July 31, 2009
Using Mobile Email Effectively
Mobile email has really changed the way we communicate with our friends, our relatives, our customers, and even our teammates. It has provided us a way to stay connected without being locked down to a computer or location. Today, you can take your email wherever you. Even though you have your email with you at all times, are you sure that you are effectively using it?
There are a wide range of options and solutions that an email hosting company can offer a customer to access email. Traditionally, emails are accessed through a computer application or through a web browser. Now days, there are several options available for receiving emails with mobile email being one of those options. A mobile email user can do just about everything a user sitting at a computer can do. You can read, write, edit and delete emails from your mobile device. Mobile devices offer users more options to stay connected no matter where they go.
Some email hosting providers offer new solutions and benefits to mobile email users to make things even more convenient, but you must be aware of these options and have the phone properly set up to take advantage of them. For example, some providers offer a “new mail” alert that they will send to a user whenever a new message arrives. However, if your phone or other device is not set up to accept these alerts, you will not be able to take advantage of this particular convenience.
Handheld devices can do so much more than just accept mobile email. You can easily set it up to sync to your computer and take advantage of other features that come with your mobile email solution. Some of these include shared messages, shared calendars, and business contacts lists.
Part of having a mobile email service and using it properly is knowing when to quit. Just because you have a handheld and take your email everywhere doesn’t mean that you should be viewing and sending messages. It is vital to determine what are the real problems and what can wait until you get back into the office. Knowing what is important and what can wait can really give you peace and remove the burden that you carry by running a business or a division of a business. I mean, sometimes you just need to escape from the office and put your worries aside.
Filed under Email by Greg Black
July 30, 2009
Email Marketing Newsletter Template
If you read this article, you are definitely into email marketing and interested in one important thing, how to make your customers to read your e-mail newsletter and react on it. First of all, I would like to talk about the content of email newsletter template, then we will discuss some technical issues that many people experience while delivering newsletters based on email newsletter template.
There are several misconceptions about how a good e-mail newsletter must look like. The most widespread mistake made by almost everybody is when a customer is treated as a customer and not as a human being. Thus misconception number one, customer just must buy something form you no-matter what you sell and how hard you do it. Please, note, customer is not a robot with a credit card. He or she has a soul and may like your product or may not. When you design your email newsletter template, you goal is to present product information in a short and intriguing manner in such a way that the whole e-mail newsletter could be read in a single glance.
It is a good idea to start your newsletter from a personal salutation such as “Hello, Mike!”. The full name in a salutation looks weird therefore avoid “Hello, Mike Bush!” in your email newsletter template. Also, avoid abstract salutations such as “Dear friend!”, “Hello my friend!” or “Hello customer!”. It may result in your email newsletters to be filtered out by anti-spam filters therefore always use an email newsletter software that can reference customer information in email newsletter templates using macros in this way: “Hello, FIRSTNAME!”.
If your e-mail newsletter is related to the originally purchased product, express your gratitude for the purchase. “Thank you Mike for purchasing a pack of Christmas email newsletter templates on 12/18/2008. We really appreciate your support!” will sound appealing for your customer. After that, go strait to the point.
Do not use abstract sentences like this: “In our new age of cosmic speeds and technical progress, every human being should not ignore the way email marketing works blah blah blah…”. I am sure, you will sound smart but nobody will ever read this. Human brain ignores irrelevant information and useless words. Start right from the point this way: “Professionally designed ready-to-use Valentine’s Day stock email newsletter templates, 8 basic designs…”.
Highlight the key product features only. Having only a few major features in your email newsletter template is better than having a long list of all features. You can always list all the features on your website with pictures and colorful text and link the page in your e-mail newsletter. If a customer is impressed by the key features he or she will follow the link to get more information.
Avoid colorful html newsletter templates with heavy graphics and try to use plain text whenever it is possible. If you have to use html though, use formatting and graphics in moderation. Your e-mail newsletter must look the way as if it was created by a human being. If it is too colorful or too long, it will be ignored. Background must be plain white and text should be black. Make your links underlined so that users could recognize them as links. May be you have exceptional designer skills and want to express yourself by drawing grey text on a yellow background, but believe me, humans got used to reading text black on white and click underlined links.
