Online Marketing Business Blog

Landing Pages: The Key To Your Email Campaign's Success

Email marketeers spend all their time working with you, the designer, in coming up with relevant and great looking campaigns. Both you and your client do countless tests on subject headers, and ensure sharp targeting of the recipient profiles.

All set? Campaign launched and you see great results and click through performance. Yup, you got the email portion down pat. But your client isn't seeing any great increase in sales. And the reason is, only half the battle is won through email, the click-through to website conversion was lost along the way. Welcome to the world of landing pages.

What's That All About?

Recipients of your client's email campaign may click through to different areas of their website. This page which they land on is called the "landing page". Yes, practically any page on the website could be a landing page (and that's a very important consideration as well when designing a website). The important part is what the visitor should do next. Strong call-to-actions are staple here. As with all websites, landing pages have the task of funneling the visitor towards a goal, defined by your client.

The potential here is, through email marketing, you control the pages which recipients enter from. Many researchers have found that a web page that does not match the look and tone of the email can lead to visitors leaving the site.

One of the best stategies is to repeat the same offer on the landing page. Use the same or similar promotional copy that you did in the email. Things brings a sense of familiarity to the recipient/visitor and they are more likely to explore further and eventually convert (they did click the link in the first place didn't they?). The natural path is from clicking to converting, and for this instance, it starts at the email, all the way through to the website's goal point.

What This Means for the Designer

Since you can dictate the landing page from the email, you'll be able to put specific content on the landing page through a design that encourages the visitor to do what you want them to do. Design the landing page to fit with the goals of the email marketing effort that got the visitor to land there in the first place.

Creating custom landing pages for various promotions or communications can create a huge impact for marketing results. And your client will love you for it!

As a web designer or agency, you'll be presented with exciting challenges in conversion: designing for visitors to take a desired action. This naturally means and up-sell on your email marketing and design services, leading to additional revenue.

There's some highly focused design agencies who have specially tailored packages that includes email design together with landing pages. They're doing to right thing for themselves, and their client. Results breed recurring business. Helping your client achieve better results through their email marketing efforts is a win-win situation for them, and you.

Why You Need Email Authentication

Email is essential to our daily business lives. And for an email marketeer or any design/communication agency providing email marketing services, it is their livelihood. Email has been a convenient and cost-effective way for us to communicate, be it through peers, work or engaging our clients. Unfortunately, email is also very easily forged.

Email authentication proves the authenticity of your email and its source.

And the great thing is, its starting to grow in popularity amongst the large ISPs and corporate email servers in their effort to control incoming spam. This gives legitimate email marketeers and opportunity to differentiate themselves from spammers, and aids in better deliverability.

Authentication Methods

There are a number of popular authentication methods currently being used at the moment. SPF and SenderID looks for a file on your server that they can cross-reference with.This helps prove that the "From" address is legitimate according to your website domain. SPF and SenderID are easy to implement as it requires you to add a few extra lines to your domain records.

The 2 other popular methods, Domain Keys and DKIM, embeds code directly in the email itself. These methods make it much tougher to forge emails, but can also be tougher to implement for the sender, and the receiver.

Due to the various methods being used currently, empoaying all authentication types would perhaps be the safest method until a certain authentication standard has been reached and widely accepted among all the major ISPs. 

The Email Sender and Provider Coalition has provided a handy checklist for major ISPs and their authentication methods.

BlinkCampaign's Support for Email Authentication

To help your email campaigns look more reputable, and thereby increasing deliverability (not to mention aiding our server's sender reputation) BlinkCampaign supports multiple authentication methods to cover all bases:

SPF is automatically setup for all client accounts in BlinkCampaign. You can, however start to setup the DomainKeys / DKIM and Sender ID authentication methods for all your client's email campaigns.

To setup authentication, under your Agency Console, simple edit any of your client's account info. Look  for the Sending Domains Authentication box on the right. Provide the domain of the "From" email address that your client is using to send their email campaigns, and follow the next few simple steps to add those records in to the DNS records.

Official Authentication Standards

• DKIM.org
• DomainKey Library and Implementor's Tools
• Sender ID by Microsoft
• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Get 500 BlinkCampaign Credits for Free

For the month of June, tell us what you like or don't like about the new BlinkCampaign and get 500 credits on us. Drop us an email (please use the email link here) to tell us what you think, and we'll present you with your free credits within a few days. Be sure to let us know what features you'd like to see in upcoming releases as well!

Be sure to include your BlinkCampaign account information as well so that we can send the credits over to you.

Each account is entitled to this offer 1 time in the month of June.

BlinkCampaign v2 Release

If you're wondering if we were on a long holiday or simply won the lottery (though we wish you were right on both counts), we've been busy finishing up on BlinkCampaign v2, which was officially released this morning.

Along with a new, cleaner look, usability tweaks and performance upgrades, we've addressed other key areas that you've been asking about.

So what's new?

Loads actually. Some of which you won't be able to see (such as delivery and code tweaks), some of which you'll feel (performance), and some which are important to you (white labelling and customization).

New Dashboards

Less clutter, more functions, quicker loading. The new Dashboards in BlinkCampaign boasts way faster loading speeds, as well as a quick links box to help you get to your tasks more easily.

Improved Performance

For the tech geeks, we've overhauled all the markup and optimized the entire application, both on the frontend, as well as our delivery engine.

By the way, we've dropped support for IE6 for its horrendous performance and lack of good CSS support. We hope the browser dies a quick death soon.

Customizing Your Signup Process

Back in 2008, we released some APIs for you to create a signup form on your own website to allow site visitors to signup straight into BlinkCampaign's subscriber lsits. We've added the ability for you to define your own custom error page for the signup process, just in case the user somehow gets an error along the way.

All BlinkCampaign Pages Reflect Your Domain

Yep, we know that some of the system messages had our domain in it. We've cleaned it all up now and your unsubscribe, opt-in, error pages etc, all use your domain instead of ours. On top of that, all system emails (such as your client retrieving their password) will be using your name and email address instead of ours.

Email Tokens Are No Longer Case Sensitive

No worries though, your existing templates will still work. All BlinkCampaign tokens are now case-insensitive to prevent coding errors and errors in generating those dynamic content or links.

What's Next?

There's a whole ton of other stuff that we've done which we won't list here and bore you with. All through this month, you'll be seeing little upgrades and improvements along the way so be sure to watch out for them!

Subscriber List Signup API & More Email Credit Management Features

The BlinkCampaign team has just released a minor update to address some of our most commonly requested features.

Creating a Subscriber Signup Form

Start creating more email marketing opportunities for your clients! Now, you can add a signup form to any webpage and link it directly to your subscriber list. Each list has its own unique API so that you can still manage multiple list for each of your clients. The opt-in process is simple:

 

Of course, you're able to customize the entire process:

• Confirmation webpage
• Verification email (as well as the To and From addresses)
• Final confirmation page

All these features can be accessed under the subscriber list for each client. Just look to the right for the new options.

