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Archive for September, 2011

HTML Emails are arguably the most effective of all email marketing designs. Theyre eye catching, engaging and flexible. They provide you with a variety of opportunities to promote your business and achieve email marketing success. However, there are many pitfalls to be aware of when designing HTML Emails. In this article well highlight some of these and give you a few tips to help you design effective email campaigns.

Back to the old school

Theres no point denying it HTML Email design is Old School web design. This means no Stylesheets, JavaScript or Flash, they just wont work consistently across the wide and varied range of email clients.

When it comes to layout its back to a basic table-based structure, which may, to some web designers seem like committing web standards blasphemy. However, when you take into account the number of email clients that either remove or pay no attention to CSS it becomes quite clear going back to basics is the only way to guarantee your email looks the same regardless of which email client is displaying it.
We have found when designing table based layouts using merged cells (indicated by colspan and rowspan in your code), some email clients, especially Lotus Notes will usually distort any layout with merged cells. Instead, using nested tables will work more consistently than merged cells. For example, a two column layout could consist of a base layer of one table with two columns with other tables inserted into each column to give you space to enter your content.
Looking Good

A great deal of formatting can be done using Inline Styles small snippets of CSS code inserted into either a containing table cell (<td>), in paragraph tags (<p>) or span tags (<span>)

Below is an example of an inline style insert into a table cell tag:

<td width=”400″ align=”left” valign=”top” style=”color:#000000; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:11px;”>

This style would then apply to the text contents of that table cell. Other standard HTML formatting tags such as <strong>, <em>, <font> etc can be used as well to vary the formatting on top of this base style.
When deciding on a font for your email its always best to stick to a font that most, if not all, of your readers will have. Common fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Times New Roman and Georgia should be fine. If youre willing to take the risk of a slightly lesser-known font its good practice to specify a set of backup font faces in your inline style eg.
<td style=” Lucida Console, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; “>

If a computer does not have a certain font it will look to the next in the list to see if it has that one.

Time Warp

When we first got our hands on Microsoft Outlook 2007 we were a bit taken aback with what Microsoft had created, not only locking it down to use only the Word HTML rendering engine (Outlook 2003 will let you choose between normal HTML and Word rendering) but also support for background images had been removed, which meant a real step back with what you can and cant do to keep your emails looking good.

To ensure the most consistent display across the majority of email clients, we took the decision to not include background images in our designs (unless otherwise specified by the customer), and weve come up with a few little tricks along the way to help us keep our designs looking top notch. The main thing to remember is HTML text should only appear on a solid background colour (which you can set in a table cell). There should be no gradients or any other fancy effects behind actual text, unless you plan to include that text in an image.

The final few things…

There are hundreds of elements to take into consideration when designing a HTML email. These are just a few of the most important things to consider:

Create a plain text version of your email to send alongside the HTML version for those who prefer it and for mobile devices and email clients that only accept text only email.
Keep the width of your email between 600-650px to ensure readability for the maximum amount of email clients.
Assign an alt tag to each image so if readers have the images turned off they should see some sort of useful information to assure them the email is legitimate.
Always set height and width attributes on images in your HTML design. Some email clients like Outlook 2003 and 2007 will suppress images in the inbox. Failing to put a height and width will result in your deign be distorted by the security message that is inserted by the email client into the image space.
Use images at the size they are meant to be rather than resizing them with HTML some email clients will ignore the HTML resize and just display the image at its original size.

Whatever you choose to do with your email marketing designs, the most important thing is to test, test and test again. You should always proof your email into the major email clients to ensure its rendering correctly and ask a proof group to check for spellings or design issues too. However, just because there are limitations to HTML email design it doesnt mean you cant be creative or push the boundaries to see what impacts on delivery, open and click through rates. Remember the aim of any email is to achieve your goal and sometimes being safe with your design isnt the best option.

