Email Marketing News and Tips

Create Your Own Custom HTML Template and Better Your Brand Recognition

Lindsay Karlin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:03:42 +0000

I know a lot of email marketing companies (including Boomerang) offer template galleries to choose from when creating email campaigns. This is an easy fix if you don’t have the means of creating your own, but don’t underestimate the benefits of having your own custom template.

Custom templates can increase brand recognition when sending your emails. You can stay with the same look and feel of your website instead of just inserting your logo into “Template #1″. An important part of developing a cohesive brand is keeping your company color scheme going in your email marketing material as well as your website.

Take the time and effort now to develop a really good looking template that matches the overall feel of your website. It will help build brand recognition and you can use it consistently until your next website overhaul.

Check out Boomerang’s current promotion for a Free Custom HTML Template.

YouTube Videos are Great for Maximizing Company Exposure

Ali Kearney — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:44:12 +0000

YouTube over the years has become one of the top visited websites on the internet. People access the site everyday looking for anything from music videos to funny videos to instructional videos. Now think about how much of a benefit it would be to have a video about your company on YouTube. For one of the most visited sites on the web, it’s a good idea to have a presence there.

Many companies have videos advertising their products which gets people recognizing their brand. This can be a great asset for your marketing plan, and it’s free. Adobe has put out many YouTube videos demonstrating how simple it is to use their products. Putting together a demo, instuctional, or informative video might be a good decision to maximize your company exposure on a highly popular website.

Iran’s Twitter Revolution

Whitney Parkinson — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:34:18 +0000

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 happening, new YouTube videos to watch, and blogs to read. These moving tales show exactly what is going on in Iran from a citizens perspective.

Twitter shows links to photos and videos of the protests, many of which show the growing political unrest in Iran. Since the Iranian government has started to ban the internet, more and more blogs and videos have come up through Twitter, an easy way to connect to millions of people across the globe. The only way to completely stop the revolution would be to take the entire country off the internet.

Follow the Iranian election on Twitter at http://twitter.com/iranElection. There are hundreds of new tweets constantly from protestors in Tehran and news reporters observing the riots in Iran.

Follow Boomerang on Twitter at http://twitter.com/boomerang_com. Boomerang’s Twitter Page will keep you updated on whats new at Boomerang.

Make it Easy to Add Signups to Your Email Marketing Newsletters and Campaigns

Sandra Watters — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:03:10 +0000

When interested parties are checking out your website wouldn’t you love to capture who they are and keep them informed on what your organization is up to? When someone specifically seeks out your website or finds you in a search he or she is clearly interested in what you have to offer. You want to make it as easy as possible to be added to your email marketing list.

Boomerang’s BlastWizard comes with a customizable opt-in web form that will collect this valuable information and add it to your email marketing lists. Send newsletters and relevant information to people who care. Collect only an email address or request optional contact data. You can customize the form to look however you like and collect whatever data you want. When the submit button is clicked a “Thank you” page pops up and a confirmation email is sent to verify the email address.

Check out a free trial of BlastWizard, no obligation, and create an opt-in web form for your website. Start adding to your email marketing list today! Any questions? Please call us at 800 -779-7792.

Boomerang Hotlink Firefox Extension

Brian Wright — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:05:06 +0000

If you use any limited message size social networking (like Twitter) or if you simply need to shorten any URL for use in your email campaign (or anywhere else), Boomerang now offers a Firefox extension to help you in this task. The extension is called Boomerang Hotlink Manager and is available to download from Mozilla.org’s Firefox add-on’s site.

Currently, this extension is in testing phase as the final release candidate and we need your input and testing. In order to install this extension on your Firefox browser, you will need to create a login and password on Mozilla’s Addon’s site. The site will then let you download and install the extension. Once this extension has been fully released, the login/password restriction will go away.

Benefits

This extension allows you to grab the URL in the URL bar or by grabbing the URL from a link on a page and convert it into a URL in the form of http://boomerang.com/zwa. You can use these shorter URLs in place of any longer URL. The URLs will be redirected automatically to the original location.

Please try out Boomerang Hotlink Manager in your Firefox and give us your feedback here. We hope to have the final release available within a few weeks. We would also like to encourage you to leave feed back on our Hotlink Manager page. Rating our extension and leaving feedback will help us get it fully released faster.

Using CSS In Your Email Newsletter?

Anthony Sipin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:37:40 +0000

As a Boomerang customer agent helping customers with the preparation of their email newsletters, I understand the importance of using CSS when designing creatives. For most email template designers, it reduces the extra work of having to assign HTML elements their look and feel individually. Sure you can set a section of your newsletter easily by defining them first. Sure you can use CSS to set a background image for another section. Sure you can use absolute positioning or layers to make life simpler.

While CSS helps primarily with formatting, rendering issues arise. For instance, if System X is updated every month (or so it seems), CSS support most likely will be involved. Take MS Outlook 2007 for example. Most email newsletter recipients use some version of MS Outlook. Some companies have upgraded their Outlook and are now using Outlook 2007. Based on tests I’ve done concerning emails that use CSS and Outlook 2007, this particular email program is not so CSS-friendly. Check the Internet yourself. You’ll see many reports on Outlook 2007 and its lack of support for certain CSS properties and selectors.

