Email news and strategy

Happy Riding,
The Team at Big Mountain Bikes

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This email is being sent from Big Mountain Bikes, 1234 Main St., Whitefish, MT 93446

You are receiving this email because you or someone used this email address to subscribe to this email. To unsubscribe from this email, please reply with REMOVE in the subject line to discontinue receiving Monthly Newsletters via email from us.

Choose Your Recipients: This is where you'll choose which customers or groups of customers are selected to receive this particular email. Using the FileMaker Business Productivity Kit, you can choose to send your message to specific groups or individuals who have opted to receive email from you. FileMaker or a similar program then will merge in personalized information for each customer into an email and place the personalized emails in your email applications' Drafts folder where you can review them to ensure everything looks good.

Then you're ready to send away. Be sure to read the next section before you press "Send" to make sure your timing is just right!

Send Your Email: Timing of the email is important. Most only have a life of three days. Thus, if you are marketing to business people at their offices, sending early in the week is usually better than sending on a Friday.

If you're sending to homes, recent studies show that weekends--especially Sundays--are best. But good days for sending email change as often as the hot new color for fall, so just test for yourself to see what works best for you.

Mysterious Image Gaps in Gmail

Have you noticed Gmail ruining your beautiful HTML emails? Are mysterious gaps appearing between your images? Well fear not, there’s an easy fix.

Recently, Google made a change to the way Gmail handles images in HTML-formatted emails. I’ll probably never know why they did this, but I’m sure there was a good reason. This doesn’t change the fact that it has caused problems for many people, like myself, that create and send emails.  As a result of Google’s change to Gmail, any image in your email that is supposed to fit tightly against another image will now show a horizontal gap.

Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome users are the ones experiencing this mysterious gap or spacing. Don’t ask me how Internet Explorer managed to avoid this problem. Some of you may have dealt with a similar problem in Hotmail already. The fix for that was to add<style>img {display:block}</style> to the top of your HTML file.

While both Hotmail and Gmail have the same issue, you’ll need to do some extra work for Gmail since it ignores style definitions that are not “inline”. Like I said earlier, it’s quite easy to fix. You’ll just need to add style=”display:block” into the “img” tag for any images that you want to make sure have no gaps or spacing.

For example:

<img style=”display:block” src=”sample.gif” alt=”sample” />

Also, don’t forget to go back and check any email templates that you created and tested in the past but are still being sent  to your subscribers. Even though they looked fine even last month, this change could wreak havoc on your design now.

How to Add an iContact Email Newsletter Sign-Up Form to Your Facebook Fan Page

Updated Content Written By:
Peter Ghali, iContact Product Manager

With the strong growth of Facebook (over 500 million users with 41% of users logging in everyday), iContact is now providing you a way to use Facebook to grow your email subscribers. With iContact’s Facebook Application you can make it easy for your fans to sign up for your emails and interact with your Facebook pages – whatever is best for them!

In this blog post, we’ll describe how easy it is to create a Facebook signup form and begin to grow your lists!

If you have not already done so, enable Facebook in your Social Tools settings to expedite the process. See our 3^rd blog post in the Social Tools series for how to do that.

Before your Facebook Signup form will appear on your Facebook page, you must installiContact’s Facebook application.

To grow your subscriber base through Facebook, just follow these steps:

1. Go to My Contacts  < Sign-up Forms.
   
   As you can see below, we have made some improvements to the Sign-up Form page by adding Social Tools Sign-up Forms section. If you have not enabled a Facebook Account, you will see the screenshot below where you can easily and conveniently enable your Facebook account to connect to iContact by clicking the Enable Facebook button.
   
   
   
   Once you Enable Facebook, the Social Tools Section should look like the screenshot below. Note that it tells you which account you have enabled. In this case it is “Mark Tester.” Now all you have to do is click Create Facebook Form.
   
   

1. After clicking the Create Facebook Form button, you’ll have an opportunity to tell iContact which Facebook page you want to associate with the sign-up form you are about to create. You can also fill in a short description to encourage visitors to sign up for your email list.
   
