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4 Tips for Writing Emails People Want to Read

By on April 26, 2013 in Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Writing Tips

Have you collected heaps of behavioral data related to clients' needs, purchase habits and email activity history? Good. Do you have a partnership with one of the best email marketing automation providers? Great. These are crucial steps to launching a campaign that can strengthen existing relationships and boost customer sales.

Content creation isn't always easy, but it's something you have to master. Putting enough research, time and thought into your messages will pay off big time in terms of subscriber response rates and customer loyalty.  So before you pull out your writer's quill (or keyboard), take these tips into account …

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4 Tips to Make Your Email Autoresponders Shine

By on April 22, 2013 in Auto-Pilot Campaigns, Email Marketing Best Practices, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Automation Tips

Autoresponder campaigns should be the workhorse of your email marketing efforts.  Autoresponders are the perfect way to automate email communication streams so you can get more done with less effort.  When carried out right – they generate great results and provide added benefits, including brand recognition, stronger relationships with existing clients, a firmer grasp on potential customers and, ultimately, higher sales. 

Sadly – many B2B ("Business to Business") marketers aren't fully utilizing email autoresponders.  A random sampling of 500 of the 'Inc 5000' businesses shows the following: … Learn more..

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3 Autoresponders You Should Master Today

By on April 22, 2013 in Auto-Pilot Campaigns, Marketing Automation Tips

Autoresponders are like email marketing on autopilot.  With the right software and message strategy, autoresponder campaigns (aka 'drip marketing campaigns') can strengthen relationships with existing customers, move prospects along the 'sales education' process and boost the brand's reputation as an expert in the field.

Marketing-Schools.org points out that drip marketing efforts also tend to result in higher sales.  There are several types of drip marketing campaigns, and if done right, these efforts give new prospects and current customers exactly what they want or need – whether it's specific details about your products or services or help making the right purchasing decision.

If you're not sure where to start with your first autoresponders, here are three examples of autoresponder sequences to consider.

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7 Tips to Make your Content Marketing a Home Run

By on April 7, 2013 in Content Marketing, Marketing Automation Tips

Online content has grown to take up a larger portion of companies' marketing budgets. A recent  Econsultancy and SoDA Digital Marketing Outlook Report  found 39 percent of respondents were boosting the percentage of their marketing spending that goes toward digital efforts. Content marketing, an increasingly important aspect of digital, will be a part of that. So how do you make sure you get the most bang for your buck with your content marketing efforts? Here are a few tips to help you succeed.

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How to Improve Email Responses & Make Clients Beg for Your Emails

By on April 1, 2013 in Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Response Rates

William Shakespeare once said "Boldness be my friend," and if you're wondering how this relates to email marketing strategies, you may want to take a closer look at how you communicate with your customers prospects and subscribers.  A recent Hubspot blog post praised an "automatic opt-out campaign" used by ecommerce company Fab that decided to actually remove customers from its email lists if they hadn't opened the company's messages for a certain period of time.

Pretty bold, huh?

While all companies shouldn't blindly copy Fab's innovative email strategy, here are a few valuable takeaways that will help you improve email response rates 

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How to Remove your IP from ATTs Blacklist

By on April 1, 2013 in Bounces and Blacklists, Message Deliverability, SPAM Topics

As with all of our articles on email blacklist management – we assume you are being a responsible email netizen and not sending spam.  And we also assume you're probably an Email administrator.   If you're an individual and you're having email delivery issues, you'll probably need the help of your IT team to get access to some of the information here.  Better yet – send them to this link directly.   If you are having delivery issues with other domains too (and you're not sending spam) then this article will help you determine if your email servers are on other email blacklists.  Of course you could move your email campaigns to an email service provider like Pinpointe and let us deal [...]

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How to Check Microsoft’s Blacklist

By on March 31, 2013 in Bounces and Blacklists, Message Deliverability, SPAM Topics

Are you suspicious that Microsoft Exchange is blocking your emails?  If you're looking for a site to check if your IP address are on Microsoft's blacklist – look no further:  Microsoft Exchange's blocklist is privately maintained so you can't query it directly.  However, we'll show you how to find out if your emails are being blocked by Microsoft and how to request removal from the Microsoft blacklist. This article only applies to email blocked by Microsoft's Hosted Exchange.  You'll need to check this article to learn more about blacklist issues with Microsoft Hotmail.com or Microsoft msn.com email services. As with all of our articles on email blacklist management – we assume you are being a responsible email netizen and not sending spam.  And we also assume you're probably an Email [...]

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How to Check and Request Removal from 88.blocklist.zap (88.blacklist.zap)

By on March 31, 2013 in Bounces and Blacklists, Message Deliverability, SPAM Topics

What is 88.blocklist.zap and How to Get Unblocked What is 88.blocklist.zap? 88.blocklist.zap is an internal ‘DNSBL (DNS blocklist)' maintained by Microsoft's Forefront Hosted Exchange service.  It resides on dnsbl.forefront.microsoft.com but is not publicly accessible. Note that it's actally called 88.blocklist.zap – not 88.blAcklist.zap.   Yea, so how does this relate to my email being blocked by 88.blocklist.zap? The spam filter for Microsoft's Hosted Exchange service was formerly called Frontbridge (now called ‘Forefront’).  Their privately maintained blocklist is called 88.blocklist.zap.  Because the filter is private (and the query is encrypted) – neither you nor a blacklist monitoring service like www.mxtoolbox.tom can pro-actively monitor 88.blocklist.zap to see if you’re on the list.  The only way to find out if you're blocked is by checking your email server log files for [...]

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How to Embed Video in Gmail

By on March 29, 2013 in Email Design Tips, Email Marketing Trends, Mobile Devices

Displaying Video in Gmail In our previous article we explained how to  embed video in your email campaigns.  It turns out that Gmail kind of supports video in email on a limited basis. Using YouTube Previews to Display Video in Gmail and Hotmail By uploading the video first to YouTube, then adding the URL to your HTML or plain-text email as text, you can get an inbox-playable preview to display. Here’s an example of this in Gmail:   Note that the YouTube Preview section of an email is fairly subtle so if your email campaign is more than a paragraph or two – your video preview is likely to be missed entirely.  If you want to make your video one of the focal [...]

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Gmail Quirks: HTML Issues with Gmail

By on March 26, 2013 in Email Design Tips, Tutorials

You've diligently designed your HTML email campaign and previewed it in Gmail – only to find that it's completely messed up. Gmail has a handful of quirks that cause your HTML emails to display incorrectly.  Here are the most common Gmail coding quirks to avoid (and tips to avoid them).  Read on…

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HTML and CSS support in email

Universally Supported CSS and HTML for Email Designs

By on March 26, 2013 in Email Design Tips, Mobile Devices

If you’ve followed our blog – you know that top email clients like Gmail and Outlook 2007 and beyond only support about 50% of all html and css.  That’s why your well crafted email design that follows otherwise best-practices for website design – just might look.. well, bad. If you're creating HTML emails – then here's a table you'll want to bookmark.  Read more…

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Anatomy of a (Well Crafted) Landing Page

By on March 22, 2013 in Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing

Our recent webinar 'Creating Landing Pages that Sell', with industry expert Bob Bly, is jam-packed with nearly an hour of tips and landing page examples.  If you're just getting started – here's a short overview of the Anatomy of a Landing Page.  Read on

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