult to

imagine a monthly investment," says Claire. "I liked that I would
only need to pay for a plan as my list grew."

And then, MailChimp worked out so well that once she needed
to pay for MailChimp, she chose to stay with the app that'd help
her start her email marketing. "As I continued to use Mailchimp,
however, I got hooked on the incredible customer service and
how easy it was to use," Claire continued. "It was a no brainer to
upgrade to a paid plan in order to use their more advanced fea-
tures."

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Upgrade for the Feature You Need

As your email needs grows, though, you might end up wanting to

switch to another app to grow your marketing efforts. That's why
Rebecca Dekker started out with MailChimp, but then switched
to Aweber as her lists grew.

Before switching to a new app, she researched her options thor-

oughly, then picked based on the features she needed for her
work. "A big part of that decision was the glowing reviews I read
on Aweber's customer service," explains Rebecca. "Another part
of my decision was that Aweber has really easy-to-use autore-
sponders. So when somebody signs up for my email list, I can
automatically send them a series of emails welcoming them to
the newsletter."

A similar focus on features helped Jeffrey Nichols choose to use

Emma for the email marketing efforts at his company, adPharos.
"We chose Emma because we liked their simple approach to A/B
testing subject lines, and … because of their agency-friendly
model," said Jeffrey.

And sometimes, it's a less obvious feature that'll be the best rea-
son for your team to choose a particular app. Whether you're
looking for an app that lets you store more info about your con-

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tacts, or is ready to send millions of emails a month, think
through the features that are crucial to your email lists, and then
pick based on that.

Find a Team That Understands You

The app is only one part of the equation. You'll also need to be
sure that the team behind your email app is ready to answer any
questions you'll need, and that there's documentation and train-
ing to help you get started easily. Those are as crucial to your
email list's success as the app itself.

Johnny Shelby picked VerticalResponse to send emails for his

company, Third Coast Training, after coming across their infor-
mative documentation online—and then stayed with them be-
cause of their own email marketing efforts. "I found VR through a
web search and not only was their newsletter builder easy to use
but their informative newsletter as well that keeps me in the
loop on how to better use their service," Johnny said.

If your team's based outside of the US, getting support when you
need it can often be tricky, so you might want to pick an email
marketing app with a global team. That's why the Aspermont
team chose Campaign Monitor as their email app. "At first we

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chose Campaign Monitor as they were an Australian based com-
pany which was great for Aspermont, but we stay for the awe-
some international support and customer service teams, handy
for those early morning or late night hiccups," explains the As-
permont team.

Support, features, or price: all are great ways to evaluate the

email apps you're considering using. But at the end of the day,
what really matters is that you pick an app, integrate it with your
workflow, and start sending emails that get read and convert
into real sales for you.

That's what the rest of the book is about. Chapter 6 will teach
you about the various types of marketing emails you can send,
while chapter 11 will walk you through common email marketing
mistakes so you can be sure to avoid them.

The remaining chapters will teach you how to grow your email
lists, segment your email lists for best results, automatically im-
port, copy, and remove subscribers, and a crash-course on A/B
testing your email messages to make sure they're effective.
Then, to close it out, you'll get some quick tips from successful

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email marketers on how to keep your email marketing going,
even when it seems you have nothing else to say.

It's a lot to take in and put to action in your work, but email is im-
portant and worth the effort. So let's dive right in with an over-
view of the best apps to send email newsletters in the next chap-
ter, so you can get started sending the best emails you've ever
sent.

Written by Matthew Guay

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 Chapter 2: The 25 Best Email
Marketing and Newsletter
Apps

Stuff's happening, and you want to tell everyone about it. That
might have required paying for a newspaper ad, publishing a
press release, or printing and mailing a flyer in the past. Today,
though, reaching your customers and contacts is as easy as click-
ing a button in an email newsletter app.

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The only question is: Which email app's button should you be
clicking?

Any email app worth mentioning can send newsletters, so let's

look at which ones make email marketing easy and effective. We
dug into 25 of the most popular apps that send email newslet-
ters, picked out their best features, and put it all together in this
roundup. If you're looking for a great way to send emails to all of
your contacts, this is the chapter for you.

Why Do I Need an Email Marketing

App?
You probably send and receive emails every day using an app
like Gmail or Outlook. Those tools work great for sending one-off
messages to individuals and groups—and if you abuse the BCC
field, you might be able to send an email to 100 people without
annoying everyone. But for larger groups and scheduled sends,
you'll need another option—something that makes it as easy to
send an email to everyone as it is to send a message to one per-
son.

That's where email newsletter apps come in. They're the tools
that power the bulk emails you receive every day, and they're a

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 great way to share news, announce new promotions, or send out
an annual email update to all of your friends and family.

Every app we looked at lets you organize your contacts into lists,
add new contacts easily via a signup form or integrations with
other apps, send beautifully formatted messages in a half-dozen
clicks, and analyze how your email performed. Plus, we found
mobile apps that send messages on the go, tools to manage
your events, and integrations to import your customers. Finally,
all the newsletter software we profiled integrates with Zapier,
our app integration and automation tool.

So without further ado, here are the best apps that send email
newsletters (ordered alphabetically). For each app you'll find a

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 screenshot, a brief summary, and pricing information. If an app
catches your interest, you can click through to our in-depth re-
view, such as the MailChimp review above, for more detailed
info.

ActiveCampaign

Emails that are just about the latest happenings at your compa-
ny can get boring. To really capture your customers' attention,
you should write emails that are focused on their interests. Ac-
tiveCampaign makes it possible by including a full CRM and mar-

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keting automation suite along with its email newsletter tool. It'll
help you gather detailed info about each of your customers, then
divide them into lists based on interests, locations, and more.

Then, unlike most CRM apps that let you send emails, Active-
Campign includes a full-featured email editor. You can drag-and-
drop email elements, design them the way you want, and quickly
send your finished newsletters off to your customers. And if you
also need to manage sales prospects, you can upgrade to Active-
Campaign's Plus or Enterprise plans to unlock useful features be-
yond email marketing.

ActiveCampaign Pricing: From $9/month for email marketing to

up to 500 contacts; from $49/month for full email marketing and
CRM suite

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our ActiveCampaign

review.

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 AWeber

An email list is nothing without subscribers. You have customers

and people who are interested in your products, so AWeber fo-
cuses on making sure those people will get added to your email
lists. It natively integrates with WordPress, PayPal and Facebook
so you can add people from the places where they already inter-
act with your company.

AWeber also lets you create advanced subscriber forms with up

to 25 fields and import contacts from a variety of list formats.
Once your lists are built, it has the tools you need to make your

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 emails look great, putting hundreds of free templates and stock
photos at your disposal.

AWeber Pricing: From $19/month for unlimited emails to up to

500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our https://zapier.com/

zapbook/Aweber/review/ Aweber review

Benchmark Email

Email needs to look great everywhere. Benchmark Email aims to

make this easy in two ways: with an internationalized app that's

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easy to use anywhere, and email templates that look great on
mobile and desktop.

Benchmark's cleanly designed email editor lets you pick from a

variety of layouts for your text and multimedia components,
then accents them with color schemes for emails that look beau-
tiful everywhere—not just on a large desktop monitor. It lets you
store your images and videos in the app to easily reuse them in
future messages. Then, the entire app's interface is equally at
home in English, Chinese, Spanish, and more, and its team works
with the standard email sending coalitions as well as China's ICP
to make sure your emails will be delivered everywhere. It's an
email app for global teams.

Benchmark Pricing: Free for sending up to 14k emails to 2,000

contacts; plans from $9.95/month for sending up to 600 emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Benchmark Email
review

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 BombBomb

Check your inbox, and the vast majority of your emails are just
plain text. Some will be wrapped in beautiful templates, and oth-
ers may include images, but for the most part they look quite
similar. BombBomb breaks the mold by sending emails that are
centered around video.

You can shoot videos in BombBomb's app or upload your pre-

created videos, then send them out as email newsletters. Then,
your contacts can reply with video messages of their own,
recording a new video email online and sending it back to you
through BombBomb. It sounds crazy, but it just might be the way

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 to break up the monotony of text emails and get your contacts'
attention.

BombBomb Pricing: From $25/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our BombBomb review

Campaign Monitor

Your emails need to stand out, and using a tweaked standard

email template likely won't be enough. That's why Campaign
Monitor tries to make it as easy as possible to code your own
email templates, then gives you the tools to customize standard
email templates far beyond the basics.

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There's a drag-and-drop email template editor with pre-made
templates that show you variants of the templates that other
teams are using to inspire you to make it your own. Or, you can
hand-code your own template using Campaign Monitor's simple
email code snippets, and host your CSS and assets on Campaign
Monitor's server. And if you run a design agency, it even lets you
make your own templates, white-label the app and resale it to
your clients with your own custom designs.

Campaign Monitor Pricing: From $9/month for sending up to

2,500 emails to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Campaign Monitor
review

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 Campayn

If you've been hacking together email newsletters by abusing

your email app's BCC field, Campayn might be the easiest way to
break that habit and start sending proper email updates. It can
import your contacts from a variety of apps—including your
Gmail and Yahoo! Mail address books—and will keep up with all
of their info just like a real address book, including their social
media profiles.

Then, it'll make sending emails simple, with pre-made templates,

a nice editor, and an email sending process that lays everything
out in one page so you can add any of your email's details at any
time. It'll even put that extra contact data to work for you, using

25
 it to segment your lists to help you make sure everyone gets the
news most important to them.

Campayn Pricing: Free for up to 20,000 emails per month to

2,000 contacts; from $10/month for unlimited emails to 1,000
contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Campayn review

Constant Contact

If you run a brick-and-mortar business, you're likely sending

emails about your events, discounts, and more. Constant Con-

26
tact is an email app that's also great at managing all of those oth-
er things you do, so you can create events and promotions, send
them out to your existing contacts, and gather new contacts—all
from one app.

Constant Contact's EventSpot tool lets you schedule your up-

coming events, create a registration page, and spread the word
via email and social networks. Then, its Social Campaigns tool
helps you create coupons or downloadable resources for social
networks to gain new follows and keep your existing followers
excited about your products. Tying it all together is Constant
Contact's email tools that'll let you share these events and more
with your contacts and easily add new subscribers to your lists
whenever you run an event or promotion.

Constant Contact Pricing: From $15/month for up to 500 sub-

scribers; 60 day free trial

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Constant Contact
review

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 EmailDirect

Every email app has a list of your contacts, and many let you fil-
ter your contacts and sort them into specific lists and more.
EmailDirect takes it a bit further by letting you interact with your
entire contact list as a relational database. You can use it to store
anything you want about your contacts, then slice-and-dice them
up into the lists that make the most sense for them.

To give the database as much info as you need, you can use
EmailDirect's API to tie it into your eCommerce store, or you can
list your own products directly in EmailDirect and track which
ones customers have purchased. You can then make as many
lists as you need, and let subscribers manage which email lists

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 they receive. That way, they don't have to unsubscribe from all of
your emails—they just can quit receiving emails about the prod-
ucts they're not interested in.

EmailDirect Pricing: From $40/month for sending up to 2,000

emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our EmailDirect review

Emma

Effective emails take time to design, write, and schedule. Emma

does its part to help with an email app that's easy to use, and

29
comes packed with beautiful email templates—including tem-
plate collections specifically for special events, thank you mes-
sages, and more.

The Emma team also offers concierge services that'll make a

beautiful template for your business, help you schedule a drip
campaign, and more. You can use that to jumpstart your email
marketing strategy, and then easily reuse the templates and con-
tent in your future messages. Emma even integrates with other
apps like Shopify so you can target your emails to customers
who've purchase certain products, and lets you schedule drips
for holidays and more with the aforementioned template collec-
tions.

Emma Pricing: From $45/month for unlimited emails to up to

2,500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Emma review

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 FreshMail

Picture a nicely designed email in your mind, and it likely in-

cludes—at most—a small header photo at the top, a background
color, and formatted text and images below that. At best, most
emails look like nice blog posts. And that's good. But if you want
more, FreshMail's templates can make your emails look like
beautiful product demo pages, complete with full-sized images,
beautiful Google Fonts-powered text, and detailed layouts that
go far beyond your standard email.

Creating your own design from FreshMail's templates is easy,

with rich content blocks that you can drag-and-drop into the edi-
tor, and a simple editing screen that lets you change the style of

31
 your text headers and body. Then, you can add your content and
send it to your contacts with all the standard email sending fea-
tures you'd expect from any other app.

FreshMail Pricing: Free for sending up to 2,000 emails to 500

contacts; from $17/month for unlimited emails to 1,000 contacts.

Zapier support coming soon

GetResponse

Ever wondered how your emails look on smartphones? With Ge-

tResponse, you won't have to send your email to your phone to
find out. Its email designer lets you preview how your message

32
will look on computers and phones while you're laying out your
design and adding in your text.

Then, you can add more to your emails with GetResponse, as

well. It'll let you import images from Flickr, Facebook, and iStock,
sell products directly in your emails with PayPal buttons, and
even bring in text from previous emails with its snippets feature.
Then, you can schedule your emails in advance by dragging them
to the correct date on a calendar. And if you're promoting your
products online, GetResponse has you covered with tools to im-
port contacts from Facebook forms and Twitter ads.

GetResponse Pricing: From $15/month for unlimited emails to

1,000 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our GetResponse re-
view

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 iContact

Your business likely already uses a number of apps to manage

your contacts, get interest in your new products, and more. iCon-
tact's designed to make it easy to add those contacts to your
email lists and automatically get new contacts subscribed. It's
deeply integrated with everything from Salesforce to Drupal so it
can import contacts and use their data to segment your lists.

Beyond sending emails, iContact also includes social networking

tools so you can draft and schedule Twitter and Facebook status
updates right alongside your email updates. iContact can even
help you get started, with design services to make a custom
email template for your brand and advisory services to help you

34
 setup your email campaigns and get the most out of your mar-
keting efforts.

iContact Pricing: From $10/month for up to 250 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

Mad Mimi

Email apps shouldn't be so complicated. But, once you put in

every feature that everyone could want, there's bound to be but-
tons everywhere. Mad Mimi tries to calm the madness by making

35
its app focused just on emails, and then leaving the rest of the
features for you to turn on or off as you need.

Everything's simple in Mad Mimi. You'll see quick stats from your
latest campaign on the front page, with a screenshot of the email
to remind you how it looked. Go to create a new email, and you'll
see a simplified editing page with themes based on color
schemes and content blocks that'll look great on any device.
Then, when it's time to pick the contacts that'll receive your
emails, you'll be shown every list with a simple on/off switch to
pick who receives your emails. And if just emails aren't enough,
there's drip emails, social media integration and more ready for
you to turn on in the Mad Mimi add-ons page.

Mad Mimi Pricing: Free for sending 12,500 emails to 2,500 con-
tacts per month; from $10/month for unlimited emails to 500
contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Mad Mimi review

36
 MailChimp

MailChimp may be the first email newsletter app you think of it

you spend any time listening to podcasts—or have ever seen any
of its monkey-themed shirts and hats. But beyond the swag,
MailChimp is an app that's serious about helping you send better
emails. You'll find everything here from a drag-and-drop email
editor to rich subscriber profiles that track your contacts' interac-
tions with your emails, and more.

The best part is the extra apps and tools that come along with
MailChimp. There are nine mobile apps that come along with
MailChimp, letting you do everything from send emails and
check your stats to sending email newsletters based on pictures
you snapped on your phone and signing up new contacts to your

37
 lists from a tablet. You'll also come to love its smarts that'll auto-
matically find the best time to send your emails based on its data
from everyone else's campaigns, and recommend smart lists
from your contacts based on other email newsletters they're
subscribed to.

MailChimp Pricing: Free for sending 12,000 emails to 2,000 con-

tacts; from $10/month for unlimited emails to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our MailChimp review

Mailigen

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Email's important, but so is mobile messaging. If anything, mo-
bile messaging may be more important today than email. After
all, your phone's always with you, and while you might ignore
your email, you're unlikely to turn off your SMS notifications. So
Mailigen lets you combine your email and mobile marketing, so
you can target your audience wherever they're most likely to
check their messages.

On the email side, you'll have all the features you'd expect, with a
familiar, Office-style editor that makes it easy for anyone on your
team to edit your email campaigns. Then, you can further your
email marketing by sending out SMS messages with your latest
announcements and deals, with all the same tools to gather con-
tacts and segment them into lists that you're already using with
your emails.

Mailigen Pricing: From $10/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Mailigen review

39
 Mailjet

If you're looking for a service to send emails directly from your

app's code, Mailjet's a transactional email service that's ready to
deliver as many emails as you need. But if you'd rather some-
thing simpler, with an interface to lay out your emails and man-
age your contacts, Mailjet's ready for you as well.

In addition to its send API, Mailjet includes a graphical template

designer where you can customize its built-in themes and use
them to send email newsletters to your customers. There's deep
list segmentation built-in, along with A/X tests with up to 10 ver-
sions to test anything about your marketing that you want. You
can have it automatically send your app's notification emails,

40
 then use the graphical editor to simply update your users about
your news and more, all from one service.

Mailjet Pricing: Free for sending up to 6,000 email per month;

from $7.49/month for sending up to 30,000 emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Mailjet review

MailUp

There are plenty of email apps that'll work great for small lists,
but what if you're sending millions of emails a month to tens of
thousands of recipients? MailUp is an email app designed exactly

41
for that. It's priced to make sending millions of emails affordable
—as long as you're not in a rush to send your messages. You'll
select how many messages you need to send each month, then
choose how soon your emails need to be sent—the slower, the
cheaper. That'll way, you can send millions of messages a month
without breaking the bank.

And, of course, there's a rich email editor, tools to organize your

contacts, and even SMS and social network marketing to reach
your audience on the go. It's an email app designed to send your
marketing messages even to the largest audiences.

MailUp Pricing: From $49/month for up to 1,641,600 emails per

month to unlimited contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our MailUp review

42
 Sendicate

Looking for a very simple way to send emails? Sendicate just

might be the app for you. Its interface is stripped down to be fo-
cused just on your emails, with an editor that lets you pick the
sections you want to add to your emails and fill in content with-
out any clutter. There are still themes for your emails, but they're
tucked away behind a menu so you can focus on your content.

Then, you can draft emails in advance to make sure they look
great, and then send them when you're ready. That's easy with a
draft section on the front page that shows your emails complete
with their header photo and subject. You can then segment your
audience with simple search filters, and schedule emails to be

43
 sent at the time and date of your choice. And with simple, typog-
raphy focused templates, you can be sure your emails will always
look great.

Sendicate Pricing: Free for sending 1,000 emails to 500 contacts

a month; from $9/month for unlimited emails to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sendicate review

SendinBlue

Want an email and SMS marketing tool that can integrate with
your site? SendinBlue is an app that's designed for just that. With
WordPress, PrestaShop, and Magento plugins, as well as an API

44
that you can use to integrate it on your own, SendinBlue can
work directly with your site or internal apps for sending email
newsletters, drip campaigns, and transactional emails.

You can design your own email templates or import an HTML

page to send as an email, then use those templates for all of
your emails. Then, you can also market to your users on the go
with its integrated SMS marketing. Combine that with its market-
ing automation, and you can see what your customers are doing
on your site and what products they've purchased, then followup
via email or SMS automatically. And, you can use the same tool
to let everyone know about your latest news and deals.

SendinBlue pricing: Free for sending up to 9,000 emails per

month; from $7.37/month for sending up to 40,000 emails

Zapier support coming soon

45
 Sendloop

If you've already tried another email newsletter app and want

something different, you'll want to be able to move your lists and
not have to start over from scratch. Sendloop lets you do just
that with its migration assistant that can import contacts from a
number of email services and let you bring over the HTML email
template you're already using.

You can then use that to start sending automated emails and
newsletters to your old contacts, as well as new ones you add via
its Facebook app or WordPress widget. Then, you can add Send-
loop's code to your site to watch your customers, see which
pages they visit, and hone your marketing strategy accordingly.
It's a marketing automation tool that's focused solely on email,

46
 helping you know as much about you contacts as you can and
send them the perfect emails.

Sendloop Pricing: Free for sending up to 10,000 emails to 2,000

subscribers; from $24/month for unlimited emails to up to 2,500
contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sendloop review

Sign-Up.to

It's tough to find time to send emails, much less learn how to use
a new email app and create a template for your emails. Sign-Up.-
to tries to make it simpler with training and design services to

47
help you get started quickly, along with managed marketing ser-
vices that can make your emails for you.

Or, if you'd rather work on your own, you can do that too with
Sign-Up.to's email designer and and form builder that'll let you
gather contacts and contact them easily. You can even reach
them on social networks and via SMS with Sign-Up.to. It'll even
help you target your customers better by building profiles about
them, ranking them based on their location, the domain their
email is based on, and more.

Sign-Up.to Pricing: Free for sending up to 1,000 emails; from £39

(around $59) per 2,000 emails sent

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sign-Up.to review

48
 Tinyletter

If you want the absolute simplest way to send emails to your

contacts, and you don't have more than 5,000 people that need
to receive your emails, you can't get any simpler than Tinyletter.
An insanely simple email newsletter app now run by MailChimp,
Tinyletter has no templates, no integrations with other apps, and
almost no features—that's why it's the only app on this list that
doesn't integrate with Zapier. All it lets you do is make a landing
page for people to signup, and then gives you a simple writing
space where you can pen plain-text emails and send them out in
a click.

49
 And that's actually all it offers. It's really the simplest way to get
your message out, and get back to everything else you need to
do. Then, if you end up needing more, it's easy to migrate your
lists to MailChimp and grow from there.

Tinyletter Pricing: Free

VerticalResponse

Full-featured email apps don't have to be complicated and con-

fusing to use. VerticalResponse proves that with its clean, simple
interface that makes it simple to make beautiful emails and send
them to your contacts. You can use its pre-made templates, edit

50
them with colors and add your own photos—complete with fil-
ters—and then turn the templates into both emails and match-
ing signup forms.

Your emails will look great everywhere, since the templates are
designed to look great on mobile, and you can have your
newsletters automatically shared on Facebook. Once your an-
nouncements have gone out, you can come back and check your
stats from both your emails and your social network shares, and
see what interactions that campaign brought in. And if you need
more professional features, there's VerticalResponse Classic with
deep integration with Salesforce for your most advanced market-
ing projects.

VerticalResponse Pricing: Free for sending up to 4,000 emails to

1,000 contacts per month; from $8.80/month for unlimited
emails to up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our VerticalResponse

review

51
 Vision6

One of the easiest ways to manipulate data is by throwing it into

a spreadsheet. Almost anyone can then easily sort the data and
quickly find similar segments. Vision6 lets you do this with your
contacts, with a spreadsheet-like interface to filter your contacts.
Instead of having to set filters and hope they pick the right peo-
ple, you'll see all of your contact info laid out and can filter it vi-
sually using tools you're already used to.

Then, you can use Vision6 to reach those contacts wherever they
are. Right along with your email updates, you can schedule SMS
and social media messages to go out at the same time. Without
having to schedule a blog post and remember to post online at

52
the same time, you can spread the word about your latest deals
and promotions everywhere with Vision6.

Vision6 Pricing: From $9/month for sending up to 5 times a

month to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Vision6 review

Build Your Own Email Newsletter App

There are dozens of great online apps to send emails, and
they're typically your best option. If you try to send emails from
your own server, you may end up seeing your emails blocked by
spam filters and more. But there's a happy medium if you'd like
more control: you can host your own email app, and then use an
email sending service to send your messages. There's Amazon
SES, Mailchimp's Mandrill, SendGrid, and Mailgun to name a few,
all of which are dedicated email sending services that can work
with your own in-house email tools. That gives you the flexibility
of an app that you control, with the confidence of sending emails
with a dedicated server that's working to make sure your emails
are delivered to any email app, anywhere.

Here are some great options:

53
 Sendy

For a self-hosted app to send beautiful email newsletters, look

no further than Sendy. It's a PHP and MySQL based app that'll
run on your own servers, and it shouldn't be any more difficult to
setup than a new WordPress install. Once it's up and running,
you can use it to create rich email newsletters with your own
templates, and can use autoresponders to automatically send
emails.

What's more, you can setup multiple brands inside your Sendy
account. That'll let you send emails to all the list you need for
multiple products or companies. You can even white label Sendy,
give your clients access, and host your own email sending service

54
 for each of them. Sendy might not just save you money on send-
ing emails; it might make you money, too.

Sendy Pricing: $59 for a Sendy license, then around $0.0001 per
email sent via Amazon SES

Although Sendy isn't currently integrated with Zapier, you can use
Zapier's MySQL integration to connect to its database and integrate
it with other apps

Sendwithus

While not a self-hosted app, Sendwithus is an email app de-

signed to let you send emails from your own app, using the

55
emails sending service of your choice. Instead of building email
features into your own app or site, Sendwithus gives your team
one place to manage your email templates, organize and sort
your contacts, then trigger new emails via a CURL or API call. You
can use Amazon SES, Postmark, SendGrid, Mandrill and more to
send your messages, then track their stats and more in your
Sendwithus dashboard.

It's designed for transactional and other drip emails, but Send-
withus could also be a great way to send out email updates from
your blog and more. You'll be able to trigger emails to go out au-
tomatically whenever you publish—or make them work however
you want. It's an easy way to send emails via an email sending
service and integrate emails deeply into your app, while still hav-
ing the convenience of beautiful email interface.

Sendwithus Pricing: Free for sending unlimited emails to up to

1,000 contacts per month; from $79/month for up to 10,000 con-
tacts, plus email sending charges from your email service

Zapier support coming soon

56
 Django Drip

For an email app you can tweak and integrate into your own
apps even further, there's Django Drip. An open-source project
from our own Zapier dev team, Django Drip is designed to make
it easy to send automated emails to your users. But it can also
send an email to everyone in a list whenever you want, making it
a great tool to send email newsletters to all of your users.

Then, if you still want to avoid the problems of sending the

emails from your own server, you can setup Django to send
them via Amazon SES, Mandrill, Sendgrid, Mailgun and more.

Django Drip Pricing: Free

57
Integrate and Automate Your Email
Marketing App
Now that you've picked out great email newsletter software, it's
time to get it working with the rest of your apps. There's no rea-
son to hand-copy your contacts into your email lists or export
your email lists to your CRM later. Instead, app automation tool
Zapier can tie all of your apps together, making sure everyone
gets added to your email lists and more.

Here are some of the best ways to automate your email newslet-
ters.

Gather Subscribers from Everywhere

New contacts can come from anywhere. You might have a form
you're already using to collect email addresses, or a spreadsheet
where you list new customers. Perhaps you have a landing page
to gather interest in your upcoming product. Or, you might just
want to add everyone who emails you about a certain topic.

These integrations will get you started:

58
 

• Add Wufoo signups to an AWeber Mailing List

• Add Google Contacts contacts to MailChimp Auto-

matically

• Add contacts to a Vision6 list from a Google Sheet

• Save Unbounce Leads to GetResponse

Add Customers to Your Email Lists

Customers are the best people to add to your email lists. They've
just bought your product, and now you can use your email lists
to teach them how to use it or let them know about upcoming
promotions and training sessions. Just let Zapier copy their email

59
 address to your newsletter, and add an autoresponder to get
them up to speed quickly.

• Automatically Subscribe PayPal Customers to a

MailChimp List

• Create Mad Mimi Customers from Gumroad Sales

• Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

Welcome New Subscribers

Your best opportunity to engage with your subscribers is right

when they first sign up. That's why so many email newsletter
apps include autoresponder features, which let you setup an au-
tomated queue of messages to go out to new subscribers.

60
 But if you already have a drip email app you love—or would
rather use an even more personal touch and reach out from
your personal email account—you can use Zapier to hook your
newsletter to your drip or email app and automate the process.

• Welcome New AWeber Subscribers with a Personal

Email

• Add MailChimp Subscribers to Drip

Publish Your Newsletter

Many email newsletter apps let you share your posts on Twitter
and Facebook, but you can do more. You could use Zapier's
WordPress integration to send your email newsletters to your
blog as a draft posts, or you could publish your emails on any so-
cial network—including LinkedIn.

61
 

• Share Your MailChimp Newsletter on LinkedIn Auto-

matically

Move Subscribers to New Lists

Run more than one newsletter, or started a new newsletter that

you'd like to jumpstart with your existing contacts? Then you can
add contacts to both of them at once, just by having Zapier copy
their contact info over to your other list.

• Copy MailChimp subscriber to new list

62
 • Copy a Vision6 contact you add to one list to anoth-
er list

Market Your Events

Events take a lot of work, so don't waste time sending out manu-
al emails to invite people to your events. You can integrate your
event platform with Zapier, to have your email form contacts
added to your event automatically so you don't have to make a
new signup form just for your event. Or, you can have meeting
attendees added to your email newsletter if that'd work better.

Then, once you're done, you can put the video of your event on-
line and add its viewers as new email subscribers as well. That
way, your event will still be bringing in new contacts long after it's
finished.

63
 

• Use an AWeber Form for GoToWebinar Webinars

• Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor

list

• Add Your Wistia video visitors to a Mailchimp list

Integrate with Your CRM

CRMs are great tools to keep up with all of your contacts, track
everything you know about them, and make sure you keep your
marketing wheels spinning. Might as well market to your con-
tacts with your email newsletter at the same time. Just connect
your CRM to your newsletter app with Zapier, and have it send
all of your new contacts—or, perhaps, just ones who have a cer-
tain tag added to their account—to your email newsletter.

64
 

• Add a new Intercom user to AWeber

• Add a New Highrise Contact to a MailChimp Mailing

List

• Send Capsule CRM contacts to Campaign Monitor

Or, perhaps you're getting people to subscribe to your news-

letter first, and then want to add those contacts to your CRM.
That's the best option if you're using a form in your email app to
add subscribers. And it, too, is simple with Zapier. Just have your
new list subscribers copied over to your CRM, and you can easily
follow up with them later.

65
 

• Create Nimble Contacts From MailChimp Sub-

scribers

• Create OnePage CRM Contacts from Constant Con-

tact

Conclusion
From simple ways to send email updates to advanced marketing
tools that'll manage your contacts, automate marketing, and
send email updates, there's email newsletter apps of all shapes
and sizes. Hopefully this list has helped you find a few that look
like they'll work for your business. Give them a try, then pick the
one that ends up fitting your needs the best and start sending
the email updates you've been waiting for.

66
Next
Now that you've picked out the perfect app to send your emails,
you'll need some people to send your emails to. In the next
chapter, we'll look at tips to help you grow your email lists, along
with ways to automate your email lists and ensure your mes-
sages don't get marked as spam.

Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Newspaper picture by Mick Backer via Flickr

67
 Chapter 3: Grow Your Email
List

How to Get Subscribers, Organize

Lists and Follow Spam Laws

Email matters.

"People don’t change their email addresses," notes New York

Times best-selling author Jon Acuff. "Facebook, Twitter, Google+,
people join and drop that pretty often. But changing your email

68
 address is a hassle. That’s why you still have friends with AOL
and Hotmail accounts."

Acuff goes so far as to call his past lack of attention to building

his email list the "biggest social media mistake" he's ever made.
It's for good reason, too: email proves again and again it's the
best way to engage customers, blog readers, fans and others.
Even with the deluge of social media options, email maintains
the best response rates.

That's why you need to start an email list, grow it, and optimize it
for your needs. Here's everything you need to get started.

The Email Advantage

One of the reasons for this is the amount of time your followers
have to engage with email. According to research by social media

69
analytics company Wisemetrics, the total life of a Facebook post
is only around four and a half hours, and the life of a Tweet is
just over an hour.

But email? Email takes 12 days for its open rates to drop off that
much.

Moreover, engagement as a percentage of your audience is

much higher through email. When you put a Facebook post in
front of 5,000 people, 75% or more of them won’t see it at all un-
less you're paying for a promoted post. It’s even worse on Twit-
ter, where less than 10% of your audience is likely seeing each
Tweet because of the number of tweets in their feed each day.

Email marketing is your best bet. So if you're not already, it's time
to take advantage of this effective marketing channel. To help
you do so, this post breaks down 12 ways you can utilize an
email list, the simplest steps to start building a list, and 17 ideas
for rapidly growing that list. Let's get started.

70
In this Chapter:

• 12 Ways to Utilize an Email List

• 3 Steps to Start an Email List

• 17 Ways to Rapidly Grow an Email List

• Optimize and Segment Your Email Lists

12 Ways to Utilize an Email List

Email lists can easily be boring if they only feature your company
updates or holiday sales. Plus, they're far too much trouble if you
have to write an extensive newsletter each time you want to
send out an update.

Emails lists can be far more versatile than that. Here are some of
the best ways you can use your email list to engage your audi-
ence and keep them excited that they signed up for your emails.
Each of them may not work for your business, but even a few of

71
 them can go a long ways towards making your emails interesting
and easier to send.

1. Share New Content

Your audience want to hear from you. That's why they sub-
scribed to your email list in the first place. But you don't have to

72
create content just for your emails; you can send them the con-
tent you're already creating.

So if you have a blog, YouTube channel, or anywhere else that

you're publishing relevant content, consider sending it to your
subscribers. For example, you could send them your latest blog
posts, infographics about your industry, videos of your product
walkthroughs or conferences, or case studies about how people
are using your product. Or, if you have new helpful documenta-
tion, consider sending it as well. And if you have too many things
to share, you could bundle them together in one email, or
spread them out over time.

