I am sure that this year will be the year of email marketing. It will become the king of corporate marketing tool. Increasingly, the companies value e-mail marketing as an effective form of business communication.

This is possible because of the versatility, the immediacy of response, low cost, easeness of customization and possibility of tracking among other things. 

If you are thinking about preparing a newsletter or e-mailing a promotional offer, don´t doubt. Include e-mail marketing inside the  communication strategy of your company during. Make e-mail marketing your best allied to stand out your competence.

New Year ... New Email Marketing ;-)

These days I receive a lot of electronic Christmas cards greeting me and wishing me happy New Year.

I must confess that the vast majority of them are not very good from the e-mail marketing point of view, and not a lot of them caught my attention. However recently I received one from one of our providers that really was interesting to watch.

It is a viral campaign from the bank ING Direct and UNICEF, in the form of Christmas e-Card that uses a cool flash website and geo-positioning  to help a good cause and was called "The Solidarity Bus".

Sorry, the contents are in Spanish

ING will donate 1 euro cent to UNICEF for each 10 kilometers that this virtual bus run through the world, which is a strange claim to do in an email, isn't it?

How is this done: when you click in the call to action link and get to the landing page at http://www.elautobus.org they get your geographic position from your IP address. The compare it with the position of the original sender of the email (tracked in the link) so that they can calculate approximately the distance between the two points and add the quantity corresponding to this distance.

Cool, isn't it? Technically and socially cool, I must say :-)

Please, use this e-Card and send it to your friends in the other part of the world so that a lot of children can go to school.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

I like to emphasize the versatility of e-mail marketing to promote our products or  services. The key will be more in contents than in the tool you use to communicate.

If you're thinking about making an e-mail marketing campaign, look  for what is your marketing message:

-If you are selling products. Remember that the consumers see the physical characteristics of the products. You can talk about added value and services that they will buy too.

-If you are selling services. Try to make something ethereal and intangible into something real. Consumers will not perceive that they buy smoke.

In both cases, offer several options to the consumer, because we like choose.

Apply the flexibility that characterizes e-mail marketing to your relationship with your customers. It will help you to redesign an old or false perception about them.

We have already told about the many advantages of e-mail marketing opposite to other tools communication. Today I am going to talk about form.

We can show the content of our e-marketing  in "wrappers" as:

• Offers
• News
• Newsletter
• Subscriptions
• Invitations
• Polls 
• Specific formats for specific season, such as Christmas cards

The choice depends on what we want to say to our target and the kind of customers in our database.

We need to explore different ways of communication. We must try to get thar our recipients understand the message. E-mail marketing will adapt to any of them!

Continuing with the analysis series in this blog, I’m going to comment on an email I received recently.

In this case the email almost has no images so the major concerns are about textual contents and deliverability. It showed up in this way when received:

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It didn’t look more interesting after activating the images either:

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Apart from the poor appearance of the contents and the lack of an unsubscribe link or a short legal text, let’s talk about text itself.

Although the subject line is quite well crafted (it reads “Beat your competence” in Spanish) because is short and to the point, the contents make use a lot of well known inappropriate words and content techniques.

They have personalized the email using my name in the second sentence which is good, but the first sentence in the email includes the word “Free” (gratis) and is formatted in bold big fonts and with exclamation marks in it. This is not a good idea as long as this weights a lot in spam filters. This by itself is not enough to trigger spam filters, but the “free” and “success” words appearing several times in the text should probably be. The use of uppercase words in several parts of the text counts too.

Going into more technical details, the return path declared email is in the domain acambiode.es wich has two email servers registered as valid ones for handling that domain:

• relay.grupointercom.com
• mail.grupointercom.com

But the email was sent using a different email called push4.grupointercom.com so a lot of server filters that check for a valid originating address will flag this email as using a faked sender and prevent it to go to the users inbox.

This phrase can be applied  in many moments of our professional and personal live. It will be useful when you write a newsletter too :-)

When you write a newsletter try to minimize what you want say. Arouse your readers curiosity in a headline, summarize what you want to say in three lines and show a link, a "click here" or a "more info":  the recipient will increase the information "on demand". You must avoid a feeling of saturation that make delete the e-mail.

Another advantage if you let the information "hiding" below a link is that you will know exactly who is interested in what, becouse your software will tell you who has clicked in what link.  This information is vital for future offers to specific target. 

Take care of this and tou will improve the composition of your newsletters. It will be more attractive with less text and the value of each communicated will increase for you.

Krasis has taken part in the conference  Online Marketing: small investment, big profits, organized by the Club Financiero de Vigo. I presented the speech "Email Marketing. Find and maintain your customers" where I summarize very, very, very much what is e-mail marketing, what are their main advantages and how start a e-mail marketing campaign.

You can read it here (in Spanish). Enjoy it  ;-)

Nowadays, there are companies wich think that corporate communication means the diffusion of its image through a letter and envelope  with its logo. This anachronistic thought is a big mistake.

You should not forget that "everything communicates" and "it is impossible not to communicate". Any organization  must show a coherent image in any corporate appearance. Don´t trust it to chance. This includes the presence in different traditional and  emerging technologies media.

Sometimes we neglect something as basic as our website. Our web must provide all the information about our company and must be our "visiting card" for all users too. Not just "copy" and "paste" the content of our dossier Coporate. We need to give them it in an attractive way appropriate to our image.

The same happen with our e-communications, such as newsletters and e-mail marketing campaigns. They are a very good vehicle to spread our corporate image. We recommend a content of interest to our target and an esthetic that identifies it with the organization they belong.

Although  an insipid contents is the worst way to make our electronic communications, an unpleasant image can overshadow the most interesting information. We recommend you to take care of things such as your email and newsletters templates  to be pleasing to the recipients and strengthen interest in the contents.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau can help us making  a sucessful e-mail marketing campaigns. You can find at www.iab.net a lot of resources about the best practises in e-mail marketing.

Glossaries, legal terms, metrics, audiences measurement, case studies... All kind of data that can update your knowledge. You will refresh your information and be more creative in your communications.

We propose you to visit the website and get some ideas for your e-mail marketing campaigns.

Enjoy!