After last week’s article: “Should you write blog posts or email newsletters?“, you might be wondering what happened with the experiment.

As a refresher… Newsletters and Blog Posts both have strengths:

• Newsletters are awesome because you can push new articles to your readers who want to hear from you. You don’t need to franticly promote new content.
• Blog posts are more easily sharable by readers. They are also indexed by google and findable in search.

Last week you received the article as a “Teaser” by email and the full content in a blog post.

I wasn’t a fan of teaser emails with excerpts. So I wrote you specific, new content. But basically, the structure was like the image below:

How did it work out?

Let’s look at a few different criteria so you can get a full picture:

• Opens
• Clicks
• Replies
• Pageviews
• Comments
• Shares
• SEO Juice
• Total no. of people who read the article

How many people opened the email?

Opens were not statistically different. In fact the opens were the highest of the past 5 emails you’ve received (by 0.1%).

If we can learn anything from the slightly higher open rate, it suggests that this topic is of interest to you.

How many people clicked through to the blog?

Since the content required you to click through, you might expect higher clicks.

1/2 of the people who opened the email clicked through

Overall, our clicks on this email were the highest ever by over double the closest email.

How many people wrote an email reply?

One of the best parts of sending the newsletter is getting your replies. Usually a quick note that you enjoyed it, or a question about how the newsletter applies to your business.

Replies suffered

There were 1/3 of the replies from the week before.

How many unique people viewed the article on the blog?

When sending the article by newsletter only, pageviews are zero so any additional traffic is a boost.

Relatively, this past week page views of the article were 12% of our overall traffic to customer.io.

However, Unique page views were only 73% of unique opens of the email. So, in this case, fewer people viewed the blog post than opened the email.

How many people left a comment on the blog post?

With a newsletter, there are no comments. On the blog there were 5 comments. Some of the content on the blog represents people who would ordinarily reply to the email expressing themselves more publicly.

One of the replies on the blog was from Helder who wrote:

I think emails that are archived online for sharing/indexing are the best. I hate being “teased” into stuff. Either give me content, or don’t. It’s partial RSS feeds all over again.

Point taken! And the primary reason we’re sending the full content by email this week.

How many people shared the article on social networks?

After 1 week, you guys did a little sharing on social networks:

• 3 likes
• 9 tweets
• 4 linked in shares
• 2 google+

The post by no means went viral, but there seemed to be some casual sharing by people.

How well does the article rank in Google?

In incognito mode in Chrome (necessary to remove personalized results), I did a little googling.

Searching for:

• should you write a newsletter or blog post? – 1st position
• blog post or newsletter? – 3rd position
• newsletters or blog posts? – Page 2 🙁
• should you write a newsletter – 2nd position

As an investment, there is long-tail value to having your content findable by people searching on the web.

How many people in total read the article?

This is where “success” gets a little fuzzy. I made a little chart to try to share it with you:

What can you conclude?

This week instead of doing the teaser, I put the full content in the email with a link at the top of the email to “Read online” and a link at the bottom to “Add a comment”.

When you have people saying that it sucks to receive teasers, that’s a good data point.

The data supports that if the full content is in the email, more people overall may read it.

What do you guys think about the full article in the email vs. just a teaser?

Add your thoughts in the comments below. Or feel free to comment on Hacker News

Hi from Portland, Oregon! I’m attending XOXO Festival this week.

Over the weekend a story blew up about an email response from the CEO of Paypal. Andy MacMillan (one of the organizers of XOXO) had GBP £40,000 being withheld by Paypal, and try as he might, he couldn’t get it back.

So he asked the internet for help, and ultimately got this response from Paypal’s CEO:

I’ve highlighted a few of the things that David Marcus, CEO of Paypal did in his email that were effective.

1. Your problem = solved In the first sentence, he committed to making the problem go away & releasing the funds
2. We’re under new managementTried to rebuild trust: New CEO, 5 months in. Things will be different.
3. Help me, help you Told Andy his preferred path forward: Continue using paypal and tell me what’s wrong. I will make the product better for you.
4. You’re our only hope More than that, your feedback will save all paypal customers.
5. I care that your problem gets solved At least send me a one liner when you receive the money so I know when to stop making heads roll.
6. Want my first born child? Here’s my mobile number – a gesture above and beyond. I know you’ll never use it but I want you to know Im serious.

