Customer loyalty is a company’s ability to retain satisfied customers. Gaining the loyalty of your online clients means that your web visitors come back regularly to your website. In order to achieve so, you need to offer them high quality and fresh content. Fortunately Internet gives you a wide range of opportunities, helping you to establish a personalized and lasting relationship with your customers. The most efficient tools to engage your audience are:

-       E-Newsletters

It allow you to send a weekly or monthly personalized email to your clients with the latest company’s news, articles and interesting information, offering them advices about your products, … This electronic tool’s main advantages are: it offers you an easy, economic and direct way to keep in touch with your customers, it helps you promoting and diverting traffic to your web, making your company reachable and closer to your clients, building the sensation of belonging to a community,…

You don’t need to be an expert to publish a newsletter. Most of the Email marketing software or web-based applications available in the market nowadays (i.e MAILCast Server) have very attractive templates where you only need to add your own content to achieve a really professional result. But remember NOT to forget the unsubscribe option in your communications. May you not have a big subscribers’ list, don’t worry; including a registration form in your web pages will make it easily grow.

-       RSS feed

This is other great tool to build online customer loyalty by publishing content by RSS. It can be easily integrated in your web; your visitors will receive your website’s updates instantaneously and anonymously through any RSS reader. The main advantage of this Internet tool is the direct control by the users, they will subscribe and cancel the subscription to your web, avoiding the disadvantages of giving their email out and keeping their privacy at all times.

Virtual communities come to play with the popularization of the Internet. They were born as online spaces to satisfy their members’ needs: information sharing, offer support, debate and socialize in an informal manner.

Nowadays, they are also a valuable tool from the business point of view (i.e. corporative blogs) because they enable and improve the internal communication within the organization, and establish a closer relationship with their clients and providers. But not only…many companies have discovered other advantage: being able to anonymously analyze how these communities (and their members) evolve and develop overtime, their likes and dislikes, their habits and uses. So handling this information, they can after introducing new devices and products adapted to this particular market.

Virtual worlds like Second life or communities like Del.icio.us, MySpace or YouTube are open spaces not only to promote products, and so get ahead to their respective competence, but also a perfect environment to interact and know, just as any other member, the marketing patterns of this targeted audience, say young people 18-40 years old and engaged with new technologies.

This online experience can be also transferred to RSS marketing. Publishing your news by RSS, people who is interested in our products and services will subscribe to our feeds. We will not know their names or email addresses but we will be able to discover their likes.

Say that I subscribe myself to a recipe’s blog. Then I could also check in my RSS reader how many people are subscribed to this particular blog. And even to what more blogs about recipes (or not) have are they subscribed to, and so on. So I will discover on what else is interested people who is interested in cooking.

With the new social networks, it becomes a game to know what is interesting to other people like me, or any other group. So many new worlds to be explored by marketers... Exciting, isn't it?

Writing up content for digital channels is completely different than writing it up for traditional medium. Because of this, it is essential to know the online environment and its main characteristics before you even start writing.

We should focus on preparing attractive and accessible contents for our users, turning our newsletter into another corporative tool for marketing. There are some patterns that can help us to elaborating interesting content:

·         Don’t  take a detour, go straight to the point.  Reading a document on the screen is far more difficult and tired task than reading on paper. Therefore you should include the relevant information at the top of the newsletter to attract attention to the recipients so they will continue reading, mentioning other news that they will find further down in the document.

·         Choose an appropriate language. It is recommendable to write in short paragraphs and simple sentences. If you are explaining a complex subject, you could use the formula “read more” to satisfy the needs of your interested readers, so they will have access to the complete information. We must use a familiar and ‘easy-to-understand’ language to make our message clear.

·         Insert images and appropriate hyperlinks. The images should support the content, adding meaning  and  impact to the information offered.  Therefore we should insert generic images which do not interfere with the content. Pleas note that the image size should not affect the opening time of your newsletter.

If it is written efficiently, the newsletter will add an important value to our company or organization. It will help us to build up a good reputation for our company. We will gain subscribers and engage to our audience.

