Want to know one of the best parts of Mail Chimp?  It has....

A free account that allows you to send thousands of emails per month, to more than 1000 contacts, and all for free.  This allows you to really try out the service before committing too much, and makes it very low risk.  Although the free account restricts access to some of the features, it still offers a great way to introduce yourself to the service.

MailChimp's A/B split testing feature allows you to try different emails in your campaign and determine which one has the best results.  They even claim that this has improved click rates for users by 17%.

Inbox Inspector allows you to view what your email will look like in almost all the email clients your recipients will be using.

At the end of the day, there's not much to lose, so why not give the chimp a try and see what you're missing?

The Delivery Status lets you know whether the email was delivered to the recipient, if it bounced, was blocked, or if the address is non-existant.  The Open rate shows you the number of people or  percentage of people who received the email that opened it.  The Click rate shows you the number of people or percentage of people who opened the email that clicked a link.

So which one is most important?

Delivery Status is obviously quite an important statistic.  Knowing if your messages were delivered, and who didn’t get them, is a vital piece of information.  It indicates bad email addresses, people who have left companies, and is a sign that you should send them some kind of follow-up.

Open rates is an interesting statistic.  It has come under quite a bit of scrutiny for not being entirely accurate.  Tracking email opens is often done by putting an image in the email, where the downloading of the image when the email is open indicates that it was read.  This statistic is skewed because some email clients don’t download images automatically.  Some email clients also download images once you’ve clicked them due to preview panes, which means a persons “open” could actually just be them clicking on the message to delete it.

Probably the best indicator of the success of your email campaign in the Click Rate.  It is the only way to know for certain that the recipient read your email, and tells you that they were interested enough to want to see more information.  While email opens can indicate many things, the clicks indicate real interest, or at the very least a healthy curiosity.

The first step is to design your website in a way that makes it easy for visitors to sign up.  Why hide the “Join  our Mailing List” at the bottom corner of the site?  It also doesn’t help to have it only on the main page.

Give people a reason to join.  People don’t generally sign up for “Junk Mail” unless they see a benefit.  They may not want to sign up if they believe they’ll be getting “whats new this week” emails, but they might sign up if they know thats how you’ll be sending them special offers or useful information.

Ask them.  It’s amazing how many more people do something when you ask them.  I’m not endorsing multiple popups to drive teh question home, but if you’re making it a goal to increase the size of your Opt-in mailing list, then design your site in such a way that it prompts the question.  A button at the bottom of your index page isn’t likely to result in thousands of people joining.  A well placed question, whether on a product page or after a transaction, if executed well, can produce more email addresses than you might imagine.

This is a common question asked by companies interested in starting out with an email marketing campaign.  The simplest approach is definitely to use a service provider.  We’ll go into the why below….

There are really two main reasons (plus many more, but two main) to use a service provider to send your mail.

1.  The interface is already built to allow you to select lists of people and send thousands of emails at once.

Email Service Providers generally have a set of templates you can select from.  After you have selected your template you edit the content of the message, and select your list of recipients (after importing/entering them) and then scheduling the delivery of your message.  This allows you to send an email with very little setup time, and without having to talk to your “tech guy” to set this all up.

2.  It helps protect your company’s IP address from being associated with SPAM which could cause servers to identify your emails as SPAM.

This is by far the greatest reason to use an email service provider.  The reputation of you IP address is something that is very important to protect.  There are lists published of IP’s known to send SPAM, and these lists are used by some servers in order to identify SPAM in the messages it receives.  Therefore, if you’re IP has a bad rating, your messages are much more likely to end up in the recipients Junk Mail.  Knowing how often some people check their Junk Mail, and how difficult it is just to get people to read emails, it is definitely not worth it to take chances in this area.

Simply put, unless you have someone who really knows what they’re doing, and someone who can set this all up so that it won’t harm your reputation on the internet, it is by far much easier to use an Email Service Provider and save yourself the headache.

You can find details about CAN-SPAM here.  In essence it lays out guidelines for commercial emails, which it defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose.”  The FTC, which is tasked with enforcing the act, approved new provisions in 2008.

Although it protects recipents from unsolicited commercial mail, it has been criticized for not being strict enough, and preventing individuals from suiing companies they receive spam from, among other things.  It has also been criticized by some for overriding state regualtion of electronic mail.

“This chapter supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a State or political subdivision of a State that expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages, except to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto.”

The upside to email marketers is that there are very clear rules to follow, and it’s easy fairly easy to stay within the bounds of legality.  The better news?  You don’t need to worry about different laws for every state when creating your campaigns, which is definitely a plus.