Here at Zapier, the majority of the marketing emails we send out

fall in this category. We've se tup email lists for our blog and app
updates page (pictured), and send out messages whenever we
publish something. That way, our fans can keep up to date with
the latest things at Zapier and hopefully learn something new,
while our team makes content that's great for everyone—not
just for our email audience.

73
 2. Provide Company Updates

If people took the time to sign up for your emails, they want to
know about any major changes in your product or service. This is
especially true if you’re working on anything that’s evolving rapid-
ly, like a software startup with an app that has notable changes
and improvements from month to month.

Sending occasional updates to your subscribers about what

you’ve recently changed and improved is a good way to keep
them in the loop and engaged with your company, and keep
yourself accountable to your users. It doesn't even have to be
that hard; the Pushbullet team, in the example above, just sent a
simple email out to let people know about their latest app releas-
es.

74
 3. Give Access to Exclusive Content

Instead of sending out content that you’ve publicly published, try

sending your email subscribers content that’s exclusively for
them and isn’t found anywhere else.

By doing this, you create a special bond with your readers. They
know that they’re getting content special to them, and that you
aren’t just giving it away to the masses. In addition, you have an
attractive offer on your site—visitors should sign up not only to
be alerted of new posts, but to get special access to content that
you don’t share elsewhere.

One popular writer who’s built a massive email list this way is
Ryan Holiday, who has over 35,000 people signed up for his

75
monthly reading recommendations. It’s a simple plain-text email,
as in the screenshot above, with the best content he's read that
month paired with short summaries of what you’ll get from each
piece. He only sends this to his email list and doesn't publish it
on his blog or anywhere else.

By doing this, Holiday builds his brand as someone who reads a

lot, and as someone who cares about others’ self education
through books.

4. Collect Product Feedback

It’s impossible to predict what will succeed in the market and

what won’t. That impossibility is what’s made The Lean Startup
approach so popular, since it emphasizes constant testing and
getting feedback as you develop your product to make sure it’s
aligning with consumer desires.

You can use your email list to move through product ideas quick-
ly without ever having to invest in building them. To do so, put
together a document outlining what you plan on building, and
then send it to your email list. This strategy will work well your
first year in business—as your email list will likely be smaller—

76
but beyond that, you’ll need to segment it into different groups
in order to connect with your most dedicated users.

Marketer, blogger and founder of Videofruit Bryan Harris used

this tactic to validate an idea of his and make over $40,000 on it.
Instead of building something and trying to force people to buy
it, he simply asked his email subscribers what they were most in-
terested in and then he delivered.

5. Source Content Topics

Beyond figuring out what type of product would be best for your
followers, you can also determine what type of content they're
most excited about. This could be future blog posts, videos you
record, eBooks and PDFs you put together, or even podcasts.

Tim Ferriss, creator of the “4-Hour” book series and author of a

popular self-improvement blog, uses his email list to figure out
the best guests for his popular podcast “The Tim Ferriss Show.”
When he emails his readers about a new podcast release, there
are two calls to action:

• Listen to the podcast:

77
 

• or Tell Ferriss who you want him to interview next:

By doing this, he makes sure he’s interviewing individuals his au-

dience genuinely wants to hear from and discussing topics that
are of interest to his listeners.

78
6. Help Launch a Product

You don’t have to stop at the ideation phase. After you’ve validat-
ed an idea with your email list, you can also use that same list to
help you launch a product by putting it in front of as many peo-
ple as possible.

Your email subscribers already like what you’re creating, and

they’ll be the most likely to buy from you. Don’t be afraid to try to
sell them something that they could benefit from, especially if
you were involving them in the ideation and testing phase of de-
veloping the product.

Brennan Dunn, founder of Planscope and creator of Double Your

Freelancing, used this technique to re-launch his already suc-
cessful book “Double Your Freelancing Rate” and make over
$31,000 on it. A big part of that involved segmenting his email list
based on his most engaged readers, giving them a ton of free
content, and then making a hard sell at the end.

79
 7. Strengthen Loyalty with Early Access

This method falls between sharing specialized content and shar-

ing your existing content. A very simple way to prioritize your
email subscribers is to give them early access to anything you
post or create, and to give them an extra behind the scenes look
at creating it.

To do this, publish your content, then delay promoting it until

you’ve given your email list an hour or two to peruse it. On top of
that, you can throw in some more information that’s not includ-
ed in the post, such as downloads you’re employing as lead mag-
nets, or transcripts of interviews. Or, if you're creating software,

80
you can give your subscribers beta access to your app, as the
Duo team did in the email above.

One example of this is the Groove blog, which is focused on the

helpdesk software maker's journey from $0 to $500,000 a month
in revenue. They write about all of their lessons along the way,
and when you sign up for their emails you get access to posts an
hour before they’re promoted to the public.

81
 8. Keep Your Community Engaged

If your site operates primarily as a community, it can be hard to

keep people coming back day after day sometimes. It’s no fault
of yours—people just forget, which is why email is such a good
way to re-engage them and let them know about important
things they might have missed.

82
One startup that’s leveraging this is Product Hunt. Product Hunt
encourages its community to post products they find, and then
the members of the community vote up the products they think
are the coolest. But here’s the kicker: a product can only be on
Product Hunt for one day, so you need to check it frequently or
you’ll miss something.

Product Hunt makes this easy, though. At the end of each day
they send out an email with the top five or ten “hunts” from that
day so you don’t have to keep checking the site. It’s information
their users asked for, making it non-intrusive, and it’s a reliable
way to keep their users engaged.

83
 9. Kick Off Promotions

Aside from your regular email marketing, you may have bigger
promotions or marketing campaigns that you want to involve
your subscribers in.

At Zapier, we did a "28 Apps in 28 Days" campaign last year

where throughout the month of February we added 28 new inte-

84
grations. By having an active email list we were able to quickly
promote it to our existing fans, who in turn helped share it with
other people they knew.

Another example is through giveaways. Giveaways have become

a popular method for growing your email list recently, and that’s
not without good cause. Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, for
example, grew his email list by nearly 200,000 people with a sin-
gle giveaway.

One of the biggest contributors to having his giveaway go viral,

according to Flynn, was the fact that he already had a good num-
ber of people on his email list, and those people helped spark
the initial sharing.

If you want to run any sort of campaign or promotion, having a

good starting point in your email list is important.

85
 10. Build a Product Around an Email List

For some companies, the email list isn’t just nice-to-have: it’s the
core of the product. These companies usually have fast moving
inventory that they need to tell their customers about quickly,
and people who are joining their email list are expecting to be
sent opportunities that they’ll have a limited amount of time to
act on.

One example of this is the startup Dollar a Day. The premise is

simple: you sign up, they bill you $30 every month, and then they
donate a dollar every day to a different charity in your name.

86
They'll then email you with info about the non-profit your dollar
went to that day.

Alternately, a popular way to monetize blogs is to offer an exclu-

sive newsletter for subscribers. Stratechery, a site by Ben
Thompson with analysis about technology, offers an email sub-
scription with an in-depth look at the important tech trends of
that day. The content that's on the website is free; it's the emails
that people are paying for.

If you’re selling something that customers will only have a short

time to act on, or providing time sensitive and quickly changing
information, then building your product around a strong email
list could be an advantage.

87
 11. Distribute Special Offers

Whether you're selling physical goods, digital downloads, or ser-

vices, having an email list is a powerful way to drive more sales
from past customers by sending them coupons and special of-
fers.

One way of doing this is to send out offers around the holidays.
You could have different coupons or relevant goods that you put
on sale during that time period, and then let the members of
your email list know about it.

Or if you want to be more advanced, you can send emails to dif-

ferent parts of your email list based on what they bought in the
past. If you have two products that complement each other, then

88
 you should let someone know about the other one once they
buy one.

You could even have a special promotion setup for people

who've signed up for your emails but haven't purchased any-
thing from you yet, such as the email from Uber above. Just set-
up an email automation that waits long enough to give the user
a chance to buy, and then send an email to tempt them to recon-
sider your products.

12. Promote Upcoming Events

89
An email list is also a great way to build an offline community. If
you have a list of subscribers interested in something very spe-
cific, maybe you sell badminton gear, you can let your sub-
scribers know about upcoming events, such as a national tourna-
ment, that might be relevant to them.

This also gives you a chance to meet your customers in person

and get valuable feedback from them. If they’re passionate about
your product or service, then they’re most likely excited to meet
you, too. So speaking with them at an event can help turn them
into even bigger promoters of your brand, as well.

---

3 Steps to Start an Email List

Now that you have some ways to use your email lists, it's time to
start building your list so you can start sending marketing emails.
If you’ve never set up an email list for marketing purposes, this
next section will help take you from zero subscribers to collecting
sign-ups as fast as possible. There are only three steps:

1. Set up an email marketing tool

90
 2. Start collecting email addresses

3. Embed an email signup form on your site

But before we get started, let’s define three terms you’ll be see-
ing throughout the rest of this post.

Key Email List Terms

Opt-In - This refers to the process of a reader or buyer to con-

firm that they want to receive your email newsletter, either by
clicking a button—such as the "Let's Go!" button below—to sign
up, indicating that they want to receive emails from you in a
form, or checking a box to receive your emails when they're sign-
ing up for your app or service.

91
 Double Opt-In - This is the process whereby someone signs up
on your site, and then they receive an email asking them to con-
firm that they want to sign up. Subscribers will only receive your
emails after they click the link in that confirmation email. This
email is important since it verifies that they do actually want to
sign up with that email address, and it can help prevent you from
getting in trouble for sending spam.

Welcome Email - This is usually the final step in the sign-up fun-
nel, where you send your new subscriber an automated email

92
 welcoming them to your list. If you’re going to send them a piece
of bonus content or a special offer, this is a good time to do it,
too.

With that out of the way, it's time to start your email list. Here's
how:

93
1. Set Up an Email Marketing Tool

Email marketing software makes it easy to manage an email list

as it stores your subscribers' email addresses, helps you seg-
ment them into different groups, and makes sure that the emails
you’re sending are spam-law compliant. Popular email marketing
apps are likely familiar names to you, such as MailChimp, Cam-
paign Monitor and AWeber, but to manage your own list, you
could use one the over two-dozen email marketing apps we
wrote about recently.

For a short tutorial on how to get started, let's take a look at set-
ting up an email list with MailChimp.

First, you need to register for an account which should only take
a few minutes. You will have to provide a physical address that
represents you and/or your business in order to comply with
spam laws, which we'll discuss more later.

94
 

Next you have to create a “list.” A list is a collection of email ad-

dresses, and you need at least one set up before you can start
collecting email addresses on your site. Just click “Create A List”
or the corresponding button on your provider.

95
 Then add the information you want your list to contain:

Finally, if you already have some subscribers, you can import

them directly from a CSV. Click on the tab at the top of your list
to “Add Subscribers” then select the “Import” option.

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 On this page you’ll be able to import existing subscribers from a
CSV or TXT file, as well as from many other apps.

Once that’s done you’ll be set to get started. Now it’s time to start
collecting email addresses.

2. Start Collecting Email Addresses

MailChimp and other providers give you an easy way to get start-
ed collecting email addresses using their sign-up forms. A sign-
up form is a simple questionnaire that you can send or point
people to so they can join your email list, or that you can embed
right on your site if you want them to be able to sign up there.

First, you need to decide the information you want collect and
then design your signup form. After you made your list in

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 MailChimp in the previous step, you should have ended up on
this page which has a link to "Signup forms".

Click on the link, and you’ll be taken to a page where you can se-
lect one of a few different types of forms. Go with “General
forms” for now.

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 Here you can design the form, remove fields you don’t need, and
add new ones with information you want to use.

Once you have it looking how you want, you can grab the URL at
the top to share with your potential subscribers. You can just
share this link on your site, social network accounts, or blog
posts for the absolute easiest way to get signups on your list.

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 3. Embed an Email Signup Form on Your Site

If you want to go a step beyond just having a link to your signup

form, then you can embed the form directly in your site.

To do this, go back to the “signup forms” tab on MailChimp and

select “Embedded forms” instead of “General forms.” Other
email marketing tools should have a similar option.

100
 

Here you can design the form just as you did before, but instead
of designing it for its own independent page, you’re designing it
as a block that you can drop directly into your site. With that in
mind, be sure to choose complimentary color schemes and type-
faces that will blend in with the rest of your site.

Once you have it looking the way you want, copy the code from
the box at the bottom right and paste it wherever you want a

101
signup form on your site. If you don’t have access to the code for
the site, or aren’t sure how to edit it, you may want to ask a de-
veloper for help.

Now you can start collecting email addresses anywhere on your

site. But before you start emailing your new subscribers, let’s
make sure you’re not breaking any laws.

How to Avoid Breaking Email Laws

By now, you know how you're going to utilize your email list,
you're using an email marketing tool, and you have an email
signup form embedded on your site.

Before we move on to sharing other ways to grow your email list,

you'll want to make sure you don’t get into any trouble with your
newfound power.

Most countries, including the US, have strict laws determining

what you can and cannot do with email marketing. In the U.S.,
the “CAN-SPAM” act dictates what you can and cannot do, and it’s
important that you understand it so you can stay compliant.

Here's the most important parts of the CAN-SPAM laws, with an

image showing how we follow these regulations:

102
 

• You must include a link to unsubscribe from your

emails—it's common to include this in the email
footer.

• If someone submits an unsubscribe request, you

must honor it within 10 days—your email marketing
software should take care of this for you.

• You cannot lie in the “From” line—so, no, you can’t

pretend to send emails from the White House.

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 • You must include a physical address representing
the company or the sender—it's common to state
this in the email footer, too.

• You cannot send email to “harvested” email ad-

dresses—don't purchase email lists from a third
party.

For a more detailed overview, read the FTC's article, "CAN-SPAM

Act: A Compliance Guide for Business." There are also separate
laws for Canada, The European Union, Australia, and many other
countries.

This is one of the great features about service providers like

MailChimp and AWeber: they force you to comply with the law
before sending any emails, so you’re protected. If you’re sending
through a good email marketing tool, not lying about who you
are, and not importing harvested email lists, you should be fine.

---

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17 Ways to Rapidly Grow Your Email
List
Now that you know how to start gathering email addresses and
the laws you need to be following with your new powers, let's
look at some more creative and advanced ways you can boost
those numbers. We'll do this by breaking list building opportuni-
ties down by where they occur:

• On your site

• Off your site

• Offline

• Elsewhere

Increase Signups On Your Site

1. Add More Signup Forms

We covered the basic method for embedding a signup form in
your site, so now the question is where else can you embed
signup forms that would make sense? You want to have them

105
appear on your site frequent enough that they’re hard to miss
accidentally, but not so frequent that your readers are annoyed
by them.

Here are a seven places you could add a signup form:

1. The end of every blog post as a final call to action

2. Page footer so that it’s at the very bottom of every

page, as well

3. Page header so that there’s a call to action at the

top of post as well

4. Sidebar

5. About page

6. Contact Us page

7. Feature box or welcome bar at the top of every

page or post

Another option is to use app integration tool like Zapier to start

pulling in email addresses from other forms you already have set
up. For example, you could add people who complete your “Con-
tact Us” or “Sign Up” forms and also opt-in to receiving your mar-
keting emails as part of that form. Just be sure you have a check

106
 box in that form to signup for your newsletters, or use double
opt-in.

Here are three Zapier integrations with popular online form soft-
ware and email marketing apps that could help you grow your
email list. To find your tool of choice, visit the Zapier app directo-
ry.

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 • Create MailChimp subscribers from Typeform en-
tries

• Add Wufoo form entries to a Vision6 contact list

• Create Infusionsoft Contacts via Unbounce

2. Add a Pop-Up Signup Form

The jury is still out on if pop-up forms are worth the annoyance
or not, but it's clear they effectively yield signups. One way to get
started with pop-ups is to install a tool from AppSumo called
SumoMe, which will let you quickly add three different types of
popups to your site.

Getting started with pop-ups, whether your site is uses Word-

Press or is custom built, is a quick process using SumoMe's tools.

• If You’re Using WordPress - This only takes a

minute. Log-in to your WordPress Admin, go to “Plu-
gins” and then click “Add new.” Search for
“SumoMe,” then install and active it.

• If You’re Using Anything Besides WordPress - First,

go to SumoMe’s Instructions Page and grab the
code for putting in the of your HTML. Then either

108
 paste it into the section of your page yourself, or
ask one of the developers on your team to do it for
you.

Once it’s installed, go to your site’s homepage and click on the

badge in the upper right.

This will let you manage SumoMe on top of your site, without
having to log in elsewhere.

You have three options for adding list building popups:

• List Builder - The typical email signup prompt that

you’re used to

• Scroll Box - Creates a more subtle pop-up as you

scroll down the page

• Smart Bar - Small call to action that stays at the

very top of your page

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 They’re all effective at growing your list, but there are trade offs.
List Builder is the most intrusive, but also the most effective.
Smart Bar is the least intrusive, but also the easiest to miss.
Scroll Box is right in the middle. It’s up to you how many of them
and which you want to use.

Once you’ve picked one (or a few), you need to set it up with your
email marketing tool. With the setting panel open, click on “ser-
vices” on the left bar, select your email marketing tool, and then
follow the instructions to get it set up.

And there you have it: you’re now building an email list passively
as new people show up on your site.

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3. Catch Visitors on the Way Out
When I visit a website that has a pop-up asking me to signup for
their email list is, my first thought is "How do I know I want to
sign up? You won't let me read your content."

What if instead of immediately showing someone a pop-up ask-

ing for their email, you did it on the way out? Services like Exit
Monitor will watch your readers' mouse movements and when
they get too close to that "X" at the top of the screen, Exit Moni-
tor will bring up a call to action to sign up for your mailing list. Al-
ternately, you can use the first tip and put a signup box at the
bottom of your posts for a similar effect.

You have a much better chance of selling them at the end than
at the beginning. Having a pop-up right away is like showing up
at a first date and immediately pulling out your calendar to
schedule the next one. You don't even know if you're into each
other yet!

4. Show a Subscribe Page Before You Show Content

If you go to the blogs of Noah Kagan or Andrew Chen, you’ll no-
tice something different. Instead of immediately taking you to
their blog content, you’re greeted with a picture of them and a
reason you should sign up for their mailing list.

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 According to Kagan, his signup rate increased to 14% on his
homepage once he implemented that big call to action.

If you’re dedicated to building your list quickly and you have

something compelling to offer to visitors, then you might consid-
er changing your blog index page into a giant call to action. If
you’re on WordPress, there’s a simple plugin that lets you do it. If
you’re not, then you’ll have to custom build it.

5. Get Email Subscribers With Your By-Line

One option that can have a smaller but meaningful impact on

your signups is to add a call to action directly to your author by-
line. Your byline is the small line of text at the top of every post
that tells the reader whose writing they’re reading. It’s going to
be on all of your posts, so you may as well optimize it.

112
James Clear uses this on his site by have a subtle call to action
right after his name, suggesting readers sign up for his news-
letter.

When they click it, they’re taken to his dedicated newsletter page
where they can sign up for his regular updates.

Doing it on your own is tricky, but Bryan Harris from Videofruit

recorded a video that has a section explaining how to do it. Skip
to 9:55 if you just want that part, but really, the whole video is
valuable.

6. Lead Magnets: Use Incentives to Capture Email Address-

es
Better than just asking someone to sign up is giving them a rea-
son to do so. With so many sites asking for peoples’ email ad-
dresses today, many of us are protective of giving out our email
address since we’re worried about getting spammed.

To reassure your readers that you’re providing high quality con-

tent in return for signing up, you can provide a “lead magnet” for
their email address, which is just any bonus that they get in re-
turn for joining your email address.

Here are some commons examples of lead magnets:

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Create an Email Course

Your readers want to learn from you, and what better way to
help them and prove your value than a carefully built email
course introducing them to the core of what you know and how
they can apply it?

Brennan Dunn does this with his free “Charge What You're
Worth” course.

You sign up, he sends you some very well thought out emails on
how to boost your rate as a freelancer, and then at the end he
asks you to pay for his much more in-depth “Double Your Free-
lancing Rate” course.

After providing that much good content for free, why wouldn't
you sign up?

And setting one of your own up is fairly simple. Just create a new
list in your email provider of choice, write an email series, then
set it to run automatically for new people who join the course. If
you want to learn more, you can read about it in our article on
building drip campaigns and using automated emails.

Just make sure you have a good call to action at the end of the
course.

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Embed a Video

One effective method for incentivizing people to sign up for your

email list is to give them access to a video in return. You can do
this two ways, you could send a link to an unlisted video on
YouTube once they sign up, or you could just host the entire
process right within a page or blog post.

To do it the second way, you'll want to upload your video to Wis-

tia, which offers two benefits:

1. Your videos will be backlinked to your site when

they’re embedded, which means that watching the
videos helps your own site’s SEO. With YouTube,
when people watch your videos, it helps YouTube's
SEO.

2. You can add a call to action at the end of the video

to sign up, or better, you can add one to the begin-
ning that they have to enter if they want to watch
your video.

Offer PDFs, Spreadsheets and Other Lead Magnets

Another incentive you could give to your readers downloadable

documents that expand on what you discussed in the post. For

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example, the PDF could simply be an easy-to-print version of the
post. You could also take a few extra steps and create a spread-
sheet template or in-depth how-to guide that would help your
reader execute the tactic you outlined in your post.

To employ this method, you have a few options. You could get
set up with Unbounce, which lets you create separate landing
pages that you can use to offer a bonus when people sign up. Or
you could host a PDF on Gumroad and then use their widgets
tool to embed the sale right on your site, even if you’re giving
away the PDF for free. Just remember to set up a Zapier integra-
tion to connect your email marketing tool with Gumroad.

A third option that’s especially good for WordPress users is Easy

Digital Downloads which embeds in any WordPress site and lets
you sell (or give away) digital goods on your site, without having
to pay a dime.

Lastly, you could do something as simple as promising to send

them a PDF when they join your list. To do this, create the PDF,
put it in your Dropbox or Box folder, and then copy the sharing
link. Then when someone signs up, include that link in their wel-
come email so they get it immediately.

Supply Coupon Codes

116
Another lead magnet that you can use to incentivize signups is to
provide coupon codes that give your signups a discount on a ser-
vice that would be relevant to them. This will vary based on your
site, but if you can identify a highly-desired service that your
readers would want to save money on, you could drive a lot of
new signups. It could even be your own product.

For example, marketer Joshua Earl wrote one of the emails for
the Email1k email marketing course led by Noah Kagan. In the
email, Earl explains how to set up a viral giveaway using King-
Sumo, and then at the end of the post he tells you that you can
get 50% off of KingSumo by joining his email list. It’s a perfectly
timed incentive that earns him new readers, and saves his read-
ers just under $100.

7. Host a Giveaway
Giveaways have become easier and more popular recently
thanks to the WordPress plugin KingSumo by Noah Kagan and
the others at AppSumo.

KingSumo incentivizes people who join the giveaway to share it

with their friends by giving you two or more extra entries (usually
three) per referral you get to the giveaway. So if Zapier is giving
away something cool, and I find it, and then I get you to sign up

117
for it too, my number of entries just went from 1 to 4 while you
only have 1.

Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income did a giveaway when King-
Sumo was in its early days and he grew his email list by 200,000
people! And that was for a prize only worth $60.

The key to this is:

1. Getting your giveaway in front of as many people

initially as possible, either through an existing
email list or through outreach

2. Making sure that you're giving away something

people actually want

All you need to do it is have something to give away, the King-

Sumo plugin, or to build a custom giveaway using something like
Harry's open source referral contest code.

Increase Signups Off Your Site

So far we've offered ideas for ways you can collect email ad-
dresses on your site, but why stop there? These ideas will help

118
 you get started collecting email addresses from other sites as
well.

8. Get Signups from a Tweet

119
 The idea is simple. When someone shares your content on Twit-
ter, you follow up with them immediately suggesting they sign up
for your email list.

It works because they’ve already demonstrated that they’re inter-

ested in what you have to say, enough that they would share it
with their followers. And since you’re reaching out to them per-
sonally asking them to sign up, it’s more effective than a generic
pop up.

If you’re interested in setting it up yourself, check out a guide to

setting up these Twitter Lead Generation cards for free on the
Moz blog.

9. Guest Post and Offer a Bonus

Guest posting is one of the best way to drive traffic back to your
blog, but why stop with traffic? The marketing tactic can also be

120
 an effective way to generate new sign ups on other peoples’
sites, without readers having to come back to yours.

Bryan Harris demonstrates this in “A Tale of Two Launches: One

Made $43,380 and the Other -$1,385” on the company blog of
LeadPages. In the piece, he explains why email list building is im-
portant, then at the end he has a call to action telling you that
he’ll send you a video on how he grows his email list if you sign
up for updates.

When you click it that button, instead of taking you to his site it
just gives you a popup right on the site so you don’t have to go
anywhere, which LeadPages would appreciate since they don’t
want to drive traffic away from their site.

121
10. Publish Slideshares
Presentations that speak for themselves are a fantastic way to
convey large amounts of information, especially when it benefits
from visual supplementation.

Once you've created a great looking presentation (or "deck") you

can upload it to SlideShare and share it with the world. But that’s
not enough—you also need the Slideshare to convert.

You can include hyperlinks in your presentation and SlideShare

retains them. That means that you can include a call to action
with a link to your site where they can subscribe; a great way to
convert readers at the end of looking through your presentation
when they’re already primed and appreciative of you.

For example, in Zapier’s Slideshare on the 35 best CRM apps,

each tool has a link to read more about it on our site where the
reader can also signup.

122
 

11. Subscribe Your Buyers

If you sell digital or physical goods with the help of a service like
PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, or Bigcommerce, you want to make sure
that your customers' email addresses are making their way onto
your list so you can let them know about future products, sales,
or info related to what they just purchased.

The easiest way to do that is through Zapier, which integrates

with most eCommerce software and email marketing tools, and

123
 can send the email addresses of your buyers directly from one to
the other.

To be safe though, you should check the option for “double opt-
in” in the Zap, since only getting a single opt-in (from the sale) is
not considered a good practice in email marketing, and could
lead to spam reports against you.

• Automatically Subscribe PayPal Customers to a

MailChimp List

• Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

• Nurture Bigcommerce Customers via Email with

HubSpot

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Increase Signups Offline

12. Bring in Business Card Contacts

FullContact is an app that lets you take a picture of a business
card, then have a person—not a computer—translate it into con-
tact data, which is then added to your FullContact network man-
agement dashboard.

From there you can add them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or send them
an email. But maybe you’re going to an event and collecting a
large number of business cards which you want to add to your
email list.

Instead of doing it manually, you can set up an easy integration

through Zapier to send some or all of your new FullContact con-
tacts immediately into your list manager of choice.

13. Pull in Event Attendees

Another situation you don’t want to miss out capitalizing on is
making sure that all of your event attendees make it on to your
email list so you can let them know about future events, as well
as send them follow-ups from the event.

125
 If you use Eventbrite, then you can set it up to push your atten-
dees straight to your mailing list through Zapier, using an inte-
gration like the one below.

• Add new Eventbrite attendees to a MailChimp list to

improve event communication

• Add Eventbrite attendees as contacts in Infusionsoft

• Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor

list

Or, check your email newsletter tool for a mobile app to add
signups from a tablet at your event. Many email apps offer such
tools. If yours doesn't, you could have a tablet open to your web-
site's form instead, as an easy way to get signups at a booth or
promotion display.

126
Increase Signups Elsewhere

14. Create Your Own Email List Additions With Zapier

So far we’ve covered ways that you can use parts of your site,
and other peoples’ site, to add new email addresses to your list.
But what about adding them from odd sources such as your
email client or CRM? Here are a few ways you can use Zapier to
build up your list.

Gmail Labels

If you have a certain label in Gmail that you want to use for
adding people to your mail list, you can set up an integration be-
tween Gmail and your email marketing tool so that whenever
you add a certain label to an email, the person who sent it gets
added to your email list.

CRM Entries

Whether you use Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Podio, Pipedrive, or any

of Zapier’s other CRM integrations, you can quickly set it up to
add any new CRM contact to your email list, using an integration
like this one between Salesforce and MailChimp.

127
 

• Send Highrise Contacts to Campaign Monitor

• Create New Constant Contact Subscriber from Cap-

sule CRM Contact

• Send Pipedrive Contacts to Mailchimp Subscribers

Google Contacts

Another option is to add anyone who you record in Google Con-

tacts straight to your email list. This works well for more person-
al email lists, or if you keep all of your work contacts within a sec-
tion of Google Contacts. If you use MailChimp, this integration
will let you have Google Contacts added automatically.

Webinar Attendees

If you’re hosting webinars, you want to either add those people

to an existing email list or to a new one specifically to people

128
who are interested enough to come to your webinars. If you use
this GoToWebinar and AWeber integration (or an integration with
any other email marketing tool) it’ll be taken care of automatical-
ly for you.

15. Email Referrals

If you’re trying to get someone to sign up for your email list, the
sell will be much easier from one of their friends than from you.
Whenever someone signs up for your list, you should take the
opportunity to ask them to refer you to one of their friends who
might also be interested in the site.

You can create a hyperlink using a mailto: link, which then links
whoever clicks on it to a pre-filled email. Now instead of having
to type out why their friend should sign up for your course.

If you're having a hard time understanding what I mean by that,

just click here to tell a friend about Zapier. Cool, right?

To do this, you create a mailto: hyperlink, but instead of just

putting in an email address, you put in an entire email. This URL
will look like it’s written in a different language, but there’s a
method to the madness.

129
Then, you can take that to the next level. Instead of just asking
for them to email a friend, you could ask them to email a friend
with you CC'd or BCC'd in order to get some bonus!

To do it, you just need to make a “mailto:” link that looks some-
thing like this:

mailto:?BCC=nat.eliason@zapier.com&subject=I%20-
think%20you%20will%20like%20this&body=I%20just%20-
found%20this%20awesome%20website%20called%20Zapier
%20for%20automating%20different%20services%20on-
line.%0A%0ACheck%20it%20out%21%20http%3A%2F
%2Fwww.zapier.com

You can change the “BCC” to be a “CC” or a “To” if you want, and
then set the email address. Change the subject and body to
whatever you want, but you’ll have to use the “URL encoding
method”. If you’re not sure what all the %s and numbers mean,
an article from W3Schools explains it all and makes it easy to cre-
ate.

16. Text Messages

If you have a user group that meets in person, or just are dis-
cussing your product with someone in public, you may end up

130
 wanting to add someone to your email list while you're out with-
out a simple way to do it.

You can write down their email and add them later, or you can
tell them to go to your site and hope they sign up, but there's a
better way. For that, all you need is a mobile phone with SMS
and a Zapier account.

Use this integration you'll be using—replace MailChimp if you'd

like. Then, you can create any mail-to address you want:

Then pick your email list, and put the body of the text as the
email of the new subscriber.

Add this email as a contact on your phone:

131
 

And now anytime you text an email address to that contact, that
new email address will be added to your email manager.

17. Your Email Signature

Last but not least, you can add a very simple call to action to
your email signature that tells people in one line why they
should sign up for your list, and is then hyperlinked to where
they can sign up.

132
To do this in Gmail, go into your settings by clicking on the gear
in the upper right.

Then scroll down to the signature section, type in what you want
it to say, then add a hyperlink to your blog or signup form

133
 

Optimize and Segment Your Email

Lists

134
So far we've just dumped all of your new signups into one email
list, but that actually limits your marketing potential. Most email
marketing tools will allow you to create “segments” or “groups”
that break up your subscribers into different categories based on
where they signed up, their demographic data, what they’re in-
terested in, and more.

Harnessing this segmentation can drastically increase your open

rates, since you can send emails that are specifically targeted to
your readers' interests. That's what you'll learn in the next chap-
ter, which includes a full guide on how to segment email lists.

Conclusion

"Your email list is the heart of your marketing strategy."

~ Marketer Greg Dineo

“Your email list is the heart of your marketing strategy," says

marketer Greg Dineo on the KISSmetrics blog. "When you write a
blog post, the people on your email list will be the first to read it.
When you have a webinar, the people on your list will be the first

135
to sign up. And, when you offer a new product, the people on
your list will be the first to try it.”

Your email list members have the potential to be your biggest

fans, your most loyal buyers, and your most reliable sources of
feedback and traffic. But you have to start collecting them now.

If you haven’t started building your email list, go back to the be-
ginning of the chapter and follow the steps to get set up collect-
ing email addresses. If you’ve done the basics but aren’t using as
many strategies as you could be, start incorporating some of the
ones we talked about later in the article and see how they boost
your sign-up rates.

Next
No matter which app you're using to send your emails, you'll
want to make sure your emails are as effective as possible. For
that, you'll want to A/B test your messages, as we'll look at in
chapter 10, and you'll also want to segment your lists to make
sure you're targeting the right people with the perfect message
for them. That's what we'll look at in this next chapter.

136
Written by Nathaniel Eliason

Image credits: Envelope photo courtesy Erin Nekervis; BlackBerry photo

courtesy Ian Lamont.

