Online Marketing Business Blog

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: