Avoid Email Marketing During the Holidays

During the holidays, people tend to be away from their computers and not check their email regularly.

This means they may get your message when they return together with a ton of other mail that has piled up during the holidays. Chances are all but the most important messages will be deleted in a rush without a second look.

This is why you should

• avoid sending your email marketing campaign during the months of December, January, July and August.

Of course, exceptions to this rule are not only possible but sometimes mandatory.

Address Recipients with Their Name in Email Campaigns

If I get a bulk email, it feels much less bulky if it greets me with my name. I feel more like myself, less like a number — and I’m more likely to read the message, maybe risk a click or two.

If at all possible, you should

• personalize your marketing mails to
• greet and address recipients individually with their name.

Often, you will use the first name only, but for some campaigns the last name will be more appropriate.

More tips for email marketing tomorrow.

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Greetings, and good day,

As some of you may have notice, there have been some disturbance in our Email Marketing server due to upgrading process of the software to newer version, and for that we are terribly sorry for all the inconvenience caused due to the upgrading works, which are designed to enhance the email marketing usability and experience on your side.

The new version contains several new functions that helps your marketing drive better, top of it are:

Smart Segmentation
Create segment rules based on subscriber information and/or subscriber activity such as link clicks, email opens, etc. Use these smart segments in your campaigns as recipient lists.

Notification Emails On Subscriber Activities
Sends notification emails on subscriptions and unsubscriptions

Live Campaign Statistics
Get your campaign statistics in real time during the delivery of your email campaign.

Social Sharing
Share your email campaigns on popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

Detailed Subscriber Activity Statistics
Get detailed reports related to your subscriber activity inside campaign statistics

A/B Split Test Campaigns
Create A/B split test campaigns, send different versions of your email content and let Embuzz select a winner email version for sending to the rest of recipients.

We are in the midst of compiling new documentation for this new version, and will update you more accordingly. Rest assured all your user informations, subscriber list and email templates are intact and untouched by this upgrade process. You can use your existing login information and log on to http://eblast.webbingxchange.com for your email marketing service.

Thank you for your continuous support, and let us know if anything we can do to make your email marketing a successful one. We truly regret for all the inconvenience caused, and highly appreciate your concern.

By Mitchell Harper

Introduction

As you may know, most people now spend more time reading their emails than they do surfing the web. Email is one of the most powerful mediums that you can use to talk to visitors, customers and prospects.

In this article I will discuss 15 best practices that you can use everyday in your email marketing activities. Used wisely and consistently, there’s no doubt you’ll see an increased response from your subscribers — whether it be for more feedback, more product/seminar registrations, or even more orders.

1. Avoiding the Spam Filters

The majority of large Internet service providers now use rigorous spam protection mechanisms to trap unsolicited email before it gets into their customers inboxes. Spam filters generally “rank” each email by a number of different criteria, and, if that email rates above a certain level (such as 10 spam points), then it is flagged as spam and deleted.

To make sure your emails don’t get flagged as spam — and deleted before they even get to your subscribers — avoid using words such as ‘Free’, ‘$$$’, ‘Save’, ‘Discount’, etc in both the subject line and the content of your email.

2. Maximizing Click-Thru Rates

Both web pages and emails can contain a lot of text and graphics, and this sometimes makes it harder to get your subscribers to perform a certain task, such as clicking on a link to see your special offers.

Numerous research papers tell us that the majority of Internet users respond better to a plain, bold, blue text link — such as this — as opposed to a banner or button. So, if you’re going to include links in your emails, make sure they are bold, blue and underlined. This will mean that more subscribers click through, meaning more conversions/sales for you.

3. The Power of Personalization

If you were standing in a crowded mall, which of these would get your attention: “HEY, YOU!” or “HEY AHMAD” (assuming your name is Ahmad). The power of personalization can and should be used in your emails. In-fact, by simply starting your email with “Hi [subscriber_name]” instead of the boring “Hi there”, you can increase both your reading and click-thru rates by up to 650%. Why? Put simply, it’s because your subscribers feel like they already have a relationship with you as you’ve addressed them by their first name.

4. One-Click Unsubscription

If you want to grow your mailing list, then there are 2 things that you absolutely must have: a double opt-in process, and a quick way to unsubscribe. In some countries, it’s actually mandatory by law that every email has an unsubscribe link in it. The unsubscribe link should take the recipient directly to a page where they are then removed — courteously — from your mailing list.