137
 Chapter 4: How to Segment
Email Lists for More Opens,
Click-Throughs and Conver-
sions

Reports of email's death are greatly exaggerated. Every month a

new email-killing product comes along, and every month my

138
Gmail inbox continues to swell with product updates, company
news and coupon codes.

Heck, those email-killers use email to teach me how their apps

work.

Take social media: it was supposed to supplant email as a mar-

keting channel long ago. But email is almost 40% more effective
than Facebook and Twitter for acquiring new customers. Twitter
still emails me when I gain a new follower.

What makes email marketing so powerful? Some say that the se-
cret sauce is list segmentation—the practice of dividing your
email list into groups based on characteristics like interests and
demographics.

Segmenting your email list helps you speak more intelligently

and directly with your customers, giving them information that
they want at the opportune time. And when you do it right, the
payoff can be huge: MailChimp found that when their users seg-
mented email lists based on data like location and job title, open
rates increased by almost 19%, and click-through rates by almost
22% compared to non-segmented sends.

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In this guide you'll learn what email list segmentation is, when
you should do it, and how you can put it into action to power up
your email marketing.

In this Chapter:

• What is List Segmentation?

• What You Need: The Basics

• How Will List Segmentation Help Me?

• Leveraging Data for Effective List Segmentation

• When Should I Segment My Email List?

• How Can I Start Segmenting My Email List?

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What is List Segmentation?
Bob Belcher owns Bob's Burgers. Every day he serves customers
with drastically different food preferences: vegetarians and ba-
con lovers; regulars looking for "the usual" and first-timers who
might be overwhelmed by a massive menu.


Wouldn't it be nice if Bob knew every customer's preferences,

background, and tastes when they walked in the door so he
could provide each person with a customized menu? Meat-free
offerings for vegetarian customers, a "greatest hits" menu for
new diners, free sides for his best patrons, etc.

In reality, this strategy would be hard for Bob to pull off in his

restaurant—soon he'd be buried in a mess of menus. But in
email marketing, personalizing your customer's experience is
much easier, and just as effective.

141
 

Email blasts that go out to your entire list might help

some people, but others will be left confused and in the
dark.

Personalization is the purpose of list segmentation: you slice

your email list into segments based on what you know about
each user—like their buying habits, familiarity with your compa-
ny, and professional background—then you send each segment
of people personalized information.

142
 

List segmentation puts unique content in front of

unique customers, and that makes everybody happy.

The segments can be as large (for example, people who signed

up for your site less than a day ago) or as small (for example,
people who bought a specific product after discovering your site
on Pinterest) as you want. But generally, the smaller they get, the
more likely it is that the information you send will resonate with
the recipient.

If you get your segments right, your users will receive relevant
emails packed with information that they actually want. That per-

143
sonalization leads to more conversions, more purchases, and
happier customers.

Note: In email marketing, you'll also hear the term "personaliza-

tion" applied to the method of personalizing the subject line or
salutation of an email by including the recipients' first or last
name.

What You Need: The Basics

List segmentation might sound daunting. But don't panic: it's an
evolving strategy that builds upon itself, and most email market-
ing tools are set up to handle multiple segments.

It doesn't take much to get started with email list segmentation if

you're willing to put some effort into the planning process.
Here's what you'll need at a basic level:

• User data that's tied to an email address - This

data can be anything from someone's gender to
their favorite soccer team. If your user data is
sparse, no worries: you can collect information and

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 build out user profiles as you go. Some email mar-
keting apps will gather data for you, too, like the re-
cipient's location and level of engagement.

• An email-sending tool - Preferably one that plays

nicely with list segmentation, like MailChimp, AWe-
ber, or Intercom (we'll discuss these more later).

• A way to organize your segments - In their purest

form, segments are just email lists with acceptance
criteria. Many email marketing apps will manage
segment organization for you (some will even auto-
matically sort your customers into segments), but
you'll need a rough plan in place before assembling
groups.

How Will List Segmentation Help Me?

List segmentation works because it provides an individualized
experience via a mass medium. Email is unique because unlike
other widespread communications—television, social media, ra-
dio—you can craft content for groups of users and deliver it in

145
batches, instead of broadcasting generic content to everyone
and hoping it appeals to a majority of your audience.

Targeted emails offer an ideal way to usher prospective cus-

tomers through your sales cycle without a sky-high price tag or
lengthy hands-on time. With the right segments, you can make it
easy for customers to understand why they need your product,
or what they should buy from you. Plus, accurate segmentation
leads to improved click-through rates, conversions, and deliver-
ability.

1. Increase Open Rates

It doesn't matter how compelling the content inside is: if people

don't open your emails, they won't be buying what you're selling.
Using list segmentation you can send tailored subject lines to
specific groups, better enticing them to click.

Proof: Women's fashion site SwayChic segmented their email

lists based on buying habits and high-engagement hours during
the day, and they managed to increase open rates by 40%.

146
2. Increase Click-Through Rates

You can spend weeks A/B testing calls-to-action and email de-
signs. But without relevant content, your email click-through
rates will plummet faster than a skydiving elephant. List segmen-
tation helps you send customers content that they actually want
to see, click on, and interact with by organizing them into interest
groups.

Proof: HubSpot used list segmentation as part of their marketing

strategy to hit a 16.4% email click-through rate—that's 583% bet-
ter than the 2.4% standard around the email marketing industry.

3. Increase Conversions

Don't make your customer think. When you hit the sweet spot
with personalized content, a strong call-to-action, and a motivat-
ed customer, it should be a no-brainer next-step to hit "buy." List
segmentation helps you put the right content in front of the right
customers, removing as much resistance as possible.

Proof: Isotoner—famous for their gloves and slippers—increased

their email marketing revenue by 7,000% by segmenting their list

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based on which products customers were looking at when they
visited the site.

4. Decrease Unsubscribes

When someone unsubscribes from your mailing list, they're cut-

ting off your direct line to their inbox. They're also opting out of a
valuable marketing channel. So yeah, try to avoid that.

Think about why you unsubscribe from emails: for me, it's either
that someone's flooding my inbox, or that the messages aren't
relevant to me. List segmentation can help with both of those
problems—it helps you control how often someone gets your
emails, and what's in those emails, based on how they interact
with your content.

Proof: Constant Contact polled people on why they unsubscribe

from emails: 56% said because the content isn't relevant, 51%
said because it wasn't what they expected.

To be balanced, though, MailChimp found that segmenting email

lists actually increased unsubscribes. It usually wasn't by much—
from anywhere between 0.071% and 0.986%—but the data was

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clear. Here's what the email giant had to say about the surprising
results:

"We’re baffled as to why more people would unsub-

scribe from seemingly more relevant campaigns. We
have some theories: Maybe the segmented campaigns
were sent in addition to normal batch-and-blast cam-
paigns, which resulted in annoying duplicate messages,
or maybe the content was just too specific."

5. Avoid Spam Filters

An email never delivered is just as worthless as one never sent.

And it's surprisingly easy to land in a junk folder: Email intelli-
gence company Return Path estimated that 7.56% of emails in
the U.S. hit spam filters. Legitimate companies face email deliv-
erability issues every day—we're not just talking about Nigerian
princes here.

Many senders hit spam filters because they send irrelevant con-
tent too often and to unengaged recipients. Using list segmenta-

149
tion, you can send personalized content that's less likely to an-
noy customers.

Proof: The team at OpenMoves segmented one client's email list

into two groups: people who had and had not clicked on a cam-
paign. They sent an email to the clickers, and nothing to the non-
clickers. The results: deliverability improved from 90% to 95% in-
stantly, helping them avoid spam blacklists.

Spam: Want to triple check that you're doing everything possible

to avoid spam filters? Read up on Mailchimp's best practices for
email deliverability, and the FTC's rules governing spam and the
associated penalties.

6. Increase General Customer Happiness

Nobody likes generic emails; they're lazy, unhelpful, and a waste

of inbox space. So by segmenting your email sends, you're saving
your customer time and helping them discover products they'll
love. And remember: a happy customer is a return customer.

Proof: The smile on your customer's face :-D

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Leveraging Data for Effective List Seg-

mentation
There are no hard-and-fast rules about what information you
can and can't use for list segmentation. Really, any data that ties
back to a specific email address could be a segment. Every com-
pany knows different things about their users based on the
products that they offer—for example, at Zapier we know if

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 someone manages their to-do list with Trello versus Google
Tasks—but here are a few segment ideas to get you started.

Demographic Data

Demographic data includes any quantifiable characteristics of a

person: age, gender, hometown, job, salary, and so on. These are
your base-level segments—they help you group users together
without getting granular over interests and past purchasing pat-
terns.

But that doesn't mean demographic segmentation is ineffective.

Just by segmenting their list into male and female customers,
clothing brand Johnny Cupcakes saw a 42% jump in clickthrough

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rate, 123% more conversions, and a 141% increase in revenue
for each email campaign. All that, using only two segments.

Try using these demographic groups to form an infrastructure

for your list segmentation:

• Gender - Gap sells clothing for men and women,

but they won't get me to bite if their emails are
pushing sun dresses (my legs are a little hairy for
that). Men and women shop differently, and your
email marketing should reflect that.

• Where they live - When there's a new, popular

restaurant in Portland, Maine, Yelp sends me an
email about it. That's because Yelp knows that I live
in Portland, and that I've rated restaurants around
town. Segmenting your list by location helps you
guess what a customer might be interested in,
which creates value for the customer.

• Job title - Jack the intern might use your app as a

"team member" for a one-off project. Jill the CTO
might buy annual access for her entire team as the
"account admin". You wouldn't give Jack and Jill the

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 same sales pitch in person, so why should they get
the same emails?

• Their chosen persona - The easiest way to under-

stand your users: just ask. I told MLB.com that my
favorite baseball team is the Minnesota Twins, so
they send discount codes for Twins merchendise.
They might get me to buy a new Twins jersey, but I'd
never glance at a rival team's products. Segmenting
by persona—like a favorite team, a job function, or
a personal goal—helps your emails stay out of the
trash bin.

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 Behavioral Data

Once you understand who's using or buying your product, try to

figure out why and how. Are people sending it as a gift? Do they
only use one section or feature on your site? Are they just inter-
ested in a single product line? You can use that data to send your
customers relevant emails based on behavior. Try using these
segments to target people based on their interests:

• What they do with your product - Knowing which

features of your site someone uses most often
gives you insight into their interests. At Zapier, we
know who uses Evernote and who doesn't—we

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 wouldn't send a lengthy email about our favorite
Evernote Zaps to non-Evernote users, because it
would be worthless to them. We want to send peo-
ple tips about the apps they use with Zapier to max-
imize engagement.

• What they buy - This is the classic Amazon strategy:

watch what your customers buy, and pitch them on
similar products. The tough part here is determin-
ing which products are similar: Amazon might calcu-
late that 63% of people who bought a breadbox
also bought a toaster. So if someone buys a bread-
box, Amazon tries to sell them a toaster, too. Seg-
menting by purchase habits doesn't require a com-
plex algorithm, though: if a user purchased dark
chocolate in the past, send them more email offers
about dark chocolate.

• Free and paid users - Freemium services should al-

ways maintain separate segments for paying cus-
tomers and users on the free plan. Non-paying
users are free-game for email-based upgrade pitch-
es. But once someone provides their credit card
info, they don't want sales-focused emails—it's bet-

156
 ter to keep them engaged with your product so they
stay in that paying customer group.

• When they last clicked on an email - Click frequen-

cy tells you who your most-engaged customers are,
but it also tells you who doesn't want to be both-
ered. Using list segmentation, you can experiment
with low engagement in a couple ways: by sending
more emails to get the user involved, or fewer to
avoid being annoying. Shopping site Fab actually
opts users out of emails automatically if they
haven't been interacting with the site—that's dras-
tic, but it keeps their open rates up.

• When and how often they buy - Sorting customers

based on when, not just what, they buy can help you
determine a timeline for your email campaigns—
you can create segments based on seasonal pur-
chases, or specific data like the peak time of day for
click-throughs on Wednesday . If I bought my moth-
er-in-law a candle for Christmas three years run-
ning, Yankee Candle better be stuffing my inbox
when December rolls around.

157
 Customer Sign-Up Date

Each one of your customers is at a different point in your sales

cycle—some are long-time users, others have no idea what you
do. You need to communicate with these people differently. If
you're explaining solar eclipses to a third grader and a graduate
student at Harvard, would they get the same speech? Probably
not.

Segmenting your list by how long someone has been a member

of your site can help you gauge how familiar they are with your
brand, what they already know, and what they still need to learn.

158
• Onboarding new users - Knowing when someone
signed up for your site lets you start an onboarding
process, or a walkthrough of how to use your app.
Apps like Pinterest use onboarding emails to en-
courage new users to set up their profile and start
pinning. This engages new users and gets them
hooked while their interest is piqued.

• Rewarding your best customers - Ok, segmenting

by how long someone has been a customer is usu-
ally more beneficial for app companies. But ecom-
merce sites can use these insights to thank long-
time customers, or delight new ones. Simply send-
ing a coupon code for someone's first purchase—or
to celebrate the anniversary of their first purchase
—can go a long way in retaining that customer.

159
 Customer Email Client Data

More than 65% of emails are opened on smartphones first. The

email marketing landscape is changing, and it's important to
build campaigns around each customer's reading preferences.

To improve a customer's experience with your content, account

for how and when they're opening your emails. Using list seg-
mentation, you can create groups based on browsing devices
and how often your customers use email.

• If they're browsing on mobile or desktop - Mobile

phones and laptops provide two vastly different

160
 email-reading experiences. And while many brands
have moved towards mobile apps and responsive
websites, a survey from MarketingSherpa estimates
that 49% of email marketers still don't segment
their lists based on device habits. Consider sending
mobile-focused customers a tweaked HTML version
that's optimized for the smaller screen—you could
even experiment with plain-text templates, which
render natively based on device.

• When they say they want to receive emails - In-

stead of trying to pick the perfect send time out of
thin air, just let your customers tell you when and
how often they want to receive your emails. Ros
Hodgekiss, community manager at Campaign Moni-
tor, suggests asking your customers about their
email preferences, and creating groups from there.
"You can have your subscribers submit their email
frequency preferences—either on subscribe, or lat-
er, via an email preference center or something
similar. Once you have sufficient data, you can seg-
ment accordingly."

161
 Pro Tip: Unsure where to start with mobile-optimized emails?
Check out HubSpot's 5 tips to kickstart your responsive email de-
signs.

When Should I Segment My Email

List?

The short answer is: almost always. There are very few cases
when you'll want to send out a mass email to all of your cus-

162
tomers—maybe to announce an acquisition, a site-wide sale, or
a change that affects all of your users.

And it's never too late to start segmenting. You can learn about
your users and sort them into segments at any time. Your goal is
to build a more complete profile of each user on an ongoing ba-
sis, factoring in new purchases, activity, and provided informa-
tion.

Yeah, some things like persona and gender are easier to collect
when someone signs up, but sometimes you can infer those fac-
tors based on other actions—if someone consistently clicks on
necklaces in the emails they get from shopping site Fab, and 95%
of Fab's necklaces are purchased by females, it's safe to assume
that the clicker is female.

That said, your email list segments are always a work in

progress. Let your segments evolve as you gather more data
about your visitors, and focus on what converts them into cus-
tomers. You can divide any segment into smaller ones to test
specific sales strategies, or collapse related segments into a sin-
gle unit if your unique versions are getting out of hand.

163
How Can I Start Segmenting My Email
List?
Effective list segmentation can be a major win for your email
marketing, but getting started is a daunting task. What used to
be a single-list operation can quickly erode into a tangled mess
of email campaigns if you don't have direction.

If you aren't sure where to begin, think through these six steps
and try to plan out a flow that would work for your segmented
email marketing campaigns.

1. Define Your Data Points

First thing's first: you can't build segments without data. The data
that matters most to your company is going to depend on what
kind of product you sell—for example, Target is more interested
in whether or not you have children than Dropbox would be.

So before you start segmenting, decide what customer data will

help you sell more efficiently, how you're going to organize that
data, and how you're going to collect the data that you don't
have.

164
At Zapier, we ask new users about their professional background
—marketing, business owner, project manager, developer, and
so on—and use that information to give them more relevant Zap
recommendations. And since we integrate more than 350 apps,
we find that our customers appreciate a nudge in the right direc-
tion.

But your main goal here is to get people to the activation stage
of your sales funnel—whether that means getting them to buy
something or use a specific feature. So to make the most of your
email marketing, focus on optimizing your data-gathering pro-
cesses so it fits your conversion goals.

Answer these three questions:

1. What data are we already collecting? - These are

your lowest-barrier-to-entry segments.

2. What data can we start collecting? - These are

data points that you have the ability to track, but
haven't organized into usable information.

3. What data do we need to ask for? - This is data

that you need to request from your users directly,
or that you need to engineer a way to collect.

165
 You likely won't have all the data points you want, and your cur-
rent data-gathering framework won't always support the tests
you want to run. That's when you need to pull in development
resources, or invest in a third-party tool (we'll touch on those be-
low).

2. Create Personas for Your Customers

Great Chinese General Sun Tzu's military wisdom was highlighted

by three words, "Know your enemy." That's fine and good for

166
wartime tactics, but on the battlefield of email marketing, try
adopting a different mantra: know your customers.

Every company should know who their best customers are—

mothers, college students, beer snobs, audiophiles, lobster fish-
ermen, whatever. But not every company goes in-depth to create
personas for those customers.

Customer personas provide bedrock for your list segmentation,

because they help you define which segments need which mes-
sage. To build a helpful customer persona, try to answer these
questions from HubSpot:

• What demographic information do you know about

this customer?

• What are the pain points for this customer?

• What do they want to accomplish (and how can I

help them accomplish it)?

• What does a day in their life look like?

If I wrote up a persona for someone who shops on high-end

fashion and lifestyle site Gilt.com, it might look something like
this:

167
 Nick is hitting his professional stride: at 30, he's a senior
marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company in New
York City, and he's finally pulling in enough money to en-
joy some of the finer things. He likes to dress well, but
that doesn't mean he's willing to blow a day's pay on
new shoes—frugal habits die hard. Nick spends a lot of
time working, but on the weekends he likes to play bas-
ketball and catch a movie with his friends; shopping isn't
his idea of the perfect Saturday.

This persona tells us demographic information about Nick (30-

year-old living in NYC), his career and seniority level (senior mar-
keting manager at a large company), his motivation (dress well
without breaking the bank), and his pain points (doesn't want to
shop around or pay marked-up prices).

We can see that Nick spends a lot of time working, so you might
put him in a segment focused on office attire sales—suits, ties,
belts—and mix in some high-top sneakers to appeal to his love
of basketball.

168
3. Choose Your Segments

Now that you have your data and understand who you're talking
to, choose some email list segments to experiment with. We cov-
ered some ideas that work for other companies in the "Leverag-
ing Data for Effective List Segmentation" section above, but feel
free to get creative with your groups based on the unique knowl-
edge that you have about your customers.

For example, at Zapier we know which apps small business own-

ers tend to use, like Google Docs, Gravity Forms, and Evernote.
We could create an email list segment that contains small busi-
ness owners, and send them tips on how to automate Gravity
Forms and Google Docs.

Pro Tip: Whichever segments you choose should be geared to-

wards driving your customer to purchasing something or using
your product. If you segment your list on every little detail, you're
just going to create a confusing email flow and a lot of work for
yourself.

169
4. Create Your Content

Once you decide on how to segment your email lists, you need
to write and design content that's targeted towards each group.
Finding the right voice takes experimentation, and we could
spend many blog posts covering copy strategies. So instead of
doubling the length of this chapter, check out these excellent
guides to creating appealing email content:

• Vero: "The Ultimate Lifecycle Email Marketing

Guide"

• Constant Contact: "Improve Your Open Rates with

These 12 Subject Line Tweaks"

• Customer.io: "How to write emails people actually

want to read"

• MailChimp: "Write Effective Subject Lines"

• Copyblogger: "37 Tips for Writing Emails that Get

Opened, Read, and Clicked"

Pro Tip: The best way to learn what copy converts for your busi-
ness is A/B testing, which we'll look at in Chapter 10.

170
 5. Employ an Email Marketing Tools' Segmenta-
tion Feature

You have data and a plan to use it. Now comes the fun part:
sending your emails out into the world. For that, you're going to
want an email marketing app that can handle list segmentation
and make multiple sends a breeze.

Here's a brief look at some of the more popular marketing apps

out there, and the list segmentation features that each one of-
fers.

MailChimp

171
MailChimp makes sending email newsletters painless. And they
apply the same philosophy to list segmentation: MailChimp lets
you segment lists by location, engagement, sign-up date, and
more using a straightforward interface. You can also save seg-
ments and automatically add users to those segments if they
meet your chosen criteria.

To learn more about MailChimp's list segmentation features, read

their documentation.

172
Customer.io

173
 Customer.io calls their list segmentation features "Segment Trig-
gered Emails," and they work a little differently than standard list
groupings. Users trigger these emails once, whenever they enter
a segment—like reaching the 3rd day of a trial period, or en-
abling a feature on your site. These tools are great for crafting
campaigns like welcome emails and onboarding scenarios.

To learn more about Customer.io's list segmentation features, read

their documentation.

AWeber

AWeber offers one of the most robust sets of list segmentation

tools on the market. You can carve up your AWeber email lists by
who opened certain emails, which pages people visit on your
site, who's clicking on links in your emails, and other information
that you collect with their custom forms.

174
 To learn more about AWeber's list segmentation features, read their
documentation.

Intercom

Intercom's list segmentation capabilities are built on three differ-

ent features: filters, segments, and tags. Filters let you sort
through your email list for users who meet specific criteria, like
when they signed up and how active they are on your site. Seg-
ments are created from filtered lists, and Intercom will automati-
cally add new customers to these segments if they match its
rules. Tags work like segments, but there's no automation in-
volved—in other words, they're totally custom segments.

To learn more about Intercom's list segmentation features, read their

documentation.

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Vero
Vero focuses more on behavior-based transactional emails—like
triggering a message when a user visits a specific page—than
newsletters. But segments come into play here, too: Vero treats
segments like individual lists, and they're built based on user be-
havior, past emails, and distinct events.

To learn more about Vero's list segmentation features, read their

documentation.

Custom App
Sometimes it's easier to build a custom solution that fits your
needs. That's what Zapier did with Django Drip, a Django-based
email sending service that lets us dispatch messages based on
very customized segments.

With Django Drip, we have the ability to build solutions for gaps
in our email campaigns, while keeping our user data in-house.

Note: Django Drip is an open-source project. If you're a developer

using a Django-based site, give it a shot for your email marketing
needs.

176
More Apps That Offer List Segmentation
Those aren't the only apps that make list segmentation a breeze.
Here are some quick links to other services (in alphabetical or-
der) that let you segment lists:

• ActiveCampaign - List Segments

• Benchmark - Segments

• Campaign Monitor - Segments

• Constant Contact - Segment Contacts

• Emma - List Segmentation and Dynamic Segments

• FreshMail - Segment a subscriber list

• GetResponse - Advanced Segmentation

• Hatchbuck - Tags

• HubSpot - Segmenting Tools

• iContact - Segments

• MailUp - Groups

• Mailgen - Email List Segments

• Pardot - List Segmentation

177
 • VerticalResponse - Segments

• Vision6 - Segment your Sends

6. Measure, Adjust, Repeat

Now that your emails are out in the world, you get to collect an-
other kind of data. Make sure you're tracking how people inter-
act with your emails: measure what they open, what they click
on, and what kinds of content get them engaged.

And once you crunch the numbers, use that knowledge to im-
prove future campaigns. If open rates skyrocketed after lunch,
try sending more emails around 2 p.m. If you saw better click-
through rates on emails with images, apply more visuals to your
messages.

You can speed up the learning process with A/B testing—these

experiments go hand-in-hand with email marketing because it's
so easy to split any list into "A" and "B" groups.

Continue making small, iterative changes, testing them against

your current email campaigns, and applying your takeaways to
your other segments.

178
Related: If you aren't sure where to start with A/B testing, we
wrote a guide on how it works, and why it can help you perfect
your email marketing campaigns.

Conclusion
Each of your customers has a unique background, set of inter-
ests, and level of experience with your brand. So don't send all of
them the same emails—with list segmentation, it's easy to per-
sonalize your message based on the recipient's interests, demo-
graphic information, and purchase history.

With a strategy and the right tools, you can customize each
user's exposure to your email marketing flow, and maximize the
impact of every opened message. When you provide more rele-
vant content, everybody wins.

Next
Segmenting your email lists will help your emails reach the best
people, but it'll also give you a bit more work. To offset that—and
to make the rest of your email marketing strategy viable—you'll
want to automate as much of your email marketing as possible.

179
In the next chapter, we'll look at the ways you can use Zapier to
automatically add new subscribers to your lists, move existing
subscribers between lists, and more.

Written by Joe Stych

Image credits: Mailboxes photo courtesy of Beate Meier. Email filter

graphic created using icons from Edward Boatman, José Campos, Agus

Purwanto and Megan Sheehan of the Noun Project. Smile GIF courtesy Gi-

phy

180
 Chapter 5: Master Your Email
Marketing List

How to Automatically Import, Copy

and Remove Subscribers

There's a service that 92% of online adults use, with 61% of them
using it daily for an average of 13 hours weekly. This service has
click-through rates that are 6-times better than social networks,
and on average it sees a 94% return on investment.

181
The service is email, and those stats—compiled by email market-
ing giant Campaign Monitor—illustrate why you should be em-
ploying email in your marketing strategy.

But with no free time in your work week, how are you going to
implement effective email marketing tactics?

Zapier. That's how.

With Zapier, an app integration tool, you're able to connect your

email marketing software to the other apps you use—such as
online forms, eCommerce platforms, CRM apps—and begin to
rapidly grow your email list. You'll also be able to copy contacts
from one list to another, automatically remove contacts, and stay
off spam lists.

This post takes you through dozens of ways to use Zapier to help
you manage your email marketing like a pro.

In This Chapter:

• Add Subscribers to an Email List from Any App

182
 • Keep a List Updated with Automation

• Take Subscribers Beyond the Email List

Add Subscribers to an Email List from

Any App

183
 Rebecca Dekker uses Zapier to automatically add her
Gumroad customers to an AWeber list.

Adding contacts to your email lists doesn't sound difficult, but

imagine what you'd do if you had thousands of contacts to man-
ually add in one day? That's what happened to Rebecca Dekker,
a PhD-prepared nurse who runs a resource site about childbirth.
She made a PDF download that was so popular, it crashed her
server. So, she turned to email marketing software AWeber to let
her fans know that they could still get the PDF from Gumroad, a
tool to let visitors download a file. The campaign yielded nearly a
thousand downloads, but the success came with extra work, too.

"I was able to download a spreadsheet from Gumroad with

everyone's name and email address," says Dekker. "It was too
time-consuming for me to sit down and figure out who was al-
ready a subscriber and who wasn't, and then hand-enter the
new people into my AWeber account. It was kind of discouraging
that I had this huge surge of people submitting their email ad-
dresses, with no way of quickly and easily adding them to my
email list."

The next time she released an extensive article download,

Dekker was armed with a new weapon: Zapier. "I signed up for
the basic plan and integrated it between Gumroad and AWeber,"

184
Dekker says. "A large number of people either downloaded the
PDF for free, or for a fee, since it was 'pay what you want.' These
people were all automatically sent an invitation to join my email
list."

• Zapier Integration: Send Gumroad Customers to

AWeber

After her second campaign, Dekker turned a list of new email ad-
dresses into her next opportunity. "This task was really impor-
tant to me, because once somebody downloads or buys some-
thing from you, they are likely to do so again in the future. It's
critical that you capture their email info before they disappear
into cyberspace. And I'm too busy to do this by hand!"

Your site visitors, customers, conference attendees, and more

provide you the same contact with people that you can turn into
a lasting customer relationship—and you, also, likely are too
busy to do it all by hand. Here are some of the many ways you
can automatically add subscribers to your email lists like Dekker
did.

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 Send Form Entries to a List

BillCutterz has an email subscribe option as part of their

signup form.

Whether it's a contact form on your website, a "Let me know

when it's launched" form on a landing page for your new
projects, or a detailed survey to offer quotes to potential clients,
forms are your best ally in email marketing. All you have to do is

186
ask for people's email addresses, and then let Zapier copy their
address over to your email list.

That's how web design firm Opus Media keeps forms from
dozens of websites connected to an email newsletter app. "Our
client runs a network of over 60 websites, so having the ability to
tether Emma to each individual site (ala Zapier) is a huge benefit
as we don’t have to replicate files, or worry about coding con-
flicts," explains Jason Werner, principal of Opus Media. "Zapier
just works."

• Zap: Use Gravity Forms Entries to Create New Sub-

scribers in Emma

Just be sure to make sure your form respondents know they're

getting signed up for your emails, and use double opt-in to make
sure you don't run afoul of anti-spam laws. With that, your forms
are the perfect place to get new email addresses for your list.

Zaps:

• Create MailChimp subscribers from Typeform en-

tries

• Add Wufoo signups to an AWeber Mailing List

187
 • Add Subscribers to ActiveCampaign via Unbounce

Related: "The 14 Best Online Form Builders for Every Task."

Add Survey Respondent to a Subscriber List

One of the best ways to find out what your customers think
about your products, services, or just about anything else is with
a survey. They can be as long or short, as specific or generic as
you want—and they can give you the perfect opportunity to ask
for their opinions via email. In fact, you can use their answers to
put them on the perfect email list for their tastes, now that you
know so much about them.

As with a form, just be sure to use double opt-in or have a specif-

ic box on your form so your users will know they'll get emails
from you. Do that, and you'll be able to keep in touch with peo-
ple who fill out your surveys—and you may be able to get them
to fill out another survey in the future to further hone in on what
they think.

Zaps:

188
 • Create/update Infusionsoft contacts from new Sur-
veypal survey answers

• Add New SurveyMonkey Respondents to a

MailChimp Email List

• Add FluidSurvey Respondents to Constant Contact

Connect a Landing Page to a List

Planning on launching a new product? Don't wait until your

launch to gather new email contacts—instead, put together a
launch page with a teaser about your product and a signup form
to let people enter their email address to get updates.

Connect that to your email marketing app with Zapier, and you'll
be able to send updates as your product progresses. You could
even offer subscribers a special discount when your product
launches, and keep them updated about the latest features
you've added going forward.

Zaps:

• Add New Lander Form Responders to a MailChimp

Email List

189
 • Add Subscribers to ActiveCampaign via Unbounce

• Add KickoffLabs Contacts to Campaign Monitor

Share Links to Build Your List

Sniply allows you to collect email addresses when you

share a link.

It's easy to share links to interesting articles and content on Twit-

ter and Facebook, but a quickly shared link is typically not that

190
valuable to you. Your followers will see your post, click the link,
and that's it.

Or, you could share your links with an app like Sniply, which lets
you add a tiny form to any link that you share. You can share the
same great articles and videos that you would have shared oth-
erwise, but this time there will be a pop-over box where your fol-
lowers can enter their email address to get other great content
from you.

That's your chance to connect the Sniply form to your email mar-
keting app, so you can keep in touch more directly with your
emails.

Zaps:

• Add Subscribers to Aweber From Sniply Forms

• Add Subscribers to MailChimp From Sniply Forms

Add Event Attendees to a List

There's one thing that email can't beat: in-person interaction. But
your events and conferences can still be a great chance to put
email marketing to work. You can ask for attendee email ad-

191
dresses—either in a signup form, or using a dedicated app like
Eventbrite—and then send them email updates as the big day
approaches. And, of course, you can follow up after the event
with your regular emails.

Doing all that manually could take hours—or up to one day per
month, as Chris Rickett, manager of entrepreneurship services
for the City of Toronto, found out.

"Prior to using Constant Contact and Zapier, our team spent

close to one day a month sending out our newsletter to our con-
tacts and adding / removing contacts to the list," says Rickett.
"With Constant Constant Contact and Zapier, staff don't need to
worry about managing contacts and can easily send our news-
letter via Constant Contact in under a hour."

• Zap: Add New Eventbrite Attendees as a Constant

Contact contact

These Zaps—or the form Zaps above—can help you save that
much time with your own events.

Zaps:

• Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor

list

192
 • Add GoToWebinar Registrants to an Aweber Mailing
List

• Add Your GoToWebinar Attendees to Your Bench-

mark Email Newsletter

Upload Business Card Contacts to a List

In-person meetings aren't always planned in advance, and

they're not always in a group. It's those spontaneous meetings
where, over a handshake and a business card, you get to talk
about your product and perhaps get someone's interest that
otherwise would have never heard about your company. And
now, you can keep that connection going by adding them to your
email lists.

Typing in every email address from every business card could be

a daunting job, but there's an app for that: FullContact Card
Reader. Connect FullContact to Zapier and all that's left then is
the easy task of taking a picture of the card you want to add to
your mailing list.

Zaps:

193
 • Add New FullContact Business Cards to Constant
Contact

• Send New FullContact Contacts to a MailChimp List

• Add New ActiveCampaign Contacts from FullContact

Business Cards

Add Appointment Attendees to Lists

For the most personal marketing, you'll need to spend time on

the phone and in meetings with your potential customers. That
one meeting isn't enough, though; you'll want to keep the con-
nection going long after you've hung up the phone or left the
restaurant. Zapier can help.

