For the full infographic click here

GraphicMail's clients are sharing the love already with more contestants entering our Valentine's competition.

Comment on this post about any of these newsletters to give them your vote for winning!

1)Center for the Arts of Bonita Springs

2)Coho Oceanfront Lodge

3)Habitot E-News

4) Teddy & Friends

The competition closes on the 29th of February, so there are still more contenders to follow. To qualify, send us your February newsletter today! 

Share the love with GraphicMail this February and win your choice of a Kindle Fire, a $200 online gift voucher or a $19.95 GraphicMail monthly account for a year!

How can you win?

Share your February newsletter with us by including the marketing@graphicmail.com address in either your test sends or your actual newsletter send between 1-29 Feb 2012, and get your friends and fans to vote for it on our blog.

You can either use one of the beautiful Valentine's newsletter templates found in our 2011 Editor, create your own or just submit your regular newsletter.

How it works

• As soon as we receive your newsletter we will post it on our blog as a screenshot and send the blog URL back to you.

• Invite your friends and fans to visit our blog by emailing them or posting the link on your social networks to get as many comments about your newsletter as you can.

•  Each comment counts as a vote. Your fans can also like your newsletter in our GraphicMail Facebook album called 'Share the love'.

The newsletter with the most comments and likes wins, and the winning emailer can choose one of the prizes mentioned above.

Need some inspiration?

Keep watching our blog for guidelines on how to craft a love-worthy newsletter and increase your chances of getting more votes.

Please note, terms and conditions apply.

We've selected this well-formatted email from SA Décor&Design as our GraphicMail newsletter of the month.

This is an excellent example of newsletter layout and content use, being both easy an enticing to read without overloading subscribers with information or confusing them about the flow of information and where to look.

Congratulations on a job well done!

You can see some of our other award-winning newsletters and keep up with new winners by following us on our Facebook Wall of Fame.

Over time an email marketing list may erode as people lose interest in your offerings, or worse yet, become annoyed by your newsletter sends. Regardless of the reason, emailers have to accept a certain amount of list depreciation as things go on, but when that list begins to lose too much mass too quickly, it might be time to consider a few ways to stem your unsubscribe rate.

There’s always something you can do to save some of your subscribers. Following are 3 day-to-day campaign tips that are sure to minimize your opt-outs:

1) Listen to your readers

First of all, in opt-in email marketing, a subscriber ignored is a subscriber lost; which is why you need to take whatever campaign feedback you get seriously while they still have that person’s attention. A little remedial communication is always a lot easier than getting someone back onto your list after they’ve left.

Most of the time though, people will unsubscribe quietly and without logging any complaints, despite all of your hard work to keep them satisfied. When this happens you need to take the opportunity to solicit feedback from them and act on it.

Chatting to a disgruntled reader who has opted out probably won't help you save that email recipient, but it may help you prevent future subscribers from leaving your list.

2) Customize email frequency

Are you bombarding your subscribers’ inbox or leaving it too scarce for their tastes?

Just as you could let them choose the types of emails that they receive, you should also let subscribers adjust the frequency at which you send to them. A major step in preventing unsubscribes is in letting your email newsletter recipients tell you what frequency is right for them; which can vary from daily, to monthly, or anything in between.

Everyone on your list will have a different frequency that's the best fit for them. So offer customized email frequency options at the bottom of every email and also on the page to which your unsubscribe link navigates, as a final effort to retain your subscriber.

You can send these emails to your inactive subscribers too, asking them to select their ideal sending frequency to re-engage and prevent an impending unsubscribe.

3) Improve your segmentation

The more specific your email subscriber segments are, the better able you are to deliver content that speaks directly to their interests, making you a welcome fixture in their inbox.

Not everyone signs up to your newsletter for the same reasons; they live in different places, have different behavioral patterns and they like different products. This being the reality, marketers need to split up their lists and craft messages accordingly. Email segmentation is important because it allows you to deliver only the most relevant, customized content to your subscribers.

Suppose that you could create two or three different offers that would appeal to different groups of your subscribers, depending on their needs, wants, interests and objections. The more relevant an offer is, the more likely someone is to take you up on that offer, and less likely they are to unsubscribe.

GraphicMail has made segmentation easy. If you’ve never divided up your subscribers before, read our beginners’ guide to email list segmentation for practical steps on how to get started.

Original image found here

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.

When it comes to your address book, size does matter.

The more people you have on your emailing list, the more marketing messages you can send out and the more responses you can potentially get. But, growing an email list can be a slow and difficult process.

There are no shortcuts to building a large qualitative list of subscribers. In fact it can be so much of a bulk email marketing migraine that after a while some people might feel like giving up on promoting new sign-ups altogether.

So how do you build your subscriber database without all the worries?

1) Make signing up as simple as possible

Email opt-in should be made easy. The more clicks and keystrokes a potential subscriber needs to make in order to sign up, the more of them will abandon the process before you have them securely on your list.

Why force a person to take multiple steps to do something that they want to do, if there are ways for them to do it with just one?

Lubricate your subscription process by testing the success of rate of single opt in vs. double opt in. Think about reducing the amount of required fields on your subscription forms - most of which are always details you can ask your subscribers about later. And rewrite your confirmation emails to be as brief and skim-easy as possible.

GraphicMail allows you to custom build your very own subscription form that you can place on either your website or social media pages. We even give you mobile optimized subscription forms to target potential subscribers who are visiting your domain on their smart-phones. 

2) Focus on converting web visitors

If (like most marketers these days) you are promoting your business via online channels, chances are that your website will be a hotspot for catching new sign-ups.

This means that your email newsletter opt-in should be compelling, obvious and everywhere. Make sure the form is prominently placed on all your web pages and make it stand out visually.

Also place sign-up promotions on relevant content such as within articles and blogs, and at the end of slide shows.

This area is where email marketing services need to help their clients. GraphicMail makes it easy to manage the online sign up process with our lists and contacts tools. You can even import all your subscribers from other emailing programs and cloud-based CRMs such as Salesforce, or sync up your address book with Outlook. Our features make it really simple to gather all your contacts neatly into one archive.

You'll also do well if you sell your newsletter to potential subscribers by adding a line or two about the benefits of signing up, such as mentioning special deals or exclusive content, or adding some testimonials by a few clients who’ve found it useful.

Once your website’s sign up forms have all been set up and testes, focus on driving traffic to your sign-up forms through all possible channels; such as your social media pages and PPC campaigns.

3) Leverage word of mouth and social media

Word of mouth is a powerful technique that works great with email marketing. If your readers find the content you share with them to be useful and informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends, which can be a good source of new subscribers.

A really great way to grow your list is to allow people to share your email with others. This adds a social component to your email which increases the possibility of you message going viral.

Add a ‘forward to friend’ link and newsletter social share buttons to your template. Even think about including an incentive for both sender and recipient, such as a voucher or free credits. You may be surprised by the amount of referral activity you can generate if you just take the time to ask.

It all comes down to asking everyone, everywhere and at every opportunity about whether they would like to hear from you via email. Be sure to tell them what benefits there are if they sign up and then make it easy for all subscribers to share your email newsletters so other people will see the advantages.

original infographic found here

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.