5. Signup Confirmation

Don’t get accused of spamming — always, and I mean always use a double opt-in confirmation process. Double opt-in means that after your visitor initially enters their email address to subscribe to your list, you should then send them a “confirmation” email. This email should contain a special link back to your email-marketing program, which will then verify that this visitor did indeed sign up to your mailing list.

6. Tuesday / Wednesday = Increased Response

Studies conducted by online research analysts have shown that the best days to perform a mail-out to your list are Tuesday and Wednesday, as this is when people are more receptive to communication. This means that they are more likely to read your content and click on links, meaning more sales.

On Mondays, everyone is still recovering from a hectic weekend. On Thursday and Friday, people are already too busy looking forward to the weekend. We’ve actually experimented with this, and received the best results by sending out emails at around 2-3pm (Malaysian Time) on a Wednesday.

7. Repeat Email Communication

An auto responder is an email that is scheduled to be sent at a certain time interval after someone subscribes to your mailing list. Auto responders are a great way to automatically follow up with your subscribers or provide them with more information on your products/services.

For example, if you provide a free newsletter, you could setup 3 auto responders for new subscribers: the first is sent 1 hour after they subscribe. It contains a thank you message and a link to get 10% off your newly released eBook.

The second is sent 24 hours after they subscribe, telling them about your community message boards, and the third is sent 72 hours after they subscribe, in which you can offer them a special deal on becoming a paid member of your site.

Auto responders help your subscribers build trust in both your company and your brand, and this can help make it easier when trying to close sales in the future.

8. Consistency is the Key

If you’re running a newsletter or frequent email publication, make sure you keep the look and feel consistent from issue to issue. By keeping the look and feel consistent, you help to maintain and strengthen your brand and your image to your subscribers, which again will make it easier to close sales when you need to.

Create a template for your newsletter and whenever you need to create a new issue, use that template as the basis for each issue.

9. On Time, Every Time

When sending a regular email to your subscribers, always make sure that it’s sent on the same day, at the same time. For example, every Wednesday at 3pm. Your subscribers will come to “expect” your email to arrive in their inbox on the same day at the same time every week, meaning that they want to read your content and are generally more receptive to any special offers or promotions you may include.

10. The Half-a-Second Subject Line

When your email arrives in your subscriber’s inbox, you generally have about half a second to catch their attention with the subject line of your email. After this, they will either delete your email or ignore it. In your subject line, try and specify a benefit that the subscriber can expect by reading your email. For example, instead of using ‘OurSite Newsletter Issue #1′, use ‘OurSite Newsletter: 10 Tips for Financial Freedom’.

11. The Free Bonus Hook-In

Free is overused these days, especially on the Internet. However, if you’re looking to grow your subscriber list, then create or source a product of value to your visitors (such as an eBook or discount coupon) and offer it to them for free when they signup for your newsletter.

To make sure they don’t simply type any email address into your subscription form, setup an auto responder to send them the free bonus 1 hour after they subscribe to your newsletter.

12. The Preview Pane

Popular email clients such as MS Outlook show a preview of an email when it’s selected in your inbox. Always have some interesting content at the very top of your email, as this is the part that will show in the preview window of your subscribers email program. If it’s interesting enough, then your subscriber will open your email and continue on reading.

13. Link-Click Testing

When creating marketing emails, try using different text for both content and links. Also try re-positioning images such as logos and buttons. After sending about 3 different emails, compare the click-thru stats and see which one worked best. Now, when you need to send marketing emails in the future, you know that you will be sending the right mix of content and images that will attract the most click-thrus, and ultimately the most sales.

14. Email-Based Learning

Add value to your website, build trust in your visitors, establish your credibility and collect more subscriptions to your mailing list by setting up an email-based learning course. To do this, simply create a series of auto responders (for example, 5) containing unique content. Then, schedule the first one to be sent after 24 hours, the second after 48 hours, etc.

15. Always Sign on the Dotted Line

Always include a signature at the bottom of your emails, as it’s one of the easiest ways to attract more traffic to your website. This signature should include your personal details, your company details, and an unsubscribe link. You can use your signature to link back to your website, and even to other products. Here’s a sample signature:

Regards,

Nurlinda Ahmad.