How To Write Irresistible Email Messages For Your Email Marketing Campaign

With today the massive amount of products and information available in any marketplace, you have merely 2.9 seconds-yes, just 2.9 seconds-to hook a buyer’s interest and keep them reading and staying on your page.

Write irresistible email messages for your email marketing campaign.

Luckily, there are many ways to overcome this barrier and keep your prospects eyes glued and focus to your message.

Write in a casual manner and make your message read like the way a conversation with your friend in a restaurant would sound. Big words might give you a good impression with some people, but most people just want to hear a clear explanation of what you have to say, so they are not going to jump to the dictionary in the midst of reading your message to find out what you are talking about.

Do use short sentences and keep it straightforward and to the point. Do use contractions instead of the more proper two word phrases. However, ensure that there are no grammar and spelling mistake. Remember, you want to seem friendly, not a slop.

Have passion and personal interest when choosing the topic for your product. So if you are selling a product related to a topic you are highly interested in, let that passion in you shown in your email messages. Say the benefits of your product you find particularly fascinating, tell your prospects why they need those benefits to solve their problem and give your personal endorsement of the product.

Be personal when you are writing your message that may be read by hundreds of thousand of people, but remember that each person who opens your message is an individual and will be far more at ease if you address them as an important and special person rather than a piece of the collective public domain.

Therefore, use the persons full name or first name and use words you, your, and you’re as often as possible and set your limit the use of words such as we, our, my, me, us and I. You do not need to tell them how great are you. You just tell them how buying your product will benefit them and why they should part with their hard-earned money to get your product.

Do you currently have a cold mailing list, unresponsive, low open rates, even lower click through rates?

Don’t worry most affiliate marketers suffer from that very same problem.

It’s most likely that the reason your list is cold is because you have not effectively grown your relationship with them.

I will now discuss three ways that you can warm up your list and help you improve on your poor email marketing results.

First, you have to inject some passion into your email subject lines.

Ask questions.

Try shock tactics.

Be very real with your subject line, ensure your email contents are relevant to minimize spam reports.

To improve your subject lines, check out popular sites so as Digg and mimic their headlines, or start a swipe file from more successful marketers and base your own subjects lines loosely on theirs.

Second, your email contents must be of value.

There is no point getting a person to open your email if the contents are useless.

It is simply not good enough to send people on your email list promotion after promoting.

The 2 to 1 ratio is quite a popular method, which means you send 2 emails containing free, valuable information and the third email is a promotional email.

Lastly, structure you email correctly.

Make it easy for the reader to know what action to take.

Always include a ps.

Try to write your emails as if you were talking to a friend, keep them friendly.

Story telling is highly effective too if you can take a real life situation and blend it into your email content.

Above all you should always be honest.

Never make false claims or lie in an email.

Keep it real!

Now you know three ways to improve you email marketing success, head over to your autoresponder and amend your current emails.

One last point, know your numbers, most autoresponders provide very detailed statistics on open and click rates, be sure to monitor them and adjust if required.

These days email is a necessary part of communication. However, this also means that email is one of the most popular ways for a virus to infect your computer. You need to protect yourself from the threat of fraud and infection.

Viruses

Email attachments often contain viruses so you need to be careful whenever you open any type of attachment even if you know the sender. There are some viruses that can infiltrate your address book and then send email that is infected to everyone on your list. This means that you can get a virus from a colleague or a friend. The best thing to do is to communicate with the sender so that you know you are expecting an attachment.

Software for virus protection is your best bet against viruses. This software will scan all your email attachments when they are received on your computer. All computers that have Internet access will need to have antivirus software so that all systems are protected as one big whole. There are some viruses that will start with one computer system and then spread to the rest of the network, eventually encompassing all the hardware that is needed to access the Internet.

Phishing

Email can lead to fraud, which is yet another type of security risk. Phishing, is one type of fraud that will try to trick you into giving out personal passwords or banking information. This type of email will use the logo from a well known banking institution or online business after which they will ask you to update your banking information or your password.

