Blog - Email

An email database is an important marketing tool. A large database allows you to proactively communicate with a large number of your customers, but before you launch an email marketing campaign you’ve got to build the list. Your website is the easiest way to gather email addresses from interested parties. Be sure to convince people to want to subscribe to your emails. You have a better chance to retain them in the long run if they find value in your emails and chose to sign up.

Incentives
Once, I signed up for a company's newsletter for $1 off my bill every month. A lot of customers will connect with you for a small value. This value doesn’t have to be monetary, but most customers need an incentive to receive another brand email in their inbox. They are probably already receiving a lot of similar emails. Think long term. Signing up is half the battle. You want them to actually open your emails. Get creative and find an angle. Exchange with them something you have of value for their email address. This value could be exclusive, behind-the-scenes access or even exclusive coupons.

Regular Newsletter
Your goal isn’t only to build a giant email list. You only derive value from it if the people in your list care about what you send them. If they delete every email you send, your effort was a waste of time. A regular newsletter’s purpose is to maintain and boost long-term relationships with your subscribers. After a list is built, this is an opportunity to communicate, compel them to buy and continue to offer the value they initially signed up for.

Online Archive
Some subscribers want a preview of what they’re getting into before they commit. Maintain an online archive of past newsletters and email correspondence to let interested visitors see what they should expect in the future. If your newsletter or emails typically offer value, an online archive can help you grow your subscription list.

Multiple Signup Locations
Different people decide to commit at different points in the perusing process. You can’t know when a certain visitor will want to sign up. Place the form obviously on the web page. Make it easy for them to find a way to sign up without having to search for one specific page. Try integrating your value proposition into a “Hello Bar” and drive attention immediately to signing up. A “Hello Bar” is a small bar that stays fixed at the top of a page while you’re on a website.  

Give Them a Reason to Trust You
Most people are jaded by the bad practices of other brands, businesses and spammers. Provide your subscribers every assurance you aren’t one of those brands. Under your signup form or on a signup page, let them know how often you email out and what they should expect. Brands that email every day, especially frivolously, annoy the typical consumer. Provide a link to your privacy policy. This will tell people how you intend to use the information you’re collecting. Show subscribers you have nothing to hide, you will protect their private information and that you won’t share it with any third party.

A research group at Ipsos polled web users internationally, and found that most people are still communicating online via email.

That's right - email. 

Social media is catching up, but the majority still find the simplicity of direct communication works best for many situations.  The study's press release does not explain "why" e-mail is so popular internationally.  Possible factors include that in English-speaking countries (remember, most social media sites are based in the United States) and others, so it is possible that the need for some international users to use translation sites may be affecting their choice of communication technology.  Some social media sites also use more bandwidth, so there may be regional preferences based on accessibility to high-speed internet and mobile connections.  So, it is possible that internet users in western countries where high-speed internet and access to the web in one's native language (or fluently-spoken second language) might take more advantage of social media than others.

However, the fact remains that email has not yet gone away, and it probably will not.  Service providers will come and go, and the line between instant-messaging through a social media site and emailing directly will continue to become more and more blurry, but simple, direct, one-on-one written communication skills are still paramount to effectively communicating with much of the world.

If you were hoping you would soon be able to get by with 140-character updates (the virtual equivalent of grunting and pointing), that's not likely to happen in the near future.  If you are someone like me, however, who actually LIKES to communicate in writing, this is good news.  You are still likely to find that many of your customers may appreciate this mode of communication. 

MailChimp has a great piece on writing an effective subject lines for emails, and Dennis Jerz, of Seton Hill University has ten very good tips for writing effective email.

As we noted earlier this week, WevRevelation is prepared to help you with your Customer Relation Managment (CRM). Also, be sure to check out Streamlining your eMail here at WebRev, as well as Tim's explanation of IMAP vs. POP. 

Mashable has commentary and additional information about the study.

Well, it has happened again.  Epsilon, a company that specializes in spam email advertising has been hacked.  We're being assured that the only "private" data that was stolen was names and emails (not bank account, credit card or password information) for customers of Kroger, TiVo, US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, CapitalOne, Citi, HSN, Ameriprise, LLBean, Lacoste, Abe Books, McKinsey & Co., Riz-Carlton rewards, Marriott Rewards,  New York & Co., Brookstone, Walgreens, The College Board, Disney Destinations, Best Buy, and Rober Half Technologies, according to Security Week.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened.   Last June, hackers stole a bunch of email addresses of AT&T customers and published them, and in December, Wal-Greens customers were hit. In October of 2009, hackers stole and published both the e-mail addresses and passwords of several web-based email providers' customers.

To protect yourself if you suspect your email address may have been involved in this latest attack, follow the rules of common sense.  Don't open unsolicited emails from people or companies you weren't expecting.  If you accidentally do, don't click on the web address in any e-mail (go to the website directly by typing the url in your browser - some links appear to be from your bank, for example, but really go to a mock-up site that will steal your password when you try to access your account).  Don't ever give your password or account information over the phone or by e-mail. 

To help protect yourself in the future, have a separate email address to give to c ompanies that require it to do business with them.  These are nothing but "sign-up" lists for spam, and you might as well send it all to the same place.  If you haven't done this before, and you're already getting hit with spam at your current email address, you might want to consider using your current e-mail address for that purpose, and start a new e-mail address for your actual friends, family, and those people you really want to hear from.

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. 
 

We have recently had a plethora of questions regarding IMAP and POP and while WebRevelation does not support local email clients, we would like to try and answer your questions on IMAP.

What's the difference?
The main difference, as far as we are concerned here, is the way in which IMAP or POP controls your e-mail inbox.