CEO – Company ABC Sdn Bhd

Visit our website at http://www.companyabc.com

Unsubscribe from this newsletter at http://www.companyabc.com/unsubscribe…

Conclusion

By implementing the 15 best practices described in this article, you can take your email marketing to a whole new level –- attracting more subscribers, and building both your brand equity and credibility at the same time

These days, email marketing is an art form. Spam is a problem everyone, including the likes of hotmail, google, yahoo and others are fighting. So when is comes to email marketing, ensuring that you manage your reputation as a legitimate sender is key!

Email delivery has nothing to do with the email marketing software you use.

IP Reputation

When you send an email, it is not send by your domain but through the IP address your domain/email service resides on. If you are on a shared hosting server, the servers IP and your reputation is shared by many. Also servers that are specifically set to send e-mails generally have Reverse DNS & SPF records, support greylisting, and other features.

If anyone on that server (IP) spams individuals and the IP gets blacklisted by “Spam Cops”, it affects everyone on that IP/server.

You can check your IP reputation here

Forward and Reverse DNS

Every domain resolves to an IP address but make sure your server has proper reverse DNS settings configured. DNS is an important way of establishing identity on the internet. Spammers will often forge domain names or IP addresses to hide where their mail is coming from. To detect these forgeries, ISPs often perform what’s called a reverse DNS lookup on incoming messages.

Example: an incoming message claims to be coming from the 202.186.96.56 IP address, an ISP looks up the domain to see if it resolves to embunweb.com. If it doesn’t, the message may be a forgery — or the sender may just now have the correct DNS entries. The result – email is either rejected or categorized as spam.

If you are unsure about your domain’s DNS setup, you can contact us for consultation

SPF Records

Sender Policy Framework or SPF is a more specific DNS entry that lists which IP addresses are approved to send mail for your domain. It is being used by more & more by the big three (Gmail, Hotmail & Yahoo uses it) and others to detect if a message is spam or not.

To learn more about SPF, or to learn how to make an SPF record for your domain, go to http://spf.pobox.com/ or http://www.openspf.org/.

Greylisting

Greylisting is not quite the same as blacklisting. In fact, it is a very powerful spam prevention method used by mail servers.

Basically, the server receiving your email will “temporarily reject” any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will, after a delay, try again and if sufficient time has elapsed, the email will be accepted. If the mail is from a spammer it will probably not be retried since a spammer goes through thousands of email addresses and typically cannot afford the time delay to retry.

Sending Rates

If you do have 1,000s of legitimate subscribers, it is a good idea to throttle your sending rates (as you can do with our email marketing solutions).

Most important, if you are serious about email marketing in Malaysia or anywhere in the world, make sure you work with people that know the industry and technicalities. Email marketing is not just about a large list and a piece of software. If you have any questions on getting your email marketing campaign a boost, contact us online at any time.

Regards,
Kevin Zahri
Co-founder
EmbunWeb.com / KevinZahri.com

Dear Maxhosting/MaxBreeze customers,

We have just completed the upgraded for our email marketing solution, MaxBreeze.

Some of the new features:

• NEW – Proprietary integrated spam checking and rating for email campaigns
• Enable or disable attachments plus an option to set a maximum attachment size
• Can extract the text version of an email from the WYSIWYG editor straight into the “Text Version” textbox
• Send multiple preview emails at once
• Preview your email campaigns exactly as they will look in all popular email client
• An option to disable parts of the cron job, or specify how often each part runs (eg bounce processing should run at most once an hour but scheduled sending runs every 2 minutes)
• “Printable” form type idea for retail stores to accept subscribers at Point of Sale areas for later entry into a mailing list

Want to see MaxBreeze in action?

View Demo (username: “demo” password: “demo”)

More info?

Click here for more info on MaxBreeze, our online email marketing software from only RM249.99 per year.

Best Regards,

Maxhosting Support Team

Have you been having difficulties sending out emails through outlook recently?

Here is why and what you can do to overcome the problem (only affects TMNET Malaysia users).

With the recent announcement of TMNET on Dec 3rd, all third-party SMTP servers are blocked except SMTP servers provided by Streamyx. View their announcement here.

This affects all users using TM ISP such as Streamyx Broadband or TM Dial-up on dynamic IP. It does not affect user of Streamyx on fixed IP.

This very controversial move my TMNET behinders you from sending out emails through the standard port 25 for those that are using email clients such as Outlook, Eudora or other email clients.

