Sometimes,  we have told you the importance of simplicity. You must not show all information when you write a newsletter, but show a "more info" or "click here" . Now  we recommend the same idea  in creating an  e-mail marketing campaign .

Typically, in our inbox are a lot of e-mails full of  information. Finally, you do not know exactly what kind of message you just received so you delete it and read the next one.

Our advice: do not get tired. Use a message to say one information only. Probably your company offers many products and services you would like to list but  concentrate on one idea that does not disperse the attention of your recipients. Avoid the noise in your communication.

Remember, you can not bomb all the information about your company in an e-mail. Try  link to your website and interested people will go there to analyze your products and services. Sure they will appreciate it  :-)

When you send an email what you aim for is that it arrives at its destination and that it can be visualised correctly. These aims may seem obvious and are normally taken for granted, however it’s not as easy as it seems. Why?

Besides the actual message you want to send, which consists of the text body, there also exists some elements surrounding this which are responsible for supplying the format and general layout. The content of the messages is in fact HTML code which supplies the necessary information to the email clients so they know how to view it, e.g. bold type, alignment, backgrounds, etc. The effects of this situation are:

• Inbound emails cannot be visualised correctly: the formats aren’t maintained, and
distributions, width, etc are affected.
• Received emails cannot be read.
• If the receiver can’t read the email without first downloading images, then the email
will most likely end up in the deleted folder without even being read.
• It gives an unprofessional image of the company who is sending the email. After
getting one or two emails like this the receiver will black list the company and will,
therefore, stop receiving that company’s emails.
• The content is confused with spam and won’t arrive at its destination.

Keep in mind these in the preparation of your e-communications.  Look for professionals if you think you can not do it alone. Effectiveness of your campaigns will increase considerably. We are sure!

Financial crisis is in everyone's lips these days. Shrinking budgets and lay-offs sprout everywhere. In such times is when your company must invest strongly in communication, whether it is in fact affected by the downturn or not. It's imperative to send out the right message to internal and external stakeholders.

I've been reading this remarkable article from Paul A. Argenti in Financial Times: "How to talk your way through a downturn". I think is very interesting to read and follow it's conclusions. Even in small companies.

Unlike during good times, you have an impatient audience expecting corporate messages. Employees, providers, customers... everyone is anxious to know about your company. Beware of being guilty by association: although your company is in good shape, if you don't communicate in the right way people could think you're in trouble just because the rest of the market is.

Argenti gives a lot of good advice:

• Do not hide
• Gather relevant information and stick to your story
• Communicate early and often
• Centralise communications
• Get inside the media’s head
• Choose communication channels thoughtfully
• Communicate directly with affected constituencies
• Keep the business running
• Keep values and character centre-stage

You can get into detail if you read the full article.

I think that e-mail is a good tool to use for this kind of communication too. The tracking information that you can obtain will be of good value, and you can adapt new messages to the results of the previous ones.

And don't forget that opted-in, planned, and well designed e-mail campaigns are one of your best allies to selling more and staying ahead of your competitors. When crisis strikes, the first reaction is to trim your marketing budget, when you should do the opposite. If customers are buying less you should do more marketing to overcome that tendency. If your competitors are trimming their investment in marketing to cut cost, you should increase it to be more relevant and take a definitive advantage.

Summing up: crisis times are times to invest more in communication in order to give the right messages to everyone and try to sell more. e-mail is your best friend for this.

In times of "lean" we have to be original to enhance. We need results but we can not spend money. So, we have to look for alternatives... Have you think  in e-mail marketing? It will help you! Sure...

Email is a cheap alternative to make good marketing. Perhaps now is time to think about buying an email marketing  tool. You will measure your campaigns and get real results of your actions.  You will stand out from the competition too and improve your image.

In these times, you must also take care of your current customers. Keep your customers is more important than get new ones. You can get their loyalty ,for example, by developing a newsletter with specific offers.  You can do that with a suitable software.

We have stressed these ideas on many other posts because we believe in what we do. Do not underestimate the power of email marketing and its ability as a communication tool. Now more than ever.

As you probably know, one of the most popular MAILCast feature is the capabability to upload your sending in a ZIP archive (as shown in this article), because most of our customers still feel more comfortable editing their email within a desktop software than within an online one. But the matter is that buying an Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression license just for this small task may be too expensive, so the solution are the multiple free html editors available into the internet.

These are some of the ones that we recommend to you:

Kompozer

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system based on NVU that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.

Aptana

Aptana Studio is a free complete web development environment  based on Eclipse that combines powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services.

Amaya

Amaya is an open source Web editor hosted by W3C. The Amaya software is available for Windows, Unix platforms and MacOS X.

You can read in this article (in Spanish) some advices to achieve your purposes on 2009.  It may be usefull for you and helps you reach your goals during this year.