"I would spend an hour or two per week mining my contacts that
had previously scheduled appointments with me," says Third
Coast Training founder Johnny Shelby, who schedules meetings
with each of his most promising leads. "Not any more, now that I
have Zapier to handle this function for me." This one automation
has freed him up over a hundred hours a year, giving him more
time to spend with his contacts.

194
Just schedule meetings with your contacts, and then let Zapier
add those contacts to your email app so you can keep the con-
versation going.

Zaps:

• Add Acuity Scheduling Appointments to VerticalRe-

sponse as Contacts

• Add new YouCanBook.Me bookings to a MailChimp

list

Pull Email or Support Inbox Contacts Into a List

Or perhaps, you've never actually met your new contact—not in

real life, anyhow. Instead, you've chatted a bit on Twitter, then
jumped over to email to continue the conversation. Or perhaps,
they emailed you first with a question about your product or for
support with a problem they've had. You already know they read
their emails, which makes them perfect people to add to your
email list.

You can connect your support system to your email list with Za-
pier, or have Zapier watch your inbox or a specific label for new

195
contacts. Then, you can add them to your email newsletter app
—being sure to select double opt-in so your newsletters don't
get marked as spam—and keep the conversation going automat-
ically.

Zaps:

• When I Label an Email in Gmail, Subscribe them to a

MailChimp Mailing List

• Add Google Contacts contacts to MailChimp Auto-

matically

• Add Your Customers From Desk to Your Benchmark

Email Newsletters

Parse Emails And Add Them to Lists

Sometimes the important contact info in an email's From line

isn't the important part of the email. If you receive notification
emails from your apps, or have a contact form that sends an
email to you with info about the person who wanted to get in
touch, it's the email address in the email's body that really mat-
ters. For that, you'll want an email parser.

196
Zapier offers a free Email Parser that can read the email mes-
sages you send it, copy specific data from them, and then use it
to integrate with your other apps. You'll just have to set your
email app to forward those notification or contact emails to the
Email Parser, then teach the parser which parts of the email
messages are important, and then connect it to your email news-
letter with Zapier. That way, you can add subscribers to your lists
even if their email address is buried in a message.

Zaps:

• Parse Emails into Drip for Easy Drip Campaigns

• Send Emails from the Email Parser to Campaign

Monitor

• Create New Mailchimp Subscriber from Mailparser

Processed Email

Turn New Sales into New Contacts

Whenever you sell stuff online, you have the perfect opportunity
to stay in touch via email. It's likely your payment processor al-
ready asks for email addresses during checkout, so all you have

197
to do is have Zapier send your customer's info to your email list.
Add some drip emails for new contacts in your email app, and
you'll have an automated way to welcome new customers and
help them get started with your products.

Stacey Berriman at Why Weight Solutions uses Zapier's PayPal in-

tegration to give them an easy way to email their eBay cus-
tomers through their email marketing app, rather than emailing
each directly in eBay's interface. Without Zapier's automation,
says Stacey, "it would take many hours to process this simple
task for every customer every day."

• Zap: Create New GetResponse Contacts from PayPal

Sales

You can do the same with your own PayPal, Stripe, Recurly or
other payment system integrations, using these or your own
Zaps.

Zaps:

• Automatically Subscribe PayPal Customers to a

MailChimp List

• Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

198
 • Send an email to Stripe customers with invalid cred-
it cards via Mandrill

Connect Your eCommerce Platform to Your List

Or, if you're using an eCommerce system—including Shopify,

WooCommerce, Magento, Gumroad and more—you can have it
send your new customers directly to your email newsletter with-
out having to add each individual purchase.

The Think On! Productions team does something similar with

their Gumroad to AWeber integration, which adds new cus-
tomers to their email list automatically. "I have had a couple cus-
tomers that thanked me for the ease of adding them to our up-
date list," says Jarrad Markel. "They really appreciated the fact
that they did not have to enter the same information more than
once."

These Zaps or your own integrations with your payment or shop-

ping cart platform can do the same for your customers.

Zaps:

• Create Mad Mimi Customers from Gumroad Sales

199
 • Add New Shopify Customers to ActiveCampaign

• Add New Customers from Magento to Campaign

Monitor

Tip: Add an email signup form to your product pages to let people
sign up for email updates about products. That way, even if they
don't buy anything today, they'll still start getting your email up-
dates.

Copy CRM Contacts Into a List

Or, perhaps your sales process is more involved. When you're

selling services or customized products, or are dealing with en-
terprise-sized customers, then your sales aren't as simple as hav-
ing your customer click a "checkout" button. Instead, you'll need
to lead your customers along a process, weed out the people
who aren't really interested, and focus your marketing on the
leads that are most likely to buy.

Any of these steps offer a perfect spot to start your email mar-
keting. You could add new leads to your email newsletters, or
only start sending messages once a prospect is close to closing
the deal. Or, you could wait until you've sent an invoice, and then

200
add your new client to your email list. Either way, Zapier can au-
tomate the process so you can focus on your sales.

Zaps:

• Send Highrise Contacts to Campaign Monitor

• Send Pipedrive Contacts to Mailchimp Subscribers

• Add Base CRM Contacts to MailChimp Automatically

Related: "The Ultimate Guide to CRM Automation"

Add Invoice Recipients to Your Lists

You've finally closed a deal, and have sent an invoice to your cus-
tomer. Don't let the conversation there. Just have Zapier add
your new customer to your email newsletter whenever you gen-
erate a new invoice.

You can add them to a new list specifically for your customers
where you send onboarding info, or you can just add them to
your standard list where you share company news. Either way,
you'll keep the connection going long after their payment's
cleared.

201
Zaps:

• Save New Freshbooks Clients to a MailChimp Client

List

• Add QuickBooks Contacts to Campaign Monitor

Keep a List Updated with Automation

Now that new contacts are automatically being added to your
email lists, you might soon find that your subscribers list be-
comes overwhelming. With everyone subscribed to the same
email newsletter, and with scant details about each one, you'll be
broadcasting your emails but will have little insight about the
people you're talking to.

Automation can help here, too. Whenever you're creating a new

Zapier integration to add contacts to your email lists, be sure to
take advantage of all the contact fields, so you'll have as much
info about your subscribers as possible. Then, here are some
other ways to keep your email lists up-to-date.

202
Add Contacts to the Best List

No two contacts are alike, and the same email list might not be
the best for each of them. All you need is a system to see what
your new contacts are interested in, and then add them to the
appropriate email list. That way, everyone will get emails that tar-
get their interests, and will be far more likely to open the emails.

If you're using forms, you could have different forms for different
interests, and send each to their own email newsletter. Same for
sales: have a list for each product category, and add customers
to the appropriate lists based on what they've purchased.

For everyone else, you'll need something smarter: a marketing

automation app. These apps will watch customers on your web-
sites, see what they're interested in, and tag them appropriately.
You can then send those contacts to the correct email list confi-
dently based on their browsing habits.

203
 

With this much info about each contact, you should be

able to add them to the right list

ORBTR founder Erik Wolf finds this type of targeting especially

crucial for some businesses. "We have a customer who runs a
technology conference," explained Erik. "When someone comes
to their website or opts in to some general marketing list, that in-
dividual could be a potential attendee, sponsor, vendor, or
speaker and our customer may not know what bucket that per-
son belongs in straight away."

"Each of those categories requires a different type of messag-

ing," Eric continues. "If they see an individual that is looking at all

204
the pages in their sponsorship section, that's a cue that they
should be using to trigger a sponsorship-related email message."

So think through your own customer acquisition flow, and then

use your marketing automation tool to direct people to the cor-
rect list based on what they've browsed on your site—and more.

Zaps:

• Add a new Intercom user to AWeber

• Add Jumplead Leads to Campaign Monitor Email

Lists

Tip: If you're not yet using a marketing automation tool, be sure to

check out our roundup of the best options.

Know Where Contacts Come From

One contact came from your form, while another bought a prod-
uct, and yet another was added from a business card. They're
each different—and yet, if you only add their names and emails
to your newsletter app, they'll all seem the same.

So don't just do the basics when setting up your automations.

Most email newsletter apps with Zapier integrations let you add

205
notes about a customer, tag them, or put them into a group. Use
those features to know where your contacts come from, and to
store any other info about them that you can.

That's marketing consultant Claire Pelletreau's trick to gauging

how many new contacts come from her ad spends—and how
much they've spent on her site.

"Facebook's conversion tracking is limited to a short period of

time, which makes it difficult to track the ROI of list building cam-
paigns I ran months ago when people are converting now," ex-
plains Clarie. "But since Zapier 'tags' my main subscribers list
with any products people have bought as well as their opt-in
source, I can see which of my customers came from that invest-
ment in paid traffic. It makes decision-making about ad spend
extremely simple, by automatically segmenting my subscribers
when they buy something something from me with Gumroad."

You can accomplish similar things with your email newsletter

contacts. All it'll take is a bit of time to tweak your Zaps that bring
in new contacts, and make sure they're adding as much info as
possible to your contacts. Then, connect your sales platform and
have it update your contacts when they purchase your product,
and you'll have a similarly detailed view of your marketing ef-
forts.

206
Zaps:

• Send Gumroad Customers to AWeber

• Send Gumroad Customers to Campaign Monitor

Move or Remove Subscribers from Lists

You'd like to be able to send your emails to as many people as

possible; that's the whole reason you're trying to add subscribers
automatically. And yet, sometimes it's best to stop sending
emails to a subscriber. Maybe they never open your emails, or
perhaps your list is just aimed at customers and they've never
purchased anything.

In that case, it's time to either remove them from your lists en-
tirely, or just move them to a new list and then remove them
from the old list—and it's easy to do that with Zapier. Most of
your Zaps likely connect two different apps together, but you can
actually use Zapier to automate actions inside of individual apps,
which is the perfect way to keep your email lists in order. ORBTR
founder Erik Wolf lists this as one of his favorite Zapier features.

207
"One of my favorite ways to use the MailChimp/Zapier integra-
tion is to actually create zaps that integrate MailChimp with it-
self," says Erik. "For example, I will often create Zaps that will re-
move a subscriber from list X if they are added to list Y."

Marketer Claire Pells uses the same feature to make sure people
are only subscribe to one of her lists at a time. "Zapier also keeps
my monthly payment to Mailchimp low because I can automati-
cally delete subscribers from the different lists once they're
moved to my main subscriber list," Claire explains. "Each sub-
scriber is only counted one time in Mailchimp's book (which is
important when you have a number of lists and fast growth)."

Be sure to experiment with your own email marketing app's Za-

pier integrations, and see what internal actions you can auto-
mate. It'll keep your lists orderly, save you money, and make sure
your contacts aren't bombarded with emails from all of your
lists.

Zaps:

• Copy MailChimp subscriber to new list

• Copy AWeber Subscribers to a New List

• Copy ActiveCampaign Subscribers to a New List

208
 —

Take Subscribers Beyond the Email

List
Email marketing is great, but it isn't everything. If your only mar-
keting efforts are sending emails, you'll miss out on a lot of other
opportunities to interact with your fans, showcase your prod-
ucts, and help out your best customers.

Here are some great ways to move your contacts from your
email app to the other tools you use, so you can keep your ef-
forts marketing running beyond the inbox.

Invite to Events

Whether you're scheduling a local usergroup meeting, planning a

conference with leaders from your industry, or just running a
Google Hangout to help people understand how to use your
product, events are one of the best marketing tools. They give
you the chance to talk directly to users, while letting you broad-
cast your message to as many people as are at your event.

209
You may have added new email subscribers from previous
events, so why not market your next event directly to your other
email subscribers? Sharing each meeting individually from a list
of contacts would take forever, but your email newsletter is the
perfect place to spread the word quickly.

That's how the Christopher Harring, director at the office of grad-

uate admission at Maryland Institute College of Art, streamlined
the online webinars his team runs each month. "Before our Zaps
were running, we would need to manually export email address-
es from our inquiry forms, import them into Emma and then dis-
tribute invitations," says Harring. "That lead to huge delays, and
often we wouldn't be able to invite everyone before the event
took place."

Zapier's automation changed the game. "Now we can Zap that

data straight from the form into Emma and get that invitation
out immediately," Christopher continues. "Our online event at-
tendance grew overnight as a result."

Zaps:

• Use Gravity Forms Entries to Create New Sub-

scribers in Emma

210
 • Send Eventbrite attendees to a Campaign Monitor
list

• Add Your GoToWebinar Attendees to Your Bench-

mark Email Newsletter

Add Contacts to Your CRM

For marketing that takes a personal touch, you'll want a better

place to keep track of your contacts than your email newsletter
lists. But there's no reason to manually add people to your CRM:
Zapier can do that for you automatically.

That integration helped the Sagsa team follow up with their con-
tacts after attending an exhibition. "Last October, we participat-
ed in an important exhibition and received more than 200 visits
from potential customers," says Andrea Perini, Sagsa's sales and
marketing manager. "Back at home, we inserted all the contacts
in our Nutshell database, and immediately sent a "Thanks for vis-
iting email" to everyone with Mailup."

• Zap: Add New Nutshell CRM Contacts as Mailup Re-

cipients

211
"All the contacts had been immediately updated, allowing us to
provide an immediate answer without distracting people from
their work," continues Andrea. "A few of them have replied, con-
gratulating us for the fast and quick response!"

Whether you're adding customers to your CRM first, or to your

email newsletter first, the same principal applies. Just have Zapi-
er add each contact to both apps, and you'll be able to continue
your automated and personalized marketing at the same time.

Zaps:

• Create new Pipedrive Deals from Mailchimp sub-

scribers

• Send Capsule CRM contacts to Campaign Monitor

• Create Contactually Contacts From AWeber Sub-

scribers

Invite Contacts to a Meeting

If you have a small email list—perhaps aimed at one particular

niche, with only a dozen new subscribers a month or so—you
might want to take your marketing beyond the inbox and reach

212
out to your readers in person. One-on-one meetings are a great
time to close the sale or ensure new users are taking full advan-
tage of your products, and Zapier can schedule those meetings
for you.

Just create a Zap that adds a new appointment—perhaps at

some time in the future—with each new contact on your lists,
and you'll be able to focus on your meetings and not worry
about setting them up.

Zaps:

• Create Google Calendar Events With Your

MailChimp Contacts

• Make Appointments With Your Campaign Monitor

Contacts

Organize Contacts in a Spreadsheet

Sometimes it's not about interacting with your contacts more.

What's needed most is a way to analyze your marketing efforts,
organize your contacts, and see where everyone came from. For

213
that, the most abused business app is still one of the best: a
spreadsheet.

"It's a helpful way of quickly seeing new signups alongside help-

ful custom field data like location, postal code, Google Analytics
UTM variables, and my own custom tracking (see the last column
in the spreadsheet attached)," says content marketer Ronnie Ni-
jmeh about his own contact spreadsheet. "This lets me us the
power of filtering and sorting in a spreadsheet that I can't easily
do in AWeber."

He uses his spreadsheet both as a way to analyze his marketing

efforts and contacts, and as a way to connect his newsletter sub-
scribers to other apps in his workflows. "One Zap moved the cus-
tomer from AWeber to a spreadsheet and another moved the
spreadsheet to GoToWebinar—and my customer service staff
easily kept track by looking at the spreadsheet," Ronnie explains.

• Zap: Add new AWeber subscribers to a Google

Sheets spreadsheet

Add your own contacts to a spreadsheet, with rows for any data
you'd like to track, and you'll find similar ways to optimize your
workflow with the world's most flexible app.

214
Zaps:

• Add New ActiveCampaign Subscribers to a Google

Docs Spreadsheet

• Add New Mad Mimi Subscribers to a Google Docs

Spreadsheet

• Automatically Add New Constant Contact Contacts

to a Google Spreadsheet

Get Notified When Your List Gets New Sub-

scribers

Getting a new subscriber is a big deal—at least when you're first

first starting out your email marketing efforts. Instead of check-
ing your email list everyday to see who's signed up, you can have
Zapier send you a notification in your favorite app. Connect it to
SMS or a notifications app like Pushbullet to be the first to know
when anyone signs up, or send the notifications a team chat app
like Slack to let your entire team know.

Or, you could use filters on your Zaps to have Zapier notify you
only when specific people sign up. That way, you can watch for

215
VIPs, premium customers, or anyone else you're hoping will
signup for your emails.

Zaps:

• Get an SMS Message When You Get a New Mad

Mimi Subscriber

• Get a Pushbullet Notification When You Get a New

Emma Subscriber

• Notify Your Team in Slack When You Get New Cam-

paign Monitor Subscribers

Add Contacts to Your LinkedIn Network

Those VIPs that have just signed up for your email newsletter are
people you should keep in touch with beyond emails. They might
be a valuable connection in the future, or they might just keep
up with the posts and content that you share on LinkedIn.

All you have to do is let Zapier send each of your new sub-
scribers a LinkedIn invite, and you'll turn a subscription into a
connection. You can even use the same filters to only send an in-

216
vitation to new subscribers, say, from specific companies to build
your network and market your products more directly.

• Zap: Invite Your Aweber Subscribers to LinkedIn

Publish Your Email Newsletter

For all of the good things about email, it's still not the only place
to reach your contacts. There's people who only check Twitter for
news, or rely on LinkedIn InMail for their most important mes-
sages, and they'll fall through the cracks with your marketing if
you're focused only on email.

You might not have time to make a blog post after spending time
on your email newsletters, but that's ok. Most email newsletter
apps let you share your newsletter with a link, and Zapier can
then share that link with your social networks. That way, your
message will get shared with everyone, and you'll only have to
focus on writing amazing emails.

Zaps:

• Share Your MailChimp Newsletter on LinkedIn Auto-

matically

217
 • Share Your ActiveCampaign Campaigns on Twitter

• Share Your MailChimp Campaigns on Twitter

Backup Your Contacts

Disaster strikes, your favorite email newsletter app dies, and

your meticulously crafted contact lists are gone forever. Unlikely,
but there's no reason to risk it. Plus, it's always nice to have an-
other copy of your contacts, whether for quick reference or to
easily be able to import them into another app in the future.

The good thing is, backing up your contacts is easy. Just have Za-
pier copy each new contact in your email lists to your favorite
storage option: a Dropbox text file, Evernote note, or have them
appended in a contacts spreadsheet for the most flexibility. Or, if
you want an easy way to contact everyone on your lists, you
could have them added to your address book automatically. Just
be warned: your address book might get overwhelmed.

Zaps:

• Add New MailChimp Subscribers to an Evernote

Note

218
 • Update a Text File in Dropbox with New Campaign
Monitor Subscribers

• Add New ActiveCampaign Subscribers to a Google

Docs Spreadsheet

Next
You've learned about the best email newsletter apps, found ways
to grow your newsletter lists, automate your work, and make
sure your emails stay out of the spam box. But email newsletters
are far from the only way email marketing messages. In the next
chapter, we'll look at what drip emails are, and help you decide
which types of drip emails are right for your business—and then,
we'll help you pick the perfect app to send drip messages as well.

Written by Matthew Guay, with contribution from Nat Eliason and Marissa

Daily

Image credits: Bulk Mail photo courtesy Nate Grigg.

219
 Chapter 6: What is Drip Mar-
keting?

The Complete Guide to Drip Cam-

paigns, Lifecycle Emails and More

Email newsletters are a great way to send out your team's latest
announcements, but they have a major problem: new sub-

220
scribers only see new emails, and never get the first emails you’d
sent out to your list. All they’ll see is the stuff you send after they
sign up.

Often called drip campaigns but known by many other names—

drip marketing, automated email campaign, lifecycle emails, au-
toresponders and marketing automation—the concept is the
same: they’re a set of marketing emails that will be sent out au-
tomatically on a schedule. Perhaps one email will go out as soon
as someone signs up, another will go out 3 days later, with one
more going out the next weekend. Or, the emails can be varied
based on triggers, or actions the person has performed like sign-
ing up for your service or making a purchase, which is why
they're also sometimes called behavioral emails.

Setting up drip email campaigns might seem daunting, so in this

chapter we've broken down what drip campaigns are, when
they’re effective, and how you can use them to cultivate a cus-
tomer from a disengaged user. Then, in the next chapters we'll
dive into the apps and tools you need to make your drip cam-
paigns successful. Let's get started.

Did You Know? Drip campaigns aren’t limited to email—the term

also applies to direct mail and phone-based marketing, too. But in

221
this primer, we're focusing on email, since it's efficient and cost-ef-
fective.

In This Chapter:

• What is a Drip Campaign?

• When Should You Use a Drip Campaign?

• How to Set Up a Drip Campaign

• How to Measure Drip Marketing Results

• Apps to Run Drip Campaigns

222
 What is a Drip Campaign?

Marketing automation company Pardot shows an over-

view of a drip campaign. See the full inforgraphic.

Drip campaigns, as mentioned above, are automated sets of

emails that go out based on specific timelines or user actions.
They enable you to stay in touch with groups of people based on
events like when a user signs up for an account or how often
that user visits your site. Each time a drip email is sent out, it
comes from a queue of already-written emails—there's no need

223
to manually write and send each one. They can even be person-
alized with your contacts' name, company info, and more.

Put simply, drip marketing is all about giving people the right in-
formation at the right time. If someone just subscribed to your
blog newsletter, for example, a drip campaign could send a wel-
come email right away, and two days later, an email that shows
off some of your most-read content. Or if a potential customer
has been hovering around your "premium upgrade" page for a
few weeks but hasn’t yet pulled the trigger, a drip campaign
could send them an email with five reasons to purchase the pre-
mium plan.

The beauty of drip emails is that this all happens automatically

based on triggers and user segments that you define.

But do drip campaigns really work? Yup: According to research

collected by the team behind the email-marketing suite Emma,
relevant targeted emails produce 18-times more revenue than
globally-broadcasted ones. Perhaps that's not so surprising,
since they also found that people who read your drip emails are
far more likely to click the links in them, with a 119% increase in
click rate from drip emails.

That’s huge, especially considering that you can reuse content,

and everything is sent out automatically. You can have specific

224
drip campaigns for educating users, rewarding your best cus-
tomers, helping people who hit a certain page on your site, and
more. Most importantly, though, is that you can pin-point user
groups with drip emails, segmenting your email list, and reaching
the right people when they're ready to buy. As email marketing
tool Sendloop points out on their blog, you can segment your list
based on demographics, purchase history, and which emails that
user has opened in the past, leading to more conversions and
fewer unsubscribes.

Like any good thing, you don’t want to overdo it. Too many drip
emails will only annoy your customers. But a thoughtful set of
drip emails can be the perfect way to remind people to buy your
product, teach them how to use your tool once they’ve pur-
chased it, and get new subscribers up-to-speed on your email
newsletter. And the more specific your segments, the more likely
you are to get interaction and interest from your subscribers—
we’ll do a deeper dive into building segments later in the post.

Did You Know? Drip marketing gets its name from irrigation—
you're slowly developing a relationship with your user by nurtur-
ing them with info, like a farmer would do with a sapling. I could
sit here all day and write farming metaphors for marketing, but
for your sake, I won’t.

225
When Should You Use a Drip Cam-
paign?
"Drip marketing" is a blanket term that covers several different
marketing strategies. But the goal remains the same: keep users
engaged with your product.

Let's look at 10 use cases where setting up an automated drip

campaign could help you get relevant information to targeted
readers, and convert them into customers. You might want to try
a few of them with your users, or perhaps they'll spark your
imagination for other ways you could use drip campaigns for
your product or service.

226
 Nurturing Leads

Zapier sends new users a nurturing drip email to help

them brainstorm automation ideas.

227
Leads—a term you may remember from our Introduction to
CRM Apps—are prospective customers, people who you think
just might buy your product in the near future. They just might
need a bit of hand-holding, or nurturing—sticking with them un-
til they’re ready to purchase your product. Lead Nurturing can
take many forms, like educating users on your service, helping
them use certain features, or offering them free trials.

The folks behind marketing automation app Drip say that when
brands nurture leads, they get 50% more sale-ready customers;
Emma noted that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases.

You can't personally hand-hold every user through discovering

and purchasing your product, but drip emails can do that work
for you. You can use welcoming, onboarding, engagement, or
abandoned shopping cart drips—along with other drip email
campaign ideas which we'll look at below—to nurture your leads
and get them ready to turn into paid customers.

228
 Welcoming

Meditation app Headspace welcomes new users with a

playful drip email and a brief explanation about what
they offer. See full email.

You've done a great job at marketing, and have attracted a ton of

new people to sign up for a trial or request info about your prod-

229
ucts. But how are these new users going to learn about your
product and why it's so outstanding?

That's where welcome emails shine—they act as an immediate

intro to some of your company’s top content, and as a primer on
using your product.

If someone subscribes to your newsletter, you could use a wel-

come drip to automatically send that user some of your most-
shared blog posts. Or, if you get a new trial-level signup for your
service, try a drip featuring case studies on how other customers
are using your product.

At the very least, welcome emails are a nice way to say, "Hey
there, nice to meet you!"

The stats show that users actually expect—and like—welcome

emails when they sign up for a new service or newsletter. Exper-
ian's white paper on welcome emails shows that these autore-
sponders enjoy a 58.7% open rate on average, while normal
emails sit around 14.6%. When that welcome email is sent in-
stantaneously (i.e. right after the user signs up), the open rate
jumps to 88.3%. So craft a great welcome drip campaign, and
you'll get the amazing engagement welcome emails recieve and
then keep the momentum going with followup messages.

230
 Onboarding

Cloud storage app Box employs drip campaigns to teach

people how to use their product. See full email.

Pageviews and trial users are nice, but eventually you need your
users to sign up or purchase something from you. That's where
an onboarding drip strategy would come in: in conjunction with
welcome scenarios or scheduled newsletters, which introduce
the customer to your brand and your values, onboarding emails

231
offer targeted "sells"—or small goals in getting them using and
paying for your product—to that customer.

These "sells" could be downloading your company's mobile app,

signing up for a webinar, or purchasing a premium subscription.
Chris Hexton, the CEO and co-founder of email marketing app
Vero, shared some helpful advice on Unbounce's blog about get-
ting your users to that activation stage:

By using automated emails, you can setup a system that

helps to drive customers toward activation in your prod-
uct.

The first step here is to identify what counts as activa-

tion. In Vero’s case it's the sending of a customer's first
live behavioural email, in Unbounce's cases it's the cre-
ation of their first landing page….What you really want
to do here is encourage new, inactive users to take this
activation step as soon as possible.

For another example, Hexton points to Dropbox's effective drip

campaign that targets users who haven’t downloaded the desk-
top app, and prompts them to install. Vero also breaks down
how Trunk Club uses automated (but personalized) emails to

232
 reach out to unengaged trial users and put the premium service
at top of their mind.

Abandoned Shopping Carts

233
 Online clothing retailer Gilt delivers automated drip
emails to users who put an item in their cart, but did not
buy it. See full email.

You crafted enticing newsletters, offered flash sales, and finally

coaxed your user into clicking that gilded "add to cart" button.
Then: your hard-earned sale vanishes. Huh?

Actually, ditching a fully loaded shopping cart is more common

than you think. Mark Macdonald, the content manager at eCom-
merce empire Shopify pointed out that around 67.45% of shop-
ping carts are abandoned (check out that link for a great break-
down of how that affects your bottom line, too).

But with an automated drip campaign, you can re-engage those

waivering customers and lead them back to the "buy" button.
Whenever users leave an unpurchased product in their cart, use
a drip to follow up and confirm that it’s still available. You don't
even need to be selling physical products for this to work. With
an app, for example, use a specific sales page—perhaps one that
breaks down the benefits of your pro-level plan compared to the
basic one— as a trigger, and send some follow-up info to anyone
who visits that page but doesn’t convert.

234
HubSpot—an inbound marketing suite that offers everything
from email automation to analytics—featured research on its
blog showing that when cart-abandoning users do return to
make a purchase, 72% of them do so within 24 hours of aban-
doning the product—that’s likely due to strong automated
prompts from the seller, designed to pull the customer back in.
So perhaps wait a bit after the potential customer visits the page,
then send a drip at a time when they're likely to see the email
and act on it—maybe at lunch time, or in the early evening.

Your drip emails then have a pretty good chance of closing the
sale. According to SaleCycle, abandoned cart emails average a
46.1% open rate, a 13.3% click rate, and $5.64 per email in extra
revenue.

Need inspiration? Shopify also broke down 13 well-designed aban-

doned cart emails.

235
 Recommendations

236
 Music streaming service Spotify suggests new music
based on your listening history. See full email.

"You might also like" isn't just for Netflix bingeing—recommen-

dation engines are a cornerstone of nearly every giant online re-
tailer (ahem, Amazon). The more a company knows about you
and your buying habits, the better they can predict what you will
and won't like. With that info, they can send you targeted drip
emails that contain products or coupons specific to your pur-
chasing tendencies.

For example, if you buy a Keurig coffee brewer online, that retail-
er might send you a coupon for 20-count K-cup packs or other
Keurig accessories, because they already know you own the
brewer. They could even recommend your favorite K-cup flavor
just about when they think you'll run out of it, making a sale al-
most guaranteed.

The same goes for an entertainment app like Spotify—its team

knows what music you listen to, and they can create targeted
drip campaigns that email you whenever a frequented artist re-
leases a new single, or when a new band in your favorite genre
signs on with Spotify. Airbnb goes even further. Vero dissected
Airbnb's automated emails that go out based on your browsing
habits, and found that when Airbnb knows more about where

237
you want to travel, its emails get more personal, and in turn
more useful.

You don’t need to be a billion-dollar business to put that knowl-

edge into action, though. Try targeting user segments with drips
based on which aspects of your service they use most, or what
kinds of content they’re most interested in.


It's easy to see why Amazon and others put so much work into
their recommendations emails, especially when you look at the
potential returns. David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance—which
provides a recommendation engine infrastructure for some of
the nation’s top online retailers—said that his software can in-
crease revenue by 3-15%.

238
Renewals

239
 

240
 Cook's Illustrated alerts users before they automatically
renew a year-long subscription.

Whether your user extended their subscription or it's about to

run out, you can leverage drip campaigns to engage customers
during the renewal process.

For automatic renewals, try using an autoresponder that sends

users an alert that their account is about to be charged. You can
load these notification emails with contact information for your
customer care team, or links to pages where users can update
their billing or shipping information. If your subscriptions don't
autorenew, craft your drip campaign with a clear call to action,
prompting users to re-up with your service. And for the users
that do renew, be sure to send them a drip thanking them for
staying with your service and perhaps prompt them to share
your product with their friends.

241
 Confirmations

242
 Fairfield uses drip campaigns to confirm user reserva-
tions, and show off some of the hotel amenities. See full
email.

You've closed the sale, or better yet, convinced a user to stick

with your product for another year with a renewed subscription.
But your drip email work isn't done. You can also use a drip cam-
paign to confirm your user's purchase renewal—just set up a
"thank you" autoresponder that goes out right after they hit the
"purchase" button. In that confirmation drip, you could include
some links to your product's newest features to re-engage them
with your brand.

It should be a no-brainer to send your users an email receipt af-

ter they make a purchase, but you can also leverage that com-
munication with related products and upsells. And with confir-
mations for things like plane tickets and hotel rooms, send a
quick email a day before the event to put any important confir-
mation codes at the top of the user's inbox. Then, perhaps, that
same drip can send another email a few days later, asking them
to review your product or service and offer a coupon for future
purchases.

243
 Engagement

RunKeeper sends users who have not logged a workout

in a while a re-engagement drip email. See full email.

The math here is pretty simple: the more often someone en-
gages with your site, the more likely they are to convert into a
paying customer. Engagement emails are a type of drip cam-
paign that invite the recipient to return to your site and look

244
around, triggered either by some on-site activity or a general lack
of activity.

Social sites are a great example of how to use activity-based trig-

gers. If someone on Twitter mentions you in a tweet, Twitter can
send you an alert-style email, encouraging you to visit Twitter
and respond. Messages like this can be a big boon for engage-
ment. Vero's Hexton highlighted LinkedIn's use of autorespon-
ders for skill endorsements in an article on Marketing Land, in
which he argued that these drips are effective because they give
you a warm, fuzzy feeling and encourage you to go endorse
someone else.

But it doesn't have to be just happy feelings; guilt can work as

well. If you don’t log an activity in fitness app RunKeeper for a
while, they’ll send an automated “We miss you!” email. It's a sub-
tle way to remind you that you should work out, combined with a
touch of nostalgia for the app they hope you'll use while exercis-
ing.

If you're still seeing less-than-ideal engagement with your email

marketing efforts, you might need to tweak your strategy and ex-
periment. Sendloop suggests offering incentives, changing up
your schedule, and rewriting your call to action.

245
Courses

People like to know what they're getting with emails. So if you

can offer a planned set of drips—say a six-week course on how
to double your blog traffic—subscribers won't just flow in, they'll
interact with the content at an incredible rate. Send stuff at ran-
dom, and they may just ignore it.

Setting up a drip campaign that acts more like a multi-part crash

course is simple, especially if you’re repackaging old content, and
it provides a steady flow of traffic from a super-engaged audi-
ence. Plus, once the last email goes out and the user knows your
product from front to back, you can close the deal on a premi-
um-level subscription.