   

1. Click the Next button and go through your normal sign-up form process. To make it easier for you, we have pre-selected Facebook’s color scheme for the sign-up form. The rest of the sign-up form creation process is identical to creating a new sign-up form. At the end of the process you get an opportunity to preview your Facebook sign-up form. You can see that below:
   
   
   
   Once you’ve taken a look at the preview, click the View Sign-up Forms button and you’ll be taken back to the Sign-up Forms page. You’ll notice the addition of the new sign-up form:
   
   

1. Now that you have created your Sign-up form and associated it with your Facebook page, you have to go to your Facebook page and install the iContact Facebook application which can be found here.

1. After that, you are all done! Here’s what the finished Signup form will look like:
   
   

We hope you found this helpful. Look for another post in our Social Tools series soon!

Grow Your List the Right email Way

Written By:
Jenni Williams, iContact Senior Product Marketing Manager

How you grow your email subscriber list matters. Grow it the wrong way, and you’ll risk being marked as a spammer, significantly harming your reputation and email delivery rate.

List growth methods fall into three buckets: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Stick to the Good, and you’ll see increased delivery rates and achieve better results from your email marketing campaigns because you will be reaching people who are interested in hearing from you.

The Good: Permission-based

When building your contact list, you must have permission from each and every contact on that list in order to send them emails. When you don’t have permission, your email qualifies as spam. When gathering permission, use an opt-in method, preferably with a double opt-in, where subscribers confirm their intent to join your list by clicking on a link in a confirmation email. If you don’t receive permission via opt-in, then you wander into Bad territory.

The Bad: Automatic Registration or Co-registration

Automatically opting a subscriber into your list after a purchase or transaction does not count as getting permission. Co-registration is having an opt-in on another publisher’s page to generate email subscriptions. These methods may seem acceptable under the assumption that permission is implied, however, without explicit permission, your email is still likely to be marked as spam and increase your complaint rates. As a result, most email service providers – including iContact – prohibit these practices.

The Ugly: Buying or Renting a List

Under no circumstances should you ever buy or rent a list of email addresses. This is the number one reason for high complaints, blacklisting, and reputation-pounding bounces! The subscribers on the list have not given permission for their email addresses to be sold, and they will not appreciate receiving an email from you.

Grow Your Good List into an Even Better List

The key to growing your list is two-fold. First, offer your customers plenty of places to sign up for your list, and second, promote the value of signing up for your email program – include examples of the deals, discounts, white papers, etc. that your subscribers can expect to receive (think about what is in it for them if they sign up, then articulate that benefit).

Following are some good ways to promote your email program:

• Include a sign-up form for your email program on your homepage within the header, footer, and/or navigation bars. Give this critical email marketing tool the real estate it deserves.
• Online retailers, promote your email program via cart checkout with an opt-in checkbox.
• Brick-and-mortar businesses, promote your program at point of sale – gather email addresses electronically (if you are able), keep a fish bowl and paper sign-up forms by the register, but make sure you clearly message to customers that they are signing up for your email program.
• Offer sign-up opportunities via social media marketing. Include a sign-up form on your Facebook page; send tweets about the benefits of joining your email list with a link back to your Web form, etc.
• At events and tradeshows, offer a giveaway for stopping by the booth and dropping in a card or swiping a badge and joining your email list (just be clear that registering for the giveaway also signs a customer up for your email program).
• Include messaging for your email program as well as the Web address for your Web form on your product packaging, brochures and other print materials.
• Train your customer service team to sign customers up for your email program.
• Include a forward-to-a-friend link in your emails to encourage your recipients to forward the content to someone they think might be interested in it. Make sure you include an opt-in form in your email to make it easy for friends to sign up.

Once you get new subscribers, be sure to embrace them immediately by sending a welcome email that thanks them for joining your list. You may even include a subscriber-only discount or coupon in the welcome email to help increase engagement. Follow these tips and principles, and you’ll be on your way to a more successful email marketing program.

What are some ways that you’ve found to be particularly effective for growing your list?