Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is an excellent tool to help you ‘push’ relevant content to subscribers who want to keep up with your latest blog entries.  For example you can subscribe to Pinpointe’s Blog RSS feed here.

Why should you care about RSS and how can you use it?

• Keep you pulse on your market.  Say you stumble across a website or blog that’s interesting and relevant to you.  You can bookmark the site, and stumble back onto the site every now and then.  Or, you can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed and get the latest updates ‘pushed’ into your RSS reader, real-time.
• Keep your customers / prospects informed.  Get ‘em to subscribe to your RSS feeds and your blog entries and posts will pop out onto your RSS feed and into their reader inbox instantly.

Why use RSS AND Email Marketing?

Give your customers and prospects multiple ways to stay in touch with you.  Some people prefer email.  But many people may prefer to get your latest tips and updates via other channels – so use them.

RSS is a great complement to Email marketing.  Use RSS to make high value content available and develop a trust level with your prospects, but reserve some of your highest value content for subscribers only. After developing a rapport with prospects you’ll find that many will be willing to subscribe to your newsletters once you ‘prove’ your  content is worth registering for.

This short and funny video clip explains *exactly* how to subscribe to an RSS feed, like Pinpointe’s RSS feed.   It’s the best RSS overview we’ve run across on the net.  If you don’t know of RSS, take a moment to review this video by the Common Craft Show for an explanation of what it is and how to use it:

To create a subscription form that you can place on your web site, you first choose which contact lists you want your subscribers to be added to when they sign up, as select which custom fields you want to include on your subscription form.

Begin by creating a form.  Select the list(s) you want your subscribers to be added to when they fill out your subscription form.  Under each list you will see the custom fields which have been assigned to that list. To include each custom field in your subscription form, simply tick the box next to it. It will then be added to the Sort Custom Fields list below. You can change the order in which custom fields appear on your subscription form simply by dragging and dropping them.

Yes.  When you set up a campaign and then again when the campaign is sent out, you are asked to provide the sender information and the ‘reply-to’ information.  Pinpointe will then send the email out with the From and Reply-To headers set to your preference.

Here’s an excellent use for this feature.  Assume you have a regional sales team in say, New York City and your sales team will be attending (or running) a local event or trade show.  Use the ’send on behalf of’ feature to send personalized email invitations from your regional representative to the prospects in his/her territory or region.  You can set up the entire process for the regional team and prospects can even reply directly to the salesperson.

Our system is set to check for and fire off any scheduled campaigns and Auto-Pilot campaigns every 5 minutes.  Once you set up a campaing or Auto-Pilor campaign, it can take up to 5 minutes for it to start sending.