When you produce great content and people actually anticipate

seeing it in their inbox, you have a major win. The numbers back
that theory up, too: Vero says that course emails—or emails that
are part of a series—have an open rate 80% higher than regular
emails, and a 300% higher clickthrough rate to boot.

246
Unsubscribes

When we're talking about automated emails, there are opportu-

nities everywhere—even when a user is about to slip away
through the "unsubscribe" button. Instead of cursing that email
address and blacklisting the IP address from your site, use an au-
toresponder to take one last shot at pulling the user in.

Along with a little "we're sorry to see you go!" message, you can
use your automated drip campaign to push other channels like
Facebook or Twitter. Remember: Users aren’t necessarily unsub-
scribing because they hate your brand—they might just prefer to
interact with you in a different way.

There are many marketing-savvy brands out there that are

putting this tactic to use, and Vision6 put together a roundup of
some of the best unsubscribe emails. My favorite comes from
Bonobos, which directly asks the user if they were sending too
many emails, and offers to decrease its communications to once
a week or month.

247
How to Set Up a Drip Campaign
Now that we've studied some of the best ways to use drip cam-
paigns to convert more sales and engage your customers, how
do you actually map out a successful automated drip campaign?

Turns out, it's actually not that hard. Here are five steps that you
could use as the basis for building our your drip emails, including
examples of how to target your audience, write your emails,
tweak for best results and more.

Just to note: It’s never too late to get started with a drip-based
strategy. But make sure you aren’t sending current users a bunch
of emails that they didn’t sign up for—if they don’t understand
why they're getting an email, they could unsubscribe or mark your
emails as spam.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Drip campaigns are all about breaking your subscriber list into
subsections, and targeting information to niches of customers.
So the most important piece here is determining which triggers
and groups you're going to use for your drip campaign strategy.

248
Drips are usually based on one of two types of triggers: either an
action in your app or on your site, or an added piece of user de-
mographic information.

Action Examples

• A user subscribes to your company newsletter, and

you send them a welcome email via your drip cam-
paign

• A user makes a purchase, and you automatically

send them a receipt with shipping information (plus
a few upsells)

• A user downloads the trial version of your app, and

you send them a series of six instructional emails
over the course of the trial, which offer helpful tips
on making the most of your app

Demographic Examples

• A user signed up for your service a week ago, but

hasn't returned since, so you send them an auto-
mated email asking if they need any help

249
 • A user started building something with your app,
but stopped halfway through the process, so you
send them a drip that offers a walkthrough and
some other tips

• Last year around the holidays, a user bought prod-

ucts from a specific category of your shop, so you
send them a list of new items in that category in
early December (plus a coupon code)

In their email marketing cheat-sheet, Vero highlights user behav-

ior tracking as a great way to personalize your drip campaigns
and hit customers with the information that they need at the
right time.

By tracking behaviour you can build up a 'profile' on

each individual user that allows you to better serve their
needs. Are they a loyal customer? Do they shop once a
year? Are they looking for a bargain or a fan of a particu-
lar brand in your store? Do they login weekly or rarely?

Figure out the target audience and the problem that

you're solving for them. Your drip campaign needs to be
targeted to a specific behavior for it to be effective.

250
Try targeting audience segments based on use characteristics
like visit frequency, likelihood of clicking on certain content sub-
jects in a newsletter, how long ago they signed up, how often
they visit your premium services page, or how long they’ve been
paying customers.

Email marketing app Drip also points out that great lead nurtur-
ing campaigns use evolving profiles and segments: ask your
users for more data, track how they interact with your current
drip campaigns, and adjust or create new segments using those
figures.

2. Craft Your Message

Now that you know whom you're targeting, you need to generate
a message that's helpful and grabs their attention. What do you
want the user to do? Or, what do you want the user to learn?

Based on your answer, write copy that's clear, actionable, and at-
tractive. Maintain the voice that you've built for you brand, but
make sure that your message is clear. Over at Vero, content edi-
tor Jimmy Daly broke down a promotional email campaign from

251
Evernote, highlighting the importance of explaining benefits, us-
ing action verbs, and making the next steps unmissable.

Tip: At this point, don't get hung up on design—heck, you could

start by sending plain text emails. But if you're looking for ways to
optimize your email layout for conversions, check out this post
from Emma, which outlines some great user interface considera-
tions that have increased the effectiveness of their drip cam-
paigns.

3. Plan Out Your Campaign

Next you need to figure out the logistics of your drip campaign—
what the workflow looks like from first contact to sale to support.
This is also when you set the goals of your campaign, make sure
that the copy in each email flows together with the others, and
decide how you're going to measure your results.

To do this, think about these questions:

How many emails am I going to send, when, and in what or-

der?

Whether you're onboarding a new customer or keeping a user

engaged, the sequence of your sends plays a crucial role in the

252
success of each campaign. Consider how much information your
target user needs, when he or she might need it, and why. Over
on his blog, Jason Delodovici wrote a great post about a drip
campaign that he spearheaded, noting the order he chose for
each email—from signup to sale—and why.

Do my triggers line up with my message?

Nothing's worse than getting an emailed coupon for something

you bought last week, or an over-the-top sales pitch seconds af-
ter signing up on a site. Make sure that your triggers are all laid
out (based on the list segments in step 1), and that each email in
your campaign is directly related to a trigger. Users should al-
ways understand why they're getting an email.

How am I going to measure success?

Hopefully at this point you know why you’re setting up a complex

drip campaign—maybe it's for customer acquisition, engage-
ment, or education for product releases and updates. Whatever
the case, you need to set goals for your campaign, and choose
the metrics to measure your success against. Depending on your
analytics capabilities (we’ll delve into one example below, you
could look at bounce rate, click-through rate, conversions, or

253
time on site. Just make sure your measurements loop back to the
"why" of your campaign.

Tip: If you’re looking to increase open rates, check out Sendloop’s

guide to writing better subject lines.

4. Start Your Campaign

Once you've decided on a strategy, start sending. To do this, you

can either implement your own custom drip software or buy an
off-the-shelf product that'll have you up and running in minutes.

Before making a decision, I'd recommend reading our drip mar-

keting app roundup, in which Matt Guay breaks down the best
tools for managing your automated drip campaigns, plus the
killer features that each app offers.

5. Evaluate and Adjust

Just because your drip campaign is automated doesn't mean you

can let it run unsupervised. You spent a bunch of time research-
ing user segments, and it's important to readjust those segments
and your strategy based on the results. If you aren't getting as

254
many clickthroughs as you want, try rewriting your calls to ac-
tion; if you aren't meeting your conversion rate goals with your
sale-closing email, try more educational communications before
asking any user to pull the trigger. Evaluate, adjust, repeat.

How to Measure Drip Marketing Re-

sults
In the set up section above, I touched on the importance of de-
termining which metrics you were going to measure your drip
campaign’s success by. But what’s the best way to track how
users are interacting with your content?

One of the most widespread strategies involves UTM codes (or

URL parameters)—small text strings that you can paste onto the
end of a URL without affecting the destination.

UTM stands for "Urchin Traffic Monitor" (after the company that
initially created Google Analytics) and these codes are used
specifically by Google Analytics to track web browsing via cook-
ies. Using UTM codes, Google Analytics can tell you where a user
has been, and whether or not they've visited your site before,

255
among other metrics. Google even offers a custom URL builder
to help you create UTM codes.

Sites signal the beginning of a UTM code with a question mark ?

—below, the UTM code is everything after the question mark:

https://www.zapier.com/blog/app-audit?utm_-
source=dripintro

To get a better sense for how this works, try opening these two
links and looking at your browser's address bar:

• "10 Plain Text Files You Should Have on Your Desk-

top for Higher Productivity"

• "10 Plain Text Files You Should Have on Your Desk-

top for Higher Productivity"

You should reach the same page even though the URLs are dif-
ferent. But note that the URL with the UTM code is tracked sepa-
rately from the URL without. The difference is that with UTM-
tracked URLs, you get signals about how the user got there—all
you need to do is check your analytics platform for the specific
URL string.

Note: You can also string UTM codes together if you separate them
with ampersands & like this: https://www.zapier.com/blog/

256
 app-audit?utm_source=blogpost&utm_content=dripin-
tro

If you're using an analytics suite other than Google Analytics, you

can still use parameters to track unique URLs—for example, I
could use https://www.zapier.com/blog/rescuetime?so-
cialsource=fb&posttime=nov141123p instead of a classic
UTM. That would simply trigger a unique traffic report for the pa-
rameter I specified.

There are a bunch of use cases for UTM codes:

257
 • Test link placements for the same page in a news-
letter by adding different UTM codes to the URLs

• Track whether email, Twitter ads, or a placement in

your header performed better for a coupon code by
giving each link a unique UTM code

• Compare whether a Facebook share button at the

bottom or the top of your blog post produces more
interaction by making the buttons share links with
two different UTM codes

Ginny Soskey, the senior editor of HubSpot's marketing blog,

wrote a thorough guide to UTM codes—complete with example
UTM parameters—that can serve as good inspiration. But a lot of
the time if you’re using an app to manage your drip campaigns, it
will track results for you.


Just remember: UTMs are great for tracking what works for
clicks, but as Vero points out you still need to focus on conver-
sions and the value that each conversion brings to your compa-
ny (in fact, they wrote an entire guide to tracking conversions via
Google Analytics).

258
Apps to Run Drip Campaigns
There are dozens of different tools available for managing your
emails and crafting an effective drip campaign—Vero, Sendloop,
MailChimp, and Emma are a few that come to mind. But each of
those apps has a different set of features, limitations, and price
points, so you'll want to evaluate them thoroughly before com-
mitting.

Lucky for you, the next chapter breaks down 25 such email mar-
keting tools—you'll learn which apps are best for drip cam-
paigns, which ones offer a broader suite of marketing au-
tomation options, and which apps are the simplest to set up. In
it, we cover:

• Drip email apps

• Marketing automation software

• Apps that send email newsletters and drip emails

• Build-your-own drip email app options

Whichever tool (or tools) you choose, marketing automation

through drip campaigns can help you nurture leads without mo-

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nopolizing up your time. When you stick with your users—and
help them use your product—they’ll grow to love your brand.

Further Reading
On top of the resources linked throughout this post, check these
blog posts and eBooks out for more info:

• How to trigger autoresponders from Mailchimp

based on web traffic

• Using drips to convert trial users

• Vero's top marketing hacks

• Contactually has a four-part series on running a

drip campaign

• How to use lifecycle emails to grow your business

Next
Now that you now everything about drip emails, it's time to find
a drip email app that's perfect for your needs. We've rounded up

260
the 25 best apps to send drip emails, and will look at them in-
depth in the next chapter.

Written by Joe Stych

Image Credits: Drip photo courtesy LadyDragonflyCC via Flickr.

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 Chapter 7: The 25 Best Email
Marketing Apps to Send Drip
Campaigns

Email's crazy. Every new communication app claims to be an

"email killer", and yet email outlives each one. Love it or hate it,
you still likely check email first thing every morning, and pull
your phone out every time it vibrates in your pocket with a new
message.

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That's why email's still a great place to reach your potential cus-
tomers, and why newsletters have found a sudden resurgence in
popularity. It's also why you need to be using some kind of drip
marketing software to get your audience the info they need.

Drip emails are a great way to give your customers and contacts
the right information at the right time, as we just saw in the last
chapter. Now, it’s time to find a drip email app for your team.
Here are some of the best.

Note: We're partial to the term "drip campaign", but this market-
ing tactic goes by many names, including automated email cam-
paigns, lifecycle emails, autoresponders and marketing au-
tomation.

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 Picking a Great Drip Email Tool

Drip email apps come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from tools
that just send emails to full-featured CRMs with marketing au-
tomation that also include drip email features. There are even
ways to send drip emails from your favorite email newsletter
tool, and tricks for creating your own drip automation with just
an email sending service.

We’ve rounded up over two dozen of the very best apps to send
drip emails—plus ways to build your own drip email app. Each of
these tools:

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 • Work great for sending drip emails

• Are relatively easy to use

• Work with Zapier so you can integrate them with

the rest of your apps

You’ll find enough info about each app to whet your appetite and
help you find a tool that fits your needs, along with its base pric-
ing and a screenshot. Then, there’s a link to our in-depth review
page for many of the apps, including an extensive look at their
features, a walkthrough of how each one works, more screen-
shots and a full lists of their pricing plans.

It’s time to find a drip email app that’ll work great for you. Here
are the best, broken down into four categories:

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In This Chapter:

Drip Email
Apps that focus on helping you send drip emails, including Drip,
Sendloop, Customer.io, BombBomb, Vision6, Quickmail, Vero,
SendWithUs, ConvertKit, Gumroad, and Knowtify.

Marketing Automation
Apps that help you manage your contacts, track what they do on
your site, and send them drip messages, including Contactually,
AgileCRM, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Interakt, Intercom, Jumplead,
Hatchbuck, and LeadSimple.

Email Newsletters & Drip Emails

Apps that are designed for sending email newsletters and also
let you send drip messages to new subscribers, including Cam-
paign Monitor, MailChimp, Aweber, Benchmark Email, GetRe-
sponse, Constant Contact, Emma, MadMimi, and Active Cam-
paign.

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Build Your Own Drip Email App
Roll out your own drip email solution using Zapier and any email
appor Django Drip, Zapier’s open-sourced email drip tool.

Drip Email Apps

Want an app to send drip emails and nothing more? The follow-
ing apps are built for just that: they each have unique features
beyond just sending drip emails, but they’re best at that one
most important task. You’ll likely find these apps to be the easi-
est way to start sending out drip emails.

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 Drip

It only seems right to start this roundup out with an app named
for the very thing this chapter's about: Drip. Drip is, as you might
guess, an app designed specifically for sending out drip emails. It
offers a simple tool that lets you gather email addresses from
your website, and can pull in your customer email addresses
from a variety of sources. Then, it’s all about email.

Drip lets you quickly create drip campaigns using Blueprints: pre-
made sets of drip campaigns with text the Drip team has
tweaked to perform as well as possible. You’ll replace the filler
text with your own product names and relevant info for what
you’re selling or promoting, and set the timeframe for sending

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 the emails that you want. Then, just sit back and watch your ca-
sual signups turn into real customers.

Price: From $49/month for up to 2,500 subscribers and 20,000

sent emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Drip review

Sendloop

There's more to drip emails than just sending pre-made mes-

sages. You'll need a way first to add people to your drip cam-
paigns, and Sendloop is designed to make that easy. With a Face-
book app, plugins and code snippets that make it simple to inte-
grate with your website, plus sign up forms and hosted landing

269
pages, Sendloop is packed with helpful ways to funnel contacts
into specific drip campaigns. It'll then let you watch their moves
on your site and more to further hone your message in subse-
quent drip campaigns.

That data then lets you construct the perfect drip campaigns.
Just as simply as writing an email to your coworker, you'll be able
to set up personalized drip emails and have them sent to specific
contacts based on the variables that matter to you—perhaps tar-
geting people who've been on your site most recently, or those
who looked at a specific page. It's easy to do that when your drip
app is integrated so closely with your site.

Price: From $24/month for up to 2,500 contacts with email au-

tomation

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Sendloop review

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 Customer.io

You should space your drip emails out to avoid overwhelming

your contacts—who wants a dozen emails the first day they sign
up for a new app? You could just set up a simple schedule where
emails go out every 3rd day, or you could be even smarter about
your timeline—Customer.io monitors your site in real-time, then
sends precisely timed drip emails for the best results.

Customer.io sees when people view your pricing page, or per-

haps check out one of your upgrade options, and then refers to
your pre-set schedule to send them an email at the best time
possible. Your potential customers might be spooked if you

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email them right when they click your pricing page, but you just
might close the sale if you email them the next day at lunch time
when they're bored anyhow.

And then, if you want to send another email to people who al-
ready received drips, Customer.io lets you make another mes-
sage and send it out to the group of people you want, even if the
drip campaign they were on is already over. Better late than nev-
er!

Price: Free for up to 200 contacts; from $50 for up to 5,000 con-
tacts

Zapier support coming soon

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 BombBomb

Tired of only seeing text and images in emails? Your potential

customers likely feel the same way. Most emails live and die by
their copywriting, but BombBomb turns that on its head with
video-powered drip emails.

You can shoot videos professionally or just take a quick video

with your phone, using the footage to show off your product, in-
troduce yourself to your readers, or get them excited about an
upcoming offer. Then, you'll use BombBomb's designer to make
the videos look great in everyone's inboxes, and get your email
automation started. Now, all you'll have to do is watch the real-

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 time alerts to come in as your contacts start watching your
videos and hopefully buy your products.

And if that's not enough, you can even include PowerPoints,

mp3s, and other files and documents in your emails. Who said
drip emails have to be boring?

Price: From $25/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our BombBomb review

Vision6

Plain text emails can be ordinary, and video emails take a ton of
effort—or might not even work well for your audience. Instead,

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you might like something that makes it easy to create beautiful
emails. That's Vision6's goal.

Packed with dozens of pre-made templates—including seasonal

options—and a drag-and-drop editor, Vision6 makes it easy to
set up well-designed drip email campaigns. It also makes it easy
to know who will receive your messages. Instead of just listing
the criteria for who will receive which drip message, you'll be
able to drill down through your contacts in a spreadsheet view
and select the contact categories you want to reach. You can
even go beyond emails by sharing your drip messages on social
media and via SMS.

Price: From $9/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Vision6 review

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 Quickmail

Taking on any new project can be difficult, and sending drip

emails is no different. Quickmail relieves some of that pain by
working with the tools you’re already using, and breaking drip
campaigns down into simple steps complete with videos to help
you along.

All you’ll need to start out is a Google account. Sign in with it, and
you’ll be able to import contacts from a Google Spreadsheet.
Then, you’ll make drip emails that are sent right from your Gmail
account, as though they’re personal emails. That makes it easy to
reply, and Quickmail is smart enough to take people out of your

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 drip campaign once they reply so you can continue your conver-
sation on a more personal level. It’s a simpler way to do drips.

Price: From $37/month for up to 20,000 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

Vero

Too often drip emails are just mass-mailed messages sent out in
a series, but they can be so much more. Many drip apps let you
personalize your emails, perhaps with your contacts' names, and
let you send drips based on their interests. Vero, though, lets you
go much further, making it easy to create emails that are as cus-
tomized as Amazon's recommended product messages.

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The basics of Vero are simple: you can make your drip emails
with your own HTML templates, craft your emails online, and
have them sent out automatically or based on triggers. But its
real power comes from the ways it can tie in with your site. It can
use your Google Analytics code to let you track stats where
you're already tracking everything else, and even lets you per-
sonalize emails with data from your server using HTML or JSON.

Vero's not as simple to set up as other drip email campaign apps,

but you should see far better conversion rates from the more
personalized messages you'll be sending out. And Vero has
enough guides to help you learn the ropes and get even more
out of your drip emails.

Price: From $99/month for up to 12,500 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

278
 SendWithUs

You've built your own app, and even have a transactional email
service like Mandrill or Amazon SES that you're using to send
emails. But you still need a way to make beautifully designed
emails and send out drips. SendWithUs is designed for you: it's a
drip email provider that works with your app and email sending
services.

Instead of hiding your email templates inside of your internal

apps, you can import your newsletter templates and tweak them
in SendWithUs. You can even tap into contact lists from your site,
and use SendWithUs to segment those users into groups for tar-
geted drip campaigns. Then, you can set up your drip workflows,

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 send your messages using your favorite email service, and moni-
tor the stats back in SendWithUs. As an added bonus, it even has
a translation service so you can stay in touch with your in-
ternational users.

Price: From $79/month for up to 10,000 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

ConvertKit

Writing a book is hard work. And even if you have Hemingway-

level composition skills, there's more to a successful launch than

280
top-notch content—you also need to market your book effective-
ly.

Drip emails are an especially great way to share snippets of info

from your book to whet your audience's appetite. Any drip email
app could work to market your writing, but ConvertKit is built
specifically with writers in mind. It'll help you create landing
pages with teasers from your book, and turn your written con-
tent into drip emails aimed at drawing your readers in and turn-
ing them into buyers when your content launches. ConvertKit
makes scheduling emails incredibly simple, with a drag-and-drop
editor to change your emails' order and a broadcast tool that can
send a message to everyone or just a segment of people—say
those who never bought your book.

Price: From $29/month for up to 1,000 contacts

Zapier support coming soon

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 Gumroad

Best known as a simple place to sell your digital goods, Gumroad

now also includes features to help you market your products via
email. Gumroad includes an updates feature to let you gather
prospective customers' email addresses, and store them along-
side your existing customers' addresses in Gumroad. Then, you
can send updates to all of them about your products and your
ongoing progress with new products.

Or, you can automate your marketing with Gumroad's new

scheduled updates and workflows. Scheduled updates let write
an an email to your customers or fans ahead of time, and Gum-
road will send it right at the time you've set. Workflows work

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 much like any other drip app; they give you the essential tools to
write emails that'll go out to new users over the hours, days, and
weeks you pick. It's a great way to combine your marketing and
sales in one app.

Price: Free for emailing customers; Gumroad charges 5% plus

$0.25 on each sale.

Knowtify

There's so many ways you can use drip emails: to welcome new
customers, remind people to use your product, teach them how
to use it—perhaps with special tips as they use more advanced
features—and to share deals and new features. Knowtify is de-

283
signed to help you send these and more automated emails, with
features to send transactional, behavioral, and digest emails.
Transactional and behavioral emails will cover your standard drip
email needs, with scheduled emails that welcome users to your
product and guide them as they use specific features, while di-
gest emails will help you keep people coming back to your prod-
uct by reminding them what's happened and sharing latest
news.

Knowtify makes it easy to build rich emails with pre-made email

sections that you can easily add and customize with your own
style and content. Then, you can use rules to send the emails to
the users you want, and personalize the emails with content
from your app and user profiles. All that's left is to schedule each
email individually, and all of your app's emails will be sent out
automatically from the same place.

Price: Free for first 1,000 emails; from $19/month for sending up
to 2,500 emails

Zapier support coming soon

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Marketing Automation Apps
Drip emails are great for reaching both potential users and exist-
ing customers, but sometimes you need a bit more to nudge
one-time visitors towards becoming real customers. Perhaps
you’d like to track more info about each contact, and market di-
rectly to each person’s interests and needs. That’s when a mar-
keting automation tool can save you a ton of headaches.

We recently reviewed 10 of the best CRM apps with marketing

automation features—some are great at building profiles about
your contacts, while others are better for reaching people on the
phone or by text. Then there are the marketing automation tools
that are best for drip emails. They’ll give you more information
about the people who receive your drip emails, so you can cus-
tomize your campaigns and make them even more effective.

Note: While the pricing of other apps in this roundup account for
the number of contacts you can add to your drip lists, most mar-
keting apps are priced by number of users on your team, so
that’s reflected in the prices mentioned below.

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 Contactually

You may be focused on sending emails, but the people behind

those email addresses are the key to your success. Contactually
is a CRM that’s focused on your contacts first, helping you gather
them from your email inbox and your social networks with any
info about them it can find. You’ll see who you need to follow up
with on your dashboard, and its email app integrations will help
you know more about people when they email you.

Contactually is also great at sending out automated emails with

its Programs feature. This feature lets you automate your CRM,
which could help you keep your contacts organized and up-to-
date but also can be used for sending out automated drip
emails. You can easily send emails to any new contact, or use

286
 emails to invite them to your social networks and more. Email
marketing may not be Contactually’s focus, but if you want a con-
tact-focused tool plus a way to send drip campaigns, it’s a great
CRM to check out.

Price: $18/user/month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Contactually re-
view

AgileCRM

Drip email campaigns are complex, ever-evolving marketing ef-

forts. But there are two key components to setting each one up:

287
writing your actual email content, and figuring out the order and
timing in which the emails will be sent.

Agile CRM simplifies the latter by letting you drag and drop your
marketing automation messages into your preferred order. That
makes it easy to visualize your drip campaigns along with the
rest of your marketing efforts.

Drag-and-drop interfaces sound simplistic, but Agile CRM packs a

lot of power into theirs. You can customize your drips so they
only go out to certain people, create drips that only send deals to
people who haven’t visited your site, or craft campaigns targeted
based on which pages they’ve visited. You can even use Agile
CRM to keep the conversation going via social media, if email’s
not enough.

Price: From $14.99/team member per month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Agile CRM review

288
 HubSpot

Drip emails are only part of the marketing puzzle: you’re also
writing blog posts, sharing social content, and tweaking your site
for your prospective customers. HubSpot lets you combine all of
your efforts through automated workflows and other tools to
help you manage your contacts and content together.

Using HubSpot, content for drip emails can be easily pulled from
your blog posts and sent on a schedule that's tweaked over time
based on user behavior. You can even have your site’s content
change for each type of contact, so they’ll each see consistent
marketing even as you’re customizing it for different customer
segments.

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 Price: Around $800/month for unlimited team members and up
to 1,000 customers; $50/month per additional 1k customers

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Hubspot review

Infusionsoft

When you set out to find a drip email tool, you likely didn't ex-
pect to find a personal task manager. Yet Infusionsoft can do just
that, while still keeping track of your contacts’ info and what
they’re doing on your site, sending your drip emails and other

290
marketing campaigns, and even helping you sell stuff online with
its eCommerce tools.

Infusionsoft is built around a "My Day" view that shows you the
tasks and appointments you have, along with the contacts you
need to followup with. But drip campaigns are never far away;
they’re the first thing in the app’s toolbar. You can lay out your
campaigns with a visual builder that lets you organize your drip
emails along with customized landing pages and even voice mes-
sages or paper mailings to share more info with your potential
users. It’s great for drip emails, but you won’t want to stop with
just emails in Infusionsoft.

Price: Around $75/team member per month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Infusionsoft review

291
 Interakt

Want to run a data-driven drip campaign where you'll easily be

able to see how your drip emails are performing? Then an app
like Interakt might fit the bill. Interakt it's built around a dash-
board that shows all of your most important stats—emails
opened, site visits, converted leads and more—right when you
open the app.

Interakt's Auto Campaigns feature also makes it easy to create

drip campaigns where each stage is customized for your audi-
ence. You can use use this tool to target a filtered subsection of
your audience, giving you an easy way to create follow-up emails
based on a variety of factors.

292
 Price: Free for personal use; around $10/team member per
month

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Interakt review

Intercom

You want to teach your users how to use your app and get the
most out of your service. So reach them where they are, exactly
when they need help. That's the idea behind Intercom's auto
conversations: you can them to send emails or in-app messages
to your users on an automated schedule, giving them help where
they're most likely to see it. And if you don't want to bombard

293
everyone with the info, you can set up subsequent drips so they
only go to users who, say, haven't visited your site again recently.

If you aren't sure what to put in your drip emails, don't worry: In-
tercom helps you A/B test your emails easily, so you can send
out different drip emails to different segments of your audience,
see which one performs better, and then standardize on that
one—or customize further from there. And you'll always know
exactly how your emails will look to your user with Intercom's
rich email composer, which makes it easy to add buttons, section
breaks, and more to your messages.

Price: Free event tracking and customer profiles; around $20 per
1k customers for full features

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Intercom review

294
 Jumplead

There are two ways to look at your email list: as a static list of
people interested in your product, or as a dynamic list of people
who are each at their own level of understanding about your
product. Some folks are new to your product, and need all the
help you can give them, while others have already checked out
several pages, and perhaps need some more advanced guid-
ance.

Jumplead helps you customize your drip campaigns for users at

every stage. It's a CRM that lets you identify your customers in
real-time, then apply that knowledge to your drip emails. You'll

295
 be able to send customized emails to your potential customers
depending on what they've seen, where they live, and more.
You'll then get notifications on the most promising people you
should follow up with.

Price: Free for 1 user and up to 100 customers; around $16/team

member per month for basic plans

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Jumplead review

Hatchbuck

Folders and static lists are equally dated metaphors today—they

each only let you put a file or item in one spot. That's why Gmail

296
uses tags for organizing messages, and Hatchbuck does the
same to your contacts. You can add all the tags you want to a
contact so you can market to their personal interests while still
automating your campaigns.

Hatchbuck also helps you create emails easily with hundreds of

templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Combine that with a sim-
ple email campaign tool that lets you pull in your pre-built
emails, target them to a tag, and set a timeframe for each, and
you'll have a drip campaign that'll turn leads into sales.

Price: Starts at $99/month for 1 team member up to 2.5k cus-

tomers or $299/month for unlimited team members and cus-
tomers

Zapier support coming soon

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Hatchbuck review

297
 LeadSimple

Sometimes you need a tool that's designed specifically for your

job. If you're in the real estate business, LeadSimple is one such
app. It's a real estate sales management app designed to man-
age everything about your properties and leads, so you can fo-
cus on giving your prospective customers the best house hunting
experience ever.

The personal touch is necessary, but a little automation won't

hurt, either. That's why LeadSimple recently added SimpleDrip, a
simple way to send drip emails from LeadSimple. You'll just set-
up a sales workflow, and right along with the features that'd re-
mind you to call leads, you can schedule template emails to be
sent to them right when they'll be most impactful.

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Price: From $49/month for unlimited contacts and up to 2 team
members

Email Newsletter Apps

Chances are, you’re already subscribed to a number of email
newsletters—you may even have one of your own. Email
newsletters are a great way to share your latest news, publish
semi-private publications, and announce deals and promotions.
The only problem is that new subscribers only get your new
emails.

Not anymore. Many of the most popular email newsletter apps

now support drip emails, giving you an easy way to ensure that
your new subscribers get your most important emails and your
latest updates. They even work great for sending drip emails if
that’s all you want, leaving you the freedom to add a newsletter
in the future.

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 MailChimp

MailChimp may be best known for their email newsletter app's

fun design, their sponsorship of podcasts like Serial, or their
monkey-themed tees and hats. But MailChimp is also a great
place to run your drip campaigns. Its new Automation features
include pre-made drip campaigns for welcoming new customers,
following up after sales, and more, or you can create your own
completely customized drips.

MailChimp's easy-to-use email designer will come in handy when

making your drip emails, and its subscriber profiles will give you
the data to show who opened your emails and what they did

300
 next. Plus, you can continue your connection by sending your
MailChimp email newsletters to the people on your drip cam-
paign lists once the drip's complete.

Price: From $10/month for up to 500 contacts; paid plan re-

quired for automated drip emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our MailChimp review

Campaign Monitor

Dates are important. There are holidays, the anniversary of when

the user signed up, your company's birthday, and more. There's
no need to write an email newsletter manually on those days;

301
Campaign Monitor can send them to your contacts automatical-
ly.

Right along with your normal email lists, you can set up automat-
ed emails that will reach your contacts on those special days or
based on any other triggers that you set. Or, if you'd like, you can
make a drip campaign that every new subscriber receives. It's
drip marketing blended perfectly with standard email newslet-
ters.

Price: From $9/month for sending up to 2,500 emails to up to

500 contacts.

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Campaign Monitor
review

302
 Aweber

Your newest email newsletter subscribers know little about your

work, and they don't have the wealth of information that you've
already shared in your newsletter over the years. Aweber's Fol-
low Up emails are the perfect way to let your new subscribers
get up to speed quickly.

Just write emails using the same interface you'd use for sending
your normal email updates, and make them look great with hun-
dreds of templates and free stock images. You can even auto-
matically personalize messages with your contact info and more.
Then, schedule when your emails will be sent, perfectly timed to
make sure people really pay attention. Then, once the drip cam-

303
 paign's done, subscribers will get your newsletters like everyone
else.

Price: From $19/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Aweber review

Benchmark

First impressions matter, and the way your email looks is the
first thing people will notice when they open your drips. Your
email may look great on your screen, but you can't possibly

304
check every app on every device. How can you be sure that your
messages look great everywhere?

Benchmark simplifies that process with its Inbox Checker, which

lets you see how your emails will look in a number of different
email apps and on mobile devices. It'll even make sure your
emails won't get snagged by common spam filters. Benchmark
also offers the tools you need to send out email campaigns,
along with hundreds of tried-and-true templates that look gor-
geous on any screen. You can use those templates to create
great drip email campaigns, and then use them to send out
email newsletters as well.

Price: Free for up to 2,000 contacts; paid accounts from $11.95/

month for up to 600 contacts with custom branding, sub ac-
counts, and more.

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Benchmark review

305
 GetResponse

You schedule everything else using your work on a calendar, why

not your marketing emails? GetResponse's new Autoresponder
tool can handle that: put together the emails you want send out,
then drag-and-drop them onto a calendar to assign each one a
date and time. GetResponse makes it incredibly simple to lay out
a drip campaign that keeps going, covering holidays and special
events so you don't need to double-check your schedule.

Then, you can also send action-based messages, letting you kick
off drip campaigns based on clicks, transactions, birthdays, and

306
 other important dates. It's a full-featured drip campaign system
that just happens to send email newsletters, too.

Price: From $15/month for up to 1,000 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our GetResponse re-
view

Constant Contact

You've already sent out so many email newsletters, so duplicat-

ing your work to spin up a drip campaign for new subscribers
would seem a waste. Constant Contact lets you copy your exist-
ing emails or survey introductions, and turn them into a sched-
uled list of emails that will go out to new subscribers.

