Here's a look back at the previous approach, in which you configured a page without knowing how the final result would look:

What will the form fields look like? What if you don't like the page styles? While we offered a 'preview' link from the landing page overview, our approach to building and editing pages wasn't a great experience.

Our new builder scraps that approach for a contextual one — now you'll see the page as you build it.

Toggle between the 'edit' and 'preview' states to see how the final product will look:

Don't like the template? Try a different one! We just launched 14 new templates designed by the immensely talented Megan Coleman McElwain:

And of course you can always make your own template.

YES.

Note that the template toggle controls the template for ALL related pages (confirmation page, rules page, etc). Just remember that the last template selected wins the day.

Oh, and all of our templates are mobile-friendly:

Page-building nirvana!

A quick aside — I'm using a contact attribute of 'choose one that applies' to collect the entrant's favorite Arrested Development character:

Responses are stored in each entrant's Signal contact profile, which means I can then segment my lists and email everyone who is wrong to explain why.

We hope this update makes it easier for you to start gathering new subscribers, or share relevant content, or find out which of your subscribers correctly believes that Gob is the top Arrested Development character.

Or Buster.

Or Lucille.

Maybe I should have gone with 'choose all that apply'…

The post A Brand New Landing Page Builder appeared first on Signal blog.

Your email subject line is the first thing customers see when they receive your email marketing message. It's the front line in the battle to get customers to open and engage with your email marketing content. One easy step to re-vamping your email marketing campaign is to re-think your subject line approach. No matter what tactic you're currently employing, check out our suggestions for ways to re-vamp or improve your email subject lines.

1. Ask a question

Try a subject line that asks your recipient a question. This implies that the answer to that question is contained in the body of the email or that you're asking your subscribers for their feedback. If the recipient wants to answer, or wants the answer, they'll click to open.

Quora Weekly Digest emails are a great example of how well questions work in the subject line (it's easy for them, sure, but think about how you can use this same technique to your advantage):

2. Include [brackets] or (parenthesis)

Brackets can frame your email and draw a subscriber's eye immediately to a one-word description of the content your email contains. Parenthesis can serve the same function, or you can use them at the tail of a subject line to include additional information or a secondary call to action.

We recommend using brackets to describe content, like [Webinar], [Video] or [Ebook].

3. Throw in a unicode symbol

Got a product you know your customers will ♥♥♥ ? Unicode symbols can help your marketing messages stand out in a subscriber's inbox. Just be sure to use them appropriately and with the right audience. (For instance, they're great for consumer brands, but you might not want to use them if you're marketing to a more serious crowd.) Check out our post on unicode symbols to use on Twitter for some unique icons to use in your subject lines.

4. Personalize it

Just as it's possible with an email marketing software to personalize content in the body of your mass emails with merge tags, it's possible to include personal information in your subject lines. If you do this it's very important that you include fallback attributes for your content (in case you don't have the first name or other personalized information for everyone on your list). You can get creative with what information you include in your subject line. Think: first name, city, item last purchased, etc.

5. Shorten it up

Trust that not everything contained in the body of your email has to be refelcted in your subject line. Organizations seem to always try to do this when sending out email newsletters. A common format:

April classes: 3D printing, Horseback riding, Basketweaving… and more!

A shortened email subject line is easier if you've segmented your list (can you send to just the people you know will be interested in 3D printing?), but even if you're not separating your recipients based on preferences, think of ways you can exclude content and still get your point across.

Need an incentive to shorten it up? Check out this bit of info on email subject line length and open rates from the Litmus blog:

6. Stop calling it the same thing every month

Predictability can foster trust, but it can also alert your subscribers to repetitive content they won't feel the need to open. Take, for instance, a wild animal rescue center in my hometown that regularly sends out a newsletter with a subject line that looks somthing like this:

Acme Animal Rescue Center E-news: November

Not really enticing you to open it, is it? But each newsletter starts with a compelling story about a wild animal who's come to the shelter in need of care. What if, instead, Acme Animal Rescue Center did a subject line like:

How we helped a bobcat with a broken leg

Which one would you be more likely to open?

