Social media sites know more about your clients than you do - leverage that with GraphicMail!

Successful communication, in any business and via any channel, is all about knowing your customer. In digital marketing though, you won’t often find that new contacts are willing to sit down and manually slog through filling in long, detailed subscription forms to help you capture all their relevant personal information.

I mean, put yourself in their shoes; would you sign up for someone’s email marketing campaign if it took a lot of time and effort?

We know we wouldn’t.

The average social media user has 195 connections - imagine the possibilities if you could tap into those connections! Every social account has tons of additional data about a user, from gender to location to interests, imagine you could segment your mailers accordingly.

Now you can.

On 10 May 2012,  GraphicMail will embed Janrain’s Engage into their client accounts. What does that mean?

You can now set up a newsletter subscription form that allows visitors to subscribe via their social network.

Just think: It's time-consuming to create new accounts for every site and subscription; often, forms are long and passwords get forgotten. Increase your newsletter subscriptions by offering Social Subscribe; and get a heap of additional user data for more targeted sending. This in turn is highly likely to increase your open and click-through rates and even sales derived from promotional mailers.

So how do you benefit from this new Social Subscribe Form?

• Collect and leverage user profile data from social networks on a flexible database.

• The more you know about your subscribers, the easier it is to make informed decisions about how to segment your contacts list, what products or services to offer them and how to make your business more appealing.

• Because you can personalize interaction with your consumers so much more once you have a clearer picture of who they are, you’ll be able to significantly improve the ROI of your website.

• Rapid signup: Consumers won’t really need to fill out any forms, they’ll simply grant your system access to their existing credentials.

• False sign-up reduction: Because social networks authenticate individuals and generally don’t allow multiple accounts, the likelihood of false identities and spammers is dramatically decreased.

How it works

The new social subscription tool will be available on all new accounts that have social sharing features enabled.

Watch this video to see how to make use of our social social subscription tool.

• Just build a subscription form and place it on your website. It’s as simple as that!

• Then, when new subscribers sign up, the feature will collect all available data from their social media profiles (such as Facebook) and then populate the information fields by itself.

• Subscribers control how much information they are willing to share via the permission settings on their social sites, so you won’t be infringing on their privacy.

• Please note that this tool will expire after the account trial period, and return once you opt for a paying account.

And this is just the beginning of some of the social integration and analysis tools that GraphicMail working together with Janrain can offer you, now and in the future.

Sign up for a free email marketing account and try it today!

We've had even more fantastic feedback from some GraphicMail mothers, who we've asked to tell us why our email marketing services makes their busy life easier, as a part of our Mother's Day promotion.

Here are a few of the newest responses that we've received:

"GraphicMail is such a wonderful part of my life. It makes it easier to not only stay in touch with my family, but also grow my business and ministry. I LOVE GraphicMail and don't know what I was doing before it came along!" - Ellaysa Newell, Founder, Perfected Praise Dance Ministry

"GraphicMail makes life easier with email blasts and ready made templates user-friendly like MS Word.  I love up loading lists and being able to blast to as much as 100,000 recipients!" - Rita Lancellotta, Director of Fine Arts, Kingdom Destiny Fellowship
 
"GraphicMail makes it a no brainer to send with one blow instead of in batches to get through the spam filter. This service just makes sense for anyone who has plenty to do." - Judy Sole, Monkey Valley Resort

"GraphicMail is an awesome tool that allows be to send one email to many subscribers. It saves me on time, which saves money, which allows for the really important things...my family!" - Lori Lewis

"I am a mother of 2 and the CMO of my own company, I created my company from the ground up and raised my children on my own so you can imagine how busy my life has been and it still is. I am not the best with technology and I am definitely not a computer savvy, so GraphicMail makes my life better by allowing me to manage my email communications with our customers without much effort or time invested. Thank you!" - Kathy

Promotion ends 13 May.

All due credit allocation will be done on Monday 14 May.

In honor of our super moms, GraphicMail is giving away 2000 free credits this Mother's Day. Promotion ends on 13 May 2012.