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Then, all you'll have to do is decide how to space out your mes-
sages, and organize a set of up to 20 emails into a drip cam-
paign. Repeat that for each of your email lists, and you'll have a
great way to introduce new subscribers to your brand without
much extra work. You'll also be able to check your stats and
quickly see how many of your drip emails were opened and sent
people to your site.

Price: From $15/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Constant Contact
review

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 Emma

There's more to a successful newsletter than a massive list of

contacts. Emma ties into Salesforce, Shopify and more to pull in
all of your CRM and sales data, and then lets you use that infor-
mation to personalize and automate your emails. You can start
drip campaigns when a sale is completed, then personalize sub-
sequent emails based on what your customer purchased.

Making a drip campaign with Emma is incredibly simple, too: you

just pick the group of people you want to target, along with the
triggers that you want to watch for, then select an existing email
and save it as a drip. That's it. You can use that to onboard new
people, or perhaps to send out special offers to subscribers once

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 they've purchased something and have been around for a long
time.

Price: From $45/month for up to 2,500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Emma review

Mad Mimi

Email apps don't have to be stuffy and boring. Mad Mimi's sim-
ple interface makes sending email newsletters fun, and its app
integrations make sending those newsletters to all of your con-
tacts a piece of cake.

Plus, in its Addons page, you can even set up a basic drip email
tool. To do that, select an existing email list, and then put togeth-

310
 er a simple set of emails that'll be sent out on a schedule. You
can then have those drip emails go along with your normal
newsletters, or have them send automatically as soon as some-
one is added to your lists.

Price: From $10/month for up to 500 contacts; paid plan re-

quired for drip emails

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our https://zapier.com/

zapbook/mad-mimi/review/

Active Campaign

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Drip email tools empower you to target relevant emails to specif-
ic groups of people. But once your drip campaigns start piling
up, figuring out who gets which emails turns into a confusing
mess. Active Campaign solves this by letting you organize your
drip email campaigns using a standard flow chart.

Using simple yes-and-no questions, Active Campaign funnels

your contacts into groups based on the actions they've taken—
like emails they've opened, pages they've visited, whether or not
they've subscribed to your blog newsletter—and sends drip
emails accordingly. It's one of the simplest ways to make a de-
tailed drip email campaign that still fits with your normal email
newsletters.

Price: From $9/month for up to 500 contacts

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Active Campaign
review

Make Your Own Drip Campaign App:

Perhaps you're more adventurous, and would like to build your
own drip campaign app that integrates the tools you're already
using. Turns out, there are several ways to do that. Here's a sim-
ple way to build your own code-free drip app using Zapier, plus

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info about Zapier's open-sourced Django Drip app, which devel-
opers can use to add drip email functionality to any Django site.

Zapier + Any Email App

Zapier's your go-to tool for automation, and it can even be used
to build a complete email drip tool. All you'll need is a form tool
—or any other app that can be used to collect emails for your
drip campaign—along with a tool to save your drip list and an
email app to send out your messages.

No matter what drip email app you use, you'll still need a way to
collect emails, perhaps from a form or by copying your cus-
tomers' email addresses when they purchase your products.
Here, instead of sending those email addresses to a drip app,
you need to save them to a spreadsheet, database, or anywhere
else that can add some structure to large amounts of data. Here
are some of the Zapier automations that you could use (see
more apps on Zapier):

Zaps:

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 • Save Your PayPal Sales to a Google Docs Spread-
sheet

• Save Typeform entries to a Google Sheets spread-

sheet

• Save Gravity Forms submissions to a Google Sheets

spreadsheet

• Save new Wufoo entries to a Google Sheets spread-

sheet

• Log Gumroad Sales in a Google Spreadsheet

Then, you'll want to decide on the messages you want to send,

and the intervals at which you want to send them. First write the
copy and create templates using your email service—you could
even use plain-text messages to get started. Then work on your
schedule. Perhaps you'll want to send one email immediately af-
ter a new user is added to your list—just connect your spread-
sheet to an email app, and have that message sent directly. The
others you'll want to delay, perhaps sending new messages three
and seven days after they first signed up.

There are two ways to handle the delay. The easiest way is with
the Zapier Delay Trigger: You'll connect your spreadsheet—or
any other data source—to the Zapier Delay Trigger, give that trig-

314
ger a name, and then set the length of time you wish to wait (up
to one week). That Zap will watch your spreadsheet for new en-
tries, and when anything's added it'll copy it and wait for the time
you specify to do anything.

• Zap: Send Google Spreadsheet Data to the Zapier

Delay Trigger

Then, you'll make another Zap using the delay trigger you just
set up along with an email service of your choice—anything from
Gmail for plain text emails to services like Mandrill or Amazon
SES for template-enabled emails will work just fine. You'll just en-
ter your delay trigger's name, format your email, and pull in the
data from the original delayed Zap.

Zaps:

• Send Emails via Gmail after a Delay

• Send Emails via Mandrill after a Delay

• Send Emails via Amazon SES after a Delay

Or, if you want to specify a more precise time period, you could
use Google Calendar to delay the Zap instead. That method is a
bit more complicated: you'll have to set the length of time to wait
by modifying the calendar date, along with putting the recipient's

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name as the event name and their email as the description so
you can easily reuse it.

• Zap: Send Gmail Emails from Google Calendar

Now, you've got one drip email scheduled—or two, perhaps, if

you took the original suggestion to send out an email as soon as
a new contact was added. You can then add more delays and
email actions for each additional drip email you want to send
out. With a handful of Zaps, you'll have your very own drip email
system that runs automatically, and you'll still have a list of all
your contacts and their email addresses to use elsewhere.

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 Django Drip

If you're a developer using a Django-based app, you can add drip

email functionality to your own app using Django Drip. Built and
used internally by the Zapier team, Django Drip is a simple app
for creating drip email campaigns. Just install it on your Django
app, and it'll tap into your app's user list and let you send auto-
mated drip emails from your Django admin.

It's more technical and complicated than anything else in this

chapter, but Django Drip a great way to bring your drip email
app in-house. Be sure to check out the documentation before
you get started.

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 —

Whether you want to send a set of emails to every new sub-

scriber you get on your email list, or would rather send cus-
tomized marketing messages to your new customers, there's a
tool for you to get started with drip email marketing. That tool
might be part of the email newsletter app you've already been
using, or it might be worth switching to a new CRM just for the
extra marketing features. Or you might even find out that Zapier
with your favorite email services = Zapier with your favorite
email services is enough.

Either way, it's time to start doing more with emails.

Next
You've learned everything about drip emails, and have found a
great app to send your drip messages. Now, it's time to start set-
ting up your drip email campaigns, and integrate your drip email
app with the other tools you use. You'll learn all that and more in
the next chapter.

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Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Rain picture courtesy 55Laney69 on Flicker

319
 Chapter 8: Successful Drip
Email Campaigns

How to Pick the Best App, Add Ad-

vanced Automation and More

You’ve built a great product, planned your marketing well, and

have successfully launched it. There's a ton of people interested
in your product, and you’ve even sold it to a handful of cus-

320
tomers already. Now, it’s time to prompt those potential cus-
tomers to buy, and make sure your new customers know every-
thing they need about the product they just bought.

You could email each new person manually, but soon you'd be
spending more time sending emails than building your product.
That's why drip emails—also know as automated email cam-
paigns, lifecycle emails or autoresponders—are such a great
marketing tool. They let you write a series of emails once, then
have them sent to every new contact automatically.

We've already looked at the basics of drip email marketing, and

explored some of the best apps to send drip emails. Now, it’s
time for you to select your drip app, set it up, integrate it with
your other tools, and hone your drip strategy. Here's how.

In This Chapter:

1. Find the Perfect Drip Email App

2. Build Your Own Drip Tool

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 3. Automate Your Drip Emails

4. Hone Your Drip Strategy

5. Use Drip Emails to do More

6. Stay Human

Find the Perfect Drip Email App

"I chose Drip [app] after using a dozen other email plat-
forms."

~ Elliott Kosmicki, entrepreneur

Sending a series of emails to your customers doesn’t have to be

difficult. At a minimum, all you need from a drip email app is a
way to make template emails that’ll be sent out on a schedule to
your contacts. There are more advanced tools, as well—apps
that will let you customize your drip emails based on contacts’
info, interests, and their interactions with your site. And, of

322
course, there’s the marketing automation apps that can send
drip email, manage your contacts in a CRM, and much more.

But you don’t have to start out with something advanced. You’ll
send drip emails to your new contacts, primarily, so switching to
a new service in the future wouldn’t be too difficult. That’s why
StoreMapper founder Tyler Tringas recommends starting out
with MailChimp before graduating to a more advanced drip
email app—in his case, Intercom.

“If you want to start regularly emailing your users with an-
nouncements, you should use MailChimp,” says Tyler. But then,
he continues, Intercom is “super powerful, but not worth the set-
up until your app really gets off the ground.” Now that his start-
up has grown, he’s using it to send automated lifecycle emails,
drip campaigns, follow-up emails and more. They’re a powerful
extension of a standard drip campaign, but perhaps too much to
take on when you’re just getting started.

323
 

Your best bet is to find an app that looks like it has the features
you want right now, and then give it a try to see how you like it. If
you’re already using an email newsletter app, or a CRM that of-
fers marketing automation, your best option might be to try out
its drip features. Otherwise, look for an app that works well with
the other apps you use. That’s what prompted the Influence &
Co. team to choose Contactually: it works with Zapier, and so by
extension integrates with the other apps they use.

• Zap: Add new HubSpot contacts to your Contactual-

ly database

324
It might take a few tries to find one that fits your needs, but
there’s bound to be a drip app that meets your requirements
and budget. Bright Learning marketer Lisa Renneisen found this
after trying out a number of new drip apps and coming back to
their original pick, Vision6. “Vision6 honestly remains my soft-
ware of choice, largely due to the advanced functionality and fea-
tures that it offers,” Lisa says.

Entrepreneur Elliot Kosmicki noted that he tried a dozen apps

before he settled on Drip after it ended up being the perfect drip
app for his work. “Drip, for me, is the perfect balance between
full-blown (and expensive) marketing automation, and a basic
email autoresponder,” says Elliot.

Zaps:

• Add Unbounce leads to a Drip subscriber list

• Add Subscribers to Drip from Gmail with Labels

So open up our drip email app roundup, look through the op-
tions, and try a few of the apps that look most promising. One of
them is likely to be the tool you’ve been waiting for.

325
 Build Your Own Drip Tool

Or, there just might not be one absolutely perfect tool for your
team’s needs. In that case, it’s time to build your own drip cam-
paign app—and it doesn't even have to be that difficult.

The drip email apps post details how you can use Zapier to send
drip emails from any app, and there's quite a few teams who are
doing just that. Oval Business Solutions uses Podio forms for
client inquires, but the app doesn't include a drip email tool.
"This is where the ever-evolving box of tricks, Zapier, comes to
the rescue," says Adrian, managing director at Oval Business So-

326
lutions. They use Zapier to send drip emails to these potential
clients using a combination of Podio forms, Gmail and Zapier's
delay trigger.

Zaps:

• Send an Email From Gmail to Contacts Who Fill Out

Your Podio Form

• Send Podio Form Data to the Zapier Delay Trigger

• Send Emails via Gmail after a Delay

Zapier lets you tie as many apps together as you'd like, to make
the perfect app setup for your team. The EviRental team, for ex-
ample, uses their own app in Knack, a database tool, to gather
leads, then uses Zapier to send the leads to Zoho CRM and send
the contact an email in Mandrill, a transactional email app.

"Zapier filters the customers [from Knack] for specific criteria,

sets an email delay and then sends all the information to Man-
drill for delivery a week or so later," says Rick Maggio, EviRentals'
marketing director. "We are able to get customer feedback in an
automated and scalable way using Zapier, [and] we've been able
to get the feedback we need to improve our users' experiences."

Zaps:

327
 • Send Knack Form Entries to the Zapier Delay Trigger

• Send Emails via Mandrill after a Delay

Or, perhaps you have an app that works great for managing your
contacts, but isn't quite as great at sending emails. Then "making
your own app" might turn into just combining the best features
of two apps. That's why DeedGrabber's Rick Dawson uses Infu-
sionsoft, but then supplements its email features with Mandrill.
He wanted more control over his emails and their deliverability
than Infusionsoft offered, so he set up a Zapier integration that
lets him use Mandrill to send email instead.

"I can just apply a tag in Infusionsoft when I want an email to be

sent, and when Zapier sees this, it tells the email provider to
send that email," Rick says. "All the contact fields are available in
Zapier to personalize the email too, which is great."

Zaps:

• Send an email from Mandrill by tagging an Infusion-

soft contact

• Send an email from Mailgun by tagging an Infusion-

soft contact

328
 For the most customizable drip setups, though, you still might
end up wanting to construct your own drip email app from the
ground up. That's why we built our own Django Drip tool at Zapi-
er. "We tried a bunch of drip email tools back in 2012, and found
them a bit narrow on segmentation abilities," says Zapier CEO
Wade Foster. "If you wanted to do any segmentation you had to
replicate your user data in a third-party system which is both
challenging and scary."

So, the Zapier development team set out to make something

better for their needs. “Django Drip lets us set up complex seg-
ments based on all the data we have about users in our data-
base," says Wade. "Finding things like what apps a user uses,
how much they've used it, and when they did certain actions are
a breeze with Django Drip.” If you find yourself with similar
needs, you might also find that building your own tool or using a
customizable self-hosted tool like Django Drip is the best solu-
tion.

329
Automate Your Drip Emails

"Email automation is a must-have for my type of busi-

ness. It takes time to set up, but it's a fantastic market-
ing approach."

~ Fard Johnmar, Founder of Enspektos

Drip emails are, by definition, automated emails. But you can au-
tomate far more than just your email sending schedule. With a
bit of work, you can automatically find new contacts, add them
to your drip emails, and even customize your drips based on
your users' needs.

The most obvious way to add contacts to your drip email lists is
via a sign-up form, but there are plenty of other ways, too. If
you're selling products, your shopping cart may well be your best
source of leads—and ideally, it'll add the lead's contact details di-
rectly to your drip app.

“If your shopping cart doesn't integrate with Drip make sure to
set up Zapier," recommends WordPress developer David Hehen-
berger. "This way, you can track events such as 'made a pur-

330
chase', 'refunded' or 'abandoned cart' (assuming your shopping
cart can send these Triggers to Zapier)."

Zaps:

• Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List

• Nurture Bigcommerce Customers via Email with

HubSpot

If your shopping cart doesn't work with Zapier, there still may be
a way to get your customers automatically added to your drip
email lists. One easy way is by using Zapier's email parser—
which can copy data from any email you send it, including sales
emails. Just have your email app forward the emails you receive
after you make a sale, and Zapier can automate everything else.
Elliott calls this his favorite feature in Zapier.

"When I sign up a client or make a sale, I simply forward the

email to one of my parsers," Elliott explains. Then, "I let Zapier
add the user to the correct Drip series, tag them as clients in
Drip, add them to Google Contacts and Sendhub groups, as well
as schedule a to-do on my task manager to call the person!" All
of that, just from one email.

Zaps:

331
 • Parse Emails into Drip for Easy Drip Campaigns

• Add Contacts to Google Contacts from Parsed

Emails

• Add Contacts to SendHub via Parsed Email

• Parse Emails into Podio

Events are another great source of leads. You could go around

with a sign-up sheet and manually add people's emails to a list,
but there's far better ways by integrating your drip list with event
tools like Eventbrite or GoToWebinar. That's how Lisa Renneisen,
marketer at Bright Learning, sends drip emails to their organiza-
tion's event attendees.

"Eventbrite is brilliant for event registration, but I don't love their

email formatting," says Lisa. "So by plugging in to Vision6 I can
automatically populate the database and send wonderful emails
that reflect my brand. It also allows me to do away with horrible
data extraction and import tasks that everyone hates!”

Zaps:

• Add new Eventbrite attendees to a Vision6 contact

list

332
 • Add contacts to a Vision6 list from a Google Sheet

Hone Your Drip Strategy

"We send Drips because it's a great way to engage with

users based on specific things they do in our app."

~ Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier

You've poured your heart and soul—or at least countless hours

—into creating your drip campaigns. Don't stop there. No matter
how good your emails are right now, there's surely ways you can
improve them.

One of the simplest ways to improve your drip emails is by A/B

testing them. Many email apps will let you write two different
subject lines and even email bodies, and then test to see which
one performs better. Repeat that as much as you want to contin-
uously perfect your emails.

But then, you can use your apps to improve your drip emails for
each of your customers. Depending on your email app, you
might be able to move contacts to a different list or send them a
separate set of emails based on their interactions with your list.

333
Rick Dawson does this with Infusionsoft with his drip emails at
DeedGrabber. "Trackable links in Infusionsoft allow you to move
people to different lists if they click on emails, and perform other
actions on them," Rick explains.

Even if your app doesn't directly let you move contacts to anoth-
er drip list based on events, there's likely another way to get it to
work. For example, Elliott uses Gmail and Zapier to move con-
tacts to a new list in Drip.

“I use Gmail tags to trigger Zapier to move a sales prospect from

one list to another inside of Drip, or mark events and tag con-
tacts in Drip," Elliott says. He then uses Drip's own features along
with Zapier to customize drip emails based on contacts' interac-
tions with his site. "Drip watches your web events, so I can also
trigger actions through Zapier when a lead does something on
my website. Then, through the Drip integration with Zapier, you
can add a user at a specific point in a Drip email series."

Zaps:

• Add Subscribers to Drip from Gmail with Labels

• Add MailChimp Subscribers to Drip

334
 • Remove MailChimp Unsubscribes from Drip Cam-
paigns

Or, you can combine two drip tools to achieve something similar.
The Enspektos team uses both MailChimp and Drip, the former
to send email newsletters and the latter to send drip emails.
They then use Zapier to automatically add contacts to drip email
lists with bonus material in Drip based on their interactions with
MailChimp email newsletters, such as clicking a link or forward-
ing the email. "These emails have reduced my churn rate signifi-
cantly," says Enspektos founder Fard Johnmar. "People know
that they are receiving secret bonus content and this makes
them feel special (because they are)!"

Use Drip Emails to do More

"Be clever and think laterally. It's amazing what you can
achieve if your just plan out your integrations carefully!"

~ Lisa Renneisen, marketer at Bright Learning

There's a number of common types of drip emails, from wel-

come emails and timed training courses to prompts to finish

335
checking out or reminders about upcoming events. Beyond sim-
ply making the best possible traditional drip campaigns, though,
there's a wide range of ways you can use drip emails.

For example, you could sell drip emails. No, really—instead of

making a course and selling it as a download, you could sell a
course and deliver the lessons as drip emails. Author Nathan
Barry did just this in his recent 10 Days to Better Design project.
"I set the product up in Gumroad, then linked it to ConvertKit
through Zapier," wrote Nathan. "When a person buys the course,
they’ll automatically get enrolled and start receiving the content
they just purchased right away."

• Zap: Add Gumroad Customers to a Drip Email Se-

quence

Drip emails can also be an easy way to make a self-paced course,

whether paid or free. Author Paul Jarvis used Gumroad,
MailChimp, and Zapier to make a self-paced course with his free
"Write and Sell Your Damn Book", which you could get via email
for free or download as an eBook.

"The course was about writing a book," explained Paul, "and

some of the lessons were slightly onerous — like 'Write a first
draft.' So, setting a fixed time delay wouldn’t work because some

336
people complete things like that much more quickly than oth-
ers." That's why he used MailChimp's autoresponder feature to
only send the next email after readers clicked a button in the
email they'd received. And if you'd like to make a similar self-
paced course, but charge for it, he recommends charging via
Gumroad, then using Zapier to send the customers to your email
list.

Zaps:

• Send Gumroad Customers to MailChimp

• Send Gumroad Customers to Campaign Monitor

• Send Gumroad Customers to Infusionsoft

Or, instead of sending stuff to help out your contacts, you could
ask them for help. The Dotted Music team does this with their
drip emails. Whenever anyone's added to their drip emails, the
first email they receive asks them to fill out their profile. That
helps the Dotted Music team market directly to their customers
needs, and keeps people engaged right from the start.

• Zap: Create MailChimp subscribers from Typeform

entries

337
Sometimes the help you need is actually something that'll help
the customer out. For example, if your user's credit card expires,
their subscription to your service will die—which means you'll
lose revenue and they'll lose access to your app. A simple drip
email, prompted by your billing service, can help you both. The
Moonclerk team uses Stripe, Zapier, and Mandrill to accomplish
this, reducing churn by 25% and saving hours each week.

• Zap: Send an email to Stripe customers with invalid

credit cards via Mandrill

You can even use your drip emails to attract new customers
who've never heard of your brand, by getting your email recipi-
ents to share your emails and refer new users. Odds are, very
few people will forward your drip emails unless you give them a
reason to do so. That's why entrepreneur Sacha Greif added an
incentive to drip emails for his startup Sidebar—if you forwarded
the email and the recipient signed up, you'd both receive a free
eBook or credit for Creative Market.

The setup was a bit more complicated than most drip emails. He
had subscribers sign up via Wufoo, and the normal drip emails
were sent via MailChimp. The trick is that the Wufoo form con-
tains a hidden referral field that contains the email of the person
who directed you to the form. That way, if you signed up after

338
clicking a forwarded email, the form would now trigger Zapier to
send the incentive in a new email via Mailgun.

Zaps:

• Use Wufoo Entries to Create Mailchimp Subscribers

• Implementing a simple referral program with

MailChimp, Zapier, and Mailgun (part I)

• Implementing a simple referral program with

MailChimp, Zapier, and Mailgun (part II)

And just that, you'd have drip emails that could help your startup
go viral. Be sure to check Sacha's full tutorial if you'd like to set
up something similar on your own, and think of unique ways that
you can use your drip emails to do far more than you'd ever
imagined.

339
 Stay Human

"We don't automate communication. We automate the

little things. That allows us to save time, in order to
spend more time on communication."

~ Andrew Apanov, Founder of Dotted Music

Of course, all the automation in the world won't replace human

touch. You can automatically add contacts to list where they'll re-
ceive automated emails—and that'll convert on its own many

340
times—but there's plenty of times when people will have extra
questions. Perhaps you could automate that, with some nifty
scripts, but you're far better off to reply by hand to those in-
quires.

Many drip emails are written to sound personal, using your con-
tacts' name and perhaps being signed with your team's names.
That's great—but only if you really have people behind those
emails.

"If you do decide to send out these personal emails, make sure
you’re actually going to respond to each reply," suggests Dan
Goldin, data scientist at TripleLift. "Otherwise you’re better off
not sending that email in the first place."

Designer Brian Casel takes the personal touch even further—in

addition to having drip emails automatically sent to people who
fill out his Gravity Forms contact form, he also has Zapier send
the data to Trello so his team can followup with a phone call or
email. "The key component that makes this entire sales system
work is not any app, or metric, or magic sales script," says Brian.
"It’s the simple act of following up."

Zaps:

341
 • Send Gravity Form leads to MailChimp

• Create Trello Cards via Gravity Forms

So use these tips to make the best drip emails you can, and auto-
mate as many of the tedious tasks as possible. Then, use the
time you've freed up to add a personal touch to your communi-
cations, and you'll have an unbeatable email marketing strategy.

Next
Sometimes you won't want a new app just to send your email
messages. Perhaps you have your own in-house tools that can
send emails, or you'd rather build a drip feature into your own
software. Either way, you'll still need a service to send your mes-
sages, and for that, we'll look at the best transactional email ser-
vices in the next chapter.

Or, if you're happy using a pre-made app to send your drip and
newsletter emails, perhaps with one of the tools we just looked
at, then you might want to jump ahead to chapter 10 to learn
about ways to A/B test your email messages to make your email
marketing more effective.

342
Related: Check out our "Ultimate Guide to CRM Apps, a free eBook
that'll teach you how to effectively use a CRM and pick the perfect
one for your business.

Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Water Droplet photo courtesy Nithya Ramanujam via Un-

splash. App dev photo courtesy doctype.me/ via Unsplash. Work photo

courtesy Startup Stock Photos.

343
 Chapter 9: Transactional
Email

The 7 Best Services to Send 1000s of

Emails Daily

Have you ever stopped to think about what happens to your

email message after you press "Send"? If you're just sending your
own personal emails through Gmail or your email app, your
emails likely get routed through your email service's Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service to your email recipient's email

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service's SMTP service. It typically just works, and so most of us
just ignore it.

But, if you're sending thousands of emails a day through your

app, or are delivering your company's newsletter to millions of
people, suddenly you need to think a lot more about how your
emails get sent. You'll very likely need a transactional email ser-
vice, a dedicated email sending service that'll make sure your
emails get delivered no matter how many you need to send.

Here's a primer to getting started with transactional email send-

ing services, with tips to help you pick the perfect app for your
need and integrate it with your apps and workflow.

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 Beyond smtp.google.com

Sending an email—even a handful of them at the same time—

isn't difficult. Your standard Gmail account will let you send up to
500 emails per day, while hosted Exchange accounts will let you
send up to 30 messages per minute. That's plenty for most per-
sonal uses. It's when you need to send hundreds of emails a
minute, or thousands a day that you need another solution.

For most needs, the best other solution is to use email marketing
apps or drip email apps to send your bulk emails and marketing

346
messages. If you want a quick and simple way to email thou-
sands of people a day, and even make your emails look great
with templates and more, those are the apps for you.

But, they're not for everyone. Perhaps you have your own app,
and you want to send emails through it. Maybe you like to self-
host all of your business tools, or you'd rather be able do more
with your emails than what a standard email app will let you.
That's when you'll want to consider a transactional email sending
service—the services like Amazon SES, Mandrill, and Mailgun
that deliver most of the notification emails you receive in your in-
box each day.

The Case for Transactional Email

Sending Services

"Don’t reinvent the wheel. The internet is full of wheels…

and most of them have APIs."

~Andy Chung, Entrepreneur

347
Today, there's a service for everything, it seems. You can run your
application on Heroku, accept payments with Stripe, call phones
and send SMS messages via Twilio, and add just about any other
feature to your app with any number of other services. These
"feature-as-a-service providers", as entrepreneur Andy Chung calls
them, give you the pieces you can use to build your app in less
time. Instead of working out payment deals with banks and fig-
uring out how to code a working internet phone system, you can
spend your time making the app you want to build and let other
teams focus on those problems.

Email's the same. There are a number of services—including

Amazon SES, Mandrill, Mailgun, Postmark and more—that let
you send email messages via an API. Instead of building your
own system to send email messages, you can add a few lines of
code and then never worry about email again.

Or, of course, you could run your own email server. There's an
email server built into your Mac and many Linux distros, and
plenty of other email servers like Exchange you can run for free
or license. It might look cheaper at first, but running your own
email service—just like running your own payment service—is
likely not your best strategy.

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Here are the three best reasons why you should outsource your
emails:

1. Send More Messages, Faster

Gmail's limit of 500 emails a day might be the first reason you'd
look for another way to send emails, but you might face similar
limits with your own email server. Many shared hosting services
will limit how many emails you can send per day, as detailed in
this list by MailPoet, so you'll soon have the same problem you
would with Gmail or Exchange.

Even on your own private server, sending thousands of emails at

once can be a technical challenge you're not ready for—or simply
more trouble than it's worth. That's why you'll find logos of pop-
ular companies of all sizes on transactional email sending ser-
vices' sites: it's easier and often more efficient to use a service
that's solely focused on sending emails well. As Tom Cook, for-
mer Quora employee said about Quora, "they use (Sendgrid) be-
cause setting up mail delivery infrastructure is a real headache at
their size."

If you're running your own email infrastructure, sending out dou-

ble or triple your standard number of emails might mean you

349
need a new server or significant developer time. With an email
sending service, on the other hand, it'll at most take a few
changes to your integration as the KnackForge team found. A
few tweaks to Mandrill's Drupal integration later, and they were
able to send 75,000 emails an hour.

Maybe you need to send 7 emails a minute, or 7 million a month.

Either way, the email service will be ready for your load, with lit-
tle to no work on your end.

2. Ensure Your Messages Get Delivered

"Sending emails from your app can suck. Half the time,
messages that get sent from your own server just get
dumped into the recipient’s junk folder."

~ Cory LaViska, Surreal CMS developer

Even if you're running your own servers, and have the in-
frastructure to send the messages you need, there's another
catch with running your own email sending server: deliverability.
You might technically be able to send emails on your own, but

350
the chances of those emails showing up in your recipients' inbox-
es are slim to zero.

Most email apps today strictly scan emails to eliminate spam,

and one of the many things they use to weed out spam mes-
sages is the IP address that's used to send the emails. They
check against both blacklists—IP addresses known to send spam
—as well as whitelists—IP addresses know to be good in general.
If you're sending emails from a shared server, there's a possibili-
ty your IP address is already on those blacklists.

If you have your own IP address, your mail still may get marked
as spam if you're not on a whitelist. As the Koomohost team re-
lated, "If your site is not associated with a reputable or identifi-
able IP address and domain name, most email providers will
mark it spam or not accept delivery." You'll also need an SPF or
DMIK record, email validation tools that may be difficult to imple-
ment on your own but are included with most email sending ser-
vices.

You could test your server first to see if your emails get marked
as spam, but your test emails to your own address just might
come through with the problems only showing up once you're
sending thousands of emails. Or, if your company's the size of
Google, it might make sense to get your own IP whitelisted. For

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everything in between, an email sending service makes the most
sense.

"Leveraging email deliverability tools seems like an unnecessary

upfront cost and waste of time (especially if you are small or just
growing your lists), but ironically this is when you need these ser-
vices the most," explains entrepreneur Jeremy Vandehey. There's
no point in sending emails that don't get delivered, and there's
no point risking it when you're just starting out and every email
really counts.

3. Do More With Your Emails

Add deliverability onto the trouble of running yet another service

—one you're likely inexperienced at managing—and email send-
ing services start looking far better. But there's also another rea-
son to pick them: the extra features they offer.

Some transactional email services, such as Amazon SES, are

barebones and focused only on sending emails—and priced ac-
cordingly. But most others include advanced stats, notifications,
filtering and more that let you do far more with your emails.

352
With a bit of coding, or just some clicking around in stats dash-
boards, you can accomplish amazing things.

Karl Seguin, for instance, put Postmark to work not just in send-
ing emails, but also to make it easier for customers to signup.
That's something that would have been difficult or impossible to
do with a self-hosted email service—and the ironic thing is,
Seguin wasn't initially convinced of the benefits of a transactional
email service.

"Why would you outsource and pay for something as basic as

sending out email?" wrote Seguin. But then it clicked. Not only
did Postmark help them send emails easier, its bounce API
helped them automatically update users' profiles with their valid
email address without having to click an activation link. "The end
result is that our website flow is friendlier. Users can start using
the site right away and our welcome email is just a welcome
email—no special activation instructions, no huge deal if it get
marked as spam."

Once you have users and are sending them emails, the stats and
insights you can get from them can be invaluable. Nathaniel Elia-
son, Zapier's marketing intern this year, used Mailgun and its
stats when building his own startup. With some custom coding, it
enabled them to see if people didn't accept their email invite

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within a week, or if they signed up then bounced, and more.
Email services give you the ability to customize your email flow,
keep people coming back, and more, without having to code de-
tailed email analytics on your own.

Picking the Perfect Email Sending Ser-

vice
Picking a service to send emails is similar to picking between dif-
ferent cell service providers. At the end of the day, they all offer a
very similar service, all of which work in similar ways and are
very competitively priced. What makes the difference is the small
things: the libraries and integrations that make them easier to
use with your app, and the stats, dashboards, and other extra
features they include.

Amazon SES is the most barebones transactional email service,

and also the cheapest: it sends emails, and little else. Other ser-
vices are often more expensive, especially for sending smaller
numbers of emails, since they include features like SPF and IP
address mapping, template hosting, reports and analytics, and

354
 more. Depending on the features you need, one service may be
better for your needs—or, as always, you can try out the most
promising ones, see which work best with your apps and work-
flow, and then standardize on it.

With that in mind, here are some of the most popular transac-
tional email services, each of which are supported by Zapier to-
day or will be supported soon. You'll find a quick description of
each service's offerings, along with a link to its status or uptime
page and an explanation of its pricing.

Amazon SES

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Amazon may have started out as the world's largest bookstore,
but today they're also one of the world's largest web services
company. Best known for S3—file storage in the cloud—and EC2
—their servers-in-the-cloud—Amazon also offers CDN services,
online databases, DNS server and more. Among the offerings is
Amazon SES, or "simple email service", a transactional email ser-
vice that's also one of the cheapest and most barebones offer-
ings available.

Amazon SES is designed to work with Amazon's other hosted

services. Rather than supporting everything in one place, you'll
use SES just for sending emails via its API or SMTP server. Then,
you can track bounced emails with Amazon's SNS notifications
system, setup DKIM records with Route 53, and store files with
S3. There's no advanced analytics, but you will find stats on your
successful deliveries, bounced or rejected messages, and com-
plaints.

It's just an email sending service, and if you already use Ama-
zon's other email services or are fine filling in the gaps with other
tools, then it's a simple and cheap way to send bulk emails.

Amazon SES Pricing

356
 

Check Amazon SES Status: http://status.aws.amazon.com (in-

cludes uptime for all Amazon cloud services)

For more info on features and pricing, see our Amazon SES re-
view.