7. Make it a numbered list

People like numbers. They immediately communicate two things: the inherent value in the email that's being sent, and how long it's going to take to digest it.

Let's take an example from above, from #5:

April classes: 3D printing, Horseback riding, Basketweaving… and more!

And mix in a tip from #7 and #1:

Which of our 9 new classes will change your life this April?

Gonna click that, aren't you?

8. Talk about the benefits

There are literally hundreds of ways you can talk about benefits to your subscriber in the email subject line. Ultimately it's about being accutely aware of the subscriber asking, "What's in this for me?" and answering that question in the subject line.

An easy way to do this is to include "you" or "your," in your subject line, because you're automatically referencing the individual subscriber. This is about YOU, you're telling them.

Have you made any changes to your email subject lines recently? If so, what were they? Do you have trouble writing compelling email subject lines, or are you harnessed by a committee of people afraid to deveate from old practices?

Tell us about it in the comments.

photo credit: RLHyde via photopin cc

The post 8 Ideas to Shake Up Your Email Marketing Subject Lines appeared first on Signal blog.

It's great when followers and fans re-tweet your comments. But should you thank them for it? If you're running the social profile for a brand or business, probably not. While the sentiment is nice, posting a bunch of empty, arbitrary "thanks for the RT" updates clutters your feed and makes you look a little desperate for engagement. After all, you should assume that if your content is good enough, other people would want to re-tweet it. Do you thank everyone who pins your shop content to Pinterest?

Cluttering up your social feeds

While most followers won't see your @replies in their main feed, if someone clicks on your Twitter profile and you're busy thanking everyone who re-tweets your content, your original post won't remain visible. Whenever someone clicks on your Twitter profile, you want your top 5 tweets to be relevant and define the type of content folks will get in their feed by following you. If your feed is just a bunch of @reply "thank yous," it may discourage new fans from following you at all.

Thanking someone for a RT not only clutters your profile page and potentially your followers' feeds, but creates needless alerts for the person who re-tweeted you. Replying on Twitter with "Thanks for the RT!" is the social equivalent of replying "Sure thing — thanks!" to an email. It's the type of needless inbox clutter we're all trying to move away from. 

3 better ways to thank people for re-tweeting your content

If you don't want to just let a re-tweet sit there unacknowledged, there are a few ways you can thank someone for re-tweeting you without cluttering up your feed (or theirs!).

1. Follow the re-tweeter. Maybe they were just throwing out a RT to get on your radar. 
2. Reply to them with another relevant comment, or engage in conversation about whatever your original tweet was about.
3. RT one of their updates or favorite some of their other content.

What you shouldn't do as a thank-you

DMing a "thank you" or favoriting their tweet seem like they might be feasible options, but in practice, they're both overkill. It's better to just let the RT hang out there unacknowledged than to spam a follower just for sharing your content, or confuse them by favoriting their update which contains your content. (That seems rather narcissistic, doesn't it?)

What do you think? Should brands and businesses thank fans and followers for engaging with their content?

pink bird notecard by cassandraflinn on Etsy

The post Do you really need to thank people for re-tweeting you? appeared first on Signal blog.

Here's a look at a couple of Tweets that are scheduled to be posted to the @Signal Twitter account in the next 24 hours:

This view will give you a nice heads up of any content that you've scheduled (email campaigns, SMS alerts, Tweets and Facebook posts), and we'll be adding other marketing activities support within Signal as well (sweepstakes, polls, surveys, etc). Similar to the recent activities view, you can drill down by activity type.

If you're an agency partner or franchise organization, you'll also have the ability to see content scheduled across your sub-accounts (a nice efficiency win).

We hope you find this product update helpful and would love to hear your feedback!

photo credit: rossmania/flickr

The post Scheduled activities now available in the Signal dashboard appeared first on Signal blog.