Starting yesterday, we asked the talented moms on our mailing list to send us an email with a personal reason why GraphicMail makes their busy life easier. 

I'm a single mother and clinical psychologist, running a full-time private practice specializing in counseling women. On the weekends, I offer workshops, retreats, and groups for women who aim to become more fully present in the world (as mothers, daughters, friends, partners, etc). The events give me juice... and the women love them! GraphicMail allows me to let women know about these events with little effort. Easy peasey! No marketing experience necessary! - Kelly

Please top me up!!  GraphicMail is wonderful because the templates are beautifully done and all I have to do is pop in my new merchandise photos. I use the same template over and over for brand consistency plus it saves me so much time when I do my mass emails.  I always get lots of compliments on my emails and it definitely help with sales the very next day I send one out. Thanks again GraphicMail!! - Valerie Dumas

GraphicMail is outstanding and always on top of the wave, I am still a beginner in this new exciting way of bringing my products to the spotlight with ease and no degree required. I love it, Love it! Love it!!!! Thank you for all the new exciting news updates we receive to always make sure we feel special GraphicMail is going to make my Mother’s DAY!!!! - Carol Thompson – Shapeup All Over

I'm a busy mom and a CEO of a small business. I'm trying to change the world...  Both for one kid who needs her mom around and for dozens of doctors and nurses and patient across the country trying to access care. When I'm writing emails, sometimes my daughter is sitting at the table in my office doing math. I need to get my work done and done well and in a very short period of time.  I can't afford to waste time sending emails and coordinating that work when I'm also trying to teach multiplication tables. You guys do the multiplication for me and take my single email times all my contacts and viola! I don't know how I'd do this without Graphic Mail! Thank you! - Melissa Stratman, CEO, Coleman Associates

GraphicMail makes my life easier because At any given time I can track any marketing piece that we have sent out to see who is clicking through, deleting, forwarding.  It's a great service. - Denise Hackendahl

I am a busy Mom and Grandmother.  I use GraphicMail for publishing several newsletters. I find the technical staff very helpful when I run into problems. I like the easy to use tools - they save me a lot of time and effort.  The new editor is 'da bomb'!  The reports I can use are all there ... right where I need them. - Jolene Adams

I'm new to graphicmail.com but so far I have found it very helpful in generating marketing emails to let potential customers know about my services. - Sherry Sutherland - APN&CSA

I run two businesses from my home while taking care of my 17 month old. I don’t know how I ever managed my email marketing before GraphicMail. - Jessica Azarov, NewZLynn

GraphicMail saves me so much time!! Rather than spending the time to create a new newsletter in a word processor every time I need to send something out, I can simply change the dates on an archived newsletter with GraphicMail and out it goes!! That time saved is precious time I can spend snuggling up to my four little ones! Thanks GraphicMail!! I would not want to be without it! - Mikelle Evans, DPR Realty, LLC

I'm a busy mum and I can tell you, trying to juggle 2 kids (not literally) and a busy business is not easy. GraphicMail helps me keep my marketing campaigns organized. I know who I've written to and if they were interested in what I had to say. Your service is a great way to get in touch with my clients quickly and easily. Thank you (for the credits) and happy Mother's Day, - Rebecca Smith - Sales Director, Ocean Villas Group Pte. Ltd

We are a group of women artists, most of us mothers, who found a way to un-wind from our family responsibilities. We get together to talk about making jewelry - our shared passion. We are a non-profit organization with limited resources, the gift of 2000 credits for Mother's Day would really help us to connect and enjoy each other and our shared love of working in metal. Thank you, we love Graphic Mail for classy communication with our members. - Dayne Sislen, Midwest Metalsmiths

My reason why GraphicMail would make my busy life easier...(and more fun!), is while GraphicMail takes care of my emailings, so I can enjoy more time with my kids! - Yvonne Gray, Sequesse

Our Reports have always been a big favorite among GraphicMail users.

Since almost every client we’ve spoken to during the past year has said they’re big fans of our campaign tracking tools, we thought it’s high time to give this section a facelift.

