Email & SMS Marketing Tips
General:
Paste as Plain Text:
When copying and pasting text from Microsoft Word, to ensure that you do not inadvertently copy Microsoft's 'behind the scenes' code, which can affect the quality of your campaign, you need to 'Paste as Plain Text'. To do this, you simply right click before pasting and choose the option 'Paste as plain text'. This will strip out any of Microsoft's prorietary coding and ensure clean coding for your campaign.
Create Contacts in Outlook by Dragging 'n Dropping
Drag an email from your inbox in Outlook and drop it into Contacts. This willl open a new contact with the senders name and email address filled out (in the correct fields) and the entire content of the email in the text portion.You can then drag and drp their Signature details into the relevent fields (i.e web address, phone, fax etc) - all without typing anything!
Design:
Coloured Fonts: If you want to use a coloured font (particularly green or blue), then you may want to consider using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) on your HTML template, rather than standard Font Tags. Many filters will penalise you for using coloured font tags, but you can work around this using CSS. If you are not sure whether you are being penalised, you can check your Spam Assassin score in the Campaign Management Centre. Ask your web designer to make the change or contact Ezemail for assistance.
Image Resources:
Looking for some great images for your next newsletter? Try the following sites for some very reasonably priced images:
Database:
Splitting Names - easily and quickly
Do you have a database which contains First name and Surname in the same column, but you would like to have them in separate columns so you can personalize your emails/mail using First name only?
Well, here's how you do it! To separate First name and Surname in Excel from one column into 2, you simply:
1: Select the column which contains both First name and Surname
2: Select Data > Text to Columns
3: Choose 'delimited' > Next
4: Select "Space" and unselect "Tab" if it is selected by default > Next > Finish
De-Dupe your database in Excel
- Ensure your data has a header row in the first row.
- Sort your data.
- Then, from the main menu, select Data > Filter > Advanced Filter.
- Select "Copy to another location" > "Unique records only", and input your new location in the box titled "Copy to". i.e D1
- You now have a data set with no duplicates.
Tracking:
Article Tracking: If you have 2 or more articles within your newsletter, be sure to give each article its own web page. This will benefit you for 2 reasons:
- You can track the interest of the individual article so you understand your audience better
- SEO - make the most of SEO and optimise each page individually.
Autoresponders:
3 excellent reasons why you should send an Autoresponder campaign to your new subscribers.
1: By sending an email to the recipient immediately, you can verify the email address which they used to subscribe with. Now is the time to look at the email and see why it bounced...generally it will be because of a mistyped address. (For this reason we suggest that make the email field within the subscribe form as large as you can so they can see what they type in).
2: The sooner you make contact with them, the better. The sooner you are added to their contact list (don't forget to ask for this!), the better. Don't wait a month before contacting them. They want information now - that's why they signed up in the first place.
3: While you're at it, why not put an enticing call to action within the autoresponder? If you have a line of communication open with a potential customer, utilise it! Mind you, there's a fine line between utilising this window of opportunity and abusing it. This is the place where you can ask for more information from them - but don't make it mandatory, or else offer them something of value. If they accept it, then you have further qualified them.
