Spanair (a spanish flying company) is looking for a new logo, and this week has arranged a poll at his website to decide between the two candidates, so visitors and customers can vote after providing their e-mail (there will be a prize draw for a travel).

I think that this is a great trick that you can also use to build up loyalty and your mailing list, or improve it with potential customers whom get emotionally involved with your brand.
Arranging a poll, gift raffles or just special offers for subscriber are always interesting initiatives to encourage people subscribing to your mailing list.

Also there’s a second interpretation to this strategy from the SEO side. On past 20 August 2008, a Spanair flight crashed at Barajas airport, in Madrid (Spain). Nowadays, wen you search Spanair at Google, there are many results related to the crash in the first page, so the poll could also be a linkbaiting strategy to create buzz and “move” this results to the second and successive pages.

Everybody says that the email is a cold way to communicate. I disagree.

We will not forget the limitations of email, but  there are many resources  to transmit emotions through an email. I am going to focus on the text:

-Orthographic symbols are enough to express feelings: exclamation marks, question marks, suspension points ... Everything communicates.
-Bold, italics and underlined: a classical. Emphasize on what interests you.
-Words you use in your email will say the tone: distended or formal. Choose it looking at your target and your organization.
-Phrases. Short one, build a dynamic text; long one,a  formal text. All depends on what you want to say.
-If you finish your sentences with a "smiley" will give feelings to the language, expressing your mood. Be careful! Do not fill your email  with happy and sad "little faces" Remember, less is more

Analyze how you are doing el-communications with your customers. Do not think you can put something  of life in your emails? ;-)

A lot of people start making e-mail marketing (kind of) using Outlook or any other similar desktop program. Outlook is easy, powerful, affordable and -most of all- is widely pushed by Microsoft, so is what you find in almost any SME in the world; maybe in its free version (Outlook Express o Windows Mail) or Office Outlook, the really powerful version. I love Outlook and in fact it has been my e-mail client since its very first versions. I find it perfect as a Personal Information Manager and to send my everyday email.

However, when you need to do marketing campaigns to lots of people, things get very different. Size does matter, so it's not the same sending an email to a couple of customers than to send it to even so few as several tens or hundreds, not to mention to thousands of recipients.

The first problem is that you have no way to design a "compatible" e-mail, so that it is going to be correctly displayed in most e-mail clients out there. Your design looks great in your Outlook, and probably in the Outlook of other recipients, but is very probably breaking in other applications such as Thunderbird, GMail, HotMail, Lotus Notes, etc... What's worse: different versions of Outlook are incompatible when displaying email so, for example, your message crafted with Outlook 2007 is not displayed correctly when opened in Outlook 2003.

When you send an email to a huge list using your own Internet connection you are consuming a high bandwidth that impacts the other on-line activities in the company, and you normally have much more less bandwidth for sending information outside the company (upload) than for downloading it. Upon this, your e-mail provider -in order to prevent spamming- is probably blocking emails which have more than a few dozen recipients in it.

Maybe the worst problem you're facing is that of the "bounces" or wrong emails that get returned to the sender because of non-existent addresses, full mailboxes, and so on. The bounce rate could be sometimes a percentage of two digits, so if you're sending hundreds or thousands of emails expect to be flooded by bounced-back emails in your inbox. You need to cope with that and you need to clean your list manually. This could be a real pain and very error-prone.

Of course you don't have any idea of what is happening with your messages. Are people reading it?, How often?, Are they clicking on your links to get more information?, What things interest them the more?

There're lots of other things to take into account. This table summarizes some of them:

	MAILCast	Outlook
Distributed content creation	X	-
By-stages content creation	X	-
Automatic composing	X
E-mail delivery capabilities	Tens of thousands	Dozens
Delivery scheduling	X	-
Avoid corporate server and lines saturation	X	-
Bounced-back management	X	-
External data source integration	X	Limited
Segmentation and filtering	X	Limited
Reading stats	X	-
Click-throug stats	X	-
RSS export and reuse	X	-
Website integration	X	-
Subscriptions stats	X	-
RSS use stats	X	-
News reading stats	X	-

Conventional email clients are great for sending conventional emails, but are plain useful for making serious e-mail marketing and communication. Resort to a professional hosted email marketing service like MAILCast and, most of all, try to get professional training on the subject too.

You'll get:

• Messages that display well in all the email clients
• Not a single bit of your connection used for delivering the mailing
• Automatic bounce management
• A lot of interesting marketing stats and reports
• High deliverability

Related posts:

• Email marketing vs. postal mail marketing
• e-mailing: Hosted service vs. Desktop Application
• Why is a good idea to leave images on the server?
• BCC field: Be careful when sending an e-mail to multiple recipients
• TIP: How to manually test problems and bounces with e-mail addresses
• Mobile e-mail is going to replace SMS in the near future

One of the key to make successful marketing campaigns -and successful sales- is know our target. Everything you can. Why not ask them? If we subtly do it we will get many results.  That is the way...

An e-mail marketing campaign  or a newsletter with appropriate links can bring us first-hand information such as what our customers interest and need. For example, products that we must promote or  discounts we must offer How decide it? Publish it in your newsletter .  All people who  "click" will be a great target for a future e-marketing campaign. Be sure.

Use e-mail marketing as more than a tool to promote products and attract potential customers. With imagination you can get more from e-mailing. Look for the feedebacks.  And remember: do not let your recipients discover it ;-)

Google has recently begun to expand the autocomplete functionality (Google suggest) to all of their domains (it was just at google.com). And? What’s the matter? Is there any matter?

Well, in depends, this will affect to your SEO strategy because will change user’s search. Searching will become more specific and users will see better targeted AdSense ads before arriving to your site (if they do). It may be good or not, but be sure that will affect to your sites.

In conclusion, you should start to build your customer loyalty right now ( if you already haven’t), because you can’t decide how search engines will evolve, and if you depend of them and their visitors, you are in risk of being in offside if their rules change.

RSS, SMM are nice tools to buid up loyalty, but, still have to tell you which is one of the best loyalty tools?

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.