Managing your client's credits on a "per campaign" basis.

Previously on BlinkCampaign, we provided you the functionality for limiting your client's credits on a monthly basis. This lets you charge your client's $x, generating recurring revenue each month, without having to worry about them going over the limit, and possibly depleting the credits for your other client accounts.

We're happy to introduce a new mode of control: credits per campaign.

Now, you'll have the ability to set x amount of credits for each campaign for a particular client. By doing so, you can limit the amount of emails going out on a per-campaign basis, ensuring your client doesn't burst the credit bank before the month ends.

This flexibility also allows you to charge your client on a multiple tier level:

Base cost + 1st tier cost (after exceeding base) + any subsequent tier

Your base being the x amount of credits for each campaign. We'd love to hear more about other business models or ideas you may have on how you're charging your clients for email marketing services!

Coming soon: credit limit on a one-time basis, due to be released mid-February.

Permissions in Email Marketing: Educating Your Clients

Its a tricky situation: selling your email marketing services and educating your clients about permission based email marketing. Sure you'd love to close the deal, but just because your client's got a fishbowl full of business cards doesn't necessarily make email marketing right immediately.

Whether your using BlinkCampaign, or any other ESPs for that matter, permissions are taken very seriously and most ESPs have a zero-tolerance anti-spam policy.

Permission is simply determined by individuals who has given permission to contact them via email regarding a topic they've explicitly signed up for.

This usually comes in 2 forms:

• mailing list sign up through your client's website
• dropping a business card which states that your client will be contacting them regarding various offers, promotions, etc.

Of course, you'd also need to check out the CAN-SPAM definition for more detailed definitions.

But I've got tons of addresses collected over the net through the years!

So they say. To your client, it may seem that each address is an opportunity cost. However, spammers work on the same principle of throwing a wide net to hook a few. It works (and therefore SPAM is still around) but its not right. Needless to say, it doesn't bode well for your client's reputation as well. ESPs (us included) will cease to support such practices and essentially, you and your client will be back at square one.

Selling the idea and benefits of permission based email marketing

Your client's options may seem limited for the on-start and they have to understand that building a good list takes time. However,with patience and good practice, the benefits or email marketing really start to shine.

Subscriber retention and loyalty

People who have opted in, would usually stay on your list, provided content is relevant to what they've opted in to in the first place. Send your subscribers newsletters if they've signed up for it. Not promotional emails. There's tons more on this in an earlier post.

Hook, line, bait and sinker

As you have more people on your list that are starting to get engaged, they're also likely to be more interested in what you have to say. Soon, further interaction could come in the form of preferences, polls, feedback as well as segmentation by interests or profiles.

Benefits all around

Subscribers get relevant information, your client improves customer relations and loyalty, your services are retained based on excellent reports, and the ESPs continue to deliver timely content on your behalf with less deliverability issues. Its a win-win situation all around.

Take a step back (you, and your client) and have a look at your junk mail folder. You and your client wouldn't want your content to end up there. Its valuable time and money wasted which could've been put to better use in building a solid subscriber list.

More Generic Domains To Deliver From

BlinkCampaign has just released a set of generic domains for you to choose from.

Under your Agency Module, simply go to Customize > Settings:

Select one of our 3 new generic domains:

• emailmkting.com
• poweremailcampaign.com
• simpleedm.com

Your login URL as well as the web version links, unsubscribe links, etc will reflect this new domain.

Do note that any existing campaign will generate an error once you swap to a new domain so ensure that all your campaigns have expired before making a switch.

Deciphering Those Bounce Error Codes

If you've been conducting some campaigns recently, you might've notice the new swanky  (but rather daunting) bounce reports being generated from BlinkCampaign.

Here's a quick low-down on what those error codes really mean:

500

The recipient's email server is not recognizing the email that was sent out or was not formatted in the way the server expected. This could occur for longer emails.

501

This is due to syntax errors in the email address, outside of those that are automatically cleansed by BlinkCampaign. Some of your client's email servers may not recognize, and do not have addresses with underscores for example. This is also indicative of an invalid email address.

502

The mail was not delivered because it is not supported by a particular server. This may the case for email campaigns with a HTML only version (no plain text version) and the recipient's email server can only receive plain text format.

503

This usually indicates a problem with the network and communication to the recipient's email server.

504

A particular valid command was not implemented on the recipient's email server, and thus, cannot deliver the mail. This is a rare issue.

550

This is probably the most common bounce error you'll receive for your email campaigns. Basically it means the mail was not delivered due any number (but not limited to) the following reasons in plain English:

• The account doesn't exist (The recipient might have closed the account or left an organization
• The recipient's email server requires authentication (which has to be manually setup and varies from server to server
• Certain ISPs require you to have the same From address as the domain where the mail is being sent from
• The recipient's server is down and has given up retrying x number of times

552

In a nutshell, your recipient's mailbox is full and needs some spring cleaning before your email campaigns can get through.

553

This error code means the email address is invalid. The difference from a suspended or closed account is that this email account never existed in the first place.

554

Yet another sort of invalid email address or does not exist anymore. This error is quite typically specified and returned from Yahoo:

554 delivery error: This user doesn't have a Yahoo.com account

554 delivery error: Sorry your message to [email address] cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued.

Other less common bounce errors you may encounter

421 - the email server or ISP is unavailable. This may be caused by many things such as the server administrator stopping the mail service, or rebooting the mail server.

450 - The email server could not access the recipient's mailbox. This could be caused by a process on the recipient's email server tidying up the mailbox (think archiving in Outlook), the mailbox could be corrupt, or the remote mailbox may be stored on another server which is currently offline. It may also be caused by the remote mail server not wanting to accept the mail (user may have blocked the domain, blacklisting, etc).

451 - The email has bee aborted by the recipient's server due to overload. This is due to high traffic at certain times and prevents the successful delivery of the message.

452 - Insufficient disk space on the recipient's email server. This can occur when an ISP's mail server goes down, and when it comes back up, there is a huge spike in traffic as mails may have been queued for delivery or frequent attempts to re-try mails for the ISPs email account users due to the downtime.

We hope this analysis of bounces helps you understand your subscriber lists better. Analyzing your bounce mails is a great way to further profile your subscriber list and also help you determine which time and day would be the best delivery day for your email campaigns.

Aug - Sept Product Updates

Bounce Reporting

We know how important bounce management is. Properly and accurately tracking your bounce can help your client further analyze their subscriber list and integrity.

The BlinkCampaign team has just released a more detailed bounce report integrated into each campaign's reporting module. With the new bounce reports, we have further broken down your bounces into error codes, as well as bounce by domains. We also hope to achieve further transparency in our delivery services with this information.