Let’s talk about some technical issues. Spam filtering is the most common problem out here. Spam filters deliver e-mail newsletter to the spam folder only if it looks like spam or if your IP address is blacklisted on spam blacklists. It means that you should not send spam as well as make your e-mail newsletter look like spam. Spam filters analyze email message text and detect word combinations used by spammers such as: “dear friend”; “hurry up”; “buy it today”; “only $9.99″; “super sexy”; “cheap something” and “act now”. If your IP address gets blacklisted on a spam blacklists accidentally, you can always contact the list owner and remove it from the blacklist.
Finally, take care of the unsubscribe feature. Do not forget to place some instructions at the end of your email newsletter template so that your customers could easily unsubscribe from your newsletter. You can use a clickable link or ask user to reply to the e-mail newsletter with the UNSUBSCRIBE word anywhere in subject. Unsubscribe must work without a hitch.
Below, is a sample newsletter template that is designed based on the guidelines described above:
Hello, FIRSTNAME!
Thank you, FIRSTNAME, for ordering PRODUCT1 on DATE1. We really appreciate your support!
Valentine’s Day is just across the corner and you can take advantage of professionally designed ready-to-use Valentine’s Day stock email newsletter templates in 8 basic styles including:
- aqua blue Mac-like transparent style; – aqua blue XP-like plastic style; – sunny orange style with red links; – girly pink style with pink links.
Please, take a look at all available email newsletter template styles by following this link: LINK2
If you wish to unsubscribe, reply to this message with the UNSUBSCRIBE word anywhere in subject.
Best regards, FROMNAME
Filed under Email by Kirill Vasilyev
Today, email is be coming one of the fastest and most popular forms of communication between businesses and individuals. Not only is it a simple form of communication, but it documents and records everything that has been said between individuals. Over the years, there have been many different tools developed to help us access email from a mail server, but push email is something new that has changed the way we access email. Push email has made mobile email even more useful and convenient for its users.
Push email gives a user instant access to any and all new email received on the server. Even on the road, the user never has to worry about missing out on an important message because the responsibility to check for new mail has been completely delegated to the push email system.
Let’s compare how push email works compared to traditional email protocols. The major difference is in the way that messages are received, handled and sent out by the server. In a traditional POP3 email system, the end user logs into an email query program that at the time of login and at set intervals will check the server to see if there are any new messages and will pull over any available emails to be viewed.
With push email, there is no need for these regular checks by your computer or by the user. Instead, the mail server is already set up to send the message right to the computer or handheld device of a user. For anyone who travels a lot, this is a perfect solution since you can stay connected with family, friends, and business contacts no matter where you are.
Push email services really began to take off when the handheld devices market became synonymous with mobile productivity. A handheld device like a smart phone or PDA can act as the client for push email so that a user can have access to their messages even without a computer nearby. Most modern phones will, of course, allow a user to read, reply, and delete any messages, just as if they really were on a computer, but by using a push email system a user can have the added convenience of staying connected at all times.
The push email protocol may not be for everyone but for those needing to stay connected it may be one of the most productive services available. Handheld and mobile devices differ so it is important to research which services and features you would be in need of and purchase a push email enabled device accordingly. Keep in mind reliable connections and features while comparing devices.
Filed under Email by Greg Black
July 28, 2009
What’s a Private Email Network or PEN?
When companies are trying to avoid the potential for infiltration and corruption in their e-mail system, one of the options that is available for them to consider is to create a business private e-mail network or PEN. Not only is this a completely attainable goal for any company that wants to make their email network more secure, but it is becoming increasingly necessary as businesses need to be capable of protecting their private and personal information in more secure ways.
Private Email Messages With enough persistence, someone that is interested in breaking into your company’s private email messages certainly can do so. This is especially possible when it comes to open WiFi locations. Not only could they potentially read sensitive information in the emails traveling between members of your company, but there is also potential there for them to manipulate and change the information in those documents to harm your business. Proprietary information can be stolen and email messages can be forwarded on, altered or not, without anyone being wise to the fact that the message was ever intercepted. This can spell disaster for an unprepared company.
For all types of companies then, regardless of the types of information that are regularly sent via email message with encrypted email service, it has become necessary for you to choose an email client that is secure and that will protect the information stored in email messages as it is being sent. The best idea is going to be to use an open architecture type of system that is going to be supported well into your company’s future rather than choosing a more proprietary system that will only last for a few years.