The design of our newsletter’s template is part of our external and corporative branding. To reinforce it, and to achieve the familiarization of subscribers with your communications, you should design your template as simple as possible and according to the corporative image shown in your website, commercial dossier, and the rest of your marketing documents. This does not mean the impossibility of changing your colors’ palette or your images’ evolve, if you wish. However the structure of your email should stay consistent overtime.

In relation to the graphic design of your template, we can refer to the usability’s general tips used also for web design. Usability means efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction with which a product achieves specific goals to particular users in a singular context.

• Do not include too many images and pictures. These mean overloading the email and thus, making its deliverability more difficult.
• Do not design all your email in HTML, as the more popular email filters may label it as Spam.
• Be careful with the background color chosen, it may cause problems to read your message.
• Simple and relevant content, as average people only dedicate 1.4 seconds to read through a commercial email. Make the scanning easy to your public.
• Don´t forget to include the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom. It is also recommendable to include the RAF bottom (Refer to A Friend), so your list can be increased ;-)

In Email marketing, the subject line is vital, mainly because it means to get into the mail inbox and the reading stats. I, myself, every morning delete at least 10 emails without doubt, only by checking the subject line (or the unknown sender). Most of the times they offer me medical or miracle potions that, fortunately, I don´t need.

Having said this, the email marketing professionals, who are sending newsletters or punctual campaigns by email so often, seriously consider the subject of our mailings. In the case of newsletters, it is usually easier because the subject line normally is the title of the periodical publication. In this sense, it is recommendable that you send the last issue to your new subscribers, so they will recognize your newsletter since day 1.

However the case of punctual marketing campaigns is different, and in many cases tricky, too. We have to carefully find an efficient line to introduce the product or service to the audience: it must be short, direct, personalized, informative, original, informative, interesting, shocking, eye-catching, flashy…because a recent study shows that 35% of the recipients open the email based on the subject line.

Therefore it would be ideal that your subject line had the following characteristics:  remark the benefit from reading our email, personalized, according to our recipients’ needs, create expectation, create an own style, not using capital letters or symbols, avoiding words such as ´free´, ´promotion´, ´offer´, ´gift’, ‘buy now’, ‘click here’, ‘opportunity´, ´important´….adn all this in 50 characters max, including spaces…only.

When we talk about RSS feed, we usually think in the edition and distribution of web content for advertising, publication of news, updates in websites, etc However the RSS also got a fundamental and highly valuable application in professional training and education.

This tool has an enormous and wide range use in the academic sector in general. As example, it could be very useful for a University to publish their new courses, grants, research studies, placements, conferences, events,…and loads more. Students and teachers would benefit from such tool, as it would help them to stay updated about what’s going on within the campus which is quite hard when you are studying in a big University plenty of departments, divisions, research groups and so on.

Furthermore these RSS will allow everyone to share comments, news, links to recent papers, images, etc. This information would be accessible no only from web providers, but also for users of PDA´s, iPods, mobile phones, etc.

The implication of these RSS for the educational community is extremely important, particularly because of the range of the publications which are made online for everyone. Thus the RSS technology contributes creating a bridge between available contents in the Internet and the users.  Reaching the global public, the RSS transforms the “lonely voice” of the websites into an international dialog with other people who are interested on the same academic subject.

When I tell my friends that I work in the Email Marketing industry, they cannot help having an odd reaction, like if they were thinking so… are you sending SPAM to people? So I have always to clarify than email marketing does not equal to SPAM.

I explained to them that sending personalized emails with relevant information about my company, products or services is just another tool to contacting customers and people who have requested this mailing for business or own interest. 

I also tell them that responsible email marketing, based on permission, is actually a new communication channel that may substitute the traditional mailing. We can think in a Bank as example, they may save millions in paper just sending their information and new products’ information by email instead of through my mailbox.

Given the Internet adoption in our household nowadays, email marketing definitely becomes a saving-costs and resources advertising channel, highly efficient and even ecologic.