More Sub-Domains

Yup, we've already got'em, as well as the ability to create your own custom domains. In the coming months, we'll be registering more generic domains for you to use on BlinkCampaign, especially for those of our users who don't have the ability at the moment to create their own custom domains, or are really unsure how. As we start implementing more domains, simply click on "Customize" under your agency module and select from one or more of our generic domain names.

Bulk Appending Your Subscriber Status

Keeping your subscriber list up-to-date and relevant is one of the most important points in email marketing. Also due to be released in mid-September, the BlinkCampaign Team will be rolling out a Bulk Append feature to allow you to update your list through uploading an updated CSV file. This is especially useful for managing large lists, especially when your client has just sent over an updated list of unsubscribes that they happened to uncover from another separate system. We really hope this new feature will take the pain out of your work in trying to marry and merge various subscriber lists from your client.

Email Campaign Integrated Spam Assessment

Paid for some spam tests elsewhere previously? That's hogwash in our opinion. Coming soon, you'll be able to run your campaign through our online spam assessment engine. With the relevant results, you can help enhance the deliverability of your campaign by tweaking your subject headers and copy straight within your Campaign module. Besides analyzing text copy, we'll also be helping out in throwing in a little spell checker and link validation, just to help make life easier.

Again, these features and updates are free for all BlinkCampaign users. Heck, BlinkCampaign is free for anyone to use for sending email campaigns for up to 5 recipients, just so you can have a go and experience what its all about.

If you're interested in signing up for a free Blink Campaign account or learn more about how BlinkCampaign can help you (that means you, web designers, developers and creative agencies) generate more revenue from email marketing. check out our website and learn how others like yourselves has taken email marketing to a whole new business level.

Online Marketing For Web Designers: Its Getting Implicit

As the web matures in sophistication, the technical demands from web designers have been increasing rapidly. Back in 2000 when most of us designers were simply concentrating on HTML and some javascript, its hard to ignore the demands of our clients for other services such as implementation of Content Management Systems (CMS), Blogs, Forums and other web applications and platforms. Of course, SEO and online marketing have become the norm in many web projects as well.

Stemming from the creative circle, I tended to shy away from such requests and instead, left the research and work to web developers, who were in a much better position than myself to be dabbling in such technologies.

So what's the big deal to web designers now? Loads when you have to seriously consider the advent of technologies like AJAX, and factor functionalities into your design. Its not just pure aesthetics (and should've never been in the first place, though many of my industry colleagues in the advertising field would beg to differ) anymore.

Getting into the game

Though we're trained designers by profession, that shouldn't stop anyone from upping their game and improving their net worth. Understanding the quirks and fundamentals of online marketing can seriously put you ahead over the next freelancer (or web agency). We are in the business of the web after all.

Thankfully for us less tech-savvy and mildly experimental sort, there are tons of web applications out there that have greatly aided us creative people in further pushing the envelope and delivering solutions, not just designs, to our clients. Incidentally, the easiest and most relate-able service we can provide to our clients is online marketing.

Take The ALA Survey

I've always been a fan at ALA and their resources.

Their annual survey is on and I'd like to help spread the word for designers, developers, information architects, and even online marketers, to take their survey for people who make website.

Help to craft a genuine picture of the way the web is designed, developed and marketed worldwide.

Blink Campaign v1.3 Release

BlinkCampaign's v1.31 release patches in some new functionalities, as well as enhancements done on the system level to tackle the ever changing environment in email deliverability. We've also set the base framework ready for our eCard module integration and will be investing more time in the new module to meet the upcoming demands for the festive period.

'Tis The Season To Be Busy

Yup, we're getting ready to pack a punch this coming festive season. The BlinkCampaign team is busy working in integrating an eCard module, targetted to be released in early to mid-October.

What's that again?

An eCard Module. We know how your corporate clients love those flashy animated stuff. Stuff that regular HTML emails don't support. Be it this coming Christmas and Hanukkah or 2009, there's an eCard to be designed for every festive occasion.

Why we love eCards

Designers like us

• Its something more visually creative to attempt
• Its a great challenge to blend your client's brand and message with the season
• We can fire up Flash again and hone our animation skills
• We get to create AND deliver eCards, giving us a nice little festive income bonus
• Its great for the environment!

Clients

• They just love those flashy stuff
• Its way faster and more cost-effective
• They get a great excuse to send one out whenever there's a chance
• They'll know exactly who've opened their eCards and who to strike off the list
• The marketing or PR department can simply type their CEO's name instead of trying to forge his signature (Honest, I've heard stories)

Tip For The Day: Define a HTML Newsletter Standard

Designers out there occasionally gripe about the lack of creative expression in template based designs. However, from a functional point of view, its important to maintain a "standard" by properly templating your HTML newsletter.

Subscribers recognize and know what to expect

Its important for each issue to always standardize where the feature story is, the tips column, latest news headlines, and whatever else you've got going in your HTML newsletters. Recipients know what to expect and can comfortably go through each issue with ease.

A tried and tested template is less prone to display errors

The biggest thorn in the designer's side is developing compliant HTML newsletters. Once you've got one down pat, stick with it. It helps prevent any unforeseen errors and time consuming testing through all the various online and offline email clients again.

Writers know exactly how much to write

With a standard template, the content writers for the newsletter can summarize their article accordingly and estimate how much word length and space they've got to play with. This prevents unnecessary tweaks to the design should Joe the journalist gets ink-happy and start pushing a 300 word feature article for you to squeeze and publish in the coming month's HTML newsletter.

How One Agency Is Making Good Money From An Email Marketing Business Model

I'm using a fictional name and agency for the post below as requested by the interviewee. He has agreed to share his story on the basis that I do not use his actual company's name for strategic business reasons.

I've recently noticed a flurry of activity on our BlinkCampaign logs from a particular region. New accounts were being setup once every 2 -3 weeks and all were using a different email from a same domain. I Googled the domain a bit, came up with the agency's website and got in touch with Dan Riker, a professional web designer and now business owner of SpeakOut Communications.

We exchanged a few emails and finally, had a chat over MSN to talk about how his agency has been using BlinkCampaign to grow his online marketing services. Why I was really interested in his story was that not only did he use BlinkCampaign as a platform to sell email broadcasting services, he was actually selling the entire platform to companies, who's individual regional marketing departments wanted the convenience of setting up and sending their own email campaigns. Each instance of Dan's platform went out to the companies at a cool five figure rate and "license" renewable on an annual basis. Read on to find out how he's been doing it.

Be Wary Of How You Label Your "Unsubscribe" Link

File this under the "good-to-know" section for your email marketing developments.

