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Jul 30

There are several tips and strategies to better manage your personal e-mail as well as your business e-mail. Some are just plain common sense, while others may not be so clear. Listed below are a few steps to better help your business successfully and effectively manage e-mails and the way they are presented.

One thing to always remember is to follow e-mail etiquette. Here are a few pointers:

  • Never write an e-mail if you are angry. Be sure wait 24 hours so you have the chance to calm down and think things over.
  • After you have finished your e-mail, have someone else look it over for errors.
  • Be sure to never use all uppercase. This makes the recipient feel like you’re yelling through your words.
  • When you use too many exclamation marks, it makes them less effective so be sure to use them sparingly.
  • Make sure your subject lines are to the point so they are more likely to get opened in a timely manner.
  • If you need to write an e-mail that is two paragraphs or more, it may be best to just give that person a call.

It is easier than ever to send e-mails, and even easier to make a mistake. Always check to make sure the address in the “To:” field is correct. As you probably know, when you start to type the name of a person in the “To:” field, there is a list of matching names that are automatically generated. Be sure to select the correct recipient. Possibly, if you are composing an e-mail about someone in particular, their name will tend to be on your mind so try not to inadvertently send the e-mail to them.

Another helpful hint is to have several e-mail addresses you use for different purposes. Use separate e-mails for public, private, online mailing lists, and online shopping. This can help keep e-mail priorities straight and keep your mind on task when in each specific account. Also make sure, if needed, you can reach that account from anywhere. Yahoo! and Gmail are good accounts to use for easy access.

After you have created your separate e-mail accounts, be sure to check them all on a regular basis. This task can be time consuming as well as annoying. A great way to access all your accounts at once is to use ePrompter which is free and can check numerous accounts at once. Another program that can do the same but for a fee is Active Email Monitor.

Always remember to reread each e-mail before clicking “Send”! People tend to judge your mistakes in an e-mail even though nobody is perfect. A good way to prevent this is to just simply read over an e-mail you have just composed which can catch 99% of any possible mistakes. Spell check is great, but won’t catch any grammatical errors or missing words.

Just remember these helpful hints to help your business grow and be more effectively managed. If you are searching for more help with e-mail as well as templates and other helpful services like quick start training, image placing, editing HTML code, and more, visit StreamSend. When you use StreamSend, it can help better present your e-mails with eye-catching templates and offers several other helpful tools.

Jun 18

Direct email marketing is a great way to reach customers and potential customers. Although, direct email marketing is only effective if used properly. There are several tips and tricks that make this process easy and more efficient. For instance, using an effective subject line for your emails can be vital in raising your open rates. Even adding a simple signature can help attract customers. Also if you make your site unique, it’s sure to make a positive impression.

For higher open rates, use a subject line that is straightforward. Make sure the subject line isn’t “pushy” or “salesy” in the least bit. A recent study uncovered subject lines with the lowest open rates look more creative but often end up considered spam by the recipient. Examples of an effective subject line would be:

  • [COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter
  • [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – June 2010
  • [COMPANYNAME] July 2010 News Bulletin!

Notice the subject lines aren’t flashy. The subjects are very direct and to the point. Examples of subject lines with very low open rates are:

  • Last Minute Gift – We Have The Answer
  • Christmas – Shop Early & Save 15%
  • Mother’s Day Salon and Spa Specials!

These subject lines are somewhat pushy and are obviously trying to sell a product. Most people will immediately consider these spam. Just remember to keep subject lines straightforward and do not make them seem like advertisements. Following this simple tip can heighten open rates and ultimately lead to more effective email marketing.

Another way to help your email marketing is to create a simple signature. Create a signature that includes your company name, what your company does, and a friendly departing message. Just don’t create a signature that is too long. A signature is more professional and it helps to better inform the people you are trying to reach.

Once people have opened your email, read the content, and are visiting your website, make sure their experience is unique and leaves an impression. The very first step to assuring your site is unique is to put it in writing. Write why people want to visit your site compared to other sites. This is called your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Make this less than a page with links to your website for further information on the most important subjects.

When writing your USP, make sure the first part grabs the attention of readers. The second part should be where all the information is located. The third part should make the reader desire your product. Finally, the fourth part should put them into action and inspire them to purchase your product. For further information and more great tips on direct email marketing, click here.

If you need help getting your company on the web, StreamSend is a great resource for email marketing and templates. Here you will learn how to launch your email marketing campaign in just minutes. Find email templates that perfectly fit the needs of your company. StreamSend helps users manage lists and subscribers, create and send emails, track, report and analyze, and much more!

Oct 30

Effective marketing is the key to any successful business. Therefore, the question on every company’s mind is “How do we increase the effectiveness of our marketing?” There are several things you can do, but the quickest, easiest, and cheapest is sending out email newsletters.

If your a company just beginning to explore the idea of email blasts or email marketing, the idea can be daunting. Do  not fret. There are so many ways to get started. If your company has access to a creative team that can tailor your email templates to suit your company that is the best option. However, not every company has the time or resources to devote to this task. If that is the case, there is another option.