Phishing provides a link that looks as though it is legitimate but that in fact will lead you to a false website. If you provide them with personal information you become a victim of theft or fraud on your credit card. This is also known as “identity theft”.

Email content and subject lines can be your clue to phishing. Instead of using your name the subject line might say something like “To our valued customer”. It isn’t hard to find some variant for personal names so be on the alert.

Less of clue to phishing is when a link is included that has nothing to do with the text in the email. You can verify this by highlighting the link and paying attention to the status bar. For example, if the email text is something about Microsoft, and the URL is www.nowhereland.com, you have a good clue that the message you’ve received isn’t really from Microsoft.

There is software that can detect whether phishing is occurring. Even though this software isn’t fully mature yet it can at least identify if an email is fraud. Whenever you are asked for your credit card number or a password you should be suspicious. Always keep in mind that no legitimate banking institution will ask you to give personal information or to verify any passwords in the content of an email.

E-mail Backups

Your email, just like other data on your computer, should always be backed up. Most email programs will be easy to back up. All you need to do is export your email messages to a selected folder and then do a backup on this folder. You can use a backup program and put your email onto a writeable CD, DVD, removable disk, or any other type of media.

You also have the option of buying backup software that is specialized for backing up email. This software is moderately priced and eliminates the need to export your email to a folder.

You can automate most backup software so that backups happen at a time that is convenient without you having to lend a hand. You’ll have to find time in your busy schedule to configure this type of software. However, you’ll be no more busy doing the configuring as you would be if you need to replace an email that you needed.

If you’re anything like the average Internet user, you’ll have seen an annoying increase in the number of spam emails that are hitting your inbox. If a spam bot finds your email address the chances are you will suffer a deluge of offers for body enhancement products and other useless offers. But there are some simple steps that you can take to stop these email harvesters.

Spambots are computer programs that scour the Internet looking for email addresses. These are fed back to a central database that is then used to send huge volumes of spam emails. Spam now accounts for over 50% of email traffic. The main way to prevent them getting your email address is to make sure it doesn’t appear on the Internet.

A low-tech way of hiding your address is writing it out without the “@” symbol. So you could write your address as:

joebloggs (at) mywebsite (dot) com

Most human visitors will know what this means, but it will be enough to fool many pieces of software. However some advanced programs maybe programmed to specifically look for this pattern.

If your email address needs to appear on a website, another approach is to use a script. This scrambles the address so that it is not visible to a spam bot but it appears normally on the page if a human was to view it.

A better solution is to use a form on your webpage to replace a simple email address. This can then be set up to send the contents of the form to your email address. This also has the advantage that you can ask the user for specific information by putting a required field onto the form.

Employing either of these measures should reduce the chance of your email address being harvested by spam bots. You should combine this with common sense practices like not revealing your email address on public forums or bulletin boards that can be easily crawled by email harvesting software.

One of the best ways to be in touch with a client or costumer nowadays is through an email newsletter that is just a click away. This makes a business’ marketing strategy appealing to consumers/customers because it lessens pop-up windows that distract the reading of clients logging in your website. Pop-up windows can actually cause clients to lose interest about something. A good start for a fledgling business is the newsletter distribution. Clients, especially those who take delight in reading will certainly recognize you and your business. Your newsletter should provide clients the details of your services and also the important information that will help them understand what further steps you will do to serve them better.

A newsletter bridges the gap between you and your customers now or future customers/consumers. They get more interested with a newsletter that informs them of useful details about things that they are searching for. Clients would like to receive a newsletter regularly because they want to be always educated with what’s new. This brought to them by reading a newsletter. If they are able know the present details of your business, a newsletter will surely be sought by consumers.

If one wants to publish an efficient newsletter, she/he must be willing to make an effort. A simple one will not bring you to the audience you wish to rich. It should be stimulating enough to someone’s interest. Sending out useful newsletters have always been contributing to the growth of business, companies, clubs, associations and other organizations because the client’s thirst for information is adequately dealt with. If you desire more clients to avail your products or services, be more creative with your newsletter design.