Apparently, certain popular spam filters such as Spam Assassin consider the term "opt-out" to be spammy. Coupled with common design practices such as including two unsubscribe links (one at the header and the other at the footer of the email), this could be a double-whammy to your email design.

How about "unsubscribe"? Well, I've actually tried it again with Spam Assassin and it seemed to help. Unfortunately, I got word that "unsubscribe" may get flagged by other spam filters. I can hear the "OMGs!!!" right now...

The alternative is using other words like "remove" or phrases such as "take me off this list" and "I do not wish to receive anymore emails". Don't get overly creative. Be short, sharp and to the point. The more ambiguous it gets, the more likely someone's going to hit the "report spam" button. If its not a properly constructed or recognizable phrase, yup, there may be a tendency for the phrase to get caught by the spam filters as well.

Incidentally, the phrase "click here" is considered spammy by many spam filters as well. (Let's hear another round of "OMGs!!!")

Co-Branding To Enhance Your Agency's Awareness

If you've tried other ESPs (Email Service Providers) previously, you might've notice some ESPs slap on their logo at the end of your email campaign. It usually looks something like "powered by [ESP Logo]" or "sent using [ESP logo]".

Coming from an ESP's point of view, this is a great form of viral marketing and getting the ESP's brand and service across to every single recipient that receives an email campaign from the ESP's system.

At BlinkCampaign, we've opted-out of doing this as we pride ourselves at being a white-labeled solution. However, this doesn't stop you, as an agency from doing your own viral marketing when developing and sending email campaigns out for your clients. This not only generates great awareness for your agency, brand and services, it reaches out to everyone on all your client's mailing lists. And done so legally as well.

Naturally, the toughest part is seeking permission from your client. You could offer your client one of 2 options:

1. Co-branding

Explain to your client that your basic email marketing and delivery services comes with a small footnote about your agency. Tell them about option 2 if they're not too keen on having your agency's logo on their email campaigns.

2. No agency branding

Conduct email campaigns and delivery them without your own agency's logo at the footer of the email. You might want to charge your client a slightly higher premium for this. Explain to them that the default pricing and package comes with a small footnote about your agency and its email marketing services.

If option 1 is available to you, go ahead and market your agency's services. Do exercise discretion of course, as the email campaign is still for and about your client.

We're always looking out for great tips and ideas for generating more revenue with BlinkCampaign. If you've got a tip on how BlinkCampaign has helped you or your agency generate more revenue through email marketing, we'd love to hear about it!

Forward-a-Friend, Then?

I've been going through some past issues of email newsletters and promotional EDMs which I've collected over the years. It then dawned on me that many email marketers had taken for granted, something that should've fundamentally been there in the first place.

The lack of a "Subscribe" button.

Its really a curious find. Perhaps due to the short-sightedness of some email marketers, having their email campaign forwarded is already an achievement in their context. However, such hit-and-run tactics have little long term benefits. Why pass on any (every) opportunity to grow your mailing list?

I've posted some tips previously on creating good newsletters. In essence, good email newsletters should provide value and information of interest to your recipient. Now if recipient, John, feels that Jane shares a similar interest and might be keen on this month's edition of your email newsletter, John would hit the "forward-a-friend" button. That's free, bonus targeted marketing for you. Now why stop there? Let Jane subscribe directly so that she can receive future email newsletters from you, which have topics of interest to her. One more valuable permission-based addition to your mailing list. Nice.

Ditto for ad-hoc promotional campaigns. If John thinks Jane might be interested in ABC Inc's latest promotional offering, he'd forward it to her, just to spread the love around. Allowing Jane to subscribe from the email campaign means she's willing and keen to receive more in future.

Yep, allowing your recipients to unsubscribe easily is important. But creating an opportunity for a targeted lead to opt-in is equally as important and provides long-term benefits. Go on, call your designer now and re-look into that email newsletter template. You'll may even be pleasantly surprised that each email campaign you conduct might actually generate more addresses for your mailing list.

Sender Reputation

Being email marketeers, we all know that having a "good reputation" is essential to getting our messages into our recipient's inbox. But, do you know what are the factors that affect a sender's reputation?

Although white-listing your servers does partially attribute successful delivery, good sender reputation cannot be bought. Although proper email authentication protocols and setting up of Sender Policy Frameworks (SPFs) do play a part, there are 3 main factors that most large ISPs use in establishing your sender reputation.

These are:

1. Spam complain rate
   This is the percentage of people marking your email campaign as spam
2. Non-existent email addresses
   The percentage of hard bounces from your campaign, due to email addresses that may no longer exist
3. Spam traps
   ISPs often turn unused email addresses into spam traps. If your campaign continually hit these email addresses, the ISPs will start to take a closer watch

Blink Campaign v1.3 Release

We've been busy back in the R&D department for the past month or so, scrambling to put together the next enhancement pack for Blink Campaign. From further usability testing and feedback, we've made a number of subtle improvements in the interface as well as the backend engines. So without further adieu, we are happy to present *drum roll* v1.3.

7 Ideas For Creating More Effective And Creative Email Newsletters

Sick of your run-of-the-mill, standard newsletter templates? Even if your client's offerings aren't of the "WOW" variety, your designs can still offer a little something extra that makes it more enjoyable to read. Think "magazine" as opposed to "newspaper". Adding some fun into your email newsletter designs will help increase your recurring click-open rate. If your client's recipients like it, they're likely to be eagerly anticipating the next release.

Note that the ideas below are not limited to the designer laying out the email newsletter, but to the entire email marketing team.

Image Based Emails - Optimizing For Images-Off

The old saying "A picture speaks a thousand words" holds true for many marketeers. Even as we understand the limitations of email clients and HTML email in general, your clients will constantly have the need for creating visually arresting email designs. Furthermore, due to the unique nature of certain industries, you really can't run away from images playing a big part in your email campaign.

Image Source is one of the leading providers of quality stock images. Since their nature of business is solely reliant on images, it is impossible to not include any of their "products" for their email campaigns.

Tip For The Day: Style Your ALT Tags

We've stressed many times the importance of ALT tags in HTML email. Unfortunately for us designers (and those good folks who place a strong emphasis on usability and accessibility), here's another thing to note on your ALT tags: Remember to style your ALT tags when necessary. They may be illegible on a background color

16 "Blink-Ready" Newsletter Templates

Newsletter templates, with its somewhat complex layout structure, can sometimes be a pain to design and code. Coupled with the inconsistencies in email client display, troubleshooting your templates could take hours to days.

To help Blink Campaign users get started asap, we've compiled a set of 16 simple newsletter templates which are ready to use with Blink Campaign. Our custom tokens have been included, and all you have to do is slap your client's logo on, or start tweaking some of the colors and font styles.

We hope these set of templates will be a useful starting block as well as a simple reference guide on how Blink Template tokens can be used in dynamic email newsletter template designs.

