How Quibb Keeps Daily Email Open Rates between 50% and 70%

When fellow newsletter creators hear that the open rates of Quibb’s daily digest email hover between 50% and 70%, I get a lot of questions. People are curious to hear what has worked to keep the open rate so high and what I’ve learned or experimented with over the past 6 months.
Quibb is a professional news site that allows people to share what they’re reading for work, with an attached “daily digest” style email. Here are some recent open rates:
There are several tactics that have helped to maintain these open rates over time, along with some tweaks and adjustments that have worked well to keep them high over the past few months. Let’s dive in to what has worked…

1. Find Out What Subject Line Format Your Readers Prefer

Originally, the daily digest email had a horribly long subject line. For example:



The intent here was to try to leverage the positive associations and social proof the subscriber had with these names mentioned in the subject line. But it resulted in a boring, often repetitive list of names and a meaningless date. Focusing on the social aspects of your product can be powerful, but only if that’s the full intent of that email.

Instead, a daily digest of links should focus on the links themselves to encourage the person to open. Members were much happier with an adjusted subject line that featured the most popular link within their network for the day. For example:


This format exposes the content but also adds a bit of social context by including some names that have meaning to the subscriber.

2. Preempt Spam with Double Opt-in

An easy and common way to increase deliverability and curtail any spam issues is to send a confirmation email when subscribers first sign up for your newsletter. Make sure to send this confirmation email from the same email address that your newsletter will be sent from.
When the person first signs up, you have their attention, and they’ll be more likely to dig through their spam folder to find the confirmation email (if you’re unlucky enough for it to be routed there). Double opt-in has become standard and leads to a cleaner, higher-quality list.
I had a problem with spam initially, as some words within the body of certain subscribers’ first daily digest emails (which was user generated and beyond my control!) were picked up by various spam filters. Those subscribers were lost forever. However, adding the confirmation step helped to maintain these new subscribers. In fact, the confirmation email had a 100% open rate, establishing follow-on delivery success.

3. Provide Clear Choices of Email Options and Unsubscribe

 

If you’re sending different types of emails, make it very clear to your subscribers how to select which emails they want or don’t want to receive. Don’t cause email exhaustion by over sending.

Also, pay attention to how these defaults are set, and make sure that the defaults add value and aren’t overwhelming to your typical new subscriber.

4. Tune Your Scheduling to the Optimal Frequency

 

The category within which your newsletter fits can give you some clarification and high-level guidance on sending frequency. For example, if your content is timely (i.e., flash sales, news), then daily makes sense. In the case of Quibb, the content is professional and best fits with members’ work days, so the Quibb daily digest is sent only during the week. This adjustment was made after noticing that traffic to the site was much lower during the weekends.

I also noticed that, on holidays, the open rate was very low, as was the traffic to the website. I then adjusted the mailing schedule to exclude holidays, as people don’t work on holidays and are less likely to want professional content on those days. Put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes and try to understand any nuances that might indicate when they’d rather not receive your email.
Be sure to check out the KISSmetrics infographic The Science of Social Timing Part 2: Timing & Email Marketing:

5. Sort Content Intelligently

 

If you’re sending the same content to all or most of your subscribers, you can play around with both the layout and content and run some quick A/B tests to determine what resonates best .
However, if each subscriber receives unique content, you should apply an algorithm to sort through and rank the content. The algorithm tries to assign the human task of curating to a computer. You can tailor your algorithm to pull the most popular and relevant content to place at the top of the email so there’s something interesting immediately visible once opened.
Also, people don’t like to make too many decisions about what to click on. Too much content can lead to people not opening your newsletters, as it becomes a chore to decide what to engage with. Help make that decision a bit easier by either manually curating your content or applying an algorithm.
Notifications that indicate person-to-person interaction are really powerful and should be immediately visible. With Quibb, if you have a notification of social activity (e.g., new follower, someone has voted on a link you’ve submitted), that notification is placed at the top of the daily digest email. Put any similar high-impact interactions or notices near the top of your emails.

6. Be Willing to Axe Emails if They Aren’t of High Quality

 

People subscribe to your newsletter because they have expectations about what it will deliver, and how it will provide value to them. If you don’t or can’t meet that bar, don’t send it!
This goes the same for blogging and the famous first rule of CopyBlogger.
With Quibb, if there are not at least 10 links from people that a member follows in their daily digest, that person doesn’t receive an email that day. It’s much better to meet expectations around quality versus simply sending out a low-quality email because you believe that you should.

