Add a share feature to allow your e-mail recipients to share your e-mail with their social network. Also, include links to your social media pages so your contacts can easily link up to you online.
Utilize the KISS rule and keep your subject line short. It’s best when subject lines are 140 characters or less and include no extraneous punctuations or odd characters.
It’s important to keep your lists current – add new contacts in a timely fashion and purge outdated contacts after an e-mail send. Remember to review your overall report, open report and bounce report for details on how your contacts are responding to your e-mail.
Link your e-mail to your PayPal or shopping cart to allow your contacts for easily donate, renew memberships, pay for sponsorships, seminars and more.
Prepare and schedule your e-mails in advance so you never miss an opportunity to connect with your contacts.
91% of adults check e-mail on their smartphone at least 1x per day. Ensuring that your e-mail loads properly on mobile devices is a must.
Transition all your printed materials to digital format so they are on the ready.
Do your contacts have a language preference other than English? Translate the content into the preferred language and communicate more effectively with your contacts.
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Download 8 Tips to Better E-mail Marketing PDF
Email campaign – So, you are in the trenches of e-mail marketing and you are developing content, accompanying that content with great imagery, collecting contacts, importing them into the system and sending out your e-mails on schedule. Bravo! Now, how often are you reviewing your reports and digging into the data from your campaigns?
Immediately after your send a campaign little helpers begin to collect data like who opened your email, when they opened it, what links were clicked and what email contacts bounced. Generally speaking a few hours after you send your email a picture begins to develop – one that showcases the success or failure of your campaign.
Generally speaking I like to check my campaign sometime during the day it was sent just to see how things are going, but I don’t pull a full report until 48 hours after the email was sent. Why 48 hours you ask? Well, after years of preparing and scheduling emails I find that 48 hours provides adequate time for your campaign to run it’s course –your contacts open the email, click on the links, forward to a friend and the data is collected.
e-mail campaigns – It may seem like once you’ve gone through the process of preparing content and images, designing and sending your e-mail campaign that the work is done, but it’s only just begun. Moments after you hit send on your e-mail campaign data is starting to be collected and categorized.
For nearly 15 years Constant Contact has been our e-mail marketing partner primarily because of it’s ease of use and it’s awesome reporting system.
The overview report provides the data results in a one-sheet format. It displays the number of contacts you sent your campaign to, the open rate, bounce rate, SPAM notices and click though rates.
From the overview report you can click on the open rate and see specifically who opened the e-mail and the exact time that they opened the e-mail. Click on the bounces and view the contacts that bounced as well as the reason for the bounce. Click through rates will allow you to view the hyperlinks within your e-mail and the contacts that clicked on those links. All of this data is critical in keeping an up-to-date database of contacts.
I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about what technology means to me. Is it to make my job easier? To get more done in the same period of time? Or do I just do it to feel like I’m connected to others?
I find myself using technology for number of different things – I communicate over email quite a bit, I research on my handheld and my desktop when I’m at work, I coordinate different people and events as well as publish what I do in my personal life and business ventures. Overall I think technology has a purpose and a place. With that said I feel it’s very important to put it down sometimes. To reconnect with the people around us, to build things out of the things in the real world, sculpture, painting or maybe even landscaping. The point is technology does have a place in our world and keeping the balance between the artificial world we’ve created for ourselves online and the real world we are living in and the people we interact with on a daily basis are just as important.
Overall I think we all have a lot to learn in managing our day-to-day lives with and without technology. We need to find ways to enhance what we do without becoming dependent on any one thing. Becoming technology neutral is something we should all strive to practice more. Find ways to utilize technology without being used by technology. As we go into the holiday season take time to handwrite a thank you to someone. Drop it in the mail or better yet create your own thank you card. Take the time to think about the message, find a picture that relays some kind of emotion connected with your message. Take it to a quick serve printer or big box store and then use that to once again connect with your friends, family and coworkers.
Our Family + Technology, We have an almost 10 year old and a 6 year old in our house. Our 4th grader is required to have an ipad for use at school and for homework. She likes to watch YouTube videos of people playing Mine craft and finding cute pics of baby bunnies on the Internet. Our 6 year old is in Kindergarten is obsessed with anything Lego. He loves making stop motion videos with his Lego mini figures and watching similar videos on YouTube. Right now Batman reigns supreme. My wife/partner and I both have laptop computers and iPhones that allow us to work on the go and keep in touch with out of town family. Social media allows us to keep up with High School and College friends’ comings and goings.
So, with all of that going on we used some common sense to keep our family safe online. Since our daughter is required to have an iPad for school the school provides an “Acceptable Use Policy” for each student and their parent to review and sign. It spells our things like students are not allowed to download or install material unless under supervision. Or, the student will not send any personal information (photos, addresses or phone numbers) to anyone else on the Internet. We’ve also had some conversations with her about appropriate material and what she should avoid online.
If you own one of the millions of smartphones in the US today you probably know that everything you do online is being tracked. When you visit a web site on your phone, open an app or simply travel with your phone in your pocket – you are creating data – but did you know that your GPS data is also being collected?
This microdata or better yet empirical data is extraordinarily valuable to an advertiser. Empirical data can be used to help understand the habits not only for the individual consumer but a group of consumers. This greatly increases the potential of an advertisement achieving its goal.
Target is a great example of retail brick and mortar business that is also reaching out digitally to its consumers. Target’s mobile app for smartphone Cartwheel allows consumers to choose or scan a product and save money based on your purchases. Cartwheel is unique as its focus is to get you to turn on the app while you are in the store and use it during your shopping. While utilizing this app data is being collected – your purchases, things you scan but don’t purchase – even the path you walk through the store.