Download the set of 16 email newsletter templates (ZIP file, 583kb)

Blink Campaign's Guide For New Users

Recently, we've had some request from our agency users for a quick "How-to" guide to get their own clients started on using Blink Campaign themselves.

Well, we've slowly consolidated all the information from our support section and compiled them in a simple word document which you can then edit, brand and re-send to your own clients.

Blink Campaign was always meant to be a white-label solution for agencies to leverage upon and sell their online marketing services while we concentrate on the technical nitty gritty, deliverability, and all the other stuff which you really shouldn't be bothered with.

If you're interested to learn more about Blink Campaign or sign-up for a free account, do drop us an email as we're working on getting our website and online registration up.

Download the Blink Campaign New User Guide (Word Doc, 250kb)

Should You Outsource Email Delivery?

If you've been doing email marketing for some time now, this question always pops up at one time or another: "Can't my email software do that? I could use the same email program to do email marketing just like sending ordinary emails.". At this juncture, we normally bite our lower lip for a moment, and proceed on with the following anecdote.

Your email campaigns are like poster ads. You could either start going around town yourself and sticking them up on walls and bus stops, or get a proper distribution team to do the legwork for you.

At which moment, the usual response from them would be some silence.

A (Near) Perfect Email Campaign

OSIM is Asia's leading brand in healthy lifestyle products, and a user of Blink Campaign. Active8 (the fellas behind Blink Campaign) has previously been supporting them in the design and delivery of their email campaigns, until we've decided to focus more on delivery while OSIM took their design requirements in-house around 2 years ago.

OSIM's online campaigns have improved tremendously, comparatively when they first started out about 3 - 4 years ago. A recent campaign of theirs really caught my eye:

Tip For The Day: Don't Use "Click Here", And Other Seemingly Harmless Words

You may be taken by surprise to find out that the word "click here" is actually being filtered by a number of spam filters. We use it all the time (in our websites) that we seldom think twice about using it for our email campaigns. For the lack of putting any further thoughts into our hyperlink labels, this "spammy" phrase can actually throw your campaign into your recipient's junk folder. Thank the unimaginative spammers for putting "click here" on the spam filters' radar.

Along with the other obvious "spammy" words (most of which consists of some medical term for performance enhancing drugs, and the tons of creative slang words that makes a man, well, a man), here are a few other things to look out for which may not be as obvious:

• Special Promotion
• Important
• 50% off (or any other numeral)
• Free
• Bonus
• Discount
• Prizes

Other things to keep a lookout for is ALL CAPS, aLtErNaTiNg caps, large font sizes, and special characters such as exclamation marks, dollar signs and percentages.

Keep these phrases at the top of your head and try to tweak your copy accordingly around the body content area, and especially so in your subject header. Do leave your comments here if you've got others (I'm sure there's tons out there) that I haven't covered.

Who's Your Daddy? Your Client's Domain May Be At Ransom

The web has been recently abuzz when some light was shed on web registrar, GoDaddy.com, on abuse complaints stemming from email marketing. And its a real BIG DEAL to legitimate email marketeers and email service providers like Blink Campaign (Heck, our domain is registered with GoDaddy!).

So what's the big deal? For a start, GoDaddy is one of the premiere domain registrars for the web. A good bunch of our own clients are on GoDaddy. Now get this:

• Your client has their domain registered with GoDaddy
• Your client uses a third party email marketing service (namely you, the external online marketing/design agency) to advertise their GoDaddy registered site.
• IF there are any spam complaints from any campaign sent that go to GoDaddy, Go Daddy will charge you a "spam complaint management fee" of a whopping $200!
• AND if due to the above, your client decides to leave GoDaddy for another registrar, GoDaddy will hold your domain ransom until a "release fee" of $75 is paid off to them!

Getting Creative With Images Blocking

Most email clients, both online and offline, block images by default. The age old practise of web accessibility becomes ever more important in instances such as HTML email design.

Usage of ALT tags should be mandatory. But I don't just mean putting in ALT tags just to explain what's behind the image. Go one up and get your recipients to download the images and entice them to update their preferences in their email client so that future images from your campaign will be automatically downloaded. Gmail offers a similar function:

HTML Email and Lotus Notes

In a perfect world, all email clients would render our designs the way we intended it to be. Seeing as how browser compatibility for the web is still some way off, email client standardization would be eons away from reaching display nirvana.

Together with Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes is a very difficult email client to comply your designs with. Furthermore, there is a general lack of concrete and reliable information on how Lotus Notes renders HTML.

IBM has claimed that as of 2006, Lotus Notes continues to be on 125 million seats - Wikipedia

A general rule of thumb is: for B2C campaigns, or personal email addresses, you can generally ignore Lotus Notes support. However, be aware that many large corporations continue to use Lotus Notes, and its impossible to tell which ones are still on the platform.

Steer Your Clients From Being Spammers

Spammers work on the notion of bulk mailing with a low conversion rate. That's why they require millions of email addresses for it to be of any real ROI. Unfortunately, it still works to a certain extent as there are recipients who still respond to spam, though unimaginable as it may seem. And its these sorts of recipients that are still keeping spammers in business.

Spammers steal almost everything they can get their hands on. Besides email addresses, they highjack server accounts and bandwidth. Worse still, some spammers use auto-generated email addresses just for sheer luck that a few of those might actually be valid email addresses.

Newsletters: How Often And When?

There's no real hard and fast rule (you knew I was going to say that, didn't you?) when it comes to the frequency of email newsletters. Depending on your client's profile, each would have their own unique demands and requirements, and so would their recipients.

Your best gauge on frequency for each of your clients would have to be from the horse's mouth. You'll know that its too often, or not often enough when you see the unsubscribes climbing.

Not often enough

As a rough aggregate, anything less than once a month is not often enough. Your client's recipients will start to forget about you. When they suddenly receive a surprise newsletter 3 months after they've first signed up, don't be surprised if they unsubscribe, or even worse, forgot that they actually signed up and simply marked you as spam.

Too often

Anything more than once a week is too often. Unless your client's subscribers have specifically signed up for more frequent mailings. Or they've signed up for multiple topics, each handled by a different department. As with daily spam, recipients will start to tire and get cheesed off by the frequency of your mailings. Again, don't be surprised if you're starting to get marked as spam.

Right, so based on the above, you've got to find your magic number by testing, testing, testing.

Ok, so when is the best time?

I"ll simply break it down into 2 types of newsletters

Professional interests

These are newsletters which recipients have signed up for out of interest or benefit to their professional knowledge. They're usually read briefly during office hours or tea breaks at work. Monday's are bad as everyone's just settling in and scoping out what they have to do for the rest of the week. Busy, busy, busy. I advise you to send these sort of newsletters mid-week, on Wednesdays or Thursdays where recipients are more settled in at work and would probably not have that many things on their mind.