7. Clean Up Your List, but Don’t Abandon Inactive Subscribers

 

Most people with an email list know that you have to keep it clean in order to maximize open rates. While this is important, it’s also a good idea to reactivate subscribers who have gone dormant. If a subscriber hasn’t interacted with daily digest emails over a certain period of time (I use 28days), they’re put into an “inactive” state and are no longer sent the daily digest.
Keep in mind, though, they haven’t taken the full step of unsubscribing. To try to reactivate these subscribers, I apply an algorithm to look through all “inactive for more than 28days” subscribers each day and select 10% of that group to randomly receive a daily digest email. If a subscriber interacts with that 1-off digest, then they are returned to an “active” state and put back on the daily schedule.

8. Put Yourself in the Reader’s Shoes

 

Quibb is a member-only news site, with the initial membership composed of professionals from the tech and start-up industries. Members share links to articles and other content that they’re reading for work. You can follow people working in areas that are of interest to you (e.g., gaming, email marketing, VC, user acquisition) to read what they’re reading. The daily email is a digest-style newsletter. It contains links that people you’re following have either shared or read that day.
Since Quibb is a news product for professionals, a daily digest email matches the inherent frequency of that product – reading news is an activity that most professionals expect to do every work day.

> Think about the category your product falls under: what sending schedule makes sense?

Members are expecting and have subscribed to the content that’s in their newsletter. It’s based on the other Quibb members they’ve chosen to follow.

> What are your subscribers’ expectations? How does an email fit with their expectations for your overall product (if one exists beyond the newsletter)?

The daily newsletter solves a real problem for members. They’re accustomed to reading news for their job, and appreciate that their Quibb daily digest allows them to quickly catch up on the best content in their industry.

> Is your newsletter clearly solving a problem for your subscribers?

Before applying any of the techniques described here, quickly run through the above three questions to do a high-level review of your newsletter. Whether you’re sending content you’ve created (e.g., interviews, articles), announcing new products or features, curating a collection of links, or sending network updates, think about the expectations of your subscribers and try to match the frequency and content of your newsletters to meet (or hopefully exceed!) those expectations in a meaningful way.

Psychology for Marketers: 9 Revealing Principles of Human Behavior

by Ginny Soskey

July 10, 2013 at 2:00 PM

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One key part of being a great inbound marketer is understanding how -- and why -- other people think and act the way they do. Think about it for a second. How can you create compelling content if you don’t know why it would be compelling to your audience in the first place? How can you personalize content to reach the right people if you don’t know what type of content they would like, and why they would like it?

Before you start jumping into all the tactical nitty gritty of marketing, it’s really helpful to understand how people operate … which is essentially what the entire field of psychology attempts to explain. Understanding some key principles in psychology can take your content from good to amazing, all because the right audience is reading and identifying with it. Bonus: if you understand these principles and weave them into your marketing, you’ll also convert more visitors into leads, and leads into customers.

Many of these psychological concepts can be used across many aspects of your marketing, but we’re just going to give one example for each. They also aren’t universal; we all know people who are outliers, do we not? With that in mind, let’s get started!

9 Important Psychology Concepts You Can Use in Your Marketing

1) Reciprocity 

Introduced in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the concept of “reciprocity” is simple -- if someone does something for you, you naturally will want to do something for them. No, this isn’t bribing. If you can act in a sincere and giving way, the other person will naturally want to help you.

When You Could Use This in Marketing

Give away something -- for free -- to help build community or customer loyalty. You don’t have be rolling in dough to give something away; it can be anything from a branded sweatshirt, to an exclusive ebook, to a free desktop background, to your expertise on a difficult subject matter. Even something as simple as a hand-written note can go a long way in establishing reciprocity. By delighting your audience with these small gifts, you’ll be one step closer to establishing a true, solid relationship with your visitors, leads, and customers.

2) Commitments 

Another principle developed by Cialdini, “commitments” is another way of saying that people don’t like breaking their promises. If someone commits to something -- whether it is meeting for lunch or signing up for your product, they feel like they’ve made an obligation to you. Once they make that commitment, people will be much less likely to bail.