As for web-based email clients, Gmail is notorious for not supporting all style and link elements, all selectors, and most CSS properties. When I tested this, I sent an email newsletter that uses CSS (such as absolute positioning and background images) to my Gmail account. The result? The email rendered horribly.

Aside from email clients, some Web browsers can display email newsletters inconsistently. For instance, I was helping a customer create their newsletter a few months back. I converted their PDF document into HTML with simple CSS. From my end, the HTML version of the email looked really good when viewed with Internet Explorer 6.0. However, our client disagreed and said the formatting was off. She was using Mac’s browser, Safari. I tested this myself as we have Mac OSX and Safari in the office for QA and testing purposes. I was able to confirm the formatting issue our client had complained about.

In a nutshell, CSS is not fully supported across all email clients, whether desktop or webmail, as well as some Web browsers.

Considerations:

As much as possible, avoid using CSS when designing your HTML email template.
If you must use CSS, stay away from layers, positioning, and background images. I’m sure there are other properties and elements you should not use but I know these three don’t display correctly in most email programs. Incorporate simple CSS instead.
Use simple HTML like tables when formatting your page.
If you do use advanced CSS, expect all sorts of responses from your recipients stating.

To learn more about which CSS properties can be used safely in your HTML email, I invite you to read http://boomerang.com/z17c.

Hope this helps!

Outlook 2007 and HTML Email Design

Rami Saker — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:56:25 +0000

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, you can still design and send decent looking emails by simplifying your HTML code and following some guidelines.

Microsoft has published a lot of documentation explaining what is and what is not supported by Outlook 2007 HTML rendering engine. Here are some of the commonly used HTML tags and features that are no longer supported in Outlook 2007:

CSS Float or position attributes
Background images (HTML or CSS)
Animated GIFs
Forms
Flash
Replacing bullets with images in unordered lists

With the lowest common denominator in mind, simplicity in your email HTML design is key. The less complex and fancy your email code, the more likely it will render as you intended.

Add Social Media Icons to Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Lindsay Karlin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:52:57 +0000

Have a Facebook page, a LinkedIn Group, or a Twitter account that doesn’t get much traffic? Advertise on your own marketing material to increase your fans/members/followers.

Add icons to:

Your website
Your blog
Your email marketing campaigns
Your outgoing email signature

If you’ve taken the time to create the social media pages, take the time to increase your following. This is a great way to do that.

How to Create a MySpace Page for Your Business

Ali Kearney — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:43:44 +0000

Even though MySpace traffic has declined recently, it is still one of the top 50 most frequently visited sites. It might be useful to have a MySpace page for your business. Here’s how to do it.

First sign up and create an account with MySpace. Use a your own name at first, then update to your company name later and/or have your company name as your display name for the page. When you finish the set up, upload your logo as your picture.

Once you have created your account, it will ask you if you would like to find friends through your email address, which is completely optional.

To edit your page aesthetics, go to the profile drop down menu at the top of the page and click on “customize profile”. It is pretty straightforward on how to edit the preferences. Appearance is for the aesthetics of your profile, while the modules are for deciding what kind of features you would like to have on the page.

There are many options for editing your profile page…

You can select a theme for your layout.
You can change the format and placing of features of your layout.
You can do an advanced edit which leaves the color and placing choice of everything to you or you can add your own CSS code.
The nicer the profile, the more attention your page will receive.

To edit the text for your profile…

Go to the drop down menu at the top of the page and click on “edit profile”
Enter text you would like viewers to read in the “about me” or “interests” boxes
Edit your name and display name under “Basic Info”

View your profile under the profile drop down menu and click on “my profile”. If you are not happy with the outcome you can go back and keep editing.

You never know a MySpace could come in handy and it is a quick and easy setup.

Share Valuable Email Marketing Reporting Statistics - Automatically

Sandra Watters — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:16:02 +0000

Boomerang’s 60 plus detailed Activity and Analytical reports included with a BlastWizard account are priceless for email marketers. Analyze opens, click throughs (unique and total), hard and soft bounces, invalids, blocked, forwards and sent data. You may not be aware that you can share all of this detailed information with coworkers, partners and your clients that don’t have access to your BlastWizard account. Built-in analytics can provide insight to your entire team to improve future emailings.

Click on any report in BlastWizard. There you can schedule automated emails to be delivered to you and your colleagues as often as you see fit. Choose whether the report is sent when the job has been sent or when it’s completed. Choose if you’d like the report emailed an hour, a day or one week afterward. You also have the option of adding the report to your “Favorite” list so it appears on the Job Summary page. All reports are downloadable in excel.

BlastWizard reports are available to BlastWizard for AppExchange users as well. In addition to the Activity History reports available to Salesforce.com users, BlastWizard reports can be automatically sent to anyone, with or without BlastWizard for AppExhcange or Salesforce.com access. Limit the number of BlastWizard for Appexchange users by automating detailed reports to others without access.

For more information please call 800 779-7792 or sit in on a live Reporting Webinar by enrolling on our website.