"I don't have time to tweet."

Business owners say this a lot, and it's understandable why. When you're in charge of day-to-day business operations, business development, marketing, sales, management, janitorial services, et al., it's not easy to maintain daily updates to your social networks, too. However, having a presence on Twitter is important even if you're not tweeting. Why?

First, you should claim your business name on Twitter even if you don't plan on tweeting so no one else, most importantly your competitors, can tweet with your business (or personal) name by claiming it before you do.

Second, whether you're active or not, having a profile on Twitter gives your customers something to reference when they're mentioning you on the social network. Having a Twitter profile is like having a website; it gives people something to link to when they mention you. On Twitter, they'll "at reply" you. So you should have a handle they can @reply to. (That @reply will link to your Twitter profile.)

So the first step in mastering Twitter without tweeting?

1. Claim your @businessname (or names!) on Twitter

Claiming your business name is easy. Just create an account on Twitter and pick a handle that matches you business name as closely as you can. (This can be a challenge, but even if your business name is too long for Twitter, get creative.)

Now that you've claimed your business name, you probably have a Twitter profile that looks something like my dad's:

Sure, he's "on Twitter," but is he really? Remaining in "egg shape" on Twitter doesn't establish any credibility. It's almost as bad as not having a profile at all. It gives the impression to your potential followers that they shouldn't engage with you, or worse, that your business profile may not even be your official business profile.

So what's step two in mastering Twitter without tweeting?

2. Fill out your business profile

Take just a few minutes to fill out all the information that appears on your public profile.

• Add a profile picture
• Pick a header photo
• Enter your name as you want it to appear on Twitter
• Add your geographic location (city, state, "Worldwide" — whatever you want to put here)
• Add your website
• Most importantly: Fill out your Twitter bio

If you're not going to use Twitter actively, you may want to mention that in your Twitter bio.

Here's a great example of someone mastering Twitter without tweeting at all. Check out Bronson Taylor's Twitter profile:

You don't have to be active on every social network. But you can use your social presence to establish some credibility for your business even if you're not planning on engaging with fans and customers there.

Is your business inactive on social networks? If so, have you established a presence there anyway? How do you handle acknowledgement of infrequent updates, or none at all?

And while our post is about Twitter, which other social networks do you feel "parking" a profile is necessary?

photo credit: ~Ilse via photopin cc

The post How to master Twitter in 2 steps, even if you don’t have time to tweet appeared first on Signal blog.

It's a discussion that gets ping-ponged around marketing forums, groups and blogs, but never quite resonates with everyone responsible for sending branded email campaigns: that using a do-not-reply email address in the reply-to field of your email marketing campaigns is a huge no-no.

What does it mean to use a do-not-reply email address?

A do-not-reply email address is an email address that, as it states, won't generate a reply if you send an email to it. It might generate an automated response, or a bounce back, but it communicates that no one answers at that email address, so replying to an email you've just received from it won't do anything.

Do-not-reply email addresses come in different forms, but often look like:

no-reply@somecompany.com
do-not-reply@somecompany.com
donotreply@somecompany.com

Using a no-reply email address became a go-to practice with businesses trying to generate the impression that an email was coming from a corporation so big it couldn't take the time to answer the potential onslaught of emails it might receive from respondents to any outbound campaign. It might have originated with automatically generated emails, like confirmation emails, sent out when people sign up for a new service. Now they're used everywhere. But there's been a backlash.

Why you shouldn't use a do-not-reply email address

Sure, a no-reply email address makes you feel like a big company. It's the email marketing equivalent to using the "royal we" when talking about your sole proprietorship. But it's inauthentic, and with the rise of social media, brands are supposed to be connecting on a more human level.

