Posts Tagged ‘email’

If you’re a business owner, or you simply work for a business, chances are you use email marketing to get things done almost daily. But what’s to ensure that your emails to clients/subscribers are perused and read, rather than simply deleted without even opening. Is your e-blast a benefit to the receiver, or a nuisance?

Make it Visual

Put some pictures in your email. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, and it certainly shouldn’t cost you any more. It can be as simple as a graph, or some colored diagrams to illustrate what the email is about. Consider a colored header or a footer to make things cleaner and more appealing to the eye. Lines, tables, and simple fonts can also help increase the readability of your email.

Make it Relevant

As with a newspaper, an article in a magazine, or even a Twitter account, the information presented must be relevant enough to the reader for them to continue reading. Relevance takes on a greater importance in the digital world where it is ten times easier to just click onto the next piece of information when one becomes disinterested. Information in your companies e-blast must be interesting enough for recipients to continue reading. Don’t include information that is redundant, or not relevant. Don’t send out an entire e-blast for a few lines of something new. Make your emails to-the-point, while containing relevant and useful information surrounding your topic. Links can and should be used, but they should not generate an entire newsletter.

Consider Your Audience

An e-blast should never go out to a particular audience based just on assuming that they want the information you have to present because they asked for other information about your company or its services. Always allow quick, easy, and visible opt-in and opt-out procedures. If a recipient is expecting an e-blast from your company say, monthly, and on a particular subject, they’ll be happy to receive it and eager to show it to their colleagues in the same field.

Consider Your Technology

Never send e-blasts from your personal email account. Always rely on your e-marketing people to handle your e-blast’s delivery. Sending e-blasts from your personal account looks very unprofessional and can also lead to your account being suspended.Email looks and feels more professional when sent from dedicated email-list software, which will in turn lead to greater readership, and growth of your subscribers.

Email is a powerful tool in the business world to deliver business-related content to your clients.  By following a few simply guidelines and letting the right people handle your email, you can successfully e-market your business. Use a company like Wilson Monnig Creative to handle your email and online marketing needs.

Google mail? Since it’s unveiling as an invite-only service on April 1, 2004, Gmail has done nothing but grow, accelerate, and succeed when it comes to webmail. A free service to anyone who signs up for it, Gmail has become the industry leader in searchable, organizable, easy-to-use email.  Let’s take a look at Gmail’s main features.

1. Threaded emails

Remember when you used to email someone back in, say, 1999? You’d send them a message, they would reply and so on, until your inbox was chock full of individual messages. Sure, they were all quoted in each message so you could keep track, but your inbox was a mess and impossible to keep tabs on. Enter Gmail. When someone replies to your email in Gmail, it takes a nice little slot in your inbox, along with all the other messages in that conversation.

2. Google Search for Email

Remember when Google began to dominate the online search scene? You could search images, documents, and of course, the internet. But until Gmail, searchable email was sketchy and hard to use at best. Gmail allows you to search your email, using that same technology that Google used for their famous search engine. Just like the search engine, you can use all the boolean search terms as well as include/exclude terms.

3. Labels

Gmail allows users to set up labels for different messages, much like folders in Outlook or other email programs. Users can color-code the labels for different items, and apply filters to incoming messages to flag them with a particular label. Labels are particularly useful when using Gmail for more than one email account, and for people receiving massive amounts of email daily. They streamline the email organization process, and when combined with threaded conversations make for a much more organized email inbox.

4. Filters

As already mentioned, filters can be set up to automatically categorize emails. Once a filter is set up, when incoming messages apply to a given filter, the filter will then categorize according to a particular label, or mark the message as read, etc. Filters keep the inbox from becoming one big cluttered mess. They can even delete messages upon arrival if the messages meet given criteria.

Gmail is the all-in-one email solution. It can be set up to check/send email from multiple accounts, and it can also be used via POP access to an email client like Microsoft Outlook.