9 Extremely Useful SendStudio Tips

By Mitchell Harper

Introduction

I use quite a few different software applications on a weekly basis, including EditPlus to create PHP code, FileZilla as my FTP client and SendStudio to send our newsletter. Even though SendStudio is one of our products, I decided to spend a few hours to really "dig in" and come up with 9 tips to get the most out of it, which I'll share with you in this newsletter.

If you're not familiar with SendStudio, it's an email marketing solution that we developed to create and send professional-looking newsletters, reminders and autoresponders. It's one of our most popular products with well over 5,000 customers worldwide.

If you use SendStudio as much as I do then these tips should save you some time. If you use SendStudio for your clients then feel free to take these tips, add your logo to the top and print them out. Send the tips to your customers "just because". It's always good to give your customers something for nothing as often as you can.

Tip #1: Making Autoresponders "Feel" Real

As you might know, you can use SendStudio to send a series of emails to your mailing list at specific intervals (such as 1 day from now, 2 days from now, etc). These are called automatic responders, or autoresponders for short.

When it comes time to create a series of autoresponders, make sure the times when they're sent out aren't too robotic. For example, if you want to send out a series of 5 emails as an autoresponder, don't schedule them like this:

Message #1 after 24 hours
Message #2 after 48 hours
Message #3 after 72 hours

Instead, vary the time between messages slightly, so they feel like they're being sent from a real person instead of being sent automatically, such as:

Message #1 after 19 hours
Message #2 after 43 hours
Message #3 after 80 hours

We very rarely send emails to people at the exact same time every day, so your autoresponder series should reflect and adopt this too so it feels like the emails were sent from humans instead of a computer.

Tip #2: Creating Your Own Email Template

SendStudio includes over a dozen email template designs that you can use for your newsletters, but what about if you have no design skills and want your own template?

It's quite easy to create your own template based on one of the included templates. Just follow these steps:

Click the Templates -> Create Template menu link
Fill out the form and choose an email template to get started with
You'll see the template appear in the editor. From here you can upload and add-in your own logo, change colors and text, etc
When you click save the template will be stored and you can use it every time you want to create a newsletter or email campaign

Tip #3: Keeping an Eye On Subscription Trends

Did you know that different days of the week influence how many people will subscribe/unsubscribe from your mailing list? We get the most subscribers on Tuesday and send our newsletter on Wednesday, as studies have shown that you get better open and response rates on a Wednesday.

Using SendStudio statistics you can see a graph that shows how many subscribes and unsbuscribes you receive over the period of a few weeks/months. From this, you can determine that on Thursday, for example, you get the most new subscribers to your mailing list.

You might then decide that on Fridays you'll make a new blog post (you do have a blog on your site, don't you?) on your site encouraging people to subscribe to your newsletter to see if that has any affect on increasing subscription rates.

Tip #4: Using Popular Newsletter Content on Your Site

SendStudio allows you to see how many times an email is forwarded onto friends. If you see an email that's forwarded quite a few times then it could be a good idea to take the content from that email (if it's an article for example) and add it into your web site or blog. If it's popular in email format, it's going to be popular online.

Tip #5: The "Show Help" Link is Your Friend

SendStudio includes over a dozen built-in tutorials to help you if you ever get stuck. The "Show Help" link at the top of the SendStudio control panel explains how to complete tasks such as sending your first email campaign, how to create a profitable autoresponders and how to add subscribers to your mailing list.

Tip #6: The "Trailing Autoresponder" Trick

If you have a series of autoresponder courses that you send out to subscribers then you can use this neat trick to boost your subscription numbers. In the last message of an autoresponder series, invite the subscriber to join another autoresponder series you have setup.

That way, when they get to the end of the first autoresponder series they can subscribe to your other autoresponder and keep hearing from you, and we all know that it takes multiple encounters with a prospect before they turn into a customer, and autoresponders are a great way to do that.