What a Private Email Network (PEN) A Private Email Network or PEN attempts to achieve is to pass email messages around only within the company on a local or intranet level, meaning that the email messages are never vulnerable to hackers because they are not being exposed to the internet at large. When employees at your company communicate through the Private Email Network, they are communicating only within your company’s own office building, which means that private correspondence is kept safe and secure, and you can rest assured that your proprietary information and personal communications are being kept completely private.
For example, the email2 platform enables your organization to create a Private Email Network, a trusted channel for confidential conversations with colleagues, stakeholders and clients.
There are a number of different turnkey systems that are available for companies large and small that are looking to create a local, private email network that can be relied on for correspondence within the company without a threat of outside interests getting in. The best systems typically involve the use of a simple program that makes sending email within the private email network easy and intuitive, behaving as a normal email system would, though the email messages never leave the closed loop system and therefore they are never vulnerable to attacks. This is the best way to protect your company’s private correspondence from prying, outside eyes.
Filed under Email by Amy Nutt
When many people start to do email marketing, they face a problem of getting customer information so called email list inside of an email marketing software they use. The simplest way here is to add all customers in an email marketing software with the use of the Add command by typing all information with hands. Ouch! This is a good way of getting blisters on your fingers, and believe me, I actually saw people doing this weird stuff. Since you need data, not blisters, let’s talk about data export and import.
Before you started to use email marketing software, you used simple email clients to communicate with your customers and most likely, you have your email lists in different black boxes such as address books including Microsoft Address Book and Apple Address Book, in Microsoft Excel XLS spreadsheets, databases or text files of various formats. Another black box you have to deal with is email marketing software. Since you need to move your email list from one black box to another it becomes very confusing. I have heard it many times: “What the hell am I supposed to do to move my friggin email list from one black box to another?”. Some people even do unusual things like changing file extensions from XLS or DOC to a whatever type the email marketing software uses, or selecting and copying everything in a spreadsheet to the pasteboard and pasting it to the email marketing software. After destroying their computers they say: “What is the name of that moron who made this friggin software?”
Do not blame developers, they did it right. You can easily transfer data between two black boxes just by using temporary plain-text files in one of the standard formats: tab-delimited file format or CSV file format. Simply export your email list from the first black box to a pre-formatted plain text file (CSV or tab-delimited) and then import it in the second black box. CSV file format and tab-delimited file format are used in almost all software products including email marketing software products as an import and export options.
Address book export and address book import. The most common source of email addresses is address book. No matter what you use Windows Address Book on Windows or Apple Address Book on Mac, you have an option to export your email addresses to a plain text file having CSV file format or tab-delimited file format. Even if your address book cannot export your addresses in plain text format, you email list distribution software will do it for you. Many email list distribution software products support address book import and address book export. To perform address book export, you need to use the File-Export command in address book. To perform address book import, you need to use the File-Import command in address book.
How to import XLS spreadsheet made in Microsoft Excel. Open XLS file in Excel and save it as a plain-text file in CSV file format or in tab-delimited file format using the File-SaveAs command. If you need to edit an email list stored as plain text in Excel before importing it in en email marketing software, you need to perform some sort of CSV to XLS or tab-delimited to XLS conversion. To import CSV or tab-delimited file in Microsoft Excel you need to perform the File-Open command and specify the file format as plain-text.
Now about import from databases. If you store customer information in a database such as Oracle, IBM DB2 or MySQL, you can easily export email list from it by using the export feature. All database systems can export data to plain-text files in CSV and tab-delimited formats. You should simply use the database exporter in your database system to get a CSV or tab-delimited file with your email list.
Import from other file formats. The rule of thumb here is to convert the file you currently have to a plain text file. This plain text file then can be further converted to a csv or tab-delimited file, which in turn can be imported in email list distribution software. Microsoft DOC and XLS files should be saved as plain text files using the File-SaveAs command. Most of software products allow you to export or save their native file formats as plain-text files. Do not try to simply change file extension from DOC or XLS to TXT. This is not going to work. DOC and XLS files are actually binary files that appear as text only when you open them in Microsoft Office.
Once you get a plain-text file with your email distribution list in csv file format or in tab-delimited file format, you can import it in your email list distribution software. All you have to do at this point is to use the File-Import command to initiate import and then simply follow the import wizard steps. This way you will convert csv file or tab-delimited file into another file format your email list distribution software supports. In other words you will get your email distribution list in your email list distribution software.
Filed under Email by Kirill Vasilyev

