Business Articles/Tips for Agencies

July 15, 2009: Why You Need Email Authentication
Comments: 1 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
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.

August 26, 2008: Online Marketing For Web Designers: Its Getting Implicit
Comments: 2 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies
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.

August 15, 2008: How One Agency Is Making Good Money From An Email Marketing Business Model
Comments: 1 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies
I've recently noticed a flurry of activity on our BlinkCampaign logs from a particular region. New accounts were being setup once every 4 - 5 days 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.

August 11, 2008: Co-Branding To Enhance Your Agency's Awareness
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies
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.

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 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 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 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 4, 2008: Tip For The Day: Helping Your Clients Gather Email Addresses
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Tips & Tricks
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.

June 26, 2008: Build Customer Value for Your Clients
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
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.

June 23, 2008: Email Surveys, & Why Blink Campaign Isn't Getting Into It Just Yet
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
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...

June 20, 2008: How To Charge Your Client for Email Marketing Services
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies
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...

June 20, 2008: Email Marketing: The Usual Suspects
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Design , Email Marketing
Its not just about newsletters or promotional eDMs. To many people, email marketing is synonymous with sales. However, email communication is in essence, far more sophisticated. Using the correct form of email communication can contribute to your client's bottom line in many other advantageous ways. There will never be a be-all, end-all solution for email marketing. Advising your clients accordingly would reap great benefits to your client, and more return business for yourself. Some of your clients may have their needs better addressed with newsletters as opposed to hard sell promotional campaigns.