Here what you can do to overcome this problem:

Solution #1: Use TMNet (Malaysia) Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
This solution would probably suit most of us, espcially if you are tied to streamyx and use email clients such as Microsoft Outlook.
The below sample of for those using Microsoft Outlook. Visit TMNET for a visual guide (various email clients)

• Launch Microsoft Outlook
• Click on Tools – top bar
• Click Account Settings
• Double Click the desired email account
• Look under Server Information for “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)”
• Change the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)” to either the below:
• smtp.streamyx.com
• smtp.tm.net.my
• smtp-proxy.tm.net.my
• Then, click the More Setting button – bottom right
• Click the Outgoing Server tab
• Uncheck ‘My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication (if checked)
• Click OK – window closes automatically
• Click Next.
• Click Finish.

Solution #2: Switch to another ISP other than TM
Solution #3: You can still use webmail to send emails. How to:

• Login in to yourdomain.com/webmail
• Compose email
• Send
• Thats it

Solution #4: You can also use public emails such as Gmail to process/autoforward your domain emails.

If you have any problems etc, pls contact us at your convenience.

Thinkvitamin.com has written an extensive article that focuses on the following areas:

• HTML/CSS email template best practice
• Getting your emails delivered
• Ensuring a good sender reputation
• Track of spam complaints with ISP feedback loops
• Embracing email authentication (Sender ID, Domain Keys)
• Technical Checklist

View the article here.

In need of email marketing? Check out our 2 products:

• Maxbreeze – web based email marketing (English / Malay)
• Groupmail – desktop based email marketing (English / Malay)

We had an earlier post “10 tips to drive people to your website” which received many positive responses. Due to the popularity of the post, we would like to expand the article to include a basic guide on how to effectively market and promote your website. Enjoy!

So where do you begin when attracting more customers or clients is your goal?

In a word…marketing.

Effective marketing is what brings customers to you.

A dependable, consistent marketing plan and implementation system delivers customers efficiently, on a regular basis, and for a much lower investment than the hit-and-miss methods many business owners attempt.

Acquiring new customers and then keeping them for life is what it’s all about.

Ideally, it should be a matter of delivering superior products and service, then renewing the sales relationship with each new customer, so they buy over and over again and… are happy to do so.

With this kind of customer satisfaction, you’ll not only turn one-time buyers into lifetime customers, you’ll also automatically gain many more first-time customers by word-of- mouth referrals.

Business success begins with the first-time customer.

Unless you already have a large list of customers… your primary focus should be in the area of attracting more and more first-timers, on an ongoing basis.

As always, if you need assistance on how to conduct a successful marketing campaign, we at Maxhosting are more than happy to assist. You are welcomed to contact us here.

Ingin mulakan email marketing? Berikut adalah 10 tips yang anda perlu tahu mengenai email marketing di Malaysia dan di mana2.

1. 1

   Kenali audience anda:Like any media, make sure that you provide your readers with the information they want. This will improve the click-through rates and encourage people to read your next newsletter rather then select the “unsubscribe” link.

2. 2

   Personalise:Practice shows that personalised content produces the best results, with better open- and read-rates compared with the one size fits all approach.

3. 3

   Jangan biarkan “Subject line” kosong: Most empty Subject lines get spammed so make sure you don’t leave it empty or your email won’t get past spam filters.

4. 4

   Gunakan “Subject lines” yang terang dan jelas: The Subject line should pertain to the email and be informative enough to encourage the reader to open it whilst not being too long. It should not be in capitals, or contain exclamation marks.

5. 5

   “From” yang jelas:The From line should clearly state your company’s name or your name. Avoid spam From lines such as “Message from a friend” that are being used quite a lot by spammers.

6. 6

   Sediakan plain text dan versi HTML:Most readers respond better to an HTML email but sometimes complicated HTML emails get blocked by the recipient’s internet service provider. Plain text, although not blocked as often, is simply not appealing but it is accessible to blind people. So the best is to send your email in both format.

7. 7

   Unsubscribe link: You must provide the reader with the ability to request that you do not send any future emails to that address. These requests must be honoured.

8. 8

   Biar ia pendek dan fokus:Just like any web content, people reading your email scan the content to see if anything interests them. Remember, web readers are always in a hurry so keep it short, to the point and ensure it is relevant.

9. 9

   Be consistent:You should be consistent with the frequency with which you send your emails. It can be one a day, once a week, or once a month but make sure you stick to it.

10. 10

    Be creative: Last but not least, unless you create a compelling Subject line your email will end up in the Deleted items box. Pastikan anda creative.

Untuk memudahkan email marketing campaign anda, cubalah produk kami – GroupMail ataupun MaxBreeze