For instructions for getting your favorite Email Marketing Newsletters into your primary email folder, follow these steps on this video.
To read an update from MailChimp on how these tabs affect your open rate, read “How Gmail Tabs Affect Your Email Marketing: An Update“.
If you use MailChimp, an online email marketing solution, and don’t get their newsletters, here is what you are missing:
On Wednesday, September 25 and Thursday, September 26, one of our network providers has to perform some maintenance at our US4 data center that will cause periods of downtime between 1 and 9am EDT (see in your time zone). Your account is at our US4 data center, which means you may be unable to log in to MailChimp during that time.
We’ll post server status updates at the @mailchimpstatus Twitter account, and you can see our server uptime reports at status.mailchimp.com.
We’ll do our best to minimize downtime as much as possible, so you can log in and get back to work.
-The MailChimp Team
They send you very few, short emails, which is great. The emails consist of updates about new services or upcoming down times or limited holiday help. I respect a company that admits to going light on major holidays.
Have you started your email campaign for your business yet? What is keeping you from starting? How consistent do you want to be or are you with your newsletters? Are your goals realistic? Is the number of newsletters you want to create a month realistic? Are the subjects of your emails interesting to your audience? Are you worried about the cost of the email marketing services? What have you learned from newsletter sign ups that you have gotten (do you value the coupons or helpful tips, or did you find something they did annoying)?
These are great questions that you could and should answer at any point during email campaign, whether you are in the planning process or have been creating newsletters for years.
My newsletter sign up is pretty small. I just started it at the beginning of this year as a part of my personal business goals. My open rate for my newsletters is over 50% for each newsletter I’ve sent!! That is amazing!! The average “good open rate” is normally about 15-20% for any industry.
I am consistent with my delivery (the 2nd Thursday of every month between 7:30-8:30am), I write to my audience so they understand and not in techno jargon, and I try to keep it short, sweet and to the point.
Now to address the cost issue. I recommend MailChimp to all my clients and friends. They have a great FREE service for newsletters and they have webinars regularly for teaching you how to use MailChimp. As part of the FREE service, the newsletter you create can be sent to your Facebook Page, personal profile and a Twitter account. MailChimp also allows you to create a sign up on your Facebook Page and your website. They also have a large variety of templates that you can modify to make it your own. Also their help desk has been helpful the few times I’ve had to use it. If you already have an email campaign with another company, you can export your contact list and easily transfer the whole list to MailChimp.
So I really wanted to create a newsletter that looks very much like my website. I wanted constancy so I used MailChimp’s “code your own” system and literally created the entire newsletter from scratch in HTML. I did a few tests and everything looked fine. It looked good in my Outlook and Gmail, so I sent it out.
WELL… one of my clients and a networking partner that has Comcast email accounts told me she couldn’t see anything on my newsletter. It was all black and she wasn’t giving an option to display images. Well, that’s not good!! What happened?!?! I went to her office and looked at it from her computer.
I noticed the few images that did appear were images that were actually linked and stored on my website and not linked to MailChimp’s gallery. So I made sure all the images were coming from my website and sent out a new test to the Comcast account. No difference. I’m extremely bummed. I really want my newsletter to be like my website for consistency.
Well, I was baffled, so I decided to chat with the experts and here is what they had to say…
Ryan: Hi Katey
Katey: Morning!
Ryan: 🙂
Katey: I have a question about the custom coding for creating emails
Katey: My Comcast contacts are not seeing the background images. It’s coming thru fine otherwise. Any ideas?
Ryan: I will help as best I can. Just to set expectations our support of custom coded emails is limited.
Ryan: Background images and HTML do not get along quite often.
Ryan: This may result in the background image not being displayed
Ryan: Can I use a background image in my campaign?: http://eepurl.com/gYZk
Katey: But the templates you have have background images in them and they come across fine
Katey: What is the difference?
Ryan: http://blog.mailchimp.com/background-images-in-html-email/
Ryan: Its possible just not recommended as it can break in different email clients
Ryan: The images are broken in the link 🙁
Katey: Do background colors work?
Ryan: Background colors should work, yes
Katey: I created an email to look very much like my site, just more narrow to fit your formatting and Comcast is being mean with my bg images
Katey: I guess I will try to make adjustments and do colors
Ryan: I completely understand the frustration. Different email clients will render email in their own unique ways. We always suggest testing, testing and more testing.
Katey: Any chance your developers are looking for a fix for these issues 🙂
Ryan: Its more the way different email clients render HTML. Unfortunately there is no standard. This is why emails will look a bit different depending on where they are opened.