When You Could Use This in Marketing

This is a great way to fight customer churn. Though you should never stop trying to delight your customers (per principle #1), it’s important to keep in mind that the longer the commitment they make to you, the harder it could be for them to churn. Think about your pricing structure. Can you lower prices but have new customers sign up for 12 months instead of one? Then, once you’ve gotten your customers’ commitment, fuel it by offering great products and customer service -- and maybe even customer-specific content.

3) Authority 

Most people naturally obey authority figures, according to another principle in Cialdini’s book. When we view someone as having authority, we’ll be much more likely to trust his or her opinions and suggestions, simply because we believe the person is credible.

When You Could Use This in Marketing

Amp up your authority in your content by prominently featuring authors’ information alongside their blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, or videos. This way, your audience can see just how smart and amazing your inbound marketers are, which can be a step in the right direction if you’re trying to establish thought leadership as a brand.

4) Social Proof 

We’ve talked about social proof a few times on the blog already, but basically, it boils down to a situation in which you adopt the beliefs or actions of a group of people you like or trust. In other words, it’s the “me too” effect. Think of this like an awkward middle school dance -- few people want to be the first one on the dance floor, but once a few people are there, everyone else wants to join in. (Keep in mind, this desire to conform doesn’t go away when you get older and less bashful about your dance moves.)

When You Could Use This in Marketing

One easy way to make the most of social proof is on your blog -- if you're not already, use social sharing and follow buttons that display the number of followers your accounts have or the number of shares a piece of content has. If those numbers are front and center and you already have a few people sharing your post, people who stumble on your post later will be much more likely to share.
P.S. We actually have a post all about using social proof in your marketing, if you're interested.

5) Liking

Another psychological theory by Cialdini, “liking” means that if you feel positively toward another person or company, you’ll be much more likely to interact with them or buy from them. It may not matter how smart the other person is or how profitable the company is -- if you think they’re cool, you’ll want to be seen with them more often.

When You Could Use This in Marketing

Liking is crucial to developing your company’s brand. Keep in mind that being “likeable” doesn’t have to mean being “nice.” Your brand could be raunchy and kind of offensive … but if your audience likes it, you can still take advantage of “liking.” You just want people to feel positively affiliated with your brand. So however you make that happen, it's worth a try.

6) Scarcity 

Ever gone to buy airline tickets and seen a tagline that says “only 3 seats left at this price!” Yup, that’s scarcity (again, another Cialdini concept). This psychology principle goes back to the simple formula of supply and demand: the more rare the opportunity, content, or product is, the more valuable it is. Note: If you want to properly use this principle, you need to be careful how you word it. If you approach the scarcity concept as if there used to be a ton of a product or service, but due to popular demand there’s a few left, people will be very receptive. On the other hand, if you approach it from the angle that there are only a few products total, so get it now, the principle won’t be as effective. Check out this post from Nir and Far for a deeper explanation on why that distinction is important.

When You Could Use This in Marketing

This could be a great tactic to use when planning events. If you’re looking to increase ticket sales, it might be worth sending a personalized email to people who haven’t registered yet to remind them that there are only X number of tickets left since so many people have registered.

7) Recency Illusion

Ever heard about a product and then start seeing it everywhere you look? While that may be part of some clever ad retargeting online, it most likely is because of the “recency illusion.” It starts happening after you encounter something for the first time, and then you start noticing it everywhere you look.

When You Could Use This in Marketing 

This is important to keep in mind when you’re designing marketing campaigns -- you should be aiming to develop robust, integrated campaigns, not just a one-and-done piece of content. By not pigeon-holing your inbound marketing to one type of content on one platform, you not only expose your content to new audiences, but more importantly, keep reinforcing your message with people who have encountered previous marketing pieces.

8) Verbatim Effect

According to this psychological concept, people are more likely to remember a fuzzy, general idea of your content -- not the longer, more detailed piece you originally created. For example, people will most likely remember that your presentation was generally about blogging for business -- not necessarily the details about writing and editing blog content.

When You Could Use This in Marketing 

In our world today, people are headline-hungry. Given the “verbatim effect,” you should try to pack as much relevant and descriptive information into your headline as you can. Besides the fact that your headline will be fighting for attention all on its own on social media (as opposed to being accompanied by the full article text), your headline is only a few words that sum up your entire post. So use it wisely -- it may be all that your readers remember. If you need some help writing compelling headline copy, check out this post on our blog.