Personal interests

These newsletters usually for into the category of the recipient's personal interests such as entertainment, hobbies, home improvement or any other topics or extra curricular activities which a relevant to the recipient's interest. For this sort of leisurely read at home, it is best to send them on a Saturday night or Sunday morning where it'll be waiting in the recipient's inbox by the time they check through their mail on Sunday.

Oops... Re-Sending An Erroneous Campaign

Just this month, one of our clients made a rather big mistake. He was sending his company's regular monthly email newsletter when he accidentally selected the wrong contents to be sent out. This resulted in his recipients receiving the base template with the default "lorem ipsum" text instead of the actual content that he had prepared beforehand. Hey, we're only human and make mistakes from time to time. We too are guilty of sending out a campaign with the wrong hyperlink, typos and other embarrassing mistakes.

Due to this, a number of things went wrong:

1. The content looked like spam due to the mash of unrecognizable words
2. The open rate was way lower as the preview pane of most email clients simply showed the gibberish text
3. Needless to say, click rate was 0
4. Unsubscribes spiked a little as recipients weren't sure where this email was coming from

The newsletter was really important to this company because they only get in touch with their recipients once a month. So they took a clever step and made a decision to re-send the campaign again, but with a little tongue-in-cheek humor. At the top where the main feature story usually is, he added another post:

Bounce Management: Don't Just Look At Your Open Rates

Many of us are guilty of this: looking and focusing on the click-open and click-through rates first each time we view our reports. That's fine and all but the reports don't just stop there. Too many a time, we've seen our users ignore their bounce rates. Bounce rates could indicate certain problems with the particular list.

Bounces reveal a lot about your client's list. If you've yet to make any sense of the types of bounces that Blink Campaign tracks, here's a quick revision:

Soft bounce

Soft bounces are temporary errors that Blink Campaign receives from the recipient's email server. There are a number of reasons why soft bounce occurs:

• Recipient's email server is down
• Recipient's email server is busy
• Recipient's mailbox is full and cannot accept any more mail at the moment

Blink Campaign resends soft bounces a number of times more, at a rate and frequency that would not seem "spammy" to the recipient's email server. If that still doesn't get it through, we finally flag it as soft bounce in your reports, ready for you to try again in the next campaign.

Hard bounce

Now hard bounces are where the important stuff is. The main reason for hard bounce is an expired or non-existent email address. We never retry to send hard bounces, simply because the address never existed or ceased to exist anymore. These addresses are immediately flagged as hard bounce in your reports.

Now why is this important? Its because email servers will start noticing and blocking you when you try to keep sending emails to bad addresses. Its also because of this that we remove these addresses from your cleansed list and flag them as hard bounce. You or your client should then decide what to do with them separately (we advise to thrash it most of the time).

Get back to your reports and check your hard bounces. If your hard bounces are rather random and none of them are coming from major ISPs (eg. Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, AOL) then you're fine.

However, if you start seeing a bunch of hard bounces from the same domain, its time to start sounding the alarm and looking into it. For example, say you got 20 hard bounces from AOL addresses, there's a good chance that AOL may be blocking you.

There's a number of things to look into. Firstly, have a look at your content and check out if there are any words that may trigger spam filters. Stuff like big caps, alternating caps, lots of !!! or special characters are a definite no-go. Naturally, spammy-words play a huge part too. Don't assume that you can hide behind your list because its permission based, or that our white-listed servers are bulletproof. Many a time, its content, not email delivery that triggers the filters resulting in blockage.

But if you notice that your content is perfectly ok, or its really a certain domain that's throwing out an unusually high number of hard bounces out, then we've definitely got a problem on our hands. If you ever face such a case, its time to get in touch with us or whichever email delivery service you're using.

Keep track of your hard bounces and don't just focus on your click-opens. The core to successful email marketing is deliverability. Its pointless if your knockout designs or excellent copy doesn't even reach the recipient's inbox.

Selling Email Marketing Services

Email marketing is slowly becoming part of the core of many design and marketing agencies around the world. Its grown in the recent years to be widely accepted as a standard business service from agencies and vendors. Now with Blink Campaign as your primary tool for conducting and providing email marketing services, we'd like to share some ideas with you on how you can pitch your service to your clients and prospects.

Tangible benefits and ROI

E-mail drove $7.7 billion in consumer sales and $8.8 billion in business-to-business sales in 2005. Both those numbers will rise by roughly $1 billion in 2006, and by 2011 should be well above $37 billion combined.
- Direct Marketing Association

I won't elaborate much here on how and why email marketing works. There's tons of articles and statistics on the web about email marketing and its benefits. And its precisely this fact that's probably the single biggest selling point for you. Email marketing works, with tangible results and much more cost-effective than traditional advertising mediums.

With email, you further bridge the gap between your client and their customers. Direct marketing ensures that customers don't need to remember your client's last on-air ad or something from the print medium. Together with personalisation through proper segmentation, you can send targeted campaigns for your client, which is far more effective than a generic brochure.

Also email, comparatively to its print counterparts and other offline communications, has the highest ROI ratio.

You can "tune-up" your campaigns

If you're speaking to your client's marketing department, they would understand, and agree, that traditional marketing activities have frequently been costly trial and errors. In fact, its sometimes difficult to tell exactly which area the costly error was in.

Leveraging on an email marketing service like Blink Campaign, show your clients the detailed campaign reports generated. Advise them on how easy it is to identify and tweak something that's not working. Show them how easy and fast it is. Saving your client time and money will definitely get you in their good books.

Once bitten, twice shy

For clients who've tried email marketing previously and dropped it, try to understand why. did they have a high unsubscribe rate? Poor bounce management? Ask them permission to share some of their campaigns and reports to help them pinpoint the failure of their campaigns. Naturally, offer them your automated solution for this. You can provide them with automated processes such as one-click unsubscribes, flag and manage bounces, topped with your own email marketing expertise and knowledge.

Creative people, get creative

The flexibility of the web has opened countless creative and effective possibilities of communication. Leverage on the same flexibility to tailor ideas and solutions that are specific for your client's marketing campaigns. Jump from promotional mailers to product updates to bi-monthly newsletters in a Blink (sorry, we couldn't resist).

Get creative. Devise integrated campaigns to generate interest. Teasers, Hollywood style. Get back in touch with customers who may have let slip your client's name. Ask your client for input, get them involved. Get them excited! If you get your client thinking and considering the possibilities, they may even come up with something brilliant themselves and get you to execute it.

Integrate with your client's website

Show your client working examples of synergies between their website, and perhaps an email design. Show them how you can reinforce their branding from the web, to the inbox. Even better, go one up and conduct a campaign directly to your client. If you're using Blink Campaign, any campaigns you conduct to a subscriber list of 5 or less is free! So go ahead, knock their socks off, and start building your email marketing services.