In a nutshell: IMAP email access coordinates between the server and you mail application. Messages that have been read/deleted/replied-to will show as read/deleted/replied-to both on the server and in the mail application. POP3 does not coordinate with the server. Messages marked as read/deleted/replied-to in the mail application will not show as read/deleted/replied-to on the server. This means that future downloads of your inbox or other mailboxes with POP3 will show all messages as unread.

When you use IMAP you are accessing your inbox on the mail server. IMAP does not actually move messages onto your computer. You can think of an e-mail program using IMAP as a window to your messages on the server. Although the messages appear on your computer while you work with them, they remain on the mail server.

POP does the opposite. Instead of just showing you what is in your inbox on the mail server, it checks the server for new messages, downloads all the new messages in your inbox onto your computer, and then deletes them from the server. This means that every time you use POP to view your new messages, they are no longer on the mail server.

IMAP makes it easier to view mail from home, work, and other locations
Because IMAP leaves all of your messages on the mail server, you can view these messages from any location with Internet access. This means the e-mail inbox you view from home will be the same one you see at work.

Since POP downloads new messages to your computer and removes them from the server, you will not be able to see those new messages on another computer when you check your inbox. Those messages exist only on the computer that downloaded them using POP.

However, if you use IMAP and create e-mail folders on the server, these folders are accessible from anywhere you read your e-mail using IMAP. If you use POP and create e-mail folders, they are stored locally, and you cannot access these folders from anywhere except the computer on which you created them.

POP can create problems if you alternate between it and IMAP. There is an option in many POP e-mail programs to leave copies of the messages on the server, but this option has complications. When you leave copies of the messages on the server, then access your e-mail using WebMail or another IMAP e-mail client, the POP client may create duplicate messages next time it accesses the inbox; you will see each of the messages more than once, and you will have to clean out (delete) the unwanted ones.

You may want to keep local copies
While using IMAP to save e-mail on the mail server is recommended, there are reasons to have local copies of messages (messages downloaded to the computer, as with POP). Fortunately, IMAP allows you to keep local copies of all your messages. The option of local copies is useful when you are connecting from a dial-up connection. You may want to download your messages, then disconnect from the Internet and work with your mail offline. Please note that while you are working offline, you cannot send or receive mail. You need to be connected to the Internet to do those tasks.

You have a backup of your e-mail with IMAP
WebRevelation’s e-mail servers are backed up every night. Thus, when your e-mail is stored on the e-mail server (as is the case with IMAP), a backup of your e-mail is made every night. These backups are used in the event of system failures or if a virus deletes your local mail. If you use POP, you lose your mail.

Bonus “Jeopardy player” information:

What do they stand for?

• IMAP = Internet Message Access Protocol
• POP = Post Office Protocol
   

As we've been discussing this week, "time sinks," are those online activities that eat up a lot of our time.  So far, we've discussed Facebook games, and social news sites.  Now, let's talk about e-mail.  E-mail is a bit like food.  It wouldn't be practical (or possible in most cases) to go cold turkey on it, but for some of us, it can get out of control in a hurry.  Here are some of the ways e-Mail can take over your life, and how to regain control.

 Groups / Listservs

 These are mailing lists that you ask to be added to, for the purpose of communicating with the other people in the group or keeping updated on events or specials.  This nearly always seems like a good idea in the beginning, until someone in the group gets chatty, or a few members have a disagreement, and exchange 59 e-mails in one day.  A good way to get these under control, if you don't want to remove yourself from them is to adjust your settings so that you receive less frequent (i.e. weekly)"digests" of the discussion threads.  This will help you resist the temptation to become embroiled in petty conversations, while still keeping up-to-date on what is happening with the group.

Contact Lists

These are lists that you end up on, usually because you've given your e-mail address out for some other reason (to enter a contest, participate in a poll, make a purchase, etc.), and ended up on one or more contact lists.   Often these lists are shared and passed on, and after a while you're on lists from companies or organizations you've never heard of.  Another good way to get on a lot of contact lists is to post your e-mail address on your blog.  If you are familiar with the organization you're being spammed receiving information from, and you wish to have it stopped, it's best to use the "unsubscribe" link that is usually present at the bottom of bulk mailings.  If there is no such link, simply reply to the e-mail with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line, and that will usually do the trick.  If you have no idea who the sender is, it's better to just mark their mailings as "spam." (There's no need to validate your e-mail address for phishers.)

Multiple e-Mail accounts

Checking numerous e-mail accounts several times a day can get time-consuming.  An e-mail client like Outlook Express, which helps consolidate your e-mail can be helpful.  Another option is to simply forward all of your e-mail to one web-based e-mail address.

Friends

Spammers you can ignore easily.  Friends are not so easy to ignore.  With the increasing popularity of smart-phone technology, there is now little difference between IM's (instant messages), text messages, and e-mails, in terms of how quickly people expect a response to their messages.  One way I've found that helps me to get this under control is to lower my friend's expectations, and only answer e-mails from most of them during certain hours (usually in the evenings). 

Last week I took a little time off to get caught up on some things, and one of the things I worked on was getting my e-mail under control.  At the beginning of the week, I was literally receiving over 400 e-mails a day.  My e-mail had taken on a life of its own.  I wasn't able to really spend time responding to the people I wanted to talk to, because of having to sift through and delete e-mails I didn't want.  It took time, but I started actually going through each and every e-mail to see who it was from, and deal with it accordingly.  Now, I'm receiving about 50 e-mails a day, which is manageable, especially because most of them are from people I actually need or want to hear from.  I think I've learned my lesson about letting this get out of control, and about dealing with spam and phishing as it creeps in - we'll see.  ;-)

 Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking.