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.

LayerCake profits from sending autoresponders and reports analysis

Nearly a year after sending their very first email newsletter with GraphicMail, California-based digital photography software and service provider “LayerCake” is producing exemplary campaigns and enjoying great response rates.

Take for example their 2011 Christmas special. It had an almost perfect delivery rate of 96.8%, and a click-through rate which was 4.5 times higher than the average for all of our senders between October 2010 - October 2011:

LayerCake Christmas Special

Subject line: OMG... Santa Came Early

Also have a look at this sleek ad hoc sales mailer, which again achieved a highly-satisfying 97% delivery rate and an equal percentage of click-throughs of what they got for Christmas. This proves to us that the people at LayerCake have learned all the right skills to guarantee that they get consistent successes in their bulk emailing:

 LayerCake Add hoc Sales Special

Subject line: Buddy Backgrounds One Cent Sale

Although on par with the sender average, they’ve also noticed a slight improvement in open rates in general, which they’ve attributed to an increase in brand awareness. Since LayerCake is relatively new to email marketing, as with all companies breaking into the channel it will take some time for customers to recognize their brand as legitimate and reliable. Once that starts to happen however, unsubscribe rates will naturally go down and open rates will begin to increase.

Says Harry Kerker, winner of over 200 awards for creativity in the USA and President of LayerCake: “ What I like about GraphicMail is that they’re always available, personal, patient and have by far the best staff and tech support I've ever worked with. We've experimented with five to ten other services to date, many of which are impersonal and offer slow email / customer forum driven support. There tends to be an inconsistency in communication and a loss of direction in the chain, so problems take much longer to rectify. GraphicMail is the only service where I know the support team on a first name basis. In today’s times of impersonal support, GraphicMail has recognized that it's still all about customer service.”

TriggerMail and Reports & Statistics have been named as their favorite tools in our suite, particularly since our reporting feature allows them to easily see which campaigns worked and what time periods are the best to send in.

When asked if he had any emailing tips for other marketers, Kerker shared a number of well-informed insights:

Show your customers who you are: “I'm a brand expert. Any email marketer needs to be aware of consistency of message and identity. Your marketing campaign, the words you use and how you look is the personality of your company. Customers get to know you and feel comfortable with your products through who you are in your campaigns.”

Be respectful of your customers’ time: “Avoid sending too many campaigns out and be more strategic about sending at times when there's the least amount of inbox traffic. Keep your message simple and get to the point quickly with your offer. Know the language of your customer, use terminology that's familiar to them, be clever but not brash or cheap like all the spammers that get you to open their mail with trick headlines.”

Be patient and accessible: “Always have a personal email address or a phone number available in your campaign or landing page. Too many marketers make the process impersonal. Believe it or not, customers want to know there's a real person behind the email.”

Play it safe with anti-spam laws: “When customers complain and ask to be removed from your list, reach out and apologize for the intrusion. I've converted at least 50% of my complaints into customers by putting a human face on our company. Your campaign should be like that little store in your home town with the friendly, trustworthy owner. How we do business has changed, but service and customers have not.”

Are you new to email marketing and don’t know what it’s all about?

Have you ever become frustrated when you log into your account and don’t know where to start?

Chances are you’re not alone.

While you don’t need any special qualifications to run a successful email marketing campaign, it does take some time to learn the ropes.

We’ve often heard of users feeling a little confused when trying out our application for the first time, since it may not always have been quite as obvious what the next step - or much more importantly: the first few crucial steps - should be. 

That’s why, from now on, when you sign up for a free GraphicMail account you’ll be greeted with our helpful new ‘getting started’ feature which will walk you through creating and sending your first email newsletter in 4 simple steps.

We’ve had lots of positive feedback about the 4-Step method from new clients so far, so we’re pretty sure that all future GraphicMailers will have a much smoother start in using our tools.

Watch this video to see how to get started with our 4 step feature.

One of the biggest worries that users often have when they’ve just started emailing is whether, for whatever reason, they might be seen as spammer by online security filters. After all, the volume of spam infiltrating everyone’s inboxes today is mind-blowing. It’s normal to wonder about how all those filters really tell the difference and get it right every time.

To help set your mind at ease we’ve just finished integrating our platform with a reputable email validation service, which will make sure that senders among our clientele who tend to spam get tracked right from the start so those who don’t send junk emails will be clearly identified; benefiting from speedier and more reliable sending services.

Just remember that you'll still need to activate your account by verifying your email address. (check your inbox for the verification email sent from GraphicMail).