And so, after many late nights at the office, we’ve just finished our revamp of the old ledger-like reports pages with a fresh look & feel and a few new additions that make it easy to breeze through and interpret your stats in greater detail than ever before.

The new Reports pages are due to go live this Tuesday, 8 May 2012.

What’s changed and what’s new?

Sleek new look - All the information you’ve become accustomed to seeing is now displayed in an easy-to-read visual layout. Your campaign metrics can now be studied via a number of colorful charts and graphs that are based on some of today’s most popular internet analytics tools.

Compare to your Industry - Check how your campaign results measure up to industry benchmarks gathered from across all national GraphicMail senders. This way you’ll know if you’ve got the edge or whether you need to make a few tweaks and fixes to keep up with competitors.

See subscriber Geo-location - Ever wonder where in the world you’re mailing to? Now you can see exactly where - by toggling the Geo-location view on your delivery reports.

On this page, countries within which your emails were opened in will be highlighted on the world map.

Learning more about where your subscribers are from enables you to segment your mailing lists and personalize your messages much better, based solely on their location.

View Recipient activity - Email marketing is all about engagement. In our previous reports and stats section it may have been a bit unclear how each subscriber is interacting with your mailers, but now we’ve recreated our recipient view page so that it gives you a precise and plain action-by-action breakdown.

To make it even easier to understand, we've furbished this feed with icons that show you a live streaming update when someone receives, opens, clicks a link in or shares an email.

Get browser, operating system and email client data - Have you ever made use of the inbox preview and seen what your email campaigns look like to your potential clients?

It’s very useful to know which webmail service or inbox software your subscribers are viewing your emails with. It’s also helpful to know what browser and operating system they’re making use of and whether they're checking their emails on a mobile OS.

An email newsletter on Internet Explorer looks different to the same one viewed on Firefox, for example, and optimizing for the small screen is not the same as for a desktop PC.

Once you’ve learned more about which of these your readers favor through our reports section, you can fine-tune your email newsletters to look their best on all those various platforms.

Our new Reports section will go live on Tuesday, 8 May. We’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and ideas about our updated reporting features. This is just the beginning of some of the powerful new data gather and analysis tools that GraphicMail will be offering you in 2012.

The email newsletter is a powerful marketing tool that can remind subscribers about you, inform them about your products, tell them what you have been up to and help build relationships with them.

But the inbox is a busy place.

Just think, dozens or even hundreds of other emails could already be on the pile by the time your message gets there. When your email does arrive, the trick is to make sure that it doesn’t look like you might be wasting your readers’ time.

It's important to stress that email is a "scanning" environment. Subscribers won’t necessarily read your emails, at least not before they’ve skimmed over it quickly to make a flash-judgment about whether what you have to say will be worth their while.

If your content seems interesting, they may choose to devote more than just a few seconds – but only if you’re able to grab them in the "scanning" phase.

With this in mind, here are 5 easy design-oriented tips to help you get to the point and maximize readability:
 
1)    Design for the Preview Pane

The human eye normally scans an email from top left to right, and then down.

So while it's a good idea to have a banner graphic for visual impact, don't make it too big. That is, try and get your key "text" message as close to the top left corner of your email as possible so it is visible within the preview pane, without the reader needing to scroll around.

Don’t bury the value of your marketing email under a mountain of trivia. Get to the point quickly.

2)    Don’t forget ‘alt’ text

Since all the email clients out there on the web don’t conform to the same set of visual standards, images are often blocked by default, with image ‘alt’ text displayed instead - unless you haven’t provided any.

Therefore, remember to populate ‘alt’ tags for every image so that subscribers who have blocking on will at least see a short description of your pictures, which may encourage them to click the “display images below” action.

3)    Fall back on colors

If you want to use a background image in your design, just remember that some email clients don’t support them, so it’s wise to provide a background differentiated from your text color for the email client can fall back on. The simple point here is to enable your subscribers to read your message no matter what.

4)    A link can save the day

It’s a good idea to provide a link to a web-based alternative to your email at or close to the top of the HTML newsletter in case, despite your best efforts, there are still display issues. This will let each reader view your email in his or her browser if they can’t see it properly in their inbox.

