Nowadays a lot of people receive e-mail in their mobile phones (400.000 in Spain alone). Most of them used to be business travellers that use Windows Mobile devices or Blackberrys. But no anymore...

Today, given the small fees you must pay for GPRS/EDGE connections and unlimited e-mail plans, a lot of people is cathing up. At current SMS prices, you only need to send as few as 34 SMS mesages in order to equal the average unlimited e-mail plan fee. This leads to e-mail being considered cheaper and more useful than the far-limited SMS format.

In Japan, for example, they have been using e-mail in a regular basis for several years, and SMS almost has disappeared.

The current mobile e-mail usage it's expected to soar in the next years, being duplicated in two years, and being twenty times bigger in a 5-years time span. As soon as 2010 are expected to be at least 350 million mobile e-mail accounts worldwide. And these will not be only corporate accounts, but GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts too in a high degree.

What does it mean to you as a marketeer?

Well, the conclusion is clear: you must take in account that many of your e-mail marketing recipients are going to read your mails through mobile devices. And this is now, not in two or three years.

Fortunately MAILCast has built-in support for this kind of situation. When you are creating your new campaign content notice that you have a tab that read "mobile version".

There you can enter the text you want your mobile recipients to receive when they download the e-mail in their cellulars. You can customize the content too.

Click to enlarge

If you not enter any content in this especial tab MAILCast will generate a simplified version of your full featured e-mail for you. This version will have all the text contents of your main e-mail so that at least people can read it in their phones. However we recommend to generate a shorter, summary, down-level version yourself.

Back in their desktops they will download the full-featured e-mail for easy reading in Outlook or other e-mail client.

You will never have to be concerned again about your customers not being able to read your e-mails while on the road :-)

Spam is a real problem nowadays. A huge amount of the e-mail trasfered nowadays is unsolicited e-mail (spam).

In my inbox, for example about 70% of the daily e-mail I receive is just spam. We're lucky because we have a good anti-spam filter that classifies and sweap most of this rubbish out of the real inbox, but... How good an anti-spam filter is?

Altough it might seem obvious to you, the main thing you want to know about an anti-spam filter is that it is accurate. I mean that a filter is almost unuseful if it not only deletes spam but deletes good mail too. That is what is called "false positives". A false positive is a legitime e-mail flagged as spam by your spam filter.

A filter that doesn't catch spam is bad, but a filter that catches too much spam (I mean, does false positives) is even worse.

It's all about balance. As it is often saind in civil engineering colleges: "To build a bridge that doesn't fall is very easy. The difficult thing is to build one that almost doesn't fall". That's true for spam filters too: "To make an anti-spam filter that filters all the spam is easy: just wipe out everythig. The difficult thing is to make one that catches just the spam" :-)

One of the best anti-spam filters we've seen is the one embedded in GMail, Google's free mail service.

We found that this is quite usual in many hosting providers, for example. A lot of people is confy because they know that their hosting provider is taking care of their spam but... at what extent? We usually found too much strict spam filters that delete a lot of legitimate e-mail without it's owner knowing it.

You must pay attention to this kind of problem. Tell your provider not to raise the filter level too much or maybe you'll end up losing an important email some day and get in real trouble.

According to Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, the RSS will never substitute the email marketing. Fistly because receiving a personalized newsletter seems warmer and more powerful medium to reach your audience. Secondly, it seems that only few people- mostly techies-  like to customize their information  through RSS feed.

Moreover, most of the people showed confussion regarding the term RSS. Few of them knew the meaning "Really Simple Syndication", so Nielsen suggests to call them "News feed" instead. This way it will be easier to guess what they actually are for.

While RSS feed are a fantastic tool to keep updated with the latest news of your interest, it can also be seen as other obligation for the Internet users who will need to check another space regularly.

If you like to read all this article, you will find it at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html.