Katey: I hear ya. Thanks for your help 🙂
Ryan: 🙂
So I will be recoding my newsletter so it does not use background images and will send out more tests later.
In case you didn’t get my newsletter, here you go.
As I’m sitting in the window of my New York City hotel, watching the snow fall, I’m reflecting on the events of the conference I attended earlier today. The conference was about Social Medias and the church. Many denominations from all over the country were at the conference. It was quite impressive. The morning started out great.
You might be thinking, “but I’m not a church!”. These lessons and discussions can be used in your business as well.
They talked about how their churches used Social Media to grow as a community and create a greater bond within their congregations. Some churches have closed/private Facebook Groups while some have Fan Pages that are open to the public. Some have Twitter accounts are strictly for the church while others follow their pastor/priest. The uses were diverse and very impactful.
One of the speakers spoke about “new media” being the front door of the church and how they grew their numbers by using Social Media. Some of the speakers said the Medias were run by the church and some outsourced everything.
A few tweets from me while at the conference include quoting some of the speakers, my observations over the crowd and the panel. I also retweeted other people’s comments. While at the conference, I got my first mean tweet. I admit it bothers me. I think I handled it pretty well and with a “thanks”. I’m trying to let it roll off my back but that is not my personality because her comment was from out of the blue and made no sense. Mean words hurt from all formats!!
Lessons learned:
A little update on us here at PetreyDish.Com. We finally took our own advice and created our first newsletter. It went out this morning and the great news is that people are emailing us and asking us questions about what we sent!! The topic this month was Twitter and how awesome it is. We welcome you to sign up for our monthly newsletter by going to our newsletter sign up page and filling out the quick form.
We will not sell your information and you can unsubscribe at any time.
For those who do email marketing, here is a link to help you verify whether the emails you were giving a legitimate or not. I must thank one of my clients that found this and shared it with me! It’s too good not to share with all of you!!
Get the idea? Collecting Email addresses the right way may be a slower process but people that want your emails, will receive them and you are less likely to marked as Spam! It will also better for your reputation - personal and business. What creative ways have you used (or heard of people doing) to increase your (their) email database - good or bad?
Sure! You want to get your email newsletter contact list to grow, but how? There are good ways to gather email addresses and bad ways. Being listed or marked as spam is bad. Very bad. We all hate spam and I’m sure the last thing you want to do is to hurt your business or be dropped from your email marketing provider. If you are tagged too many times as spam, that could become a reality.
There are service providers out there that will sell you a list of emails. This is a waste of money most of the time. The people on the list may not be interested in your products or services are the email addresses don’t belong to real people. Sure you get a ton of emails, but do they want your information?
I personally can’t stand getting newsletters from strangers, especially if I have no idea how they got my address! Just because Joe gave you his business card with his email on it, does not mean you have permission to add him to your email newsletter list. I’m a Web person - I really don’t care that some real estate company is recruiting agents or is looking for listings. Don’t want it- please don’t sign me up. 🙂
The best way to go about collecting addresses for your newsletters is by asking people directly. If you belong to a networking group, ask the other members; don’t just sign them up. If you are part of a trade show, have a booth at a state fair, or hosting an event have a sign up sheet available. You’d be surprised at the number of emails you will get. Most email marketing companies have a sign-up form that can be added to your website and Facebook pages. You could do an incentive for your current recipients to help spread the word and share your newsletter (coupons, a prize, a special personalized thank you, etc.). Getting the idea? It’s better to grow slowly than to have a host of strangers irritated with your company, wouldn’t you agree?
Thinking about doing an e-newsletter? There are many out there such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, VerticalResponse and a host of others. My best recommendation would be to figure out how often you plan to send out the newsletter (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.), whether you want a custom designed newsletter or are happy with a template, and how many contacts do you have/want. These 3 key variables are crucial in picking the correct service provider.
All 3 products listed have tracking and reporting. This means they let you know how many emails were opened verses not opened, added to the mailing list, removed from mailing list and much more.
Best advice… try out the products. They all have a free trial and MailChimp will even stay free, as long as you stay within the simple guidelines. The forever free plan from MailChimp - “Store up to 1,000 subscribers. Send up to 6,000 emails a month”.
NOTE: Please do NOT send e-marketing to those who do not sign up for the newsletter. You could be marked as spam, lose credibility with customers, business associates, and even lose business for unwelcomed email. Please ask the individual if you can add him/her to your emailing list!!
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