SendGrid

One of the largest transactional email sending services, SendGrid

delivers over 14 billion emails each month for companies like
Spotify and Uber. It's designed to be simple to integrate into

357
 your app, with a number of different APIs and supported client li-
braries. You'll find built-in support for email authentication and
reputation scoring for your IP address, to make sure you emails
get through, along with a library of online documentation and
videos to help guide you along.

In addition to sending standard transactional emails over its API,

SendGrid also includes a marketing platform with a drag-and-
drop email template editor and online list management. You can
create your templates and manage your lists in SendGrid, then
use that data through SendGrid's interface or its API—or you can
handle everything yourself. And, if anyone replies to your emails,
SendGrid can parse those emails and any attachments they may
contain, and send them along as you'd like.

SendGrid Pricing

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 Check Sendgrid Status: http://status.sendgrid.com

For more info on features and pricing, see our Sendgrid review.

Mandrill

The company that makes MailChimp wasn't content to just send

beautiful email newsletters; it also uses its email sending exper-
tise to ensure your app's emails get delivered. That's what Man-
drill is designed for.

Originally a project to integrate MailChimp with Amazon S3, Man-

drill was born because they couldn't get the features they want-
ed to offer using that service. So, they built Mandrill as an email

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 sending service that could also include reporting, templates, in-
bound email processing and more. They've already worked hard
to ensure MailChimp emails will be delivered to any inbox, as
quickly as possible, and Mandrill is infused with that same tech-
nology and care.

Mandrill includes almost every feature you'd want, in all of its

plans: dedicated IP addresses, in-depth analytics, template host-
ing, inbound email parsing, and more. There's also a split testing
tool so you can use different templates and test their results, as
well as email scheduling for $0.05 per thousand scheduled
emails. That way, you can handle your own emails but still get
some of the conveniences most often found in email marketing
platforms.

Mandrill Pricing

Check Mandrill Status: http://status.mandrillapp.com/ (includes

uptime and deliverability stats)

For more info on features and pricing, see our Mandrill review.

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 Mailgun

Built by the Rackspace team, already known for reliable hosting,

Mailgun is designed to be a reliable email service for developers.
Not only can it deliver your emails well, it even includes email
validation features to check and make sure you're sending
emails to valid addresses.

You can send emails the way you want in Mailgun, with isolated
sub-accounts for each domain you add, giving you an easy way
to manage all of your email lists separately or manage client
emails along with your own. There's batch sending features to
personalize emails, detailed analytics and logs, and a powerful

361
 parsing engine to turn incoming emails into JSON and route it
where you want.

All transactional services will help you not have to worry too
much about email, but there's still some things you'll want to
think about: your delivery rates, email reputation, and more. If
you'd rather let someone else take care of those, too, Mailgun
also has a managed service that can take care of the rest of your
email solution. That way, you can just focus on your code and
never worry about email, even if you're sending millions of mes-
sages a month.

Mailgun Pricing

Check Mailgun Status: http://status.mailgun.com

For more info on features and pricing, see our Mailgun review.

362
 Mailjet

Picking a transactional email service doesn't have to mean you

leave behind the features other email marketing apps offer.
Mailjet brings the best of both worlds to the table, as a full-fea-
tured email marketing and transactional email sending service.

You can customize Mailjet's email templates, store your cus-

tomer's data and use it to personalize your emails, then use that
data to segment your lists and send the perfect emails to your
audience. Or, you can do the heavy lifting on your own, and send
emails using Mailjet's API.

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 Then, you can test your campaigns and improve them using
Mailjet's A/X testing, which lets you test up to 10 variations of
your campaign and then send the best version to the remainder
of your recipients. There's also real-time analytics and data on
your emails, and tools to compare each set of messages to your
last, to see how your marketing is going over time. That, along-
side your transactional email sending, so you can keep all of you
email work together in one place.

Mailjet Pricing

Price quoted is for Premium plans; Basic plans without segmenta-

tion, A/X testing, and campaign comparison are around 25% cheap-
er

Check Mailjet Status: https://mailjet.statuspage.io

364
 For more info on features and pricing, see our Mailjet review.

SendinBlue

Want to send transactional SMS messages along with your trans-

actional emails? SendinBlue might be the email service for you.
It's another app that includes email marketing along with a trans-
actional email API, and it also includes SMS marketing to give you
one more way to get in touch with your audience.

Using the same REST API, you can create campaigns using Send-
inBlue's marketing platform, or you can send transactional email
and SMS messages. You'll be able to keep up with all of your cus-
tomer's data with SendinBlue's integrations with eCommerce

365
 and CMS platforms, and can simply trigger campaigns from your
app. Or, you can send receipts and other transactional messages
directly through its API. Either way, you'll get the same reports,
with full details on your open rates, click-throughs, and more,
and can export it to analyze on your own.

SendinBlue Pricing

Check SendinBlue Status: https://apidocs.sendinblue.com/api-

status/

Zapier support coming soon

366
 Postmark

You don't need to buy stamps to send letters anymore, but you
might need to pick up some Postmark credits to start sending
emails simply from your apps. Instead of having to subscribe to a
certain plan or figure out what your price will be once you're
sending a certain number of emails, Postmark lets you purchase
email credits at the rate that works best for you and use them as
you need. That gives you a chance to get the bulk rate, even if
you're just starting.

That bulk rate will get you a lot with Postmark, too, since every-
one gets the exact same features. You'll get 45 days of search-
able history, so you can see the full contents of the emails you've

367
 sent and pinpoint why they bounced. You can also see full pro-
files of each of your email recipients, complete with info about
which emails they open, their location and more. And if those
users reply, you can put those replies to work after Postmark
turns them into JSON and sends them to you with its API.

Postmark Pricing

Check Postmark Status: http://status.postmarkapp.com

Zapier support coming soon

368
 Knowtify

All transactional emails are not created equal. There's the notifi-
cation emails that let you know you've made a purchase or have
been contacted inside an app, along with behavioral (or drip)
emails that are sent when you do something in the app to help
guide you along. And then, there's digest emails from social net-
works and more that let you know what's happened while you
were away. Knowtify is a transactional email service designed to
handle them all.

You'll find marketing-focused tools like a rich email template de-

signer, list segmentation and email personalization tools, behav-
ioral triggers, and a schedule for your recurring emails. Set all of
that up, then you can integrate with your app to send detailed

369
 transactional and behavioral emails based on things your users
have done. Then, with most Knowtify plans, you'll be able to
send automatic digest emails to your users with your service's
latest news, the things that user's missed from the app, charts
and graphs about how your app's helped them, and more.

Sure, you could create these emails on your own and use any
service to send them, or you could just let Knowtify build them
for you so you can focus on your product while still sending
more informative and engaging emails.

Knowtify Pricing

Zapier support coming soon

370
Get Started Using Your Transactional
Email Service
Now that you're convinced not to run your own email server, and
have picked out a service to send your messages, it's time to ac-
tually start using it to send emails. Unlike most apps, you can't
just fire up your new email sending service, click three buttons
and send out a bulk email. You'll instead need to integrate them
with your apps and tools, or fire up terminal to send messages
manually.

Here's some of the many ways you can put your transactional
email service to work today.

371
 Send Emails From Your Software

Whether you have fancy online apps that want to send emails, or
are still using traditional desktop software, many programs will
let you configure your SMTP server to send emails. There's no
need to put in your Gmail credentials anymore. Instead, put your
transactional email service's SMTP server info into your app's set-
tings page.

372
Then, just keep using your app as normal, and it'll now send
emails using your transactional email service—complete with
your default template if you're using a service that adds a tem-
plate to your messages. That's how the Digital Fusion team
sends emails from their Filemaker database. They've integrated
Filemaker with Mandrill's SMTP server so they can get all the ad-
vantages of an email sending service from a traditional app.

"Even if you wish to use (Mandrill) just via SMTP alone it makes
sense," says Digital Fusion developer Daniel Wood. "The Mandrill
SMTP credentials are reliable, secure, and work anywhere (sub-
ject to firewall restrictions of course). In addition, you get all the
benefits of comprehensive email tracking and settings to help
customise the experience."

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 Add it to Your Site and App's Code

The most obvious way to start using a transactional email ser-

vice, of course, is to integrate it with your app. Right from the
front page of most of these services, you'll find code snippets to
integrate them with your app using PHP, Python, C# and more.
Typically, it'll just take a couple lines of code to get their API
working with your code base, so just look at the documentation
for each service before you dive in.

Beyond that, there are modules, plugins, and libraries to inte-

grate many of the popular email sending services with apps that
you're likely already using. You can find WordPress extensions
and Drupal modules that'll let you send emails with the service
of your choice, and more. Look around and see what's available

374
 for your tech stack, and that might be one of the things that
helps you decide which service to use.

Get New Apps for Email Sending Services

There's plenty of apps that are great for email marketing, but if
you'd like the features and performance of a transactional email
service but don't want to do all the coding on your own, perhaps
some new apps are in order. There are a number of apps out
there that are designed to work with transactional email ser-
vices. They'll handle the code needed to create your emails and

375
 make them look nice, and use the service of your choice to send
the emails out, giving you the best of both worlds.

SendWithUs, one of the apps included in our roundup of great

email newsletter apps, is one such tool. It helps you create beau-
tiful templates for your emails, and even includes tools to trans-
late your email content so you can reach your audience any-
where. Then, it includes analytics, A/B testing, customer profiles,
segmentation, and automatic drip campaigns, so you don't have
to code anything extra. All you'll have to do is add SendWithUs'
API to your site to have it send emails or add new contacts.

For an even less geeky experience, Sendy is a self-hosted email

newsletter app that sends your messages via Amazon SES. You'll
just install your copy of the app, add your SES account info, then

376
 create and send apps without ever having to touch a line of
code. It's one of the simplest ways to send emails with a transac-
tional email service.

Automate Email With Zapier

Even if you can't code, you can still make your own apps and in-
tegrate your email service with any other program using Zapier.
Just connect your transactional email service to Zapier, then you
can send emails automatically from any of your other apps.

Send Emails From Your Favorite App

Everything from your website to your CRM can send email mes-
sages, but they likely won't send them with the templates you

377
typically use. If you'd like to customize your automated app
emails, your transactional email app is your best friend. You can
connect your apps that typically send emails to Zapier, have Za-
pier trigger when you need an email sent (say, by adding a tag to
your contact), and then Zapier will have your email service send
out a perfectly formatted email. No need to look for a new app:
you can put your apps together and use each of their best fea-
tures.

Zaps:

• Send a Welcome Email to New SugarCRM Leads via

Mandrill

• Send an email from Mailgun by tagging an Infusion-

soft contact

• Trigger an email from Mandrill from a webhook

Contact Your Customers

When someone's just purchased your product—or attempted to

purchase it—that's the perfect time to get in touch via email. You
may need to send them an email receipt, or a detailed email with

378
a PDF guide attached to help them get started using it. Or, if their
credit card was rejected and they couldn't complete the pur-
chase, you might want to get in touch and remind them to try
again. Either way, all you'll need is your payment tool, Zapier,
and an email sending service.

Zaps:

• Send an email to Stripe customers with invalid cred-

it cards via Mandrill

• Add your Chargify Customers to your SendGrid

Newsletter Subscriptions

• Automatically send an email to your buyer with Za-

pier and Mandrill

Build Your Own Email Powered App

Need to build a tool that'll collect information then send it out in

an email? You could have a custom app developed for it, or you
could just pull out your handy spreadsheet or form tool and put
the basics together. Connect it to an email sending service with

379
Zapier, and suddenly it'll be a simple app of sorts—all without
any coding.

Zaps:

• Send Email via Amazon SES to new Google Docs

Spreadsheet Entries

• Send Sendgrid email for new Wufoo form entries

Or, if you're a bit more technical, database apps give you the
most power to build a system you want and then use it to trigger
your emails. You could have an email sent out to new contacts
once you add them to your database—or have it email them
once you've updated their profile with a particular tag. Almost
anything's possible with Zapier, a database, and an email server.

Zaps:

• Trigger an email via Mandrill for new MySQL rows

• Use Mailgun to create an email queue to send a

drip email campaign

• Send email via Mandrill for new SQL Server row

380
Get Notified

APIs typically work both ways: you can use them to trigger ac-
tions, but they can also send you information back. Depending
on your email service, you should be able to get notifications
whenever your emails are sent, when a message bounces, or
perhaps even when you get a new reply to your messages. Plug
those notifications into Zapier, and you can then have your email
server notifications show up on your phone, in your team chat,
logged in your notebook or anywhere else you want them.

Zaps:

• Mandrill email message to new HipChat message

• Post emails sent to Mandrill into a Slack Channel

381
 

Sending bulk emails—whether directly from your app, with a bit

of code in terminal, or through any app that lets you send emails
—doesn't have to be difficult. With a transactional email service,
you can send all the emails you need, from the apps you're al-
ready using, and you might even be able to do more with them
than you've ever done with your emails before. And if you're only
sending a couple thousand emails a month, it might even be
free.

Next
Whether you're sending emails from a drip or newsletter app, or
are using one of these transactional services to send your mes-
sages out to the world, you'll want to make sure your emails are

382
as effective as possible. For that, you'll want to A/B test your
messages, crafting separate versions of your messages and au-
tomatically testing to see which version performs best. We'll
learn all about how to A/B test emails in the apps you're already
using in the next chapter.

Written by Matthew Guay

Image credits: Mail truck photo courtesy Thomas Hawk.

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 Chapter 10: A/B Test Your
Email Marketing

How to Get Started, What to Test and

20+ Apps to Help

A/B testing. The phrase itself sounds complicated and time-con-

suming—something that can really wait for another day. But it
doesn't need to be that way. Modern web tools, like the 25 email
marketing apps we recently reviewed, are often equipped with
features that make A/B testing (also called split testing) as simple
as scheduling a campaign or customizing a template.

384
Though there are all sorts of A/B tests you can run—mainly on
the pages of your website—this post focuses on tweaking what
ends up in your customers' inbox. Specifically, how to A/B test
with the help of an off-the-shelf email marketing app such as
MailChimp, AWeber or Campaign Monitor.

Before we show you exactly where to access testing features in

your email marketing software—including A/B testing links for
20-plus apps—let's examine the basics of A/B testing: how it
works, guidelines to follow, and email characteristics to test.

In This Chapter:

• What is A/B Testing?

• How A/B Testing Email Works

• 10 A/B Testing Rules to Follow

• 10 Email Characteristics to Test

• 20+ Email Marketing Apps that Offer A/B testing

385
 —

What is A/B Testing?

Pretend you own a restaurant—the Chatterbox Café—and after a

few months of flat revenue, you're tempted to change up your
menu to see if has an impact on sales. You create a new menu
where instead of just text, you include five pictures of your high-
est-priced items. That's the only change—everything else about
the menu stays the same. You then make 25 copies of the new
menu, placing them alongside the 25 copies of the original all-
text menu, and then split your café down the middle—patrons

386
on one side get the new menu, and everyone else gets the old
menu.

After two days, you tally up the revenue and compare the two
sides, pleasantly finding that the menus with the five pictures in-
creased the average table ticket by 15%. You have a winner. Next
stop: the copy machine.

That is an A/B test. You have variant "A", the menu with text only,
and variant "B", the menu with the five pictures. Variant "A" is
also often referred to as the "control"—the variant you've been
using and keeping stats on. Returning to the example above, it's
only because you knew the historical sales of your café's control
menu that were you able to confidently say the new picture
menu increased sales by 15%.

That example is an A/B test in a café, probably the last place in-
ternet marketers would think to apply an A/B test today. You're
likely more familiar with testing your company's homepage—
slightly changing the copy, picture or button color—with an aim
to increase sign-ups or sales inquiries. The same can be done for
your marketing emails, too, and it's not as complicated or labori-
ous as it might seem.

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 How A/B Testing Email Works

MailChimp's A/B Split Campaigns find the better variant

for you and then use that version for the majority of
your email list

Let's start with an honest admission: Before I dug into the A/B
testing features provided by email marketing software, I fully ex-
pected I'd be manually setting up, executing and analyzing A/B
tests. That is, I'd split my email list down the middle, send a con-
trol to one group, a variant to another, then watch the results
come in.

But it's not like that at all. A/B testing just takes applying an extra
bit of text to your email body copy, using an extra subject line
field or setting up a second email and marking it as variant "B".

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 Once you do that, your email marketing service takes care of the
rest.

Here's a brief look inside three popular email marketing tools—

MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor—to demonstrate
just how easy it can be to get an A/B test up and running.

A/B Split Test From Names in MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most widely-used email services in part

because of its friendly brand that permeates the software. Its A/
B testing tool, officially called "A/B Split Campaign", falls right in
line with that branding: it's a convenient shortcut to better ver-
sions of your emails.

While some tools will make you conduct an A/B test on your full
list, MailChimp lets you pull aside a sample—say, 3,400 emails
from your 10,000 subscribers—and conducts an A/B test with
just those folks. What percentage should you test? After seeing 7

389
 years of testing results, the team at MailChimp recommends a
test segment of 20%-50%—the smaller the list, the higher the
percentage, too.

Once you've selected a percentage, MailChimp has you choose

which metric it'll use to select the best version, which will be sent
to the remaining email addresses on your list after your test re-
veals a winner.

Finally, you need to enter the details of your test. For this exam-
ple, let's test the from name (the email sender's name). We want
to find out which is better: using the company's name or a per-
son's name?

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After you've filled out the fields, send the test and let MailChimp
take care of deploying the winning email—or use the "Manual"
option to pick it yourself. Remember, the only difference be-
tween the two emails you've sent will be the "From Name"—a
small but possibly important variant. If you had changed up any-
thing else, such as the subject line and the from name, the re-
sults would be a mix of those two changes. This is commonly
called an interaction effect (or confounding effect). Your stats are
only good for that specific setup.

For more on MailChimp's A/B Split Campaign tool, which also allows
you to test subject lines and send dates and times, read this
MailChimp Knowledge Base article.

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 Split Test Call to Actions (CTAs) in AWeber

AWeber is another popular email app among marketers because

of its ability to easily add contacts via WordPress, PayPal and
Facebook. Once you've accumulated a list of more than 100 con-
tacts, the email marketing tool lets you start A/B testing your
communications—or as they call it, conduct a "Broadcast Split
Tests." 100 contacts, they say, is the minimum to get statistically
significant results.

Unlike MailChimp where the ability to A/B test a campaign is of-

fered after you've written and designed your email, AWeber has
you select Broadcast Split Test before you begin setting up your
campaign.

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From there, they give you the ability to create up to four variants
—since you're A/B testing though, you'll want to select "2 mes-
sages"—and then enter the send percentage for each.

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After doing so, you'll indicate which message editor you're going
to utilize—the app's "drag and drop email builder", "plain text
message" or "code your own HTML"—and then click "Save Split
Test". You've now set up your split test structure; all that's left is
your campaign's copy, design and scheduling.

At this point—writing and designing your email—you'll want to

keep everything the same except for your call to action (CTA) link
or button. If you're emailing your restaurant patrons about this

394
 month's special, for example, and your aim is to have them click-
through and make a reservation, one email's call to action might
say "Book a reservation" while the other says "Save a table for
me!"

After you send the email, you'll see stats for the two versions roll
in, and since you're concerned with subscribers visiting your
reservations page, you'll want to pay attention to the "clicked"
count. You can use these stats to decide which text is more entic-
ing for your next email.

To see their full tutorial and video overview of a Broadcast Split Test,
visit AWeber's Knowledge Base.

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 A/B Test Subject Lines in Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor prides itself on its well-designed and cus-

tomizable email templates, something you'll get the chance to
play around with when using their A/B testing option.

Like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor does the work for you—after

selecting what to test, enter the two versions, select the email
content, and then decide on a subset of your list to send this test
to. Campaign Monitor recommends sending to 20-30% of your
list—in the screenshot below, for example, the marketing team
plans to send emails to 17,820 respondents before a winner is
named.

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Testing subject lines with Campaign Monitor is quite easy, too.

After selecting it from the interface above, you'll enter two sub-
ject lines in the two provided fields. That's it. Everything else
about your email—from the sender name to the CTA text—will
remain the same.

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 When you see the results, you'll want to hone in on open rate—
in the test below, "Version A" is the winner.

See Campaign Monitor's A/B testing options by visiting their help

documentation.

10 A/B Testing Rules to Follow

In their A/B testing documentation, Campaign Monitor stresses
that it's best to test your emails by either viewing a preview or
sending yourself a campaign email.

"It's very important to test and check for errors of any kind be-
fore you start an A/B test because you cannot make any cam-
paign changes when an A/B test is in progress," reads their docu-

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mentation. With Campaign Monitor, that's an easy step to heed
since before they allow you to send the emails, they show you a
campaign snapshot—similar to a travel itinerary when you pur-
chase a plane ticket—that includes these test options.

This is a good rule to follow when A/B testing, but it isn't the only
one. Here are 10 A/B testing guidelines to consider before jump-
ing into a test of your own.

1. Know What You're Testing and Why

What are you trying to improve about your marketing emails?

Ask yourself that simple question before proceeding. At Zapier,
we'd like to increase the click-through rate on our blog news-
letter emails and amp up the open and click-through rates on
our new user onboarding emails. If we hit those goals, we'd likely
see more unique pageviews on our blog and a higher level of en-
gagement with our app. So our "what" is increase open and click-
through rates, and our "why" is to increase engagement.

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 What are you testing?
For the "what you're testing" question, you have two options—
each has been mentioned in this chapter, but let's clearly define
them:

Open Rate: This stat tells you how many of your subscribers
open a particular email. It's expressed as a percentage and calcu-
lated by dividing the number of emails opened by the number of
emails sent minus the number of emails bounced—bounced
meaning the subscriber's email is no longer valid. A 30% open
rate, for example, would mean that if 102 emails were sent and 2
bounced, 30 were opened.

Pay attention to the open rate when you're testing subject lines,
sender names and message preview.

Click-Through Rate or Click Rate: Look to this number to learn

how many of your subscribers clicked on a link in your body of
your email to visit your site. This number is also expressed as a
percentage and is calculated by dividing the number of sub-

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 scribers who clicked a link by the number of emails sent minus
the number of emails bounced.

Some email marketing software—such as Campaign Monitor (be-

low)—lets you take this a step further, too, and hone in on a spe-
cific link in your body copy. This can be helpful if you have multi-
ple links, such as a text link in the intro and a button link at the
bottom, for the same landing page—now you can see which link
is most effective. If your email marketing service doesn't offer
this feature, rely on Google Analytics to tell you which link gets
the most clicks by giving each link unique UTM parameters.

Pay attention to the click-through rate when you're testing call to ac-
tion text and buttons along with body copy.

401
Why are you testing?
For the "why you're testing" question, it's really up to you. An in-
creased click-through rate on a call to action in your onboarding
email could mean higher revenue next quarter. An improved
open rate for your emails could turn into a higher active user
count, leading to more feedback on your product. It’s also impor-
tant to make sure that metric will actually move the needle if in-
fluenced.

Also ask yourself what you'd like to learn from your tests. This list
of outcomes offered by Campaign Monitor in an A/B testing case
study offers some great questions to start with:

• Do long or short subject lines work best for my au-

dience?

• Does including a number in the subject line get my

audience to open emails?

• Does subject line personalization work for my audi-

ence?

• Should I phrase the subject line as a question rather

than a statement?

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No matter the objective, just be sure to identify it at the start of
your testing.

See the industry norms for open and click-through rates in

MailChimp's "Email Marketing Benchmarks" report.

2. Focus on Frequently Sent Emails

Hold up, you want to A/B test your "Happy Holidays!" email?
Think again: you'll be waiting 12 months until you can put your
results to good use.

A/B testing works best for perfecting frequently sent emails—at

Zapier, our frequent emails include blog newsletters, new user
onboarding emails, and error alerts. We send hundreds of thou-
sands of those emails weekly; if we can increase the open or click
rate by just 1%, that's a major win. So back to that holiday greet-
ing idea—sure you might send it to your full email list of 55,000
email addresses, but what are you going to do with the results?
Email services and clients change so frequently, it's unlikely that
what you learn can be applied to whatever you send next year.
The key challenge with frequent emails is making sure that sam-
ple sizes are enough for the inference you’re trying to make,

403
Evan Miller offers a helpful calculator to find your minimum sam-
ple size per group.

3. Split Your List Randomly

If your email marketing software doesn't offer A/B testing—or

you want to spin up a manual test on your own—remember to
split your subscribers randomly. One way to do this is to down-
load your list as a CSV and randomly sort it using Excel. Or, you
can simply arrange it alphabetical order with any spreadsheet
software, slicing it up from there. Luckily most email marketing
apps will handle this step for you.

4. Make Bold Changes

The struggle with A/B Testing in general is having a large enough

sample size. However, there’s a lever that can be applied to rem-
edy this problem. The larger the difference in effect between
emails, the smaller the sample size can be. Therefore, test highly
divergent variants. For example, plain-text versus HTML emails,
or "one prominent link" versus "everything is a link." Just try to

404
learn the lay of the land by turning "big knobs"—save finer ad-
justments for later.

5. Test Just Two Variants

Since sample size is our biggest challenge, we want to avoid

things that will explode the necessary participants. Sample size
requirements will explode as variants are added, so unless you’re
consistently testing over 100,000 in each variant, keep it to two
variants.

6. Wait 4-5 Days

In our experience at Zapier, a single email's effect declines

sharply, petering out around day 4 to 5 after being sent.* If your
email has no effect after 5 days of waiting, it’s not likely to ever
have any meaningful difference. 4-5 days is a good rule of
thumb, otherwise you might destroy your experiment.

* Statistician's Note: Given the tools being used are Frequen-

tist—they almost certainly are, if not you’ll see the phrase
"Bayesian" everywhere—you only get to look at results once.

405
 The reason is that the p-value is only valid for one peek at that
point it expires (in terms of statistical validity). Zapier’s data
scientist Christopher Peters recommends waiting a "represen-
tative time," that amounts to the amount of time you’d be will-
ing to wait.

7. Check if Results are Statistically Significant

You dispatch your A/B test to your 65,000 subscribers and it

comes back that 5,400 of them opened the "A" version and 5,500

406
of them opened the "B" version. B's the winner, right? Not so
fast. Just as new reporters have a tough time calling a political
race on election night, you too should you be slow to call a win-
ner in your A/B test. The best step to check if your results are sta-
tistically significant is to use one of the many free calculators on-
line. Visual Website Optimizer, an app for A/B testing your web-
site, has a simple free significance calculator (pictured) that
serves up a quick answer. When using it for email, consider "visi-
tors" as "subscribers".

8. Make Sure It's a Meaningful Effect

Statistical significance is a statement about the repeatability of

your result, not the extent to which it moves the needle. It’' very
important to ask yourself, will this change really impact an as-
pect of the business that is cared about? It’s possible to achieve
statistical significance while having no real effect on the bottom-
line. This might mean new landing pages with more relevance for
customers or a better UX on the landing page.

407
9. Act on Your Results

And the significance calculator says… "yes", your results are sta-
tistically significant. Moreover, they're meaningful because you
were careful to check that they could be ahead of time. Score!
Since hopefully your variants were divergent, you might have
learned something big about email marketing. Zapier's Peters
suggests trying to replicate the experiment to to see if the effect
is repeatable. If you reach this point, you're really onto some-
thing. You can install your divergent variant —this is now your
"champion." Now repeat with a new "challenger" that is again di-
vergent to the new champ. You're well on your way!

10. A/B Test Again

Customer behavior never stops changing, and neither should

your A/B tests. If you've increased your click-through rate, chal-
lenge yourself to spike your open rate. If you bumped your open
rate with a better subject line, consider changing up the message
preview. If your message preview is perfected, change up the
sender.

Out of testing ideas? That's what we'll cover next.

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 —

10 Email Characteristics to Test

1. Change the From Name / Sender Name

HubSpot saw a higher email click-through rate when it sent a

campaign using a team member's name as the from name
—"Maggie Georgieva, HubSpot"—versus their company name.

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"Our control generated a 0.73% CTR (click-through rate), and the
personalized version generated a 0.96% CTR. With a confidence
level of 99.9%, we had a clear winner," says marketer Bryan Har-
ris in a video on the HubSpot blog. "Our conclusion after con-
ducting this A/B test was that emails sent by a real person are
more likely to be clicked on than emails sent from a company
name."

From Name / Sender Name Variants to Test

• Company - Zapier

• Company newsletter - Zapier Blog

• Company department - Zapier Support

• Team member name - Wade Foster

• Team member name and title - Wade Foster, CEO

• Team member name and company - Wade Foster

(Zapier)

• Team member first name only - Wade

• Team member first name and company - Wade

from Zapier

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 2. Try Shorter, Longer and Simple Subject Lines

CoSchedule, a content planning and scheduling tool, used Cam-

paign Monitor to identify the best title length for their popular
newsletter, "The Content Marketing Update". What they found,
as told in a Campaign Monitor blog post, is that longer titles re-
ceived higher open rates. Specifically, the blog post stated,
"shorter subject lines were less successful for (CoSchedule) than
longer ones, and that around between 40 and 50 characters was
their sweet spot."

411
So 40-50 characters? That's a pretty long subject line. <— this
is 47 characters

Subject Line Variants to Test

• Length - "Longer email subject lines work better

than shorter, here's why" versus "Longer email sub-
ject lines win"

• Simple and straightforward versus detailed versus

over the top - "Get to the point" versus "See the A/B
test that proves once and for all shorter emails are
better"

• Answer versus question - "Red call to action buttons

works better than blue buttons" versus "Which
works better: red or blue call to action buttons?"

• Non-urgent versus urgent - "Save 50% off your sub-

scription" versus "6 hours left to save 50%"

• Negative versus positive - "10 habits that kill pro-

ductivity" versus "10 ways to boost your productivi-
ty"

• Use of numbers - "9 ways to delight your cus-

tomers" versus "How to delight your customers"

412
• Use of an exclamation point - "Thanks for signing
up" versus "Thanks for signing up!"

• Use of symbols or emoticons - "How to delight your

customers" versus "How to delight your cus-
tomers :)"

• Use of company name, company newsletter name

or company department name - "Five new features
for you" versus "Five new Zapier features for you"

• Use of company team member name (first last or

only first) "A message from our CEO" versus "A mes-
sage from our CEO Wade Foster"

• Use of customer name (first last or only first) - "Wel-

come to Zapier!" versus "Welcome to Zapier, Lloyd
Christmas!"

• Sentence case versus title case versus all lowercase

- "How Zapier writes copy that converts" versus
"How Zapier Writes Copy That Converts" versus
"how zapier writes copy that converts"

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 3. Mess Around with the Message Preview /
Preheader

The message preview (highlighted above) is an easy to overlook

part of an email campaign, one that I'll admit we've missed mak-
ing the most of on several occasions. The little snippet of text
that shows in your inbox—also called the email preheader—is of-
ten customizable using your email marketing client. But beware:
your email subject lines and message preview could butt heads,
depending on the email client your customers are using. Gmail,
for example, puts the title first and then the message preview.
Mobile email apps, on the other hand, will list the title with the
message preview below. Either way, you don't have too many
characters to work with.

A/B testing this could be cumbersome, since it might require

manual testing, but it will be worth the effort. Think to yourself:
how often do you read that little piece of copy to help decide if a
new newsletter is worth reading or not?

414
Message Preview / Preheader Variants to Test

• Pull in the copy from the first line of the email -

"Hello there, welcome to Zapier! You're joining thou-
sands of people who use our tool to automate time-
consuming tasks …"

• Offer a very short summary - "Welcome to Zapier,

I'm excited to show you how you can start automat-
ing your work."

• Supply the call to action - "Here are 101 ways you

can start automating your work."

4. Give Plain Text a Go

Sometimes simple is refreshing. That can be the case when you

get an email in plain-text format, rather than a flashy, over-de-
signed newsletter—plain-text emails feel like something you
would get from a friend.

Unbounce points out that the plain-text format worked best for
the Obama 2012 team.

415
"I think it gave the impression that there were real people writing
these emails, that it wasn’t focus-grouped to death. It was some-
thing more off the cuff," says Amelia Showalter, the campaign's
director of analytics.

5. Personalize the Subject Line or Salutation

Hey reader! If I knew your name, I'd have inserted it there. Unfor-
tunately, I don't, which is one reason I've been cautious of per-
sonalizing emails in the past—not all subscribers supply their
first and last names. But besides testing emails with names,
think about testing personalization in other ways, too.

Email marketing app Vero, for example, personalized an email by

employing a term they felt had a better chance of striking their
audience.

• A: [Vero] The free trial ending email that works

• B: The free trial ending email that converts

"The word 'converts' resonates more with Vero’s (conversion rate

optimization)-focused audience and resulted in a 15% increase in

416
opens and a 50% increase in clicks," writes marketer Siddharth
Bharath on the Vero blog.

Personalization Variants to Test

• Use your customer's first and last name in subject

line and/or salutation - "Welcome to the Zapier Pre-
mium Plan, Jess Byrne!"