Your company can always use pre-made email templates. That’s were we come in. By signing up as a member of this site, you and your company gain access to everything you need to create effective email newsletters. The best part is they are pre-made, tested for optimal efficiency and FREE! It’s your one-stop-shop for email marketing.

Dec 8

You may have the perfect product, the perfect sales pitch and an endless list of eager buyers’ e-mails, but if your message isn’t reaching its base your potential customers will be nothing more than lost sales. This is the exact scenario that many online entrepreneurs are finding themselves in, often times having to get out of the game long before they ever have a chance. Thankfully, there is a service in place to help easily organize even the most daunting of email lists, ensure that marketing emails actually make it to customers’ inboxes, and provide a wealth of features that will allow you to present your message in a professional manner. That service is StreamSend.

How Can StreamSend Help Me?

Simply put, if you need to send out bulk e-mail in a timely, organized fashion and need to be guaranteed that those emails are actually being received, StreamSend can help you. You’ll find countless tools to organize and maintain an updated list, though organization is only the beginning. StreamSend can also help polish your sales pitch with a wealth of professional HTML e-mail templates and even tweak the look of your e-mail with HTML editing features. However, one of StreamSend’s most enticing features is that every client receives a private IP address. This ensures that your e-mails will never get blocked due to the marketing infractions of someone else using the same IP address.

StreamSend May Work, But is it Worth the Cost?

Find out for yourself! StreamSend offers a free 30-day trial to let you get a feel for if the system can help with your individual needs. After the free trail, they have standard plans starting as low as $19.90 per month and Large Volume Plans beginning at $209.90 per month. It should also be noted that there are no contracts to sign, so if you find 5 months into your campaign that you’re not getting the results you feel you deserve you can easily change course.

StreamSend Sounds Great, But My Business Isn’t That Big

It’s true that StreamSend works with some of our nation’s most iconic brand names including Jelly Belly, MTV and UPS, but that’s not to say that StreamSend can only benefit the big guy. From small businesses looking to make the leap into the big leagues to home businesses simply trying to stay a float, if you have a product that needs online exposure StreamSend can help.

Nov 10

Building and growing a responsive, quality mailing list can require a dreadful amount of work. Furthermore, once you have built your list, you must nurture and grow it. Whatever you do, do not flood your recipients with advertisements and pointless emails constantly. This is a great way to destroy your precious opt-in list. Honestly, acquiring all of those email address is minuscule part of the email marketing process. It is extremely important to know that you’re building an individual relationship with every person who gives you their email address. If you mess up in the beginning, you are hindering your chances on building a lucrative relationship with your subscribers. On the other hand, do it right and prove your company’s worthiness, and you will both have smiles on your faces for years to come.

There are 3 key elements involved in list building:
  • Acquiring The Email Address

This is the easiest task in building a list. The rule here is that you must have the explicit permission from the subscriber to send them emails. Place a check box on your sign-up page or include this in your terms of service. Remember, it’s all about building trust. It is also illegal not to include this statement if you intend on emailing your subscriber according to the CAN-SPAM act in the United States.

  • Welcoming Your New Subscriber

We all receive the pointless, and endless flood of emails filling up our inboxes called SPAM. Because of this, it can be difficult to make a person read your email. A well thought out welcome message with good content, will build the foundation for a good email marketing relationship between you and the subscriber. The welcome message will not only build trust, but will verify the validity of each email address, further weeding out the bad seeds. It also acts as a 2nd screening process since 90% of your opt-outs will come in after you send this email, so make it pretty, and make it good!

  • Customer Relationship Management

This is the most important element of maintaining a quality opt-in list. It is unfortunate that this is the most overlooked step of list building. I can understand why, as this is by far the most time consuming aspect of nurturing your opt-in list. You must honor all of your subscriber’s personal email preferences. If you have an email marketing service provider or some good server-side software, take advantage of the tracking features. Many will allow you to track bounces, unsubscribing, clicks, and inactivity. This is very useful data and should be analyzed and archived regularly.

Always make sure that you’re holding the interest of your subscribers. If they seem to be fading away and your statistics are declining, send out promotions, special offers, and even surveys to pull them back in.

Most importantly; never give up on your list!

It can take a lot of time and energy to build a great opt-in list. In the end, when you’re staring at page after page of your opt-in subscribers, you will surely look at it as time well spent.

Oct 24

Have you created a Squidoo Lens yet? We’re just getting started on ours and thought we’d share it with our readers.

Click Here to create your own Lens

http://www.squidoo.com/htmlemailtemplates

Help us out by rating our lens or adding it to your favorites. We have only scratched the surface of using squidoo so please bookmark our lens and check back often for updates!

Oct 14
email newsletter It is very important for all businesses to have a regular newsletter for effective email marketing. It is with email newsletters that it is possible to keep in contact with customers, announce the release of new products and get-togethers and help build a good rapport with potential customers.