But they are partly right. There are always people taking the advantage of the new technologies, abusing, sending unsolicited email advertising to the Internet users. However we cannot let this people to ruin a fantastic mean.

For instance, I wouldn’t personally buy a customer database to launch my marketing campaign. These commercial databases are sold telling you that the persons involved have already agreed to receive your email campaign. In my opinion, these persons may have given permission to this company, but not my company specifically, Therefore I think that this would be a very aggressive manner to reach my potential customers and so, my marketing efforts would be ruined.

If I like to reach new potential clients, I would send them a personalized email, introducing my products and services and inviting them to join my database. It´s not only respect and politeness, it is also be responsible with your business reputation.

Krasis has the pleasure of announcing a new version of MAILCast.

Our developer team, taking into account the needs and requests of our users, has working hard last months to finally achieve an excellent result.

As many of you would already know from this morning after log into your user account, MAILCast has new functionalities. All of them have been done to make it easier for you, sending your email campaigns and your newsletters.

Next I will introduce you the latest improvements of MAILCast 4.0:

· New “Basic” interface. Now you can choose whether working in the classic interface, or new basic one. This new simplified version allows to access to all channel’s functionalities from a single screen. You will not have to scroll the side bar. Try it! You’ll enjoy it.

· Excel integration. Many users were demanding this and here it is. MAIL Cast’s external channels that before were linked to Access, now they can also work with Excel.

· "One-Click ZIP Publishing".  This new functionality extremely simplifies your direct marketing´s tasks. Publishing your graphics bit by bit, and after composing the HTML in the content editor is over. Design your communication in HTML on your computer with any program, and include images and resources, as you wish.  Then include all your files in a ZIP file and upload it to MAILCast who will process them, publish them in the Internet and will get them ready for edition just before you do the mailing. Publishing an own design was never easier.

· Specific version for mobile devices. In the first step of the campaign composing process, you will find a new sheet called “Mobile version”. So you can type a shorter version for those subscribers who will read your mail from a mobile device.

· Sender’s personalization for every user. You only need to include in your Access or Excel document two fields called “Sender" and "SenderEMail". That way every subscriber will receive the email from the appropriate sender. Your marketing could be even more personalized.

· Personalized fields with own values in the test emails. Now you can introduce the values for each personalized field, as you wish. So that you will obtain a more “real” test version of the final mailing version.

· Content index automated generation. With a new label in the automated templates, you will have the option of generating an index, short or larger, with internal links to the different news included in an issue. MAILCast will automatically do it for you.

· News reutilization between issues.  When you are using the automated composing functionality in MAILCast, so useful creating newsletters, you can mark already used news as available for composing again, and vice versa. This facilitates the reutilization of the content between issues of the same channel.

· New templates versión. Although you may not notice it in Outlook or other ESPs, the new templates are optimized to improve the visual experience of subscribers using Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.

· Improved stats. At the time of checking the reports, you will find that they are generated faster tan before.

 · Improvement linking external databases.

And don´t be shy, your opinion counts!! So, please, don’t hesitate in sending us feedback about MAILCast. It will help us improving more and more…

Here some basic points that help me to develop my email marketing campaigns. You may need to do some changes according to your specific goals. I find it quite useful and simple; just gathering the basic information that I need to file in order to see the results of the campaign in the long-run.

-          Campaign name

-          Sending date

-          Goals (open rates, CTR, Bounces, Subscriptions…)

-          Database segmentation (potential public to reach)

-          Campaign subject (write at least 4, then you can choose the more adequate)

-          Get your List ready (additional info, filters…)

-          Create your HTML email (don´t forget the Unsubscribe link, forward a friend)

-          Check the links on your newsletter (if they are working correctly, where they go, landing page…)

-          Schedule your mailing in the appropriate day and time.

-          Monitor the results (reading, open-rate, CTR, subscriptions, cancellations, website activity, increased traffic to your web, comments, customer feedback).

-          Analyze the results in relation to the planned goals

-          Conclusions and recommendations to future campaigns.