One of the few things you need to remember in making an effective newsletter is that you should never waste the time and attention of your reader. An email inbox is a very busy place for a newsletter to be, so when your newsletter does arrive, make sure you to the point quickly and surely. No need for lots of greetings and ridiculous photos. Figure out what people should know and what they want to know about you and your company or business and give it to them straight away. Another is to stick to relevance and never go off topic. You lose more potential customers that way.

It is also advisable to have a specific goal in mind when you’re making your newsletter. That way, you would know if the newsletter that you sent out to everyone is effective.

Believing too much in photos on your newsletter is dangerous. They are attractive but steals the time of your clients to read more if they are diverted to opening windows to see your photos. It is not helpful. It is more appreciated if you just put it in simple writing, so unnecessary traffic due to images is avoided.

Finally, be aware that there is no retrieving of newsletters once you’ve sent them. Be cautious. Perform a trial first before sending them to every one of your clients.

Any unexpected error made, however small when it comes to email newsletters will cost you a lot more than you might be prepared for.

How to PreventInformation Loss during an Outage with Email Continuity

Occasionally, power failures take place all of a sudden and workers lose important information on their email which often can affect employee output. A good answer for this problem is to install email continuity service for the business office.

Gmail infuriated the majority of its users when it was inaccessible for several hours in 2009. The downtime disabled a lot of businesses temporarily, but Google immediately worked on getting Gmail back up for many of the users. The outage had a serious impact on business and people learned that even ever-reliable Google can cause a serious glitch in their lives by depriving them access to their email. It has led individuals to consider having an email continuity service and several organizations wisely did.

Outages are certainly not limited to Gmail though. Other webmails also have problems with periodic downtimes and email users may also experience power outages once in a while. Many of these glitches will take place throughout the years, so it is essential to be prepared by getting email continuity. This will protect against data loss, which is the primary impact of a speedy or extented disruption.

Inbound email can nonetheless be accessed even throughout an outage simply because this system queues up the recipient’s mail even when the server is down. Apart from these, what else should consumers look for in email continuity service?

1. A reliable email continuity service should be turned on the instant an outage brought on by disasters or upkeep takes place. This will prevent the users from scrambling to retrieve records and losing them just because the continuity system needs to be turned on manually.

2. It should integrate easily into the email application and the service would allow the users to sign in to it instantly without transferring to another site.

3. This service should function similar to a typical email. Incoming as well as outbound email services should be readily available even throughout a sudden disruption.

4. It must not have mailbox size restriction. Additionally, it should have the capability to back up less than 6 individuals working in the same company or nearly 10,000 employees of an international company.

5. It must not require the user to download any software or install any hardware. It needs to be compatible with the user’s current system. The system also need to easily deployed even when there are many individuals who need to use it.

6. System maintenance must be unnecessary.

7. Users should have access to the program round the clock and customer care should be available all day, also.

8. It should deliver inadvertently deleted email correspondence on the user’s inbound or outbound mail.

9.Potential customers should check out the service provider’s portfolio to see if they have important clients that have enrolled with them. This ensures that the company can provide the best email continuity service to their future clients.

In an ideal world, data loss because of power outage or system maintenance should not occur. Unforeseen glitches, however, will continue to happen as natural disasters, periodic power outages, and preventive maintenance are inevitable. Because of email continuity, data loss and the crippling effects of it on a business can be prevented.

Fred Boersch is an office employee who has used email continuity in the course of an outage. Check out the top websites for email continuity service if you want to find out more about this.