Today, you may still be wondering why a company that has built its communications program on email should move its resources into social and also mobile marketing?

For starters, just ask yourself the following question: is everyone you want to reach already on your email list? And if they are, are you able to provide them with relevant and dynamic communications 100% of the time?

Here’s the thing - If you're not communication with your customers via email as well as through social and mobile channels; you're probably not reaching your audience with contextual messages where they live, work and play.

Here we highlight some opportunities around the convergence of email with social and mobile, giving you some insights into how to integrate and manage your cross-channel voice and leverage these tools to achieve better results:

While it's simple for marketers to understand why they should be integrating email, social and mobile, the real challenge remains how to do it.

1) Embed social media links into your emails

This is one of the most popular email marketing tactics. But to avoid getting the cart before the horse, you'll first need to lay a reliable foundation in social media.

It's critical to identify where your customers are rather than to assume. To help with this there are many free tools that can provide insight about social site traffic to help you priorities your social initiatives (such as Compete and Hitwise).

You can also make use of a data service provider, like Rapleaf, who will add social data to your opt-in mailing list. This information is delivered at the individual email address level and gives you a more complete idea of each consumer; including whether they are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goolge+ and so on.

2) Discover how your brand is being discussed and in what context

Is there a buzz around certain products? Are there complaints that need to be resolved? Are there suggestions or comments that are waiting to be addressed?

Start by monitoring blog posts and social conversations by setting up Google alerts and using a service such as Hootsuite to see what content of yours is being shared on social networks.

Next you need to examine what draws your customers in and brings them back for more - in other words - the 'sticking points'. To study this, use analytics tools to see which parts of your website are the most active and which links, content, referral sources or conversations generate the most traffic. 

 
Once you have taken these measures you can identify what motivates your audience and therefore design better programs in the future. With this data at your disposal you can also start thinking about trying contact list segmentation tactics that will enable you to tie in campaigns across email, social and mobile channels based on individual preferences and analytics. For example, you can segment by gender, age, geographic location, or by preferred channel - which is critical to know when you're looking to communicate with a specific customer.

3) Keep it clear, simple and consistent

Email should work hand-in-hand with other digital messaging channels, and the efforts made on each one should complement initiatives on the other. Here's a simple plan for of how to achieve integration:

3.1: Create your email campaign and define the message with your subject line

At 50 characters or less, your subject line should clearly state what your readers can expect from your email, what's in it for them or what you want them to do as a result.

3.2 Translate your message to Social

If you have concluded that your subscribers are active on Twitter and Facebook, your task is then to convey the same message to this audience according to the unique attributes of each platform.

By taking that message to 120 character in Twitter, you can create more interest in your call-to-action. Add a #hashtag and use a shortened URL to cut down on  character count.

A Facebook post gives you the opportunity to entice fans even more by expanding your message to 150 characters and adding a compelling visual.

3.3 Take your message mobile

Every email and social marketing message also presents the chance to provide relevant motivators in a contextual setting to your mobile-oriented consumers.

For businesses looking for an easy entry point into the mobile sphere, GraphicMail has developed an all-in-one mobile campaign tool. The hosted email, social and mobile marketing services offers a free mobile site creator, easy list building features and key metric data feedback that assists marketers adjust their campaigns for greater return on investment.

Mobile sites can have unlimited pages, and GraphicMail makes it easy to upload videos, images (rendered automatically to the appropriate size and weight per device type), text and feedback/ survey forms. This innovative product marries mobile sites and push-marketing by way of a personalized web-link within bulk SMS marketing sends; enabling a message to be delivered directly to subscribers' phones with a simple click-through from an SMS, to channel viewers to a graphic-rich, personalized mobile site.

Alternatively, marketers can also just run a simple bulk text campaign. As before, your message will need to be reduced - this time to 160 characters - including any contact details, a physical address or other supporting information. 

It's that simple. If you start with email as a campaign backbone, you have all the tools and resources already at hand to reach audiences anywhere and everywhere, with no need to create anything new.

