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:

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?