Valentine’s Day is on the approach and whether you personally view the season of hearts as the most romantic time of the year, filled with love and affection, or an annual catastrophe of tacky décor and extravagant gifts; there’s no question that it can have a positive effect on any business.

Valentine's is the perfect opportunity to re-ignite relationships with customers and remind them that they are at the forefront of your mind and that you understand their needs and desires.

February has also become one of the most competitive in bulk email marketing, as recipients' inboxes are stuffed with look-alike offers from various retailers and spammers. This means that most of it will likely be ignored with all the red-hot overload.

Here are 3 things you could do to rise above romantic mediocrity and make sure that you get some extra love from your subscribers this Valentine’s:

1) Send ‘fe-mails’ to Venus and ‘mails’ to Mars

There are lots of people out there ready and willing to part with their cash to buy the ultimate Valentine’s gift, but even if you have the perfect product, one single offer may not be appropriate for all the members of your audience.

You want to present the right message to the right people. For example; you won’t want to send an email with masculine products to the men on your list, since that would defeat your efforts.

 
So to work around this issue, Valentine’s is a great time to try email list segmentation. You can do this by separating your subscriber list by gender and then sending female -oriented offers to the guys and male-oriented offers to the ladies. Having segments for new customers and those who’ve made purchases before can also play a big role in the type of messaging you have in your campaign.

You can send a special email to people who bought from you last year around Valentine’s Day with an even better offer for this year. If they had a good experience last time round, present them with an exclusive deal and they will most likely buy from you again.

Says Barbara Ulmi, GraphicMail Marketing Manager: “It’s important to take the time and effort to get the perfect emails written for each segment of your list, not just in terms of the products they contain, but also in terms of the tone. The playful, boyish approach that often puts men at ease fails with women - who may prefer something more sincere and heartfelt.”

Have you entered GraphicMail's Valentine's competition yet? Watch this video to find out how.

2) Give them romantic ideas

How many times have you wondered and worried over what you’re going to do for your Valentine’s Day?

Men are always spending more than women during Valentine’s, and often have a tough time coming up with ideas of what to buy and where to go; making them highly receptive to suggestion and easy to influence.

You can draw their attention by doing the homework for them and, for example, providing a list of the top 10 best Valentine’s Day gifts or dates. Tie this to your own offering by sending out a Valentine’s Day email newsletter filled with specials and information about which products you think will make for an unforgettable evening. These could be centered round your top selling items from last year or the ones you currently want to promote.

If all else fails suggest a gift card purchase option for customers who are stumped or can’t decide.

3) Get dressed for Love

The first order of business is, of course, getting your customers in the mood for Valentine’s Day, and this starts with your creatives.

A great Valentine’s themed email template will not only boost their enthusiasm about the celebration, but maybe even your sales. If you use a good balance of Valentine-specific copy and images, subscribers will begin to get thinking about the event and will want to look directly at what you have to offer for it.

This is a very simple, but important step. Changing appearances could even be all you need to do to in practical term to improve your sales.

If you don’t have time to come up with a new look, there are still other options. Think back to the Valentine’s emails you received 12 months ago; do you remember what any of them looked like in clear detail? Probably not, and the same should be true for your subscribers.

So if your schedule is too tight, you can even re-use stock images and certain texts from last year, as long as you are repeating the resources on your site and landing pages to keep the feel consistent.

There's lots of hype surrounding email engagement, yet everyone has a different opinion on what that really means. In practice, we can only influence people while they're engaged with us, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically or overnight. It takes time and work, and is a slightly different process for every kind of business.

Engaged subscribers usually represent a small percentage of a list, but they do have the most value to a brand. This makes cultivating engagement a worthwhile pursuit.

Here are three tips for increasing subscriber engagement in bulk email marketing campaigns:

1) Roll out the welcome wagon:  Engage subscribers from the start. Welcome new subscribers with a helpful, eye-catching email to connect them with your brand from the first click. It can be hard to get newcomers to engage with you and respond in the way long-term subscribers do, so it’s necessary to reach out to them specifically. That’s where automation through triggered emails and personalization comes in.

Set the right precedent for a long-term relationship with every new subscriber by developing a welcoming system. Be supportive of newcomers by offering them additional customer support or maybe even extra incentives. Consider having a newsletter series specifically aimed at teaching them the ins and outs of your company. If they lose interest, you lose money, so don’t give them the opportunity to by engaging them from the start.