We've selected this fashionable email from Fancy French Cologne as our GraphicMail newsletter of the month for April:

We chose this newsletter particularly because of how well it’s optimized to encourage sharing on visual social networks Pinterest and Instagram.

• There are prominent calls to action to these platforms in the lower columns; urging readers to explore the company’s content on those sites, and if you’ve got a passion for fashion; the pictures on the mailer itself are so appealing that you’d want to show them off to your own social connections. 

• To support this, the copy is minimal, but informative – which means that the visual nature of the newsletter hasn’t been disrupted by piles of text.

Having content worth sharing and the means to do so directly available is a good formula for increasing brand awareness on multiple social networks.

Overall, this is a great example of effective social-email integration.

Congratulations on an email marketing job well done!

Having a subscription form on your company’s social media pages is one the most fundamental parts of building a large and relevant list of contacts. 

In a previous post we wrote about how to get subscribers through your Facebook page by setting up a custom iframes form, and explained step-by-step how to set up a subscription form on your company’s Facebook page with GraphicMail’s email marketing tools.

With Facebook’s shift to its new “Timeline” style layout, however, the Static HTML application that makes it easy to build your own apps on the social site has changed:

Firstly, if you’re unfamiliar with Static HTML, it’s basically just a tool that provides an administrative structure for a custom Facebook application. By using it you don’t have to learn any programming skills to add subscription forms and other features.

If you haven’t worked with or installed it before, click here to add the Static HTML app to your page.

Next you need to choose the Page that you want to add this application to (if you have more than one).

After you’ve done this, the app will then be displayed with a star icon among any other apps you might already have, labeled as “Welcome”.

Click on the big star to access the app.

You will see a blank top box which is your canvass for entering whatever you want onto your iframes tab. Essentially, anything you enter into this area is your “application”.

So for example; this could be a form, some links, an image or even just some plain text.

The app supports HTML, CSS and Javascript languages. You don’t need to be a programmer, but it helps if you know some basic HTML to understand how to manipulate it if you want to make any tweaks.

 All you need to do here is drop in the embed code for your subscription form (as explained in our previous post about letting people sign up via Facebook).

Click “save” on the top right hand corner, and the app will then appear on its own tab on your Facebook page.

(Note: You can also preview your app before you save it, to make sure you’ve entered the correct code and that it will display correctly).

Now that you’ve got your subscription form, it’s useful to do some editing on the iframes tab so that visitors will be able to identify it easier.

Backtrack to your Timeline and look at the Featured Apps area. The subscription form app should now appear in this list.

Click the Edit icon for this app and go to Edit Settings.

Edit the name of the app by calling it “Email Newsletter sign-up”, or anything that you think will appeal to someone viewing this page.

You can also upload an icon for your new app tab. When you’ve done that, click save and then click “Change” for “Custom Tab Image.”

And that’s all there is to it. Your custom subscription form will now display on your Facebook page in the app tab area with the title you have given it.

To finish things off, go back to this area again and click the Edit icon as you did before.

You can then change the order of your apps to place your subscription form in a better location - in case you already have a few other apps taking up the prime real-estate.

(Note: It’s unclear why, but keep in mind that Facebook is busy ironing out some of the bugs in its“Timeline” build, and that the iframes team is still catching up to the new environment; so the application may not be working properly for everyone quite yet.)

“SoLoMo”, the latest online buzzword, is a combination of social, location and mobile marketing and a quickly emerging trend that everyone should have on their radar.

Essentially, SoLoMo takes the form of mobile phone applications that combine social networking and location data. The blend of these makes perfect sense, if you think about it. With rise of smartphones and tablets that integrate geo-location technology to help users locate what’s around them, lots of online searches happening today have a local, real-time intent.

Today, people everywhere are using their mobile device to find what they want with the ‘right here, right now’ mindset - which is where SoLoMo fits in.

An example of SoLoMo would be a smartphone app that determines your location, suggests restaurants close by based on what kind of cuisine you’ve been searching for, which can even extend to providing reviews and ratings for those restaurants or rewards for entering their premises or buying certain items off the menu.

So it’s all about giving people highly targeted, context-rich communications.