9) Clustering

People have a limited amount of space in their short-term memory. In fact, most people can only remember seven pieces of information (plus or minus two pieces in any given situation) at a time. To cope, most people tend to cluster similar pieces of information together. For example, if you had a whole grocery list of random items, most people would tend to mentally group items into certain categories (dairy, grain, meat, etc.) to be able to better remember what exactly was on the list.

When You Could Use This in Marketing

Do the legwork for your audience: group similar topics in your writing together -- either under numbered bullet points or with different header sizes. Besides being much easier to scan, your writing will be much easier to remember and recall down the road -- especially if you’re creating long lists of content.

What psychology principles do you use in your every-day marketing? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
Image credit: Saad Faruque

15 Customer Retention Strategies that Work 15 Customer Retention Strategies that Work part 2

Support

This one is a no-brainer: You can't create a tribe of loyal customers without an exceptional customer service experience that keeps them coming back. In this section, we're going to bust a few customer service myths wide open, as well as tackle some important things you need to keep in mind when offering support online.

9. Speed is secondary to quality.

When it comes to customer service that keeps people coming back, the research shows that quality matters more than speed. According to a study by the Gallup Group, customers were nine times more likely to be engaged with a brand when they evaluated the service as "courteous, willing, and helpful," versus the "speedy" evaluation, which only made customers six times more likely to be engaged.

10. Customers enjoy businesses who know them.

Telling your employees to spend more time with customers might seem like folly, but smart entrepreneurs know that isn't the case. Numerous behavioral psychology studies have shown that everybody views their service experience as more positive when they don't feel rushed or ignored. Don't spend time idly, though; have employees attempt to find out key customer traits, just like Derek Sivers did with his employees at CD Baby.

11. Choose the right platform.

The best way to improve your online customer service efforts is to utilize the channel your customers most prefer. Although recent research has shown that a majority of people still prefer and use email more than other services (including social networking), you need to pick the channel that makes the most sense for your business. Hosting companies know that online chats are critical when their customers’ sites go down, but other businesses may have customers who are just fine using email as their primary method of contact.

12. Make it a communal effort.

Countless case studies have made one thing clear when it comes to creating an efficient support system: You need to keep everybody in the loop. At Help Scout, we use tools like Campfire to access real-time notifications of what's happening on the customer end; we were able to improve our response time by 340 percent by enabling a support room that all employees can access. Read more about how we did it.

Loyalty Programs

The key to creating customer loyalty programs that work is to know why customers use them and what gets customers to keep using them. Below you'll find consumer research that answers these questions.

13. Get people started.

Consumer researchers Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze are known for their studies on The Endowed Progress Effect. Their results have conclusively shown that the biggest wall that prevents customer loyalty programs from sticking is getting people started. They've shown through their notorious "car wash study" that people are twice as likely to finish loyalty cards if they are automatically started (or rewarded) as soon as they sign up. Read more about this process here.

14. Get ideal customers to be VIPs.

Additional research by Nunes on loyalty programs has shown that people just love being VIPs or gold members of programs. There is one caveat, though. This only works when people know there is a class below them on the totem pole. Speaking to human nature, Nunes saw a notable increase in gold members’ participation as soon as he implemented a lesser silver class.

15. Label your customers.

A research study on voting patterns conducted by Stanford University conclusively showed that people are more likely to participate in something if they are labeled with a positive trait. Our friends at Buffer refer to their premium customers as "awesome" members, and even label their upgraded payment plan as the "Awesome Plan"—a much easier phrase to embrace than "paid member."

Your Turn

What are some other customer retention strategies that you use and would recommend?
Let us know by leaving a comment below!

15 Customer Retention Strategies that Work 15 Customer Retention Strategies that Work part 1

15 Customer Retention Strategies that Work

 

 Customer retention is incredibly important for growing a sustainable business, but before we look at some strategies for improving it, let's put an important data point front and center:

According to the Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent increases profits by 25 percent to 95 percent.

This is important to consider when evaluating your own customer loyalty strategies because in the customer service echo-chamber there is a lot of "hoo rah" about taking care of customers, but little discussion on the business side of things.

At Help Scout, we do things differently; we're all about loving customers, but we also aim to prove that great service is more than just the right thing to do—it's also good business sense.
In order to help you increase your own retention rates, we've compiled a list of our 15 favorite tips (backed by academic research and case studies) on increasing customer loyalty, divided into five easy-to-browse sections.
Let's begin!