2) Track and understand user actions: To increase customer engagement, you first need to understand what interests them and why. In email marketing campaigns, this means understanding the actions your subscribers take on and from your newsletter.

Begin by defining an engagement score. Combine key metrics such as opens, clickthroughs, comments on your newsletter, friend referrals, time spent on your site, visitation frequency and end-goal actions such as downloads and product or service purchases. Also consider measuring interaction with your support and marketing materials, including downloadable product sheets, promotion participation and access to help centers.

3) The engagement ideal and how to achieve it: To truly be considered an engaged subscriber, there's a logical order of progress that must take place. The individual must first receive your email, open it, view your message as something relevant to them, begin to interact with your brand and then repeatedly purchase from you.

The important thing to grasp is that sales and engagement are two different metrics. Anyone can easily make a single purchase from you, but if they don't come back and buy again, enough wasn’t done to engage them and turn them into a long-term customer.

Talk to your subscribers individually. In addition to using their first name or other demographic elements, consider integrating personalized upsell opportunities into your transactional emails based on how they interacted with other bulk email campaigns.

Engagement is what keeps a business alive. The vast majority of your sales will come from engaged customers. The more engaged customers you have, the more sales you'll make.

We are the start of what is looking to be a great year for email marketing. Online sales from email are up and it is still the channel that is seeing the highest Return on Investment - a perfect reason for companies to increase email marketing efforts and budgets.

Email marketing isn’t all about the numbers. In the day-to-day work of a marketer it might even be more about the combination of results and enjoying the work. But don’t be fooled, building a great audience and email program is hard work. There is one rule I’d suggest marketers to live by, keeping that hard work doable:

The one golden rule to live by

Enjoy working on your email marketing program.

It is as simple as that. If you enjoy working on your bulk email marketing program it will show through in all emailings you send out. How do you think a recipient is going to be enticed if you aren’t? Going to enjoy reading if you didn’t enjoy writing?

Here are 3 ways to keep the marketing juices flowing and bring enthusiasm to your email program:

1. Get Hooked and get Newsjacking

Marketing is the art of connecting with your audience. One of the ways to connect with your audience is to tap into their everyday life and understand what is keeping them busy. So this year you might want to put the Olympics on your agenda as well as Easter, Father’s Day, Valentine’s or school vacations.

What really gets blood pumping is what is called “real-time marketing” or Newsjacking – a kind of hook on to the events of today. Luckily email and social media are both as quick as you can spell “real-time”. What’s in the papers today can become the subject of your marketing.

Some email tools can connect the website RSS feed to your newsletter templates, making it easy to publish over multiple channels at the same time. Because in these cases, time is of the essence, it requires a flexible marketing team and one or two quick thinkers, tough it can really give you encouraging results and a boost of energy to work on a project like this.

2. Create a goal specific campaign

All email marketers have goals to reach. Even if the goals aren’t written down (yet). Email marketers want new subscribers to sign-up, they want to increase sales or stimulate customer loyalty. Or even measure their impact through the more simple metrics in life such as increasing email opens and click throughs.

Take at least one of these goals and run with it. It is very stimulating to work towards a (new) goal especially if the results can be measured and monitored real time. So for instance; create a campaign that is specially designed to get people that haven’t opened their email in a while to interact. Think about including new and stimulating ‘from names’, stellar subject lines, pre-headers, preview pane design and all elements to re-active that interaction-lagging subscriber. You can just go ahead and make the improvements. But if you really want to know what works best, there are different ways to do A-B testing with your bulk emails. Are you getting some creative ideas yet?

3. Go green

Creating fresh content isn’t about reinventing the wheel. Most companies have a ton of (unused) content lying around and some of that is really good too, like blog posts from a year ago that could have been written yesterday. Check out what evergreen content had some good impact before. There are lots of ways you can go crazy when you have a great foundation.

For example; customer feedback that hasn’t been used or what the top five email newsletters of last year were?

Grab that content, and revive it, make it even better than it was. This is not only very efficient use of your resources, but also very rewarding, because you will almost certainly see the effect.

The one email marketing rule to live by

There you have it. Do you love to create great emails? Maybe not every day. But by adding some juice, a sparkle of enthusiasm and some variance it certainly becomes more enjoyable! So see if you can adapt one of three ideas and don’t forget the one rule: Always enjoy working on your email program.

Article originally published by email marketing consultant Jordie van Rijn on eMail Monday.

New Year’s resolutions are always easy to make, but always really hard to keep.