A do-not-reply email address also gives the impression that you're not open to hearing from your customers. While you insist that they remain open to hearing from you (you are emailing them after all), you're not keeping the channel of communication open so they can write back. Sure, they could check your website for contact information or customer support, or reply through one of the social links you've included, but responding through social channels or contacting customer support doesn't have the immediacy email communication does. It also requires extra steps on the customer's part. Without explicitly saying so, you're making it harder for your customers to contact you than it is for you to contact them.

Your goal should be to create a two-way dialog between you and your customers. So open up your email channel to replies. Yes, it means that email address will also have to handle processing all the bounces and "out of office" auto replies, but taking 15 minutes to clean out an email inbox is worth it for the confidence it inspires in your customers.

But you don't understand! No one email address could handle all those replies!

No one wants their personal inbox inundated with responses from a high-volume email list. But you can set up an email address to handle responses from your email marketing. For instance, we use hello@signalhq.com. It's not tied to a particular team member, but it's friendly. And we check it.

If you absolutely must indicate to your customers that your reply-to email address isn't checked often by someone in the company, or isn't checked at all, we suggest 2 things:

1. Include an alternate method of contacting your company somewhere in the body or footer of your email. 
2. Consider giving your do-not-reply address a personality. Pinterest calls their no-reply email pinbot@pinterest.com. And Moo Cards takes it even further by giving their automated system messages a robot personality ("Little Moo") that explains, "I'm just a bit of software." (Moo still, however, uses a do-not-reply address for Little Moo, but it's a start…)

Remember that having access to your customer's email inbox is a privilege that shouldn't be taken advantage of. One of the most important ways you can gain your customers' trust — and ultimately retain subscribers — is to keep the lines of communication open.

Do you use a do-not-reply email address? If so, why? If you don't, what email address do you use to send your email marketing?

photo credit: SamWhited via photopin cc

The post Why you shouldn’t use a do-not-reply email address (and what to do instead) appeared first on Signal blog.

their

Since part of my job is to create and send an email newsletter for an email marketing company, this tweet ignited complex emotions. I spend half my day telling people to create email newsletters and how to do it. And yet lately I've made a conscious effort to unsubscribe myself from many email newsletters because I, too, am getting too much email.

I was surprised and pleased to see a non-profit email marketer respond to this tweet almost immediately:

I had the same question. If email doesn't work, how, then, shall we communicate?

Shannon's reponse was:

Seeing this, I felt relieved. Okay, I thought. It's not that people don't want to hear from marketers, they just want to hear from marketers via the channels they prefer. We know this already! But many marketers don't act on it.

I DM'd Shannon to ask permission to use her tweets in this post, and she followed up by saying that she feels she gets added to email lists after handing out her business card. She says she considers this spam.

I have to agree.

Stop recklessly building your email lists

Many marketers have been trained to believe that list size matters. But they're wrong. Size doesn't matter, relevance does. A list of 20,000 people doesn't mean anything if only 8% of your audience is opening your emails. (And, using some platforms, you're paying to store those contacts!) It's better to have a list of 5,000 with a 30% open rate and a 0% unsubscribe rate. You can assume most people on that list want to hear from you. They may not open every email, but your name in their inbox isn't making them grit their teeth.

Be where your customers are

Shannon's response also brings up another point: as a marketer, you need to be where your customers want to find you. This may not always be on email. Customers are increasingly turning to social media to get their marketing dose in a place where they don't have to take direct action on it.

Here's an example: a pizza place by my house regularly wraps its menus in rubber bands around my front doorknob, forcing me to deal with their advertising by removing it from my door and putting it in the recycling bin. It makes me not want to order from them. I'd rather just see their ad on a billboard, or find them on Yelp when I want to order pizza. Instead they're forcing me to deal with their marketing. Hanging something on someone's door is email. Billboards and Yelp are Twitter and Facebook. Advertising that's not in my face, but that's there when I want to see it.

How can marketers deal with email fatigue?