Every business has one goal – to raise their ROI. With email marketing, businesses are making that a reality. But the question remains, why are some businesses profiting while others are not? Hey, that’s a really good question. There are some important strategies to factor into your campaign when looking for a good return. Here are just a few:Thought out StrategiesMost companies decide to give email marketing a try because they know it is one of the most cost-effective tools when undertaking a large or small email marketing campaign. However, strategies are not like fast food, ready to go, no waiting, no stress. Marketing plans are just that, plans that are thoroughly thought out and seriously researched. Before venturing out into an extremely competitive and perceptive market, you need to have a solid foundation for your service or product.Questions that need to be answered:1. Who is your target market?2. Are you sure that your target needs your product or service?3. Have you researched your competitor’s website and blog?4. Do you know your keywords and phrases for SEO success?5. Do you have a clear call to action and suitable landing page?6. Have you integrated Social Media marketing?7. What are your goals and objectives that you plan to achieve with email marketing campaigns?Goals and Objectives:How are you going to achieve your goals and objectives? Have you considered using powerful and dependable email campaign software. Honestly speaking, it is tough out there. Having sincere intentions, a good product, or service, coupled with a dynamic message, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Without that email campaign’s ability to land in your recipient’s in-box, get opened and read, you have just wasted most of your valuable. time.Appearance MattersDo you have time to design? How are your HTML skills doing lately? As the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. If you feel a bit intimidated by these questions, then consider the software alternative that will help you achieve all your business goals and objectives. Email Campaign Software comes with hundreds of professionally designed templates. All the graphics are optimized, meeting ISP standards. Simply pick out the design that matches your brand and voice. You can easily change colors, fonts, while importing your own logo and pictures. Sorry, you have to write the text. According to all email-marketing surveys, no one reads an entire page of text. People glance and skim, while looking for relevance. Remember to keep your message sharp and clear. Put your call to action in the first paragraph. Don’t make them wonder why you are sending this email marketing campaign. Let them know what’s in it for them. Do not add too many graphics. No one will be impressed. Graphics take time to open and can obscure an important message. Many people have never changed their graphic default settings, so the emails come in with giant blank spaces. Keep that in mind when designing your next email campaigns.Don’t be Mysterious: According the Can-Spam laws for business, you need to include your physical address or you may be considered a spammer. You should also have a business email address in the sender’s email box. Today’s consumers are inundated with email and spam. With all the recent warnings of viral worms, and malware, very few recipients will open a message from a sender they do not recognize.How to Market with Email MarketingThe Power of TrackingSorry to say, that once you hit that little send button, your job is not over. What happens to that campaign once it is sent, is as important as its birth. To maintain control you need to know the destiny of each and every campaign that you send. Using email campaign software, you will know: # of emails delivered/not delivered # not opened/opened # bounded emails # subscribed (opt-in) unsubscribed (opt-out) # of errors and undeliverable # visits per linkOf course, this list is not exhaustive. But we hope it is a wakeup call, showing you the importance of having the right email campaign software by your side. Whether you want to grow your business, sell your products and services, while creating a viral campaign, you cannot do it with small thinking using a manual approach.

How To Get More Subscribers & Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts

All online business owners want to know how to increase their sales as soon as possible. And if you haven’t already done so, one of the best way to improve your profits is with an opt-in email list.

With an opt-in email list, you can improve your website conversion rates by following-up on some of the people who voluntary subscribed to your email newsletter. Your opt-in list will contain a list of prospects that are not ready to buy your products yet, but are maybe thinking about doing so in the future.

To keep them interested and to help them stay on your list, you can consider sending them updates on when new products arrive, tips on a particular subject, or other updates about seminars or special events that could be relevant to them. As the opt-in email list idea proves to be effective for you, you will want to find new ways to increase the number of subscribers that you have, and also how to improve the conversion rates of your list – which are the 2 things that this article will touch on.

The best thing about opt-in email marketing is that you stay in front of your prospect. By doing this, you can inform them of your products and get them to come back to your website – thereby increasing your sales – and also your traffic. The traffic aspect of this is important for possible joint venture opportunities in the future. Joint ventures can increase your sales for free, and sometimes add additional names to your customer list.

You should also make it a priority to minimize unsubscribes as much as possible. The best way to do this is to not mail so often, and when you do mail, be very informative and insert personality into your messages. Your subscribers want to deal with a real person – not a faceless organization, so add some “kick” to your emails.