Do you think this email from David Marcus is effective?

Around the net, it was met with quite a lot of skepticism. But in my read of the email, it struck me as a genuine attempt to right a wrong.

I’d love to hear from you. What’s your opinion on David Marcus’ response? And what other CEO email stories do you have?

Sincerely,

Colin

P.S. If you’re in Portland, Oregon and will be attending XOXO, let’s grab coffee!

P.P.S Follow us on Angel list. Help us get visibility with investors to help us grow Customer.io and keep writing this email.

Have you received a bad email from a company and clicked reply to give them feedback only to find that their email address is “noreply@lamecompany.com”?

They’re CRAZY! You always want to encourage users to get in touch with you.

User feedback by email is the next best thing to sitting next to real users doing real user testing.

Let’s think about a situation that some of us are all too familiar with. Imagine you released a new feature but not a lot of people are using it.

How do you know if your version of the feature sucks, or if the feature isn’t appropriate for users of your app?

When people check out the feature, but don’t use it, email them and ask “why?”. You’ll know instead of guessing from looking at your metrics.

I’m not going to pretend like writing emails to gather feedback is easy, because it’s not. You’re asking a favor of the recipient, in exchange for making the product better for them. These emails are hard to write.

But the responses you’ll get will make it worthwhile.

Here are a few tips:

A few things you should not do

1. Don’t punish people or express frustration that they haven’t set up your product
2. Don’t nag. If you have multiple emails, increase the time from the last email with each additional email.
3. Don’t ask people to do too many things at once. If you try to focus on one task to accomplish, they’re more likely to do it.

A few things you should do

1. Use AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to structure your email. We talked about it last week in The Lizard Brain — and email.
2. Answer the question “Why is this good for me?” for your recipient (not for you). When asking someone to do something, why should they do it? Even better, show them.
3. Be personable. Imagine you’re writing the email to a friend of your best friend. Someone you haven’t met yet, but you’ve heard great things about. A friendly message will go a long way.

Here’s an example I put together soliciting feedback about a feature of Pseudo Project

Do you have a great email to solicit feedback? Or do you want help? Send me a copy. I’d be happy to give you feedback or feature it on greatemailcopy.tumblr.com.

Until next week,

Colin

P.S. Wednesday is now email day, so look for an email from me next wednesday. Same-ish time. Same place.

P.P.S* Thanks to everyone who sent in emails you re-wrote using AIDA. I hope you’re enjoying reading “Ogilvy on Advertising”.

Hello Friend,

Have you ever been to the beach and there’s that hairy guy with a big gold chain, wearing a speedo and showing just a little too much? 
For the faint of heart, turn away now because…

…this week’s email is all about open rate data. I’ll show you ours, ask to see yours, and I’ll cover a key metric: the email open rate, which is one way to gauge whether your users are engaging with your emails.

Most companies don’t write interesting emails. Just take a look at averages across industries.

Mailchimp publishes “Email Marketing Benchmarks”. Averages across different industries vary, but most industries have between 10 and 20% open rates on their marketing emails. The top industry is a mysterious “Other” with a 33.52% open rate.

I’m feeling a little nervous sharing this… but here are our email open rates for the past few emails.

We started off with a rate of 33% opens, equal to Mailchimp’s best performing industry segment. But by applying the advice experts have been giving and incorporating feedback from you, we’re now at open rates of 47% — nearly a 30% improvement!

If you’re relying on open rates as a key metric, it’s important to understand how they’re calculated.

So, how does almost every email provider calculate open rates?

A tiny invisible image, unique for every recipient, is placed somewhere in the email. So, when you send an email to tyrion@lannister.com and the image is accessed from the server, you know Tyrion opened the email. This works the same way across almost all email products. 

Tracking using an image works great except for one tiny problem…

Gmail turns images off by default and so do a few other email clients. As a result, open rates tend to be under-reported.

For example: A friend of mine runs Timehop (an awesome startup that sends a daily email about what you did on that day a year ago). They have A LOT of gmail users who also use iPhones. If these people receive the email before they get to work, there is a good chance they’ll open the email on their iPhone.

Here’s the tricky part: iPhones automatically load images. So their open rates report higher when the emails are sent early in the morning. But it would be wrong to conclude that more people are reading the emails.