How GraphicMail is going SoLoMo

GraphicMail attended this April’s Ad:tech advertising and technology conference in San Francisco.

We are pleased to report that the focus was definitely on services that have had success by combining social, location and mobile elements.

Says Carlos González, our GraphicMail Mexico representative: “Ad:tech’s main focus was definitely on Mobile, Social and Affiliate Marketing, with Location and SEO. Importance given on the presentation program regarding Email Marketing was secondary, even though present during lots of talks as a valuable medium.”

“The landscape of possible media (including of course social networks) is confusing and big, good segmentation should be encouraged permanently as well as content personalization. Open collaboration and innovation were words constantly echoed by most of the keynote speakers.”

Marketing communications cloud services such as GraphicMail aim to provide integrated products that can work via multiple platforms for their customers (like laptops, desktop PC’s, tablets and smartphones) and email marketing has been mentioned regularly as the strong backbone of current mobile and social developments. 

We couldn’t agree more, which is why GraphicMail already offers a number of tools (and has a few new ones in the pipeline) for marketers to tie social media, mobile technology and location data into their campaigns:

For example, GraphicMail has partnered with Rapleaf so that we can now provide you with real-time demographic insight and campaign analytics, instead of the patchy demographic data that most email marketers have on their lists - to help you better target your campaigns and increase engagement.

Want to increase your reach? Embed your email newsletters with social widgets and watch your campaign go viral as it gets shared across a number of social networks - all of which can be tracked and measured.

GraphicMail is also currently working on a new social commenting and subscription form solution, as well as a new reports & stats section with geo-location , device and browser data (among many other improvements).

With our email marketing platform you can learn more about your subscribers than you thought possible, and then segment your lists and personalize your messages based on their location. You can also use this data to catch your subscribers while they’re on the go - with our bulk texting tools, or push them to your mobile site wherever they are via a link in an SMS. 

The possibilities are endless.

This is just the beginning of some of the powerful data gather and analysis tools that GraphicMail will be offering you in 2012.

If you’d like to keep up to date with these developments that can all serve to improve your direct marketing performance, sign up for our regular newsletters. 

So stick with GraphicMail and go SoLoMo.

Are you among the many people who’ve been wondering about whether either email marketing or social media marketing is the best for your business, and if you should commit to just one of them?

To be fair, email has been around for a long time, so these days it’s not making headlines too often anymore.

Instead, social media is getting all the buzz, but according to a new survey; email is still a more popular mode of online communication - making it possible for you to reach more people.

Private research firm Ipsos polled 19,216 adults in 24 countries earlier this year and found that 85% of them used the Internet for email, while only 62% used it for social networking.

They’ve also found that how people use the Internet varies from country to country. In Hungary, 94% go online to use email while only 46% do so in Saudi Arabia. In Indonesia, 83% of people use the Internet for social networking.

Social media use is also high in Argentina (76%), Russia (75%) and South Africa (73%). It’s low in Japan (35%) and Saudi Arabia (42%). The U.S. figure for social media use was right around the average, at 61%.

Despite some efforts by social media networks to remake messaging for a new generation, the good old email inbox is still the most preferred.

Did you believe email is dead?

These findings actually do make sense if you think about it; because, to begin with, you really just can’t do much social media marketing without email.

Social networks today are reliant on a constant stream of email notifications to inform and drive users. Many online companies are making use of social sign-ups and logins as well, to boost and streamline their email marketing campaigns, and help them make more informed decisions about how to segment the subscribers in their mailing lists.

At the end of the day, your vision should be to get the two to work together, and not to create a divide between the messages that you’re providing to your audience simply because you’re reaching out to them via different channels.

And besides, bulk email communication and newsletter resources make for excellent content to share on social networks.

Email marketing gone Social

With pretty much every individual and business on social media these days, shouldn't your newsletter be too? Read our email marketing via social share white paper to learn how to reach more readers and profit from using social media tools in synergy with a hosted email marketing solution.

GraphicMail will be releasing a number of social media-oriented features this year, so keep watching this space!
 

Originally published on Mashable.