Your mom deserves the best...

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We've just finished upgrading our Joomla extension to the latest version available of the popular platform.

If you’re already up to speed with running the 2.5 release of Joomla, then our revised email marketing integration will work for you.

The Joomla extension allows you to quickly add a newsletter sign-up form to your website, to help you easily get subscriptions to your bulk email marketing contacts list.

What is Joomla

Joomla is one of the world’ s most popular open source content management systems. With millions of websites running on Joomla, the software is used by individuals, small & medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create & build a variety of websites & web-enabled applications.

Let us know what you think about it – post a comment on this blog or a review on the Joomla user community.

We've selected this charming email from Gillyweed as our GraphicMail newsletter of the month for May:

The first thing caught our eye with this email was how effectively their social call-out was personalized.

Marketers often tend to place the links to their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networking profiles in areas where readers might not notice them, or position these directly bordering large colorful photos or other elements that might obscure the icons.  

What Gillyweed has done well is to design their own unique Seahorse-themed Facebook page icon that is very clearly differentiated from the rest of their content, and located in a space where it just can’t be missed.

The slender, single column-like layout also means that their newsletter should generally render well on mobile screens.

Any room for improvement?

One suggestion we would have is that they add a clearer call to action, with attention-grabbing clickable buttons in the body of the newsletter to take readers directly to the relevant product sections on their website.

Congratulations on an email marketing job well done!

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, after the initial responses in our previous post, 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.

Original infographic found here

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 face-lift.

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.


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.

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.

In honor of May the Fourth.  Enjoy Star Wars day.

View other great Famous Inboxes here

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.