The study compares time spent on different types of media vs. the percentage of advertising spending in that media.  What they found was that although only 12% of peoples time was spent on print media, it accounted for 26% of advertising spending.  Conversely, Although time spent on internet media was 39%, advertising spending in internet media was only 13%.  So what does this all mean?

Morgan Stanley indicates that this is a sign of a marketing opportunity in internet, as there seems to be quite a disparity between the numbers.

Some factors which may account for the difference are the fact that internet marketing is much more inexpensive per impression, so you need to do less of it to reach more people.  There are also more websites and different places to market on the internet than there is print media combined, increasing the competition in internet, and therefore reducing the cost.  Internet marketing is also still fairly new and is seen by some as a bit of a black hole.  Not everyone is certain of its success, and many are unsure how to track and measure the success they may be having.  Print media advertising many times includes a face-to-face meeting, where as internet marketing is not always a local activity.

All this being said, there is definitely a disparity between the two numbers, and considering that internet marketing is the least expensive form of marketing, there is a real opportunity, if using sound strategies, to improve your ROI on your marketing dollars.  If you look at the graph you’ll also see that internet media is the only form of media with an increasing percentage of time spent.  It’s another great reason to take a second look at where you’re spending your hard-earned dollars.

The reality is that it can take a few emails before you reach the intended recipient at a time that is good for them.  Day to day, peoples schedules can be drastically different.  Emails can also end up in Junk Mail (How often does your Junk mail get checked?) or come in on a day off.  Not only that, people can also read your email and be interested, but the timing for them to take action may just not be right at the moment.  There are lots of different legitimate reasons for this, which is why drip campaigns or “drip marketing” is so important.

Drip Marketing takes this into account and attemps to solve these issues.  By sending or “dripping” emails over time, one can hope to reach the recipient at a time where they have the time to devote some of their attention to the email.  It also enables you to remind them that you’re around, and can be useful in follow-ups, post-sell, or even situations where leads have become cold yet could heat up again sometime in the future.

For these reasons it’s necessary to have a Drip Marketing strategy, whether it be by mail or email.  Constantly reaching out is needed to reach the greatest percentage of people, and to remind people that you still exist.  Just remember, it’s called drip marketing for a reason, make sure you’re not “drip marketing” with a fire hose, or you may end up creating more enemies than friends.

One method to increase readability and response to your emails is to format emails as if they were sent from your standard mail client.  Take care to “personalize” the email by using the recipient’s name.   Keep the language casual and the correspondence short as in a typical email.  Many times the best way to get feedback is to instert a link in the email, preferably to new content that the recipient hasn’t seen.  It is best to also create your standard signature at the bottom of the email, so as much as possible it looks like an email tailored to the recipient.

Using this method, you’ll be surprised by the number of people who click your link, and ever more suprised that people are actually emailing you to thank you for the information (assuming you actually had something useful to send them that is.)

The Iphone gives email marketers more opportunities to catch the recipient’s interest than some other email clients.  Unfortunately, many marketers take this for granted.  Here is a tip that will help you increase your opens and clicks.

Many standard templates from email marketing companies include a banner at the top of the page for an image.  This is often an eye-catching graphic that is meant to grab the attention of the recipient.  Iphones are great because they give you a preview of the message, and when you open the email it automatically downloads pictures.  The downside is that a picture is not shown in the email preview, and what is shown is not usually pretty.  The preview typically ends up being the http link to the email, or a hyperlink, depending on the formatting (as shown in the picture at the top of this article).  With one in seven emails being opened on an iphone currently (and growing), it’s important to consider this when formatting an email.  An easy way to take advantage of this information is by working some text into the top of your email that will grab the recipients attention.  If you use their name and a somewhat personalized message at the top, they’re much more unlikely to have their finger hovering over the trash bin before your images load.

Getting people to open emails is hard enough, don’t make email marketing more difficult on yourself.

Eight Ways Twitter is Useful Professionaly gives some examples of uses in the professional realm.

Although there are some ways listed that Twitter can be useful, it has definitely not penetrated every market and it remains to be seen whether it will continue to be perceived as useful by enough people to ensure its long-term professional use.

Twitter has been picked up quickly by many early adopters, but it is has not earned the professional legitimization of sites like LinkedIn has.  This may be due to the gap between the use of the two.  Although many people are much more acquainted with social media than in the past, it is still relatively new, and very much a foreign concept to many business people, who are used to thinking about the web solely as a place to put their website.

Despite Twitter’s popularity, it is likely that it would take a long time before its adoption would become a standard across industries.    It’s atypical style for many business people will likely inhibit it’s general adoption for a while to come.