email tips

The Rise of the Spam Bots

Posted by Mel Jewell

Email marketers know the best distribution lists you can have are the ones grown organically, with a huge source being via sign up forms on your website. This means you can be certain that that person really wants to sign up…right? You might also have forms to capture such things as contact or blog comments to help you communicate with your users better. But just how safe are your forms really? If you haven’t added any protection to them against spam bots and malicious phishers, then sadly, not safe at all. The implications of this can often be dire for your success as an email marketer. Feedback from your users is a helpful way to know if you are collecting…

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A fresh way to be relevant for your customers

Posted by Mel Jewell

There’s a fine line between connecting with your users based upon their email/website activity and inadvertently stalking them. The number one rule when trying to deliver relevant content to your users is “do not come across as Big Brother in an Orwellian dystopia” – people just don’t seem to like having their privacy invaded for some reason. Here are some suggestions of how, through teaming up with a company like Fresh Relevance, you can provide your users with useful and relevant content, specifically looking at email communications, in a way that should ingratiate them to you rather than get their hackles up. Getting Started with Fresh Relevance The great thing with Fresh Relevance is there is very little development required…

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Expanding our development horizons

Posted by Mel Jewell

As with most emailing platforms today, automation has become a crucial element for timely, smarter marketing capabilities. Our platform has its own powerful automation suite in the form of workflows which can allow you to do all manner of clever things with your marketing from sending a series of triggered emails based upon user behaviour to notifying yourself when an event happens, e.g. someone clicks on an important link. This is all good and well, but what if you have development requirements to connect to all this using another application? Well, thankfully our system is now set up on the rather handy Zapier (which if you are unfamiliar with is basically an online suite of third party apps, e.g. Salesforce,…

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Dynamic coding for smarter and more efficient templates

Posted by Mel Jewell

Dynamic code in templates can save a lot of time for a lot of different scenarios. Not only will you not have to go through your data with a fine toothcomb to fix things to fit your template requirements, you may also only have to make one template rather than multiple ones, saving significantly on development time and resources. Here are just some of the solutions our platform can offer to really help save time and effort when it comes to perfecting your templates: Personalisation using titles, first names and last names One very common issue you may find, is you want to use personalisation in your email, be it a salutation or in the subject line, but you have…

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Essential Email Marketing tips for Christmas

Posted by Mike Parry

At Christmas time email marketing retailers really need to make hay while the sun shines. However, sometimes we are so busy doing our day to day job that we don’t stop to think about the specific requirements or the bountiful opportunities Christmas offers us. What we do know is if we get it right it is a great year at the tills and if we don’t well… Download the full infographic

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8 ways to improve your email marketing

Posted by Mike Parry

In our latest infographic Natalia looks at 8 simple ways to improve your email marketing. With email set to reach 4.9 billion users by 2017, it has greater reach than any social channel. Nat looks at some of the basics which will improve your email marketing if you follow these simple rules. Download the infographic

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Make a marketing form in three easy steps

Posted by Mel Jewell

HTML forms are a great way to collect information online and then store it in a database for future use. For the technically minded you can set a form up on a website / webpage and then, through some server-side scripting, e.g. PHP, save the captured information in a database and do with it what you will. At the same time as storing the information you can also trigger events, such as sending a confirmation or welcome email. But what about those that may not have the technical or time resources for such a web development project? Well, our emailing platform has the perfect solution – an in-built Form tool that can implement either a sign-up form or an opt-out…

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Do image heavy emails still have a place in email marketing?

Posted by Jaina Mistry

A healthy balance of live text and images in email – it’s the general consensus in email design and development as well as being best practice. This healthy balance is seen as a must to help emails land in inboxes rather than the spam folder, and to ensure our emails reach the widest possible audience. However, over the years there has been a rapid increase in the number of email clients and devices that need to be considered in email development. With each combination of device and email client/inbox provider, email marketers are faced with set after set of rules and restrictions that need to be abided by. What’ll work in one email client won’t in another. Oh, but it’ll…

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