• Use your customer's first name in subject line and/

or salutation - "Hey Jess"

• A combination of the above

• Use your customer's persona in the subject line -

"Why marketers read less"

• User terms that resonate with your audience - "The

free trial ending email that converts" (above)

• Use "you" versus don't use "you" - "How you can be

more productive today" versus "How to be more
productive today"

417
 6. Rework the Body Copy

"Cut the length of your email copy in half. Now cut it in half
again."

That's the top-voted piece of advice on a GrowthHackers thread

titled, "Ask GH: In two sentences or less, what’s your single best
email marketing tip, trick, hack or piece of advice?"—it was of-
fered by Morgan Brown, a marketer at GrowthHackers.

It shouldn't be a surprise to see that recommendation in the top

spot. It's a safe bet that you—like the rest of us—don't often care
for long emails.

But what else can you do to your email body copy beyond length
to start A/B testing it? How about trying a new format? That's
what the team from Flightfox did—instead of the usual chunks of
copy, they used a question-and-answer format.

418
 

The result: Flightfox doubled their conversion rates, according to

a case study by Vero, a lifecycle email marketing app.

"The original email had relatively high open and click through
rates but was converting at a rate of 1.6%. This was an excellent
start but there was certainly room for improvement," Vero
states.

"With their new copy, Flightfox have been able to increase their
conversion rate to 3.2%. A fantastic result that has an instant ef-
fect."

Body Copy Variants to Test

• Shorter versus longer

• Bullet points

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 • Numbered list

• Question and answer format

• Only one sentence and a call to action

7. Play Around with Images

Which of the above emails draws you in? If you're like the users
of Unhaggle, the company behind the featured emails, it's the

420
 one on the right. After A/B testing these two, click through rates
increased by 378%, according to a case study by Vero.

"Here’s a snapshot direct from Unhaggle’s email provider," Vero's

founder Chris Hexton writes on their blog. "The changes they
made in the second campaign helped Unhaggle achieve a mas-
sive 32.4% click through rate. This is one of the highest click-rates
we’ve seen recently"

Hexton credits three items for the success of the email—images

that stir up emotions, punchy, short body copy and clear prices
to see the savings.

While this is a success story in images, it's also an A/B test case
study that can serve as an example of what happens when you
change up too many items in an email. If Unhaggle had only in-
serted images, they could have narrowed in on more images
making an impact on click-through rates. Now their results, how-
ever, lead them to continue testing to conclude which of the
three characteristics impact the most customer decisions.

421
Image Variants to Test

• One versus multiple images

• Text on image

• Screenshot of a video

• Call to action incorporated in image versus call to

action separate of image

• Animated GIF

Pro Tips: Heed the advice of email testing app Litmus: Use JPEG or
GIF for the best chance of having your pictures show in your cus-
tomers' email clients. Be sure to also enter ALT text—what shows
up in place of an image—just in case the images don't load in your
customers' email clients. For more on image formats in emails,
see Litmus' post, "PNG, GIF, or JPEG? Which is the Best Image For-
mat for Email?"

8. Modify the Design

3-4 seconds. That's it. That's the length of time Litmus says you
have to grab a customer's attention when they open up your

422
 email. So what better way to grab it then with a design that ap-
peals to their eye?

Moreover, your design needs to be ready to be viewed on mo-

bile, too. Email marketing app Movable Ink found that an aston-
ishing 61% of brand emails are now viewed on smartphone and
tablets. So testing responsive design is almost a must now; larger
text and clearer call to actions are good places to start.

Pro Tip: To test every email client that your marketing campaign
could ever be viewed in, try out a tool like Litmus.

9. Tweak the Call to Action (CTA)

Try Zapier Now!

or…

or, maybe…

423
 

Which one do you want to click? That's your goal here—how

many different ways can you write a call to action. Not only write
it, but present it, too: should it be text link or a button? Should it
go at the top of the email or the bottom? Or both?

Email call-to-action A/B tests conducted by live chat app Zopim

found four factors that were present in winning CTAs. Abhiroop
Basu, the company's content strategist explained these charac-
teristics in a blog post.

• More than one call to action helps if your email is

longer than a few paragraphs - "Ideally, you want to
ensure the reader does not have to scroll up or
down to find a CTA. In our emails, the ideal number
of CTAs was 2, evenly spaced out within the email."

• Call to actions in capital letters worked well - "We

didn’t want to spam our readers with ALL CAPS
CTAs, but we found that for some reason these per-
formed the best."

424
 • Call to action text should be easily legible - "Another
way to put it is to ensure your CTAs don’t have too
many characters (90–150 characters is the sweet
spot)."

• Call to actions should be concise and to the point.

"In our case having 2 words in the CTA worked the
best (i.e., “FREE UPGRADE” and “UPGRADE NOW”).
Additionally, MathOffice.com found that adding val-
ue to the CTA could increase conversion by 14.79%
—so make it interesting."

Call to Action Copy and/or Button Variants to Test

• Shorter versus longer - "Go!" versus "Start Automat-

ing Your Web Apps!"

• Sentence case versus title case versus all lowercase

versus all uppercase - "Try the new feature" versus
"Try The New Feature" versus "try the new feature"
versus "TRY THE NEW FEATURE"

• Exclamation point or no exclamation point - "Get

started" versus "Get started!"

• Italicize versus bold versus underline

425
 • Size of font or button

10. Switch Up the Delivery Day and Time

What if your received the Zapier blog newsletter every Sunday

night at 8 p.m. EST? Would you be more or less likely to open up
that message and click the link to read our latest post?

Testing for the optimal day and time is hard—especially as online

businesses cater to customers and subscribers around the globe
—but the question of when it's best to send emails continues to
plague marketers. So there are two routes to take: stick to the
stats or follow your gut.

426
If you listen to the stats, a good place to start is GetResponse's
recent look at 300 million messages. It showed that Tuesday is
not only the most popular day to send emails, but also the day
with the highest open and click-through rates, as well.

If you follow your gut instead, you're in good company. On the

Crazy Egg blog, marketer Neil Patel offers this advice:

Everyone wants to know, but precious few actually test

it. Save yourself some time, spare yourself some grief,
and give yourself a break.

You see, there’s no stock answer to the question “what

time is best?” Like everything else in marketing (and life),
the true answer is it just depends.

If, for example, you send your email at 7:30 a.m., Patel says, you
might think you'll get higher click-through rates because profes-
sionals are checking their email. But there's a catch, he warns.
"They feel rushed, open your email, but may not have time to re-
spond to your offer. Sure, you get high CTRs, but your conver-
sions are awful."

So instead try 4:30 p.m., when Patel says employees are bored at
work, winding down and possibly looking for a distraction. "They

427
may see your email, open it, and be more likely to convert. Fewer
opens? Maybe. Higher conversions? Yes."

Delivery Date and Time Variants to Test

• Day of the week

• Time of day

For more testing ideas, see EmailMonday's "150+ fresh A/B email
split testing ideas you can use today".

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 Start A/B Testing Your Emails Today

You should now have the confidence to go out and conquer any
customer's inbox… well, maybe not conquer, but at least A/B test
for increased open and click-through rates. To get you started
fast, here are quick links to A/B testing features provided by
some of the more popular email marketing services.

• ActiveCampaign - Split Testing

• AWeber - Broadcast Split Tests

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• Benchmark Email - AB Testing

• Campaign Monitor - A/B testing option

• Constant Contact - Email AB Testing

• Customer.io - A/B Test

• E-goi - A/B split testing

• Emma - Subject line split testing

• FreshMail - A/B split testing

• GetResponse - A/B Testing

• HubSpot - A/B testing

• iContact - Email Split Testing

• Infusionsoft - Split Testing

• Intercom - A/B testing

• Mad Mimi - Compare Stats

• MailChimp - A/B Split Campaign

• MailUp - A/B Test

• Mailigen - A/B Split Test

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 • Pardot - A/B Testing

• Vero - A/B test

• VerticalResponse - Split Test

• Vision6 - A/B testing

Next
Now that you've got an email marketing tool and a strategy to
make great emails that get opened, it's tempting to get right to
work and stop reading right here. But don't leave just yet, or oth-
erwise you might end up making one of the many common mis-
takes that are made with email marketing. In chapter 11, we'll
look at 21 of the worst email marketing mistakes, and how you
can avoid making them in your own work.

Written by Danny Schreiber

Image credits: Screenshots from respective app help documentation

pages. AWeber results screenshot via Basic Blog Tips. Unhaggle email

screenshots courtesy Vero.

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 Chapter 11: Experts Weigh In

21 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Send plain text emails. lowercase every word in the subject line.
Always put the call to action as a text link and a button link.

Successful email marketing tactics are spread across the web.

But even with ample resources available and advanced email
marketing software, mistakes are regularly made. These blun-
ders, however, aren't the blantantly mispelled words in the open-

432
ing paragraph or the misplaced graphics that feature the wrong
promotion. These are the little—and sometimes big—mistakes
that are easy to overlook, but when made, could cost you email
opens and click-throughs.

To prevent you from erring like everyone else, we asked mar-

keters, startup founders and marketing executives to name the
mistake that sticks out most.

What's one mistake you see email marketing campaigns

make too often and how can it be fixed?

Inbox Mistakes

1. Subject Line is Overhyped

Dan Norris, Co-Founder of WP Curve

The one mistake I see is overhyped subject lines. Writing head-
lines is a fine art and while the BuzzFeed style baited headlines
might get more clicks, people forget about the impact on the

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trust of their brand. When I see consistent headlines that draw
me into an email with very little substance, I immediately as-
sociate the sender with spammy IM techniques and it impacts on
how much I trust their brand. The style I dislike the most is when
the headline implies something and when you click through, you
find out that it's not the same thing. This kills trust and isn't
worth the click.

It's OK to encourage people to click but if they are constantly let

down when they get into your content, it will have a long-term
impact. I would rather sacrifice a few clicks to maintain the in-
tegrity of my brand.

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 Dan Oshinsky, Senior Newsletter Editor at BuzzFeed

Anyone can game subject lines, and that's a problem. I did it

once with a subject line that read, "Hi, You're Fired." The lead sto-
ry in the newsletter featured videos of people screwing up on the

435
job, so the subject line wasn't totally inappropriate. But the sub-
ject line was super aggressive—plenty of readers opened that
email thinking they'd actually been fired! At the time, that was
one of the most-opened BuzzFeed newsletters ever. But the rela-
tionship between the marketer and the sender is built on trust,
and when you send emails like "Hi, You're Fired", you can lose
that trust pretty quickly. Since that email, my team's had a simple
policy: Always do what's best for your readers and your sub-
scribers, and delight them with every email. Do that every time,
and your open rates will be strong in the long run.

"Always do what's best for your readers and your sub-

scribers, and delight them with every email."

~ BuzzFeed email policy

2. Message Preview is Overlooked

Jeremy Smith, Senior Product Marketing Manager / Email

Strategy at Yammer
Most clients display some preview text next to or near the sub-
ject line. This bit of text is called the preheader, and is usually

436
limited to around 100 characters and will be pulled from the first
few lines of text in your email.

MailChimp makes it easy—you just replace the text prompt they

provide to make it work. Other platforms, well, they vary. Exact-
Target has a bug in their built-in preheader formatting that
makes it not render in most email clients, which I’ve developed a
multi-client workaround for.

I’ve tested the crap out of preheater efficacy, and it can move
open rates quite a bit, as you get a chance to extend your offer
from just the subject line into a more detailed call-out.

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An email from MediaMath opens with 'You know what

they say'…

438
 …but email clients show a very different preview mes-
sage.

Kristin Bond, Author of Email Marketing Blog Email Snar-

keting
All of the little details that make up an email—from name, from
email, subject line, pre-header, etc., are important. A lot of
brands mostly focus on the body of the email and the subject
line, and forget about the pre-header. I've seen so many emails
where people still don't even have pre-header copy, or if they do,
it's "To view this email in a browser, click here." Or even worse, if
they're building an entire email as an image (which is bad
enough on its own), the pre-header is a bunch of code or a very
long URL.

Pre-headers are such a fun part of email—they can supplement

the subject line, and give the subscriber more reason to open
the email. They're increasingly important on mobile. They're also
a great way for brands to show a little personality. For brands
that use very short subject lines, they're especially important,
since the character space that would go for a subject line is being
used by the pre-header. You only have a few seconds to get a
subscriber's attention—why not use all of the tools you have?

439
 In this screenshot from a random section of my inbox, most of
the brands used pre-header text to add more context to their
subject line, but some used almost the SAME text as their subject
line, and one (Dillards) supplemented a boring subject line with
even more boring pre-header text. Which email would you open?

Ryan Hoover, Founder of Product Hunt

Email marketers often overlook the preview that's often dis-
played beside the subject in most email clients. This is critical to
driving enough interest from recipients to open the email to read
more.

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 3. Email Address or From Name is "noreply"

Rob Walling, Founder of Drip

Using a generic email "from name" such as "admin" or "noreply".
People want to interact with people, not mailboxes.

Joe Stych, Marketer at Zapier

When brands send emails from a "noreply" address (or an email

address that never gets checked), they're really saying "we don't
want to talk to you." It's an engagement opportunity that many
teams miss—on one of the largest direct marketing channels out
there.

We want to make ourselves available to users who have ques-

tions about Zaiper and how to use it. So we send all of our
emails from contact@zapier.com, and encourage people to

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 reply if they're confused about how to get started. All of those
replies are routed to a Help Scout mailbox, where our awesome
support team puts users on a path to success.

When people talk with our support team and get their questions
answered, they're much more likely to turn into paying cus-
tomers. If we used noreply@zapier.com instead, those oppor-
tunities would pass us by.

Email Copy Mistakes

4. Email Offers No Value to Customer

Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo

I see people sending follow up emails that have nothing valuable
for the reader. It's cliche but anytime you sign up for a service

442
you get a generic, "Oh, go click this and do this and just PAY US
NOW!"

Instead, focus on your emails being so valuable your potential

customers read them, share them and are excited to use more of
your product and pay you money.

Just ask yourself if your emails are valuable even if your potential
customer never buys.

"Just ask yourself if your emails are valuable even if your

potential customer never buys."

~ Noah Kagan, AppSumo

Luke Guy, Blogger and Entrepreneur

Biggest mistake I see is the fact that people cold sale within an
email. Like they'll email this brand hoping they'll buy from them
because of one email. Which is crazy! One email and you think
you're going to land a $1,000 contract?

Complete newbie move.

Instead, people should build a relationship over time and then

offer a service of some sort. So instead of being spammy, be

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helpful. Outreach and grow your list. You do this by offering
something within every email. Content that is. Not a price tag.

Jessica Meher, Head of Marketing, Web Team at HubSpot

Not offering anything of real value. Too many emails are "me,
me, me" and don't offer something the recipient actually cares
about.

5. Email Focuses on the Product, Not the Cus-

tomer

Matthew Smith, Creator of Really Good Emails, a Collabo-

rative Effort of the Assembly community:
Emails should serve the customer not the product. Often times
the marketing team, not the product team is in charge of the
email flow and their directive is to grow. If you get myopic about
that task you forget that the most solid growth comes through
simple, repeatable, service that is so good it's sharable. Serving
customers comes by meeting them in their email client with sim-
ple tasks and giving them more than they expect or more than
they are paying for with their time.

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 This email by Squarespace does this well.

This email by Home Depot fails at this.

445
 

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6. Email is Void of Personality

Paul Jarvis, Bestselling Author and Web Designer

The biggest email marketing mistake I see people are guilty of is
not letting their own personality shine through. Just because
you're selling something doesn't mean it needs to sound like
"Marketing-Bot-O-Tron-3000" wrote it. People probably signed up
for your list because they liked your unique voice, your point of
view, the way you do things that isn't the same as everyone else.
So when you've got something to do sell them, for Pete's sake,
keep your personality and voice shining through.

Sandi MacPherson, Founder of Quibb

There aren't enough companies telling interesting, relevant sto-
ries to their users. People are interested in hearing about your
company, or at least your perspective on what you're best at,
along with the people behind the product that they enjoy using.
Using social cues and proof in products is a well understood ap-
proach, yet people don't take it as seriously in their email mar-
keting strategy. Anand Sanwal at CB Insights does a great job at
this, where he shares his personal opinions on interesting news,
asks email subscribers to email him directly with their opinions

447
on that news, and also shares interesting tidbits about what him,
the company, and other users are up to. Spitfire Athlete's emails
are also great at this, sharing the stories of various successful
athletes they're partnering with to encourage users to reach
their own fitness goals.

7. Email Contains Too Many Calls to Action

(CTAs)

Georgiana Laudi, Director of Marketing at Unbounce

Marketers often try to do too much in one campaign email (pre-
sumably because they don't want to have to send more than
necessary in fear of unsubscribes). Trying to accomplish too
much in an email is asking readers to do too much work to deci-
pher if your email is relevant or not to them. One CTA linking to
one landing page (too, with one CTA) clarifies your offer and
makes it easier to convert.

Ellie Mirman, Vice President of Marketing at Toast

One of the biggest mistakes I see in email marketing campaigns
is that there isn't a clear goal or call to action. Too often, email

448
marketing is treated as "something we have to do" without much
thought about what goal it's trying to achieve. Email marketing
can be used to generate leads, engage customers, drive blog
subscribers, or any number of other relevant goals. Email
newsletters are often the worst offenders of this—they are
crammed with content without much clarity on what the mar-
keter hopes to get out of sending that email. Some of my most
successful email campaigns have been simple, with a single
piece of content and clear call to action to download.

Here's an image of an email that does this well:

449
 

Chris Litster, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at

Constant Contact
While most businesses send email campaigns with a good idea
of what they want people to do, they don’t always make it clear
to the reader. Email recipients should know what you want them
to do right away. Think about the action you want them to take.
Do you want them to visit your website, redeem an offer, register
for an event, or visit your store? Make sure they have all the in-

450
formation they need to take that action and make it as easy as
possible for them to do it.

Paul Jarvis, Bestselling Author and Web Designer

The biggest email marketing mistake I see is a lack of focus. Just
like if a website has 50 calls to action, 30 blinking buttons and a
navigation that's longer than "War and Peace", it's not going to
convert or retain any visitors. The same applies for each, the
more focus there is on ONE idea, ONE call to action, ONE task for
a user to complete, the more likely they are take that action.

Kristen Craft, Director of Partnerships at Wistia

Here's one mistake a see a lot: giving people too many calls-to-
action in an email. It's confusing to the recipient and dilutes the
effectiveness of the email campaign. Plus, it makes it harder to
gauge the effectiveness of the email, since you don't have a sin-
gle metric you can look at (like click through rate).

Instead, give people a single CTA, and ideally, give them one
that's super compelling (like watching an awesome video!). A
video thumbnail as your CTA is likely to give you 3x the number
of click-throughs (versus any other CTA). For example, I'm pasting
below an email we sent last summer, inviting people to our of-

451
 fice. Very simple, clean, and with just one CTA for a fun video.
(Side note: do not include the video itself in your email. This can
lead to some bad outcomes! Use a clickable thumbnail image
that automatically redirects to a landing page with the video on
it.)

452
Related: "The Surprising Way One Startup Increased Email Click-
Through Rates By 300%

8. Email Doesn't Supply a Text Link

Bryan Harris, Founder of Videofruit:

People still like text links. Be sure to include one above the fold
and one below the fold. And ALWAYS put them on a line by them-
selves.

9. Email is Too Long

Dean Levitt, Chief Of Culture at Mad Mimi

I often see people spending hours, even days, crafting long
emails filled with many topics, ideas and news that would need a
minimum of 10 minutes of uninterrupted reading to get through.
While they often look amazing, they simply don’t get the results
an email marketer might want. These monster emails lower your

453
engagement and worst of all, they suck up your time and energy
and become a chore.

Avoid turning email marketing into a chore by doing the follow-

ing:

Keep it short and simple! Pick a goal and write a simple, short
email that leaves the reader in no doubt what their next step is.
It should be engaging, fun to read but most of all, it should take a
few moments to grasp and act. If you’ve got a lot to get off your
chest, send short emails more often.

454
Email Formatting Mistakes

10. Email Contains a Personalization Faux Pas

Jason VandeBoom, CEO and founder of ActiveCampaign

I often see basic personalization issues. If you can't get the basics
right it's not a good sign. Nothing feels less personal than seeing
a personalization tag (such as %PRODUCTID%) within a received
email. Already know that the vast majority of email is automated,
but there is a certain level of trust that is lost when this happens.
Any decent marketing platform will allow you to send test emails
that utilize full personalization rendering so that you don't have
to risk it.

455
11. Email is Only Images

Jessica Meher, Head of Marketing, Web Team at HubSpot

Using all images as the entire email. It's typically not mobile opti-
mized. Entire content doesn't appear if someone's settings are
"images off"—and what happens if the image links break! Some-
times not clear what's clickable, and image-heavy email can be
considered spam by filters. Looks like a giant ad.

12. Email Doesn't Use any Images

Bryan Harris, Founder of Videofruit

Use at least one image inside of each email. Every split test I've
done shows that people are MUCH more likely to click and image
as opposed to a text link.

456
13. Emails Miss Out on Power of Plain Text

Diana Smith, Director of Marketing at Segment

Don't underestimate the power of the plain text email! Some-
times nicely designed emails for newsletters and product up-
dates can increase conversion rates. But, for your first onboard-
ing email, try a short, plain text note coming from a real person
on your team. Ours has a 60 percent open rate!

Popular style of designed welcome email:

457
 

458
 

I'd want to test those against something that looks like this:

459
 

Email Frequency Mistakes

14. Emails are Sent Inconsistently

James Clear, Writer and Entrepreneur

Simple: Not being consistent enough. I think once or twice per
week is perfect, but you can't miss. Show up every week.

460
 15. Too Many or Too Few Emails are Sent

Ros Hodgekiss, Community Manager at Campaign Monitor

Overall, one of the most frequent mistakes we see email mar-
keters making is underestimating, or overestimating the frequen-
cy with which their subscribers wish to hear from them. And this
is backed up by the numbers - according to a 2013 survey, 53%
of consumers reported getting too many emails from retailers,
while only 44% said they get the right amount.

461
There are simple ways to get around this issue. First of all, you
can have your subscribers submit their email frequency prefer-
ences - either on subscribe, or later, via an email preference cen-
ter or similar. Once you have sufficient data, you can segment
accordingly. This approach puts the power into your subscribers'
hands. Secondly, you can periodically survey your subscribers to
find out more about them - which I recommend anyway, for rea-
sons beyond simply learning how to become a better sender. Fi-
nally, there are some great studies out there on ideal email fre-
quency, including one we did internally that suggests that send-
ing every 2 weeks is the sweet spot for subscriber engagement.

Any which way you do it, you can certainly benefit from less un-
subscribes and more clicks and opens if you pay attention to
what email send frequency works for your subscriber lists.

16. Email Messages Overlap One Another

Christopher Lester, Vice President of Sales at Emma

Lately, I've noticed a lack of coordination in my inbox. Multiple
emails from the same online retailer in the same day, often with
contradicting offers — meaning I had to navigate all the mes-

462
sages to figure out how to get the best deal on that lamp I’d had
my eye on. This multi-email trend was at its peak during the holi-
days, and with all the hustle and bustle of the season I found my-
self unsubscribing from brands that I have known and trusted
for years. I think the lesson is to send with your reader’s needs in
mind instead of with your own business objective as the goal. It’ll
pay off in the long run.

17. Emails are Effectively Pointless

Robbie Mitchell, Head of Marketing and Communications

at Knewton
Dumb: vacation properties (e.g. hotels) sending recurring
newsletters promoting local deals. I stayed at a hotel once for a
wedding, or went on a honeymoon to a remote location, and
they keep offering me deals to come back. I am never going
back.

463
18. Email is Rarely—if Ever—Sent

Wade Foster, Co-Founder and CEO of Zapier

Zapier collected 10k emails on a pre-launch list and we didn't
send them a single email until we launched. That was 10k stale
email addressed that could have been nurtured and loved. Our
launch could have been much more successful had the email list
been nurtured. So despite my hesitancy to send an email that
wasn't a launch email, I should have found something valuable
to keep those people up-to-date on at least a monthly basis.

464
Email List Management Mistakes

19. Emails Keep on Coming

Neil Patel, Co-Founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISS-

metrics
Most companies keep emailing the same people over and over
again. Normally this isn’t a problem, but a lot of people won’t
open your emails. By emailing the users that aren’t responsive, it
will cause some email providers to start pushing your emails in
the spam box as they are assuming you are sending junk emails
based on your low open rates.

In order to prevent your emails from going into the spam box,
don’t keep emailing people who aren’t opening up your emails.

465
20. Email List is Never Segmented

Tommy Walker, Marketing at Shopify

There isn't nearly enough focus on segmentation or subscriber
feedback.

For example, if you're a site that offers beginner, intermediate

and advanced level advice and you ask me to sign up for your
email list, you should be using what you know about me (like the
page I signed up on) to send messaging that is in line with the
"skill level" that was indicated by the page I signed up on.

Or, let's say you have a piece of software. At the very least, alter
your communications with your low, average, and high use cus-
tomers. Not all customers or readers are equal, so don't treat
them as such.

"Not all customers or readers are equal, so don't treat

them as such."

~ Tommy Walker, Marketing at Shopify

466
Also, it's not uncommon for email marketers to do a quick "get-
ting to know you" survey for new subscribers, but what about a
similar survey 3,6,9 and 12 months down the road?

Not only will this give your subscribers the impression you're ac-
tually interested in what they have to say, but it also gives you a
gauge qualitatively of how you're performing, and how you could
be doing better.

Erik Harbison, Chief Marketing Officer at AWeber

If you’re not segmenting your email list, then you’re probably us-
ing terms like ‘blast’ and think email is dead.

Getting the email with a discount for the product you just pur-
chased. Receiving updates on a version of software that you
didn’t download yet. These are the signs of a poorly segmented
list and great reasons you’ll click the unsubscribe button.

Even sending a one-question survey can help gauge an interest,

want or need of your subscriber. This can only help you deter-
mine a better approach for your content, sending cadence and
expectations.

467
Segmenting on basics like geography or origin of sign up may
help with developing the right messages and content, but should
only be considered the start.

When you factor in deeper actions like purchase history, activity

levels with your product/service and content downloads, then
you’re able to significantly strengthen the relevancy and maxi-
mize the one-to-one relationship that email provides.

21. Emails Don't Follow Customer Behavior

Jimmy Daly, Head of Content at Vero

The biggest mistake I see all the time is marketers ignoring be-
havior.

Here's what I mean. You see a lot of promotional email, lots of

newsletters, etc. That's the easiest place to start with email mar-
keting so people focus on it. Then, you get lots of content around
optimizing subject lines, writing better copy, when to send
emails, etc.

We're missing the point!

468
Email marketing campaigns should be sent as a direct result of
data and behavior. If a user is inactive, they get a nudge to come
back. If they are active, they get emails about features they
haven't tried yet or inspiration to engage at an ever higher level.

Data-driven lifecycle email is so, so, so powerful. And I believe it's

where most businesses are missing the boat on email.

For bloggers and information marketers, segmentation is key to

data-driven email. If you can't track behavior via an app or e-
commerce store, you need to do it directly in your email market-
ing software. Here are a few ideas to start with:

• Send new subscribers an onboarding email series.

Focus on content that you know converts. (In this
case, "conversion" could mean encouraging a read-
er to download an e-book, opt-in to a membership
area or simply read more content.)

• Find the people who consistently open and click

your emails and send them VIP content or give
them early access to new content.

• Send simple (but awesome) behavioral email. For

example, if someone requests an e-book and you
deliver it via email, you are nearly guaranteed an

469
 open. Build on that momentum by moving them a
step closer to your next goal (an online course, we-
binar, newsletter subscription) by including a clear
valuable proposition and a strong call to action.

Matt Hodges, Senior Director of Marketing at Intercom

(The mistake of...) Not considering your audience. It's like writing a
love letter and then addressing it “to whom it may concern."
Businesses do it all the time; I've lost count of the number of
emails I've received from a company where I have literally no
clue who they are or what they do.

470
 What's the fix? Send well-targeted messages to the right customer
at the right time in the right medium. Intercom shows us who
our customers are and what they do in our product, and lets us
use this live data to segment audiences for campaigns–based on
location, in-product behavior, etc. Check out a blog on the topic
from our co-founder Des Traynor, "A Simple Improvement to
Product Mails".

Rob Walling, founder of Drip

Sending the same email to all of your subscribers. If you aren't

customizing individual emails (and which emails people receive)
based on a person's opens, clicks and actions they perform on
your website, your competition will. The days of one-to-many
email marketing are rapidly coming to a close. The future will be

471
won by those who embrace one-to-few and one-to-one email
marketing.

The Worst Mistake

Required Login to Unsubscribe

Robbie Mitchell, Head of Marketing and Communications

at Knewton
Worst: requiring login to unsubscribe (aka "manage subscription
preferences"). As a result, I just mark as spam instead. Bad for
everyone.

472
Next
You're nearly finished—you've picked apps to send your emails,
and have your emails optimized and integrated with your work-
flow. You even know what you should avoid when sending
emails.

But how will you keep from burning out after sending so many
emails? The tips in our closing chapter will help you keep your
email marketing efforts paying off for years to come.

Written by Danny Schreiber

Image credits: Frustrated photo courtesy Oliver Newport. Screenshots

courtesy respective individuals. HubSpot email example via HubSpot blog.

473
Chapter 12: Don't Quit

How to Keep Sending Great Emails

"The work you get to do is the important stuff: planning

a robust, exciting, engaging communication plan that
isn't an afterthought to endlessly importing email ad-
dresses."

~ Christopher Harring, director, Maryland Institute Col-

lege of Arts Office of Graduate Admission

You've picked an email marketing app, and have new subscribers

flowing into it and your other related apps automatically. You
might even have your subscribers being moved to new lists over
time, automatically. But the well-oiled email marketing machine
this book's helped you create isn't worth much if you're not
sending emails.

So now, your main job is sending engaging emails that'll actually

get noticed. "The work you get to do is the important stuff: plan-
ning a robust, exciting, engaging communication plan that isn't

474
an afterthought to endlessly importing email addresses," says
Christopher Walker, director of the office of graduate admissions
at the Maryland Institute College of Arts. That's the fun part—but
it still can be tough.

The most important things in your email marketing are consis-

tency and authenticity, along with feedback from your readers
and experimentation. In closing, here's some quick pointers on
how to achieve all of them in your email marketing, and hopeful-
ly keep the emails coming without burning out yourself and your
team.

Authenticity

Just as your social posts can quickly get drowned out by every-
thing else being shared, your emails will also be surrounded by
more important messages—and you'll want yours to stick out.
For that, Neil Cybart recommends finding your own voice, and
being persistent.

"I think the most important thing with producing a daily email is
having passion in what you are writing because this enables you
to develop your own voice," Neil said. "Having confidence that
your level of knowledge or experience gathered over the years in

475
 a particular subject or field can provide readers with value they
wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere is a key aspect of producing a
vibrant daily email."

Consistency

Want your emails to be read? Techcrunch's Jon Russell says that

with email marketing, consistency is the secret—just as with any
other online publication efforts. "You need to be disciplined
about publishing regularly, but that's just like YouTube, blogging
and other kinds of online media," says Jon.

Drop the consistency, and your email list will quickly become for-
gotten—and your name won't jump out at people when they see

476
your messages in their inbox. "If you’re patchy, your audience
will suffer and people will become less inclined to open your
emails," says The Next Web's Owen Williams.

Experimentation

But don't worry way too much about what your emails say. Feel
free to experiment: just be authentic and consistent. That's how
Kale Davis approached his Hacker Newsletter, until he found the
format that worked best for his readers. "I think of each issue as
an experiment, and over time you'll get a sense of what works
and doesn't," he explained.

Feedback

And, of course, don't forget to be open to feedback. Private feed-

back is only a reply button away, so encourage people to let you
know their thoughts about your emails. If you're sending too
many emails, or the messages aren't relevant enough, people
will tell you—and then, you can thank them for their input and
tweak your emails to be better next time.

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Owen Williams has found this to be one of the most important
parts of his experiments with email newsletters. "If you’re build-
ing an email newsletter, ask for feedback from your subscribers,"
says Owen. "When sending out your weekly update, put a note
at the bottom asking for people to reply if they have feedback.
You’ll be surprised by how many actually love to have a say."

Put it all together, and you'll realize your best option is to jump
right in, start sending emails regularly, and tweak as you go. Au-
tomate your processes as much as you can, and you'll have time
to put back into your email's content. You'll get feedback to in-
corporate, will find your own voice along the way, and with any
luck your emails will become popular enough that people will be
excited to have them show up in their inbox.

That's how you can not only achieve the impressive stats at the
beginning of this article, but perhaps even surpass them. All with
just a lowly email, the one internet communication medium
that's stood the test of time.

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 Keep Learning

You've conquered email marketing—don't stop there! The Zapier

team has an entire library of eBooks teaching you everything you
need to know about APIs, CRM apps, and the ins-and-outs of our
own automation app. There's even screencasts to help you get
more out of the apps you love and already use, and more app-fo-
cused eBooks coming soon.

Then, there's the Zapier blog, where you'll find articles like those
included in the chapters of this book, along with articles about
productivity, remote work, and more. Be sure to check out our
blog and sign up for our email newsletters to be among the first
to know whenever we publish new articles, free books and more.

Thanks for reading! ~ Your friends at Zapier

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