There are a few lessons to take away from Shannon's tweet:

1. Never add someone to your email list who hasn't explicitly opted in. Don't add your Rolodex to your email list.
2. A smaller, healthier email marketing list is better than a massive, ineffective one.
3. Keep the emails you do send short.
4. Segment your email marketing list so messages you send are targeted. Email your full list less frequently.
5. Allow your subscribers to segment themselves by telling you their preferences and preferred email frequency.
6. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe, but know where to find subscribers on other channels. Know their preferences.
7. Branch out. Use channels like Twitter and Facebook to break up your message and reach more people.

In essence, you should always be listening for feedback on the way your customers prefer to receive your message, and be willing to evolve your marketing strategy to fit their needs.

What changes, if any, have you made to your marketing strategy to meet with cusotmer needs?

The post What to do when email marketing is dead to your audience appeared first on Signal blog.

Whlie university bookstores benefit from a built-in customer base, they also face a unique marketing challenge: an entirely new audience every four years. Because of this, it's important for college store marketers to easily advertise, manage and segment lists while giving students the flexibility of easy opt-in and out. And, while college stores sometimes have large marketing lists and lots of messaging going out at concentrated times each year, their marketing "team" is often a part of just one or two people.

We chatted with the Iowa State University Bookstore about how they use Signal to navigate the unique college store marketing environment.

Signal: When did the ISU Book Store begin using Signal?

ISUB: We began using Signal in August of 2011.

What are some of the primary marketing activities you use the Signal software to do?

Mostly email marketing, but we are starting to use text messaging more and more. We are also using some of the social media tools within Signal to monitor activity all in one place and schedule posts. We'd like to implement more promotions in the near future, too. Baby steps!

Tell us a little bit about managing the marketing for a university bookstore. What are your challenges? What challenges do you have that are unique to your industry?

In the college book store industry, your primary market is always changing.  The way you market to those people is constantly changing too.  We need a platform that not only streamlines several processes, but also allows us to manage these marketing options easily.  Also, at times, promotions are planned at the last minute and we need to be able to reach customers quickly and easily.   

Why does Signal work well, do you think, for college stores?

Signal gives us all of those options we need to effectively manage multiple promotions and also multiple mediums for reaching customers in one place.  Many college stores do not have a multitude of marketing employees working for them as an advertising agency would.  Therefore, it needs to be easy, simply and fast.  That's the biggest reason Signal works.  

What's your favorite feature in Signal, and how do you use it? Got any "inside" tips for other Signal users on features you've discovered, or ways you're using the product that might be useful to others?

The email templates are our favorite features of Signal. We have a consistent look for each email we send, but yet are able to customize with little knowledge of HTML Once the email templates are set up, they are so easy to use that pretty much anyone can use them!

One trick we found of the system is to upload a "Sold Out" version of an image when an item is no longer available that we emailed about. If you upload it with the same image name as the previous image, it will load as the "Sold Out" version for the customer the next time the customer loads the email or web version.

What overall marketing advice have you learned over the years that you'd want to share with other Signal customers?

Adjust and readjust.  Just when you think you have it down, things will change.  Above all, you need to be flexible and never afraid to try something new.  Risks are good.  But calculated risks are even better.  

The post Signal Customer Profile: Iowa State University Bookstore appeared first on Signal blog.

Did you know you can also customize your Facebook tab images? It's easy. To illustrate, I'll replace our old Signal email tab image with a new one:

To get started, click the little 'down arrow' icon to the right to show all your Facebook tabs:

Hover over the image you'd like to change, you'll see a pencil icon appear.

Click the icon to show a list of options, and click 'Edit Settings':

A screen will appear with options to rename the tab or change the image. Click 'Change':

Hover over the image, and an edit icon will appear. Click 'edit':

Choose your new file, which must be 111px by 74px:

You're done! 

We created a few icons you can download and use for your tabs. Right click any image and save it to your computer to upload to Facebook. Enjoy!

The post Changing Your Facebook Tab Image appeared first on Signal blog.

The post Scheduled Maintenance: Monday, April 22th at 11:59 PM CDT appeared first on Signal blog.