Communication

It's hard to create loyal customers if they aren't paying attention to you. Given this fact, below are our favorite bits of research on clear communication with customers.

1. Stand for something.

The quickest way to get customers to ignore you is to not stand for anything. A study by the Corporate Executive Board that included 7,000 consumers from across the U.S. found that of those consumers who said they had a strong relationship with a brand, 64 percent cited shared values as the primary reason. If you want loyal customers, you need them to care about you ... so what do YOU stand for?

2. Utilize positive social proof.

While negative social proof ("Nearly 90 percent of websites don't use heat mapping software!") has been proven to dissuade customers rather than encourage them, numerous studies on customer motivation have shown that positive social proof ("Join 20,000 of your peers!") is often the most effective strategy for getting people to listen.

3. Invoke the inner ego.

Despite what we often say, most people like things that resemble them in some way. This cognitive bias is called implicit egotism, and is an important thing to keep in mind when communicating with customers. In order to attract the sort of customers you want, you need to identify your target customers down to the last detail and then craft a brand message that perfectly matches their pains, goals and aspirations. It's easier to fill this existing demand than to create one.

Selling

If customers don't enjoy your selling process, they'll likely never do business with you again. Thus, selling to customers the "correct" way is an integral part of creating customer loyalty. Below are a few studies to help you improve the process.

4. Use the words they love to hear.

Not all words are created equal. Certain persuasive words encourage customers to buy more than others, in particular: free, new and instantly. When customers hear these words (and the promises they imply are backed up), they'll enjoy their purchases more than they would have otherwise.

5. Reduce pain points and friction.

All businesses, no matter the industry, are going to have to sell to the three types of buyers that are out there. According to neuroeconomics experts, nearly a quarter of these buyers will be conservative spenders, or "tightwad" customers. George Lowenstein of Carnegie Mellon University recommends using bundles, reassuring words (e.g., change "a $5 fee" to "a small $5 fee") and reframing as strategies to better sell to these conservative buyers. Read more about his advice here.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity is the social construct that makes the world go 'round ... or in your case, keeps your customers coming back. The premise is simple: Go above and beyond for customers and get rewarded with repeat business. The execution, however, can be trickier, so below is a compilation of interesting research on how to improve reciprocity with your customers.

6. Realize that budget is negligible.

Giving back to customers can appear incredibly costly, but it doesn't have to be. Instead, embrace the art of the frugal wow by understanding that reciprocity is built even with small gestures. In fact, psychologist Norbert Schwarz found that as little as 10 cents can create reciprocity between two individuals (it really is the thought that counts!).

7. Utilize surprise reciprocity.

Although reciprocity works incredibly well on it's own, research shows that it is even *more* powerful when started by surprise. For a simple example, recall a time that someone did something nice for you unexpectedly; the gesture probably wasn't all that unusual, but the fact that it came out of nowhere left a strong impression on you.

8. Make it personal.

In a study from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, researchers found that waiters could increase their tips by 23 percent by the simple act of returning to tables with a second set of mints. So do mints have magic powers? Apparently not: The researchers concluded that the mints created the feeling of a personalized experience among the customers who received them. So it was the personalized service received that made them enjoy their experience so much more.

10 Ways to Convert More Customers (using Psychology)

ዋልያው ንሥሩን ጋለበው : Daniel Kibret Blog

#ዋልያው #ንሥሩን #ጋለበው please like share comment

‹ይህቺ ኢትዮጵያ የምትባለውን ሀገር የሚጠብቅና የሚታደግ አንዳች ኃይል አለ› የሚባለውን ነገር እንድናምን የሚያደርጉ ብዙ አጋጣሚዎች አሉ፡፡ ሕዝቧ ብትን፣ ቅዝቅዝ፣ ድብዝዝ ሲል ከየት እንደሚመጣ ሳይታወቅ ብቅ የሚል፣

እንደ አውሎ አጥለቅልቋት፣
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እንደ ደመና ከልሏት፣
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እንደ ደመራ የሀገር ፍቀር ስሜት ለኩሶ፣
እንደ ጨረቃ አድምቆ፣ እንደ ፀሐይ አሙቆ፣
እንደ ሰም አጣብቆ፣ የሚጎበኝ መንፈስ አላት፡፡...............

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