No.

The reason we can accept poor response rates from email marketing is because we are lazy. Creating and sending an email is just too easy these days. So, type away, drop it into a nice template, fire it off and see what happens.

No wonder response is weak. You’ve earned it.

Want to get some killer results? Read on.

To get the big numbers, you are going to have to do a bit of work. For an email to be super effective it must achieve three things (please note that I am going to avoid all the technical stuff about deliver-ability and getting through spam filters and just focus on your campaign):

1. The email must be opened (attraction)
2. The email must be read to some extent (engagement)
3. The email must inspire action from the reader (response)

So let’s go through each stage and see what is needed.

Getting Your List To Open Your Email

Getting your list to open your email is often the biggest challenge. Many experts say that a provocative subject line is the best way to get your prospects to open your emails. I agree to some extent. Hey, if you have a great subject line then use it. But if that’s all you have and the content of your email does not match the excitement or anticipation created by your subject line then you will only fool them once.

And this leads to my first insight into email marketing. The key to getting people to open your email is to create the condition that they will want to open it—before they even get it.

Yes, before.

How is this possible? It is possible because all of your previous emails have offered them some great value.

You see, too often we write emails from our own selfish needs. Perhaps you want to up-sell customers to another program, or simply want to sell them something. Now there is nothing wrong with that but what is in it for them?

In every instance you emails must offer your prospect some value. This can range from some good information, insights into their business or even some good entertainment value.

A good example is the email we launched at FreshBooks back in January 2008. At FreshBooks the currency of our business is our relationships with our customers. It’s our lifeblood. Now we’d done a great job at connecting with them through our phone, email and forum support channels and also had a growing blog readership, but no newsletter.

What we did know was that our customers were always interested in what we were up to and how we worked. The blog revealed that to some extent but we thought that a more “intimate” and personal view might be a good idea for a newsletter. One of the things we do at FreshBooks is take our customers out for dinner whenever we are in their town. It’s a wonderful and intimate environment to really get to know our customers and them to get to know us. So we thought we could extend that experience to a newsletter and voila, the Supper Club newsletter was born.

FreshBooks Supper Club from July, 2009

Getting Your List To Read and Respond To Your Email

Now, the Supper Club is not opened by everyone, which is just fine because it was expressly designed for the group of customers that were interested in the goings on at FreshBooks. What we do have is a very loyal and consistent readership month after month. And we continue to get accolades from our customers about how much they enjoy it and look forward to it every month. We feed them the exact stories that reveal the goings on inside FreshBooks with photos, fun stuff and a very casual and fun writing style.

Importantly, pretty much every Supper Club includes an interactive element where we ask them to vote on something, participate in a fun contest or even volunteer for stuff. Heck, these are folks that want to take their relationship with FreshBooks to the next level, so we do our best to serve that up and get them participating.

Their response tells us that we’ve delivered what they were seeking. And that’s what we are after.

Can you do that? Yes.

You just need to think from the perspective of your prospect, not from your own selfish needs. What email can you send them that would add value for them? They may not buy anything with the first email, or even the second or the fifth, but over time, if they continue to open your emails and get good value from you they will come calling whether it’s to buy something or share their great experiences with your brand to someone else, or just be really happy they found you in the first place.

Feel free to read through all the Supper Club Newsletters to get some ideas on how we engage our audience every month.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I am going to share with you my very first email where I managed to get a—wait for it—98 percent open rate.

This morning, the Authorize.net payment gateway went offline preventing thousands of vendors from accepting credit card payments including many FreshBooks customers.  With their website and phone system unaccessible, Authorize.net has been fielding questions with their Twitter account this morning.

For FreshBooks customers using the Authorize.net gateways to automatically bill their customers, Authorize.net transactions that failed this morning will automatically be retried tomorrow morning. You will know this has happened as the status of your Authorize.net invoices will have changed to ‘retry’.

However, if Authorize.net is not back up by tomorrow morning, your invoices will change to the ‘failed’ status and the status will become a red active link.  The ‘failed’ status link allows you to retry the payment any time in the future giving you to option to retry the transaction when Authorize.net becomes available.

Please note that although Authorize.net remains offline, all of our other payment gateways continue to function normally such as PayPal, Google Checkout, and Linkpoint.

New look and feel

Thanks to the J-Team (that would be Jaco and Jeff), the Settings area is rocking a fresh new design. Navigation links are clearer, with easy to click target areas. Form elements are neatly aligned, with slightly larger input areas, and helpful explanations below.

Priorities, priorities

Everybody needs to edit their tax settings. So why did we bury that 3 clicks deep? No matter – taxes are now their own tab, so you can get there right away.

Introducing “My Account”

We’ve moved account-related pages into a whole new area called “My Account”. Here you’ll find your current billing package with FreshBooks, the administrator account, API token, and Basecamp account details. Getting there is easy; just click the “My Account” link on the top-right.

Redesigned payment gateway page

Most folks only have one payment gateway enabled, and having to scroll through a giant list of gateways you don’t use was a bit of a pain. So now we’re emphasizing your enabled gateways, and hiding the rest.

Colors and logos become one

Behold the colors and logos page, which holds … your color and logo settings. We’ve replaced our aging color picker with something more in keeping with the times (can you say saturation-slider?), and added big, sharp images that show you where your logos go.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, really; we’ve made a ton of small changes throughout the Settings area. Login to your account and take a look, and as always, your feedback is both welcome and encouraged.

But there’s good news: after a long day of checking every corner, we managed to track down the problem to an unexpected bottleneck in MySQL. Clearing up that bottleneck has let us tap the full speed of our new
hardware.