As far important as our subscribers’ list or our newsletters’ design and content is knowing the efficiency of our email communications. Because of this, it is essential comprehend what our email marketing´s stats mean. Analyzing them, we will find out our mistakes and our success points, and so gaining more from our online marketing strategies.

-          Reading stats

They tell us how many times our mailing has been read. Nevertheless these stats may be not 100% accurate, given that your readers may open your email from their mobile phones, Blackberries, using Outlook preview panel, blocking images, etc. and unfortunately these readings will be not counted in the stats.

For these reason, MAILCast offers you additional stats, unique reading stats which reflects only one reading for IP address, although one subscriber had read your email ten times, MAILCast will count it as only one time. In addition, MAILCast also gives a detailed report of bounce-back emails, identifying the particular email addresses affected, and the reasons for bouncing (whether the email inbox is full, the server is unavailable, email address is not correct, your message has been considered as Spam by email filters, etc).

-          Links stats

They show us the persons who have click on the links included in your mailing. These stats are 100% accurate. As before, MAILCast not only details who has click on which link, but also how many times has been done. This figure can be extremely useful for sales forecasts, as it will inform us about what products have been more interesting and for what audience.

-          RSS reading stats.

If you are publishing content via RSS, having integrated the MAILCast’s News channel in your website, then MAILCast will give you a report about how many times your content have been accessed, and in what days. So it will enable you to track the result of your publications, what news was more popular for what IP addresses. Given that the RSS readings are anonymous, MAILCast cannot give you personal data from this report.

-          Subscribers’ management stats

If you have online registration forms available in your web and managed by MAILCast, you will receive a detailed report (downloadable in Excel) of the new registrations and cancellations of your newsletter’s subscribers.  Having these online forms in your portal, it will easily increase the number of your subscribers and people who are interested in your business, products and services. Furthermore MAILCast offers you the option of double opt-in and opt-out, helping to comply with the current Data Protection legislation. Furthermore, MAILCast will delete from your database those addresses that have been bouncing, so you will keep your list clean, and it will not affect your business reputation. Taking care of your list of subscribers is important; otherwise most of the email service providers (ESP’s) may flag your mailings as unsolicited commercial emails (Spam).

The communication process becomes fundamental to comprehend our customers’ needs, so we must take this thought into account. In order to achieve an efficient relationship with them, we must consider our communication as a reciprocal information exchange, so we´ll find out the opinion and ideas of our interlocutors.

We communicate a message in very single contact with our clients. Our communication skills will help to our recipient to decide whether our message is positive or negative. Because of that, here are some advices helping you to empathize with your clients and gain the customers’ trust:

·         Show the client that you are listening

·         Try to obtain useful information from any message you get from them

·         Allude to some comment that you have received from the client, demonstrating that you have been listening and acting as a result.

In addition of bearing these aspects in mind, we must not forget the clarity of our message, and so avoid to misinterpretations, because them can make the effectiveness or our messages fail.

According to the current legislation and recent anti-Spam consciousness, MAILCast promotes the use of double opt-in to fill up your subscribers lists.

What double opt-in means is that after your subscriber enters their email addresses to receive your newsletters, then they go a step further: they’ll need to confirm their correct email address by replying to an email sent to that particular address. So that you confirm the permission of your subscriber, you avoid misspelled addresses, etc. Tip: when your customers confirm the subscription (clicking on the link), they can go to a “Thank you” webpage where you can advice them to add your sender email address to their address book, so that your newsletter will not finish into the Junk folder.  

Now, double opt-in is fine. What about double opt-out?  A nightmare…! Don’t twist it. If they like to unsubscribe, make it easy. It is nothing more frustrating that going from page to page without finding the bloody option to delete your email address from the database. The longest it takes, the worst feeling you got of that company. Think that the foundation of effective email marketing is building trust and relationships with your subscribers.

The ignorance is bliss, but you can get it right now.

Of course, MAILcast will let you choose the method and messages of your choice for subscribing and unsubscribing to your e-mail newsletters.

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.