Promotion Or Newsletter? Know The Difference

At present, email marketing is still rather deeply rooted in most people as promotion or sales based. Most of our own clients (end marketeers, not Blink Campaign users) would send out a promotional email once or twice a month, getting their recipients to sign-up for something, introduce their new products or spread word about a great sale coming up.

This sort of direct marketing has already established itself as an effective method of marketing. In fact, its so deeply rooted that we've noticed many people use the same lingo/tone/impression/content in general with their email newsletters.

Email promotions focus on ACQUISITION, email newsletters focus on RETENTION.

Promotional based email's primary goal is for the recipient to click on the call-to-action. Taking a cue from Google Analytics, the email is designed and laid out to "funnel" the recipient through a persuasive process, giving the final push at the call-to-action. Even the copy is written solely for this purpose. The end "goal" would be either to register/participate in something (survey, contents, etc), download, go to the product page on the website, and anything else under the sun that prompts the recipient to take some immediate action. As immediate action is required from the recipient, promotional emails are very short-term. If the recipient doesn't take the intended call-to-action, the entire value of the promotional email is lost.

Blink Campaign v1.2 Release

Since the release of Blink Campaign, we've received loads of valuable feedback from our users, who have basically shaped this feature release. From v1 to v1.1x, we've been focusing more on tweaking and fine-tuning backend matters such as performance and deliverability. For the v1.2 release, we've enhanced more on the frontend UI as well as end-user features. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to all that have used, helped and contributed to Blink Campaign.

Agency Logo and platform name

In our prior version of Blink Campaign, you had to add in a name for the application or your own agency name. Logo upload was optional and served to increase the branding visibility of the agency.

With this new release, you now have the option to show/hide the platform name which would allow you to either have a larger (longer width) logo without the text getting in the way.

Then

Now

To hide the platform name, simply login to your account and go to "Customise". You can show/hide the plain text by selecting "Show my logo only".

Custom Domain setup

Yup, its finally here and available to setup on your own! Setting up your own custom domain allows you to hide our domain from your clients while using your own custom domain.

To setup your very own custom domain, simply login to your account and go to "Customise". The custom domain setup is available right at the top of the page. Just follow the few simple steps and you'll be ready in no time!

Do note that you might require your system/website administrator's assistance in setting up a cname instance for creating your custom domain.

Custom CSS class style within <largetext> token

For further integration to the WYSIWYG editor, the <largetext> token now supports inline style definitions.

This allows you to define a CSS class directly in the token, instead of creating a <span> or <div> tag to wrap around it. The CSS styling will also be directly reflected in the editor under the custom classes. To include a custom CSS style to your block of editable text, simply use <largetext style="Custom Style Class Name" />. Example: <largetext style="style1" />

Uploading email templates

I'll be the first to admit that we've been a little strict with HTML markup for upload into Blink Campaign. In addition, some non-compliant, non XHTML valid custom hacks were required for templates to be displayed correctly in various email clients (thank you for the pain, Outlook 2007). With this new release, designers are free to explore and hack away if necessary to ensure consistent visual layout across the more popular email clients. Blink Campaign will only check for valid tokens as well as ensure that a minimum ##UnsubscribeLink## is available in the email template for CAN-SPAM compliance.

Go on, get your creative hats on again and start developing more templates with greater ease!

If you would like to know more about Blink Campaign, or have any thoughts/feedback/criticisms/compliments, do get in touch with us.

Good and Bad Email Newsletters

Developing a good newsletter can help your client see ROI in their online marketing efforts with you. Leading to further establishing a great working relationship between the both of you, as well as passive recurring income through email marketing as well as your client's regular correspondences through their email newsletter.

Here are a few simple good and bad points you should consider when developing your client's email newsletters.

The Good

A good email newsletter has to be of value to the recipient.

• Enjoyable to read (offers at least one: interesting, relevant or useful information)
• Easy to sign up to (didn’t create barriers or ask for too much information.)
• From a “good source” - known for expertise in the field, or a well-known brand.
• Easy to navigate - well designed, looks good, easy to read more then one article.
• Well written content
• Easy to share (read: forward a friend function)
• Offers exclusive content (special offers not available anywhere else)
• Arrives at times that are convenient

The Bad

• No useful content - nothing useful. no special offers. no new information.
• Hard to read - maybe it’s one big image that’s blocked and appears to be an empty email. Maybe the design and layout of the text makes it hard to read and decipher.
• Ignores permission - comes too frequently (or feels like it does) - or more frequently than promised. Or, the sign up appears to generate lots of third party mailings. (read about my experience with this in an earlier post.)
• “Hello, are you ready to buy?”  - Each newsletter gives the same feeling you would get if you walked into a shop and five sales people descended on you immediately to ask you if you are going to make a purchase. The newsletter is all sales, no information. All pressure, no enjoyment.

Tip For The Day: Helping Your Clients Gather Email Addresses

I was just catching up with a few of my customers today on how they've been doing in their online marketing venture. From the ground, it seems that everyone's keen and is fully aware of the benefits of email marketing. However, the greatest stumbling block always seems to be:

My client is keen to get on with email marketing. But they don't have a database of subscribers.

At Blink Campaign, we frown upon bought or rented lists. Not only is it unethical and intrusive, it could get us into a lot of trouble with ISPs around the world. Not to mention cause all our customers great inconvenience.

So how can I grow my list legally?

We always start with the website. Either you are most likely collecting the email addresses of site visitors on your webpages, or need to do something to that tune. Not to get into anything too technical, your client's website should have a simple means for users to leave their email address to join your client's mailing list. Don't forget to remind the users the benefits of them signing up.

You'll be glad to know that Blink Campaign will also be releasing a simple API soon to allow you to copy and paste the code into your client's website, thus allowing new signups to be directly updated into your client's Blink Campaign master list.

Besides your client's website, there are multiple ways to collect email addresses offline at every possible point of customer contact:

• Request for people to sign your guestbook at corporate functions and events (product launches, showcases, etc)
• Ask for an email address whenever there is a customer service or support call
• Leave a field for email address in invoices, brochures, customer surveys and feedback forms
• Put a fishbowl for business cards at retail outlets, booths and other trade fares and events.

Lastly, ask your client to have a "Join Our Mailing List" call-to-action type button in their email signature. The mechanics of this can be as simple as a mailto with something like "Sign me up" in the subject line.

Learning From Your Recipients

At times as agencies, we get too caught up with timelines, client's requirements, planning and delivery that we tend to forget the most important person in a campaign - the recipient. Just a few days back, I've had the fortunate (or unfortunate) privilege to re-visit being at the other end of the inbox. A certain local web portal totally ticked me off and has tarnished its reputation and professionalism in my mind. I won't mention any names, to save mylifestlyemap the embarrassment. Through this experience though, it reinforced a few basic, but often overlooked lessons. Its was just simply amazing how the online marketing folks there could've gotten it so wrong, in such short a time.