Among other measurements, we monitor site performance by measuring the amount of time it takes to log in and send an invoice from various locations around the world. In the graph below you can see how eliminating that bottleneck has helped performance significantly:

FreshBooks is now running faster than ever. Thanks to those of you who struggled through yesterday with us.  We are now pleased to introduce you to our new hardware and the fastest running FreshBooks experience to date – enjoy!

For those curious about what happened, there’s some details under the cut.

The problem was caused by our new configuration of MySQL.  The usual approach to setting MySQL’s table cache size is to make it large enough that it can hold all of your tables open, but we have too many tables for that to be practical. Instead, we decided to make it big, to improve the odds that tables we need were already in the cache. And since we had new, bigger hardware with more RAM and faster disks, we decided to cache even more tables.

Unfortunately, while opening tables is fast in MySQL, the speed at which it can close tables gets slower and slower as the table cache grows. Linearly, in fact. And since the cache will always end up full, the speed that MySQL can close tables becomes the speed that MySQL can open tables. And to exacerbate the problem, opening and closing tables in MySQL uses a global lock, so only one thread can be opening or closing tables at a time, regardless of how many threads are executing in parallel.

Once we understood this, we realized that if the cache is going to be full, it needs to be kept as small as possible. We reduced it to the minimum we could get away with without having to reopen tables in the middle of one session interacting with FreshBooks. And now that closing tables is faster, everything’s faster.

What’s new in this release?

A Redesigned Generate Invoice Page

Your generate invoice page has been redesigned to be even easier to use. In addition, you can now choose which details you wish to display or omit when generating invoices from your timesheets.

An Improved Search Interface

Your search tool in your account has been upgraded from a pop-up window to a slide-down interface which will hopefully save you even more time when searching for information inside your account.

There are more details about the release inside the application. Be sure to click your “4.6” link at the bottom of your account for more information on this release.

It’s possible other patrons raised their eyebrows at FreshBooks business cards sticking out of picture frames with encouraging messages like “This Way!”, but we didn’t receive any complaints.

A bunch of FreshBooks customers and a few of us FreshBookers gathered Thursday night to get together and talk about the ups and downs of running a business these days. We had Connie, the librarian-turned-social-networks-consultant. We had Emmanuel, the Flash programmer running his own studio. There were computer consultants, artist representatives, overseas traders and web developers. A diverse bunch, to say the least.

Josh and I shared stories about our respective times in Tokyo, and Kimberly confirmed for me the story about the flaming Taipei monorail I’d only ever heard from an insane painter (it was good to get it from a slightly more reliable source). I talked a great deal with Jerry about how the study of literature relates to software development, and James told me about a crazy spreadsheet wizard who can predict the future with spooky accuracy.

It was great getting together with all these folks and hearing their stories, understanding how FreshBooks can provide value to so many different types of users. Running your own business is a lot of work, and it’s pretty amazing to feel like we’re helping these folks realise their dreams. I was actually touched when I asked Emmanuel when he started up his studio and he said, “The same time I signed up for FreshBooks.”

I didn’t hear back from anyone who got lost in the place looking for us, so I assume the business card breadcrumbs were 100% successful. We’d love to show you pictures of the event, but to tell you the truth, we were all having so much fun we completely forgot to break out the cameras!

To try out the new vCard import tool:

1. Login to your FreshBooks account.
2. Click on your white “Settings” link on the top right corner.
3. Click on your blue “Import/Export” link under “Step 3″.
4. Click on your blue “vCard (e.g. Mac OSX Address Book)” link.
5. Select the vCard and click your Upload button.
6. Review your data and click on your Import button when finished.

Not different just to be different but different because different is interesting (I tried to add one more “different” but couldn’t make it fit…oh I guess I just did).

A great example of this took place last week at the How Design Conference.

You see we decided to exhibit at this conference and after we registered we realized that we didn’t have one of those super slick and fancy Trade Show Booths that make lasting impressions to all that see them.

This was a problem since having a poor Trade Show booth is probably worse then not having one at all.

So putting our “Fresh” glasses on we came up with a cool solution…we basically did the one thing no one expected to see at a design conference!

Instead of having a fancy booth made for us we decided to get two 8 Foot x 8 Foot Canvases. Jazz Martin – an artist who is also a FreshBooks user – took some glue and paint and created a living breathing (always changing) art installation that started at the first moment that the conference began and was worked on until the last moment of the event.

This accomplished a bunch of cool things for us:

• People liked it
• People talked about it
• People kept coming back to see the progress

We were so pleased with how this turned out and proved to ourselves once again that when you replace ordinary and boring with extraordinary, you can never really go wrong!

Update! Check out the time-lapsed music video we made of the fun we had in the trade show booth!

It’s great starting companies, but odds are you need help to do it successfully. On many occasions I have recommended advisors for entrepreneurs, but it’s not just leaders who need advice – your staff do too. Why? Because you can’t do all the hard work. When you are running a fast growing company your staff are wrestling with tough problems, and when they’re doing that they *deserve* help that you probably can’t give them.

Coaching and mentoring is an intimate relationship and ideally the apprentice should choose teacher, but you can suggest advisors you have recruited – who know you, your values, your style and your business. Being familiar with those subtleties of your business are less relevant for technical advice, but useful nonetheless. I think it’s much more relevant for HR and strategic initiatives as your culture and your vision will lend itself better to some opportunities than others.

In the past I’ve talked about why advisors matter, how to recruit them and how to make successful relationships with advisors. All those things apply to your staff as well, so get them connected.

If you are interested in the history surrounding this May holiday, Daniel wrote about it here.