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A few days ago CSS-tricks posted an entry about what clean and semantic html code looks like, and gave many tips about how to compose it, using a wonderful example.
It’s really great to compose html as in that example, and not just to be cool, but to be standards compliant , save bandwidth and time redesigning and don’t forget that search engines will love your site (and when I say search engines , I mean Google ;-))
Unfortunately, for Web Designers and Html coders specialized in e-mail marketing this is just an utopia, because composing an e-email in html is, the most of times, like crossing a virtual mines field:
- Don’t use a tableless Xhtml+CSS layout: Instead of, use basic html with tables and, at most, inline CSS.
- Be careful with images: If you send too many images, your e-mail probably will end into the spam folder of spam filters. Also, your recipients won’t receive anything (but <alt> tags content) if they don’t download them.
- KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid): You can make fewer mistakes when coding keeping your layout simple. Complicated cool designs won’t help you anything.
- Test, test, test and test it again: Test your e-mail in several clients (as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird...) and webmails (Gmail, YahooMail, LiveMail...), each one has got its own weak points and just the experience will teach you how to improve your skills in html for email.
It’s a pity that we have to focus our efforts on composing html emails instead of focusing it on the contents, the real King of the internet.
It seems to be a common practice now in the US among "cool" techie people. They post, on the wild in the Internet, the e-mail adresses from the PR people that annoy them and write e-mail that they don't want (or like).
The last one has been Chris Anderson, editor in-chief of the mythical magazine Wired, following the trace that others such as Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing left behind.
He is fed up with receiving e-mail from people that don't know who are writing to. he receives 300+ e-mails a day that are not spam, so he states in his blog:
"Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers."
I can understand him, but I think that publishing all these e-mails publicly on the Internet, at the mercy of spambots harvesting all of them for their evil activity, is very unfair and in fact, in Spain (the country I'm currently living) is illegal. C'mon man, just black-list them, but not publish their e-mails.
In Spain the LOPD (simmilar to the CAN-SPAM act in the US but a bit more restrictive) will fine him with about 30.000 euros (around US $42.000) for each complaint received by each one of these people. Wow! He would have thought twice on doing that! :-)
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 :-)
Recently we posted about RSS vs e-Mail. Maybe we should have started by the root of the thing... What the RSS acronym stands for? What is RSS and how does it work?
Technically speaking RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication, and is a standard form of representing contents by using a special XML schema.
Oh my!!!! This maybe doesn't mean anything to you, so lets explain it in simple and day-life terms.
I bet that you like a lot of web pages. Many of them are about your job and professional interests. Others are about your hobbies, news, and this kind of things. You usually want to visit this pages in order to read the new contents they are publishing. If you dare to visit nothing more than a few of them you, literally, are spending hours a week getting this information.
What if you could get the new contents right at your desktop, without needing to visit them anymore?
This is what RSS gives you. Let's see it graphically:
First af all, the page you're interested in must export it's contents to RSS. You know that it is doing this, because usually it somewhere will have an icon (orange one) with the RSS or XML word in it. Clicking on it shows the contents (in an strange way usually, because is XML). In most modern browsers like Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox or Safari, you can also have an orange toolbar icon like the one in the above picture that shows that a page has an RSS source for its contents (or RSS feed).
You can check an example of all this in our main webpage (http://www.krasis.com/) or even in this blog! :-)
This is represented in the figure above by the webpages on the right and the arrows.
Well. That's OK. You have the source but, how do you use it?
Here is where the element in the middle of the image fits. You need an RSS Aggregator or Feed Reader to consume the feeds. As of today, there are lots of feed readers in the market. We recommend an on-line service like Bloglines (in the picture) or Google Reader because you can access them from any computer even on the road or through your mobile phone. They are free and work in any web browser in the market. Naturally you have a lot of other options in the desktop, like Omea Reader, Newsgator, or even the new Microsoft's Outlook 2007 or Windows Vista Sidebar. Just make your choice!
In this feed readers you have all the contents from your favourite pages served, without needing to visit them. This saves you time and effort, and you keep informed in a timely manner.
So, hurry up, get a feed reader and start to aggregate the contents you like right now!
The marketeers point of view
Obviously the proliferation of RSS and people not visting your page it's a big challenge for you as a marketeer. But you can't afford not having an RSS feed of your contents in these days. So... how does this affect you? How can you take advantage of it?
Stay tuned! We are going to tell you in future posts.
Update (13/11/2007): Look at this terrific video from CommonCraft that explains RSS in "plain english". Great!
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.
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