Tip For The Day: The Power of Personalisation

When we receive a mass email campaign, we all know that its a bulk mail campaign. Sometimes, we also feel like we're just an email address in a database and nothing more.

However, when greeted with my name, I"m more likely to read what's in the campaign, and maybe even click or link or two.

Therefore, based on this psychology, try addressing your recipients with their names in your campaigns. If you're using Blink Campaign, this can be easily achieved by adding the ##FirstName##, ##LastName## tag or both in your HTML, as well as your subject line.

Use the recipients names appropriately. A professional, or more formal correspondence might call for the First and Last name while something casual might simply require just the First Name.

Try it for yourself and see. Measure your campaigns with and without personalization, experimenting with various subject lines and check back on your reports to compare the results. You might be pleasantly surprised on how a little personalisation can go a long way!

Building That First Impression Through Welcome Emails

Guess which sort of emails have the highest click open rate among all email communications? Yup that's right, its the welcome email. And not utilising the welcome email to its full potential is a great opportunity cost to your clients.

"You never get a second chance to make a first impression"

Through the welcome email which your client's recipients have signed up for, you should (through good design and content structure) set the tone and expectations of the recipient. The old saying "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" couldn't be more apt. Properly executing your client's welcome email message can create anticipation in the recipient for future campaigns.

HTML Email Do's and Don'ts

Don't use forms

Hotmail ignores forms in HTML email to ensure that messages do not contain malicious scripts. Other webmail services (Gmail and Yahoo) and email clients support the use of forms.

If you intend on sending HTML emails with a form and amongst your recipients are also people with a Hotmail email address, than I would recommend not using a form. Instead use a link to refer to a form on a HTML page.

Don't use javascript

JavaScript in HTML email is never a good idea because of all the dangerous scripting (for example XSS attacks) that can be executed. For this reason most webmail and email clients disable JavaScript by removing or ignoring it.

For example, this code:

<a href="javascript://" onclick="window.open('http://www.website.com/cd.html','','width=500,height=400')">View tracklisting</a>

would be rewritten to:

<a href="http://intranet.active8.com.sg/pages/createpage.action#">View tracklisting</a>

The solution is to refer to the tracklisting without JavaScript.

<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com/discount/cd.html">

Don't use DHTML

Dynamic HTML uses a combination of Javascript, HTML and CSS. It is not recommended to use DHTML because JavaScript is disabled by most webmail clients and email clients.

CSS and HTML Email

I love CSS. I really do. I've totally forgotten how to develop a webpage using tables. So this really stumped me when I had to go back and do a newsletter design for a particular client. Its been eons ago since I've last created an email newsletter, let alone coding using tables and spacer images.

Because of the huge variation of support across each email environment, there really isn't any one design approach that will guarantee consistency. Instead, you should take a couple of things into account.

All text and links must have a style

You have to specify the font, font color and the font size for all the text and links in every table cell (create your design with tables). If you don't specify a style, then most webmail clients will use their own style sheets. This could result in displaying different fonts, font colors and sizes and could also mess up your design.

Hotmail and Yahoo display Arial as the default font if you don't specify a font. Gmail uses Verdana. Hotmail uses a 11px as the default font size, Yahoo uses 12px and Gmail uses 16px.

Tip For The Day: Schedule All Your Campaigns For Later

Here's something very useful from one of our agency clients. In fact, its so obvious, we started wondering why we didn't think of it ourselves.

Schedule your campaigns for later.

Ever had the experience when your clients says "All go!" and you login to your client's campaigns, select the "Launch Now" option and hit the "Save & Close", only to have your client call you five minutes later requesting for some last minute changes, or an update to the sender list? We have. Too many times.

When dealing with clients. you'll always have last minute changes.

Its simple enough. Let's say you've just finished creating your email campaign for your client. You've sent the regular test mails to them and yourself. Everything's good and ready to go. BUT always schedule it for later. You can set it to 10 or 30 minutes from now. Just don't LAUNCH NOW. Because after you click the submit button, your client will inevitably think of something they've forgotten to add. Or some URL had to be changed. When dealing with clients. you'll always have last minute changes. Scheduling for later gives you some time to jump back in and edit. Once the buffer time frame is up, the campaign will simply send itself off without you having to worry about it again!

Creating, Designing and Coding HTML Templates

Traditional marketing has already started to becomes less effective and accountable since the advent of the internet. Businesses are constantly seeking ways to engage customers on a personal level and provide them with information that is in line with their goals as consumers and in turn, gather information on what sells. HTML emails allow us to do things that traditional email doesn't. Besides having a more pleasing and desirable design, at the same time reinforcing your client's brand, HTML email also allows you to track opens, click throughs and forwards. Communicating with your customers and providing them with information that they ask for is a great way to drive traffic to your client's site and ultimately generate business leads for you and your client.

Build Customer Value for Your Clients

Branding 101: Through strong branding, we build a base of customers who will keep coming back year after year. However, the truth of the fact is: all these branding and marketing tactics usually end up with a one-time sale, only benefiting a short-term revenue. To truly achieve the objective, you, as the online marketing guru in your client's eye, have to help your client build true customer value. Consider too, that each campaign requires more involvement from the end recipient. And thankfully, there are benchmarks which you can use to help your client measure each of these forms - Revenue, Loyalty, and Advocacy.

Email Surveys, & Why Blink Campaign Isn't Getting Into It Just Yet

Requests to include email surveys in Blink Campaign is probably the most frequently requested feature.

Many agencies have asked us if they can embed surveys into their campaigns, as well as include a survey creation tool in Blink Campaign. My reply to them was always "Yeah, that would be great! But..."

First, let's take a quick look at what online surveys are. Online surveys is essentially made up of web forms. And if you've ever coded HTML email, you'd know that basic HTML markup isn't so great in email, let alone, web forms. The most I would ever get into from a HTML email perspective, is a single field box suchs as "Search" or "Comments". Anything more complicated, you'd need some technical know-how, code level hacking and perhaps some server setup as well.

How To Charge Your Client for Email Marketing Services

As designers and communication agencies, there's countless services that we can offer our clients. And there are many different ways to charge your clients for email marketing. Stemming from a design agency background, we at Blink Campaign have been (and still are) in the exact same position each day. Through the years, we've adopted a number of charge methods, each tailoring to our client's needs accordingly.

This issue has led our Blink Campaign customers and agencies looking to us for advice on how they should charge their clients for their services. Well honestly, there is no hard and fast way to doing this. However, I would like to present you with some of these options and let you work out which method best suits you and your client, in both budget and scope.