Tip #7: Using Autoresponders in "Every Day" Situations

Autoresponders can be used to increase customer interaction and sales for practically any business, even those that don't have a web site. Here's a few ideas:

How about automatically following up with customers when they place an order on your web site? Why not send them a discount code to use on their next order?
Why not take information from your web site and build a free eBook for your web site visitors to download? When they download the eBook, ask for their email address and send them a few follow up emails about your products and services.
Create a series of emails and build an "online course" to teach your subscribers about your industry, products and services. For example, if you sell sunglasses, teach your subscribers about the benefits of outdoor eye protection and review a few different pairs of sunglasses (with links to purchase them, of course)!

Tip #8: Don't Overuse Custom Fields

Custom fields allow you to collect specific details about each of your mailing list subscribers including their first name, location - practically anything you want, however you never want to overuse custom fields in your emails, especially in the subject line.

Imagine if you receive an email like this:

Subject: Hi Mitchell, how are you?

Body: Hi Mitchell. I just wanted to email you to say hi. Mitchell, if you need anything just let me know and I'll be happy to help. Thanks Mitchell!

Hardly appealing, and you can tell it wasn't written by a real person. If you use custom fields such as the subscriber's first name in your email messages, don't over do it. Use their name once in the entire email, and that includes the subject line.

Tip #9: Sending to Multiple Mailing Lists

If you have a few mailing lists and want to send the same email message to all of them then SendStudio will take care of removing the duplicate emails for you. When it comes time to send the email SendStudio will make sure it goes out to each subscriber only once, regardless of how many mailing lists they've subscribed to.

This can come in handy when you want to send a general message to all of your lists, or if you keep separate interest lists, for example customers who ordered blue widgets, customers who ordered red widgets, etc.

Conclusion

I hope you liked my 9 tips to get more out of SendStudio. If you use SendStudio a few times a week like I do then I'm sure at least one of the tips can save you time.

If you want to learn more about email marketing with autoresponders then you can subscribe to our email course. The emails are sent out every few days over the period of a few weeks and you can unsubscribe at any time. Of course, the emails only contain 100% useful content. We'll never try to sell you anything.

3 Responses to "9 Extremely Useful SendStudio Tips"

Fill in the form below to leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Barb Salsbury

said this on 13 Sep 2007 9:10:07 AM CDT

Thanks for the good advice. Now if we could only get the 30-hr-day & 9-day week so I could implement all the great ideas I have piled up!

One thing - there's a typo in your "9 tips" email: At the bottom on the links to other articles "New ArticleLive Tempalte:Herald", "Template" has a little problem.

Thought you'd want to know.

Barb

(Reply to this comment)

Neal

said this on 29 Sep 2007 2:23:53 PM CDT

Great tips, but you didn't tell us how to implement them. For example, Tip #3, I cannot find "statistics" anywhere.

[From Mitch: Hi Neal. When you login to your SendStudio control panel there's a "Statistics" tab at the top. If you're not an administrator then it might be disabled for your account, so you might want to check on that.]

(Reply to this comment)

Abby Eagle

said this on 15 Oct 2007 10:48:45 PM CDT

Thanks for the info.

RE: Tip #9: Sending to Multiple Mailing Lists

If you have a few mailing lists and want to send the same email message to all of them then SendStudio will take care of removing the duplicate emails for you. When it comes time to send the email SendStudio will make sure it goes out to each subscriber only once, regardless of how many mailing lists they've subscribed to.

This can come in handy when you want to send a general message to all of your lists, or if you keep separate interest lists, for example customers who ordered blue widgets, customers who ordered red widgets, etc."

What i would like to know is how you integrate SendStudio with your customer database CRM and your incoming orders? I use ACT! as my contact manager and i receive order via PayPal. Now that i have SendStudio i have the additional problem of a customer database in ACT! and SendStudio. What do you or others do?

[From Mitch: Hi Abby. You can export from ACT! into SendStudio and it will keep your records up to date and not import duplicates. That's a bit time consuming, however we will have something for you in a few months.]

(Reply to this comment)