Often, we promise our customers things that finally we don´t keep. This is the worst we can do with someone who trust in us. A dissatisfied customer will tell a lot of people you are not trustworthy. Be carefull with your words

Enjoy it!

Yes, this is an email marketing blog, not about SEO or SEM. But everything about online marketing is related, and using the correct keywords in your mailings isn’t an exception.

When Internet  users are searching for a product or service normally use a small range of colloquial keywords. For example, may be your target uses “online courses” instead of “e-learning”, do you know what I mean?

So, if you are choose right keywords that fit better into your target needs and use a short and personalized mail subject, you will see how your CTR grows (of course, also the sales will do).

Eg: “John , try our new online courses.”

But be careful and don’t be too sensationalist, because your email can be flagged as spam by  spam filters.

Eg (not to do): “A great new offer!!! save money by trying our new  online courses, for free!!!”
(Yes, I’m going just a little bit over the top)

Choosing  the right keywords

There are many sources where you can get this data from. The most important are your website statistics, a system such as Google Analytics  will reveal which are the keywords most used by your visitors, and which of them convert more sales.

After this, you should use a keyword tool (or several) to confirm that your site is oriented to the correct keywords, or find similar keywords and identify search trends that could help you to improve your business.

These free keyword tools are my favorites:

• Google Keyword tool
• Google Trends
• Google Insights
• Seobook Keyword Suggestion Tool
  

Good luck!

I've been writing my technical blog -devoted to web programming and technology (in spanish)- since may of 2004, so almost for 5 years now. I also do cross-posting to Geeks.ms, the biggest Spanish-spoken community related to Microsoft Technology. Before the blogging era I ran several other technical web pages. I humbly consider that my content is generally of good quality, and I get a lot of visitors and a lot of comments. I spend many hours each year collating valuable knowledge for everyone to read for free. I've been doing this for almost 12 years now. And my pay for this is precisely zero, nothing, nada.

I do this just for the sake of it, not for making money out of it. I even use my own blog as a repository of knowledge for a lot of things I learn and that otherwise would get lost (every day I'm able to remember fewer and fewer things due to information overload). So, economically, I didn't expect anything in return for my work.

However, a couple of years ago I decided to include a little bit of advertising in the blog. Very few non-intrusive ads and, thanks to the magic of Google Adsense, most of the time content-related. So I hope that even the ads would interest my visitors. It was most of all a marketing experiment. I wanted to know how the ads would work in a niche blog like mine, and if they would influence the number of visitors and the perceived quality of the blog.

It was quite disappointing to see that very, very, very few people click on ads, even the people who find the contents interesting or even tell me that "You saved my life with this trick", "I was going mad with this problem and your solution works like a charm", etc... In Spanish-speaking countries the click-rate is much lower than those on the US or Anglo-Saxon countries.

I have thought a lot about the advertising in pages with free content. I have always intuitively understood that clicking on ads is a way to thank the people who have help me for free. A lot of pages and portals that offer great content depend on ad revenue to survive, so when one of them gives me good value (such a good advice or a game or a great free download and so on) I try to click on one ad to say thank you.

There are people who are proud of not clicking on ads, and who even install programs that automatically remove advertising from their browsers.

But if you don't click on ads the whole idea of free content on the Internet automatically vanished. So I think that clicking on ads that interest you is a good way to achieve two main objectives:

1. Say thank you to the people who bring great content to you and help to ensure continuity of that good work
2. You get access to products or services that maybe can interest you or be of value to you.

I stick by a couple of watchwords, however:

1. I only click on ads that could interest me, so there is a legitimate interest in the click too.
2. The portal I visit must show legitimate, targeted advertising, not generic banners about things unrelated to the subject of the page.

I think it's a win-win situation for everyone. The content owners get rewarded for their good work, the advertiser gets a prospective customer on their site and you get information about something that maybe is going to interest you.

The reality is that almost no one cares to think about this kind of things, and that not a lot of people click on ads. The percentage is high enough for Google and other aggregators because the traffic they get is so huge, but is hardly enough for a regular website to make a living. And it's a pity.

It's OK for me and my blog (although a little bit of extra money for my work would be great), but if the site is a commercial one this is absolutely necessary for them.

Googling a little bit about this subject to know what people think about this approach led me today to Seth Godin's blog. He wrote a few months ago a short text about this, expressing the same idea that I intuitively have. And he got a lot of criticism from almost everyone saying that this idea perverts the advertising business. And he is a world-class guru in e-marketing, so I guess that I will be crunched for having written this ;-)

Anyway, I think that the idea is absolutely legitimate and that is a real win-win situation for everyone. And I like the fact that someone like Seth thinks like me :)

I just want to share my thoughts about this with you.

Cheers!

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!