Email Marketing News and Tips

To stay connected with what is going on in Iran you need to be on Twitter. Iran has been rioting for weeks now over the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Protests and rallies have continued daily with thousands of people showing up for them. The organization of this revolution has taken place online, using Twitter, YouTube, and blogs. The Iranians have been using Twitter to plan protests and quickly spread news about where the next protest will be. There are constant updates on what is... Continue reading

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As a Boomerang agent helping customers with the preparation of their email newsletters, I understand the importance of using CSS when designing creatives. For most email template developers, it reduces the burden of having to assign HTML elements... Continue reading

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As the install base for this new version of Outlook is growing, email marketers need to pay special attention to the restrictions Outlook 2007 is introducing when it comes to rendering HTML. Previous versions of Outlook relied on the Microsoft browser (Internet Explorer) to interpret HTML elements and style sheets. Outlook 2007 uses Microsoft Word as its HTML interpreter instead. This imposes quite few limitations on HTML email design as it makes less use of some of its creative elements. Having said that,... Continue reading

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If you have a well-maintained list, you save time and energy that you could use for another task. If you have a list that requires more of your attention to clean up, you better put on your gloves. An incomplete list may help keep your sanity and enjoy your job, too! Well, OK, maybe I'm stretching it. But really, having a well-maintained list can make you feel good about yourself. This practice is highly recommended if you plan on customizing your email newsletter by using merge codes. In this article,... Continue reading

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Do you know what your competition is doing? Why don't you find out? Sign up to be on their email list for newsletters or special offers. Find out if you are doing something better than them or if you might need to improve upon your own services to stay on top of the competition. It also gives you insight into how often they are marketing to their lists, what types of offers/newsletters they are sending, and if they offer any kind of incentives for feedback. Sign up for a free trial with your competitor’s... Continue reading

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There's a new way to unsubscribe, feedback loops. Most major ISPs such as Yahoo and AOL are using feedback loops so recipients of unwanted emails can hit a Spam button instead of unsubscribing. Complaint data is then sent back to the sender. Complainers are automatically unsubscribed from your list and then the data can be used to analyze and improve deliverability. Before feedback loops existed senders and email service providers weren't aware of these complaints so emails continued to be sent, spam... Continue reading

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Ever wonder why people use Twitter with "#" in front of certain words or phrases? These are called #hashtags. I see them as a way for people to easily search your Tweets based on content. According to the Twitter Fan Wiki: Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. Basically, it's an easy way to track... Continue reading

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If you are a BlastWizard user, you probably know by now that you can merge a number of recipient data using predefined merge codes that can be accessed from inside the HTML Editor. This has been covered in a previous blog article by one of my colleagues. In this article, I will attempt to explain how you can merge custom recipient data, whose fields cannot be mapped over, and therefore do not show in the Editor's "Merge Codes" dropdown menu. Here is how you can do it: Prepare your recipient list and make... Continue reading

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Email marketing professionals are sometimes challenged by composing email newsletters with really lengthy articles, usually requiring the reader to scroll down significantly. While it is good to provide details of products, company events, tips, etc. in your newsletter, you might want to consider the following tips: 1. Use snippets of each article - perhaps the opening sentence - and then follow it with a "Read more" link so the reader can read the rest of it. I know this has been standard practice in the... Continue reading

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I'm shopping for a new bike. I've been riding my old one to work for the last 15 years and it is time. So I've narrowed it down to a few models and I am waiting for one to show up on ebay. I could keep checking but I don't log onto ebay enough to see every listing. So I'll just create a TwitterBlog and get the ebay listings sent to my phone every time a new one shows up. I've already done this with craigslist using a similar method I posted on this blog about a couple of weeks back here. But it took... Continue reading

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