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July 2008

July 24, 2008: Blink Campaign v1.3 Release
Comments: 0 | Categories: New Features and Updates
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.

July 22, 2008: 7 Ideas For Creating More Effective And Creative Email Newsletters
Comments: 1 | Categories: Design , Tips & Tricks
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.

July 21, 2008: Image Based Emails - Optimizing For Images-Off
Comments: 0 | Categories: Case Studies , Design
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.

July 21, 2008: Tip For The Day: Style Your ALT Tags
Comments: 1 | Categories: Design , Tips & Tricks
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.

July 18, 2008: 16 "Blink-Ready" Newsletter Templates
Comments: 1 | Categories: Design
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.

July 18, 2008: Blink Campaign's Guide For New Users
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Tips & Tricks
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.

July 18, 2008: Should You Outsource Email Delivery?
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
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.

July 17, 2008: A (Near) Perfect Email Campaign
Comments: 0 | Categories: Case Studies
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:

July 16, 2008: Tip For The Day: Don't Use "Click Here", And Other Seemingly Harmless Words
Comments: 0 | Categories: Tips & Tricks
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.

July 16, 2008: Who's Your Daddy? Your Client's Domain May Be At Ransom
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
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.

July 14, 2008: Getting Creative With Images Blocking
Comments: 1 | Categories: Design , Email Marketing , Tips & Tricks
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.

July 14, 2008: HTML Email and Lotus Notes
Comments: 3 | Categories: Design
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.

July 11, 2008: Steer Your Clients From Being Spammers
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
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.

July 10, 2008: Newsletters: How Often And When?
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing , Tips & Tricks
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.

July 9, 2008: Oops... Re-Sending An Erroneous Campaign
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
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

July 9, 2008: Bounce Management: Don't Just Look At Your Open Rates
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
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.

July 8, 2008: Selling Email Marketing Services
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies
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.

July 8, 2008: Promotion Or Newsletter? Know The Difference
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
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.

July 7, 2008: Blink Campaign v1.2 Release
Comments: 2 | Categories: New Features and Updates
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.

July 4, 2008: Good and Bad Email Newsletters
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
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.