However, it is not sufficient to create just any email newsletter; it has to be effective and interesting enough to rake in sales leads and added revenue. For an effective email newsletter, make sure that it is a quick read as readers don’t usually have the time or patience to read long newsletters. The most time they will spend in reading a newsletter is four to five minutes.

Use short and interesting content in the newsletter

This means that the articles in the newsletter should be short and interesting so that it will immediately capture the interest of the reader. In addition to creating short articles, it is important that you use headlines to summarise the important points of the article. Also add some graphics in the newsletter design that are easily printable.

It is also possible to create a more interesting email newsletter by adding some attention-grabbing photographs and art work to the email template design. However in the process, don’t use too many graphics as too many graphics only lead to a cluttered newsletter design.

The email newsletter you create should be physically readable with fonts of a minimum of 12 points in size. There are many fancy fonts available for you to use in your email template design; however not all fonts look good when printed. Some of them are also difficult to read after printing; so try out different fonts before deciding on the best one for your email newsletter.

Choose your font and backgrounds wisely

The email newsletter should have consistent headings and text fonts. It is always better to use black or dark coloured fonts in the email newsletter and avoid using colored ones for the email newsletter’s text printing. You also have to pay attention to the colour of the background of the email newsletter. Don’t use dark colours; backgrounds in white, grey, beige, off-white, etc are easy to read, especially after printing.

It is important to hire a competent writer and editor for your email newsletter. This is because circulating an email newsletter with numerous errors only leads to creating a negative image to the readers. Just a spell checker will not suffice in creating the perfect newsletter; have it manually edited for grammar, readability and content.

Be consistent in the publishing of the email newsletter

It is not enough to only create an effective email newsletter; an email newsletter works in email marketing only if you publish it on schedule. It is up to you to decide if you have sufficient content, man power and money to publish the email newsletter weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually and once you decide the frequency, you have to stick to it.
All these efforts will lead to the production of an effective email newsletter that can be sent to all your present customers and to the new customers who sign in to the email newsletter.

Oct 12

Thousands of companies use email as a key marketing tool, sending out promotions, newsletters, and coupons to increase sales. This is a very cost effective method of marketing. Companies who have caught on to the obvious success rate in these campaign can easily send out 500,000 emails in one day.

email templates
E-mail marketing is not as simple as it may seem. It is more complex than just writing an article on a website or just posting on a forum, because for any email marketer to succeed, your emails must really reach out to your targeted audience. Therefore it is very important that you build, or obtain a quality, targeted opt-in list.
There are many brokers available in the market who provide quality email lists, however the best and most effective way of reaching out to your target audience is to build your own list. These opt-in lists contains email addresses of people who are your target leads i.e. those people who may be interested in buying your product/service.

I have received a ton of questions on the best methods to grow your site’s subscriber list, which is by far the most important factor in a successful campaign. There are many ways to build a quality list, you can start by building trust with your clients. Assure them that you won’t be selling their email to third parties, and do not spam your clients. Next, you will want a well placed opt-in area on your site, this should be in a highly visible area. Many companies will offer exlusive deals or incentives as a reason to subscribe. After you have these two important items in place, work on generating more traffic to your site and watch your list grow.

Sep 28

When talking about email marketing, it doesn’t take long for words like “opt-in” to appear. Yet I still receive numerous emails every month asking, “What is opt-in email marketing?”

It’s easiest to think in terms of mailing lists when dealing with email marketing. Email marketing is nothing but a good mailing list in the end. The list of an opt-in marketing campaign obviously starts empty. The only way to grow this list of email addresses is to get viewers of your site to “opt-in”. All you can do as a webmaster is assist an individual in the subscription request submission process.
email templates

This request must always be for a specific list, there can be no grey areas when dealing with opt-ins. For example, if a customer submits a form that says “Yes, please send me a copy of your monthly newsletter” you have permission to add them to the list of customers who will receive a copy of the monthly newsletter, use the list for the newsletter and nothing else. To continue sending them your monthly newsletter, you need their permission to do so (along the lines of “Yes, keep me up to date by adding me to your list of monthly newsletter recipients”).

“Permission-based” basically means the same thing. Marketing material is sent only with permission, and is often customized to the subscribers personal interests and preferences.

Aug 23

When presidential candidate Barack Obama relies on email marketing for one of the most important announcements in his candidacy, it really shows the awesome power of an effective email marketing campaign. “Be the First to Know”, a catchy phrase that says it all. This massive email marketing campaign went off without a hitch, and boy would I love to see that golden opt-in list he’s accumulated since it’s launch.

html email templates

This well crafted email marketing campaign goes to show that building a targeted opt-in list, is actually very simple. In essence, it all comes down to one thing; you have to have something that they want. Of course a well designed landing page, auto-responder, and a great email service provider are also required. Put these 4 items together and you’ll be well on your way to email marketing success!

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