2011 is completely in our rearview mirrors. It’s almost weeks into 2012, and all those well-intended resolutions which seemed so reasonable at the end of last year may have already been abandoned.

While some of your master plans  may have encountered some delays, you can still score points on your self-assessment by deciding to adopt some healthy bulk email marketing habits to improve your campaign performance for the year to come:

1) I resolve to begin my year's communications with an email marketing plan

Don’t dawdle for months before you figure out what you want to communicate and promote this year. Do yourself a favor and start setting specific goals. Now.

Why not set one big direct email marketing objective for the year? Or at least one for each quarter or month? You could, for example, consider goals for the amount of subscribers you want to add to your list in 2012 or get brainstorming in advance for specific commercial dates such as Valentine’s Day; which is just around the corner.

Keep your plans simple and make sure they’re realistic and reachable. Don’t waste time in 2012 on things that won’t help you. After all, it’s a lot more rewarding when you know your goals are within your grasp.

2) I resolve to make 2012 a year of measurement

With the statistical tracking features provided by most email service providers (ESPs) there’s no reason to practice guess-marketing. But if that’s what you’ve been doing, then there’s no better time than the present to become a monster of metrics.

Record all your benchmarks and measure your successes this year. If you're not sure about what kind of stats you should be looking at, download our 2011 Email Industry metrics white paper to learn about all the key figures and what they mean.

Before you can set real goals you need an accurate baseline of figures and trends to project your annual performance from. Focus on what’s important to your business as you gather stats and set your goals accordingly. Whether that’s new sign-ups, higher open or click-through rates, more fans or followers, better campaign ROI or any other key metric improvement.

Comparing your current figures against last year’s numbers, if you have them, will give you a better idea of how you are growing, what to expect, and let you anticipate high and low business periods before they happen; which also makes it easier to budget.

3) I resolve to make my emails mobile friendly

Mobile and bulk SMS marketing will go from buzz to biz in 2012. With the growing popularity of smartphones and the increasing dependence on mobile devices, marketers will have to consider adding mobile to their communications mix and take their marketing strategies to the next level. This will be the year to catch consumers where they are, wherever they are; on mobile.

An increasing amount of people started reading their emails on a mobile device in 2011. As we move closer to the time when mobile web access eclipses PC web access, brands will realise they need a web offering optimised for the mobile environment. This has not yet happened within all businesses, but soon the time will come when consumers will be demanding it.

In 2012, give serious consideration to making your digital communications mobile friendly. Ensuring that you have mobile sign up forms and that both your emails and website landing pages render properly on popular mobile devices are top priorities.

For more email marketing New Year's resolutions, read our original article published on Memeburn.

As GraphicMail marks its 10th year, CEO Nick Eckert shares his expert opinion on the convergence of email, social media and mobile marketing and how to ramp up subscriber engagement in 2012:

There were a couple of trends that crystalized in 2011 which will be the major drivers in our industry over the next four business quarters.

I would like to share my comments on each of them and then take a step back and call out what I view as a dependency to all of these that most digital marketers, in their excitement of ‘the new’, often forget.

1) Social and Email

The lines have begun to blur, but let’s face it; email was in fact the world’s first social application. On top of that some people, myself included, might even argue that despite more recent innovations, it also remains the best performing of all social apps.

So instead, the real issue we should be thinking about is what this means to today’s digital marketer and/or small business owner.

Social and email strategies need to be created in conjunction, and not in separate silos. In the social-email mix, it’s important to think about which newsletters warrant sharing and which articles get called out to your social media audience; and the reverse is also true in that you’ll have to carefully consider when and how to call out what you're doing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ in your email newsletters.

The cross-pollination of these channels will continue this year and digital marketers will be looking for ways to monitor and manipulate this process to better leverage their client relationships.

This mashing up of email and social strategies requires good client data. But we will discuss this further at a later stage. For now, GraphicMail is committed to continue with deeper integration of social data and product features this year.

2) Mobile Marketing

Mobile will go from buzz to biz in 2012. Smart phones came of age in 2011 and this has changed forever our relationship with the Internet and, more importantly, our inboxes.

It's now common for people to check their email, on the go, at every hour of the day. The increased frequency of mobile-email use means rethinking some basic principles like email design - to make sure it's simple enough to read well and look good on a smart phone.

The 160 characters of SMS/text is a powerful slate for driving customers directly to optimized mobile sites with timely information. Make sure that landing pages linked from newsletters are mobile optimized. Going deeper, marketers also need to consider when best to use SMS/text as a messaging tool because of the immediacy of the channel and its excellent open rates (on average, roughly 99% for SMS/Text vs. 30% for email).