Moral of the story: take the accuracy of open rates with a grain of salt. 

Consider where people will be when they receive your email, and what device they use to read your emails.

Do you get killer open rates on your emails?

Forward an example of one of your highly performing emails to colin@customer.io. It’ll just be between you and me unless you tell me:

1. You want me to feature it on greatemailcopy.tumblr.com
2. I can share it in the newsletter next week.

Do your open rates need improvement?

Great, let’s work on it together. Forward me an email you wish had performed better. Don’t forget to include some context about what purpose that email should have served.

Next time, I’ll share some common traits of high performing emails that we will all be able to learn from to kick our emails up a notch.

Before you move on to surfing reddit, hacker news or maybe doing some work, do me a huge favor. 

Forward ONE email you currently send to colin@customer.io. Let me know if it’s “killer” or “needs improvement”.

Until next time,

Colin

P.S. A few days ago I did a blog post about how I would re-write an email for Trello to improve readability. They read it and changed the email they were sending. My top tip is to set the width of your text emails to 550px max. 

I recently made that change on all of our text emails.

Hello Friend,

Last email I asked you what you wanted us all to learn about next. Here’s a little status update

1. This time: Writing killer subject lines
2. Next time (all going well): Email open rates (based on analysis of our own data)
3. Later: Mapping out the emails your app should send

I can’t wait for the Email Open Rates newsletter. We have a great data scientist working to uncover gems of information in our data… But this email is about writing killer subject lines

I used to be bad at writing copy. So bad that at my last job, we hired someone to compensate for my poor skills.

If you’re anything like me, when you’re bad at something you want to get better. About 8 months ago, I learned about a series of Ebooks from CopyHackers. I read them cover to cover. If I’ve gotten better at copywriting, it’s because of these books as well as lots of practice and experimentation.

When you guys said you wanted to learn more about subject lines, I knew I had to speak with Joanna Wiebe, copywriter extraordinaire and founder of CopyHackers.com.

Joanna kindly broke down subject lines into her Top 5 things to think about when writing subject lines. We got a little excited about talking to Joanna and decided to record our conversation. So click on the 3 minute video and if you want to learn subject line kung fu like Neo in the Matrix. Or read on for the text version of Joanna’s wisdom:

Here are Joanna’s 5 things to think about when writing subject lines

1. The Basics
2. The Trigger
3. What’s in it for them
4. Friend-ness and Relevance
5. Context

So let’s dig in to what Joanna recommends (note: I’ve paraphrased a few lines, but these great ideas are hers not mine):

1. The Basics

• Use the brand name somewhere in the line, even if it’s in the From line
• Stick to 50 characters with spaces – or less (unless you have data that suggests longer headlines work better)
• Don’t use title case but rather use sentence case
• Avoid overtly spammy words, or more than 1 spammy word
• Mirror the subject line in the email headline

2. The Trigger – Why is someone getting the email?

• Are people expecting this email or aren’t they?
• How long ago did they ask for this email?

3. What’s in it for them?

• In a newsletter, what’s intriguing, timely or curious about the subject?
• If it’s an enticement to upgrade, what’s the offer? When does it end? What new highly desirable feature should I want to get?
• If this is a “welcome” email, what will make them feel welcomed? Do they event want to feel welcomed, or do they just want access to your free ebook?

4. Friend-ness and Relevance

How can you make the email look like it’s from a trusted source who understands them, not from a company with an agenda? Get strategic about:

• Personalization
• Recent behaviors (e.g. “you just signed up”)
• Time since we last spoke (e.g. “It’s been a while, Sarah”)
• lowercase, like a friend would write.
• Tone
• Avoiding creepiness! How do you know so much about me? If an email gets triggered from inside an app, what level of detail should you share with me in the subject line?—When does it get creepy?

Or, if they consider your brand a friend then use your brand voice. Good examples of this are Woot.com and Kate Spade

5. Context

Remember, you’re trying to get noticed in the midst of a massive inbox (in many cases) filled with competing messages from invited and uninvited people. You must consider context in all copywriting, and subject lines are no different.

Thanks Joanna Wiebe for chatting with us.

Listen to the audio (15 mins).

Want this newsletter to have more issues with audio and video? Let me know. It’s a little more work, but you guys are worth it.

• Colin