You will have to test on whether or not HTML or text emails work the best for you, as some marketing tests show that both work better than the other. However the thing that you must be careful of when sending HTML emails is that it doesn’t be perceived as spam to the email filters – and that your messages don’t end up in the spam folder.

The best way to gain an open ear everytime from your subscribers is to be on top of the marketplace, and to know what the current needs and wants are. If every time you email them you have new and exciting things to share with them, they will want to wait for and open all of your future emails. And this technique also shows that you care about them. They may not know it immediately, but you see it in the number of subscribers that you retain each and every month.

To get more subscribers, there are 2 great ways to go about this. You can ask your current subscribers for referrals, or you can simply write articles about topics relating to your products and services.

With the referrals technique, you will want to inspire action, and the best way to do this is to offer an incentive for referring others to you. Think of a nice, low-cost gift that you can give to your subscribers for referring their friends to your website. You benefit from the new prospective customer, and they benefit from the great gift that you gave them.

With the articles technique, you can write 300-500 word articles on topics related to your products and submit them to the many article directories online. These directories are highly visited by the search engines, and your articles can be viewed by someone who searches on a keyword related to your article. Also, website owners may find your article useful, and decide to place your article on their website – resulting in more free traffic for you – which results in more opt-in subscribers.

Your articles can also be repurposed as the content of many of your emails. With an informative article, subscribers will find your tips helpful and will click through to your website – possibly resulting in more sales.

Another great idea for improving the revenue of your email list is to consider offering your subscribers coupons that they can use for purchases. This makes them feel special because you’re offering them something that is not available to the general public, so they will be more inclined to redeem their coupon – especially if it’s a great deal.

All of these techniques will prove to be helpful when emailing your list and trying to increase the number of subscribers that you have. Be sure to start using them today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adrian Hargray is the owner of the Instant-Downloadz.com website where he shows you email marketing techniques you can use to make more money from your email list. To learn more, visit the following website for more details: Email Marketing Secrets

Most of us in online marketing or business know about building an email list. When you acquire trust and agreement, then you can let loose your own brand of constructive relationship building and marketing. If you want to market via email, then by law you need to gain their permission. Relationship marketing is more of an ideal; a best-practices term implying the best way to realize revenue from your email list. The biggest reason so many email marketing campaigns fail is the list owners have not built solid relationships. The net effect is almost universally the same – a poorly converting, unresponsive email list. The obvious thing to do is then merely create solid and positive relations with your email list users.

A mailing list that is packed with untargeted people is also one of the greatest causes for email marketing failure. In that situation you are looking at people on your list who’ve got no attraction in what you offer. There are a number of reasons this can occur, and one reason is often where you get your subscribers. Another important reason concerns what they understand that made them opt-in in the first place. People who opt-in from your website or blog will often tend to be a lot more targeted since they originated from your site in the first place. If you gain subscribers using a squeeze page, then of course the same applies relating to targeted copy. The bottom line is there can not be any misunderstandings at all anywhere as to who you desire on your email list.

If you are totally unknown to your market, then your job is to totally wow people with your content. That implies you have to demonstrate, with your content, that you do know what you are speaking about. A few things are super critical and making folks think you are a complete expert is one of them. The way you present and position (market) yourself is all important in this regard. Your results will also be in direct proportion to the amount people trust what you have to express. It is just that your target audience needs to feel that your information is reputable and trustworthy. So the far more you can ‘wow’ them, the better off you will likely be in terms of gaining their respect.

It is amazing because people like when they meet a person who is just friendly, helpful and is willing to provide solutions. People will gain their impressions to a large extent from the content and overall quality of information you produce. People are weary of the scams and worthless information so often thrown together. So many online have had plenty of of crappy content, so you really do not have to try all that hard to make it great. Everyone has experienced wasting time on a site because the quality of the content became readily apparent upon closer inspection.