GraphicMail already offers leading bulk mobile marketing tools and we have great plans to improve on these features over the coming year.

3) Engagement and Relevance

This is more strategy than substance, but email marketing services will need to offer tools that make it possible.

Some of these are tools to facilitate the blending of social and email while others are there to help businesses become more dominant on the mobile internet.

Being more engaged means using email autoresponders and triggers effectively to on-board clients and personalize communications. It means humanizing email - adding more personality into your newsletters and communications. It means not focusing on features, but focusing on who's using your product or service and how.

This brings me to my final point:

Engagement and relevance are great concepts, but it means digging deep into your data to find out who's helping you promote your brand through social channels. This is where Email Service Providers (ESPs) really need to help their clients; which is why GraphicMail will be offering some new features to help you enhance the producing of relevant and engaging communications in 2012.

We want to give you improved reports that allow you to understand who's looking at what and help you set-up future email campaigns to easily engage with your client's based on their interests. We want to provide tools that help you collect the information that YOU decide is the most relevant, so you can collect preferences about your clients and combine this with intelligence we help you uncover; such as what channels they are using - so you can push the right message to them via the right pipeline.

Trying to achieve engagement and relevance is meaningless without the client data that allows you to do so. This is where most ESPs fall short. Rather than help clients collect and unpack this data they give them tools to manipulate the information - assuming they already have it.

Unfortunately, most small businesses don't, so ESPs need to be active in helping their clients build this foundation.

I'm looking forward to announcing a number of new features in all these areas as the year progresses.

I wish you all great success in 2012.

Nick Eckert
GraphicMail CEO

This festive season we gave our clients a chance to win their money back for their GraphicMail monthly account between the date of sign up and 31 December.

We received a great response, and today at last our American and Canadian winners have been drawn randomly from all qualifying entrants.


And the winners are....


(*drum roll*)

GoldSilverForecast for the USA and Canmore Arts and Culture for Canada!

Congratulations! Our representative will be in touch soon to arrange your refunds.

All the best and we hope you'll have a year of happy emailing with GraphicMail.

Now that we’ve sung our ‘auld lang syne’ for 2011, our team is back in action for the new year, filled with vim, vigor and pleasant reminders of the year past.

From today it’s all systems go at GraphicMail South Africa, with full product support available to our clients as normal.

The new year brings new challenges and frontiers. Even if you’ve got a shoe-string post festive-season budget, you can still make effective use of your resources and start your email marketing year off with a bang:

 1) Begin 2012 with an email marketing plan

Don’t spend the whole month of January floundering about without any concrete campaign or plans. Do yourself a favor and start setting specific goals.

Why not set one big email marketing objective for the year? Or at least one for each quarter or month. You could, for example, consider goals for the amount of subscribers you want to add to your list in 2012 (see how to add email newsletter subscription forms to your web or social media pages), or get brainstorming in advance for specific promotions such as Valentine’s Day - which is just around the corner.

Keep your plans simple and make sure they're realistic and reachable. Don’t waste time on things that won’t help you. After all it’s a lot more fun, and rewarding, when you know your goals are within your grasp.

2) Make it a year of Measurement

If you haven't yet, there's no better time than the present to become interested in your stats. Record all your benchmarks and measure your successes this year. With GraphicMail’s powerful email marketing tracking and analytics tools, there’s no reason to practice best-guess-marketing and send emails blindly. 

Be sure to focus on what’s important to your business or organization as you set your goals — whether that’s new sign-ups, number of fans or followers, campaign ROI or any other key metric. Comparing your figures against last year’s numbers, if you have them, will give you a better idea of what to expect and let you anticipate high and low business periods before they even happen - making it easier to budget.

3) Become mobile friendly

The web is rife with opinions and predictions about mobile technology and what it will mean for marketers in 2012. What we've kept saying is that with the growing popularity of smartphones and the increasing dependence on mobile devices, everyone will want to take their mobile marketing strategies to the next level.

So this will be the year to catch consumers where they are, wherever they are - on mobile.

It’s time to give serious consideration to making your digital communications mobile friendly. Make sure your website and your emails are optimised to work with mobile devices and use mobile subscription tools to grow your email list. Read our Mobile Marketing white paper to learn how to take your marketing mobile like a pro.

GraphicMail hopes you’ll have a prosperous beginning to the new year.

Let the 2012 emailing begin!