Companies invest considerable amounts of time and money into their email marketing campaigns. Why? Because it still represents one of the most effective means of communicating and converting customers. But all that time and effort is often applied to but one brief moment in time before it goes to die in the Deleted Items folder.

Businesses can extend the shelf life of their email content by using blogging software to publish it online. It serves as a resource for information, a driver of search engine optimization, and a continuation of the conversation.

The following article, published by BtoB, is an interview with our CEO, David LaPlante about the subject of improving email marketing with blogging:

Using e-mail to promote your blog

By Karen J. Bannan

Story posted: May 17, 2007 - 1:10 pm EDT

Today, Technorati, the online blog search engine, is tracking and indexing more than 81.2 million blogs. While the majority are penned by regular Joes and Janes, an ever-increasing number come out of corporate America—first-person marketing vehicles that often spawn conversation and buzz.

If your company has its own blog, experts such as David LaPlante, CEO of interactive agency Twelve Horses, based in Reno, Nev., say you can and should be leveraging it via your e-mail marketing program.

“The e-mail-to-blog connection is quite effective because it archives all of your content online, which means it’s searchable and helps with SEO [search engine optimization],” he said. “It also extends the conversation by allowing people to make comments and refer to your marketing in their own later posts and Web articles. If companies simply send out e-mail marketing to a specific list without any tie-in to the Web, then that content stands a good chance of dying after a short while.”

LaPlante and Todd Van Hoosear, social media practice manager at Woburn, Mass.-based public relations firm Topaz Partners, provide these tips to help you get the most out of your blogging activities.

1) Use Web analytics often. Because blogs are usually updated every day, you might be tempted to reference your CEO’s latest missive. But LaPlante said a better option is to highlight the blog post that was most popular, even if it is a couple of days or weeks old. “Analytics will give you insight into what people really care about and what they are more likely to read,” he said. Van Hoosear said his company likes to use “Best of the Blog” or “Most Commented On” lists in the e-mails it designs.

2) Use your voice. People like blogs because they are conversational; they usually aren’t preachy and don’t use too much marketing-speak. LaPlante suggested taking a page from your own blog when writing e-mail newsletter copy to help boost readership satisfaction.

3) Use your blog to cross-promote—when applicable. If you’re offering e-mail readers a free white paper download or a coupon code, you can carry it over to the blog as long as it’s done right and doesn’t seem like you’re pandering, Van Hoosear said. “You’ve got to be very clear that yes, this is a promotion, and it can’t come out of nowhere,” he said. “If your blog is all about your technology and all of a sudden you’re throwing out a sales pitch, it’s not going to work.”

4) Help others blog about your marketing messages. Van Hoosear said it’s imperative to give people many ways to consume your content so they can make their own decisions. “When you put your e-mail into blog format, you’re making it easy for them to quote your newsletter and pass it on,” he said. “Bloggers want a URL so they can quote and link, so you should always let them know where they can find your content.”

LaPlante said you can benefit even more by turning your blog into an e-mail message. “We have a tool that automatically sucks up RSS feeds according to rules, organizes them, applies rules and filters, and passes it out as an outbound e-mail,” he said. “At the end of the day, people believe in blogs. They aren’t sugar-coated, not edited and re-edited. They are the real deal. People like them, and you’re still extending your brand.”

The easiest way to avoid being falsely marked as spam is to have your recipients add your email address to their address book. Here is how to do that for the most popular email clients:
OUTLOOK

• Right click on the email
• Move down to the “Junk Email” option
• Select “Add the Domain to Safe Senders List”
• Click “OK”

AOL

• Open the email
• Click the “Add Address” Icon
• Click on the “Save” button

Yahoo!

• Open the email
• Click “Add to Address Book”
• Click “Add to Address Book” Again

Gmail

• Open the email
• Click the down arrow next to “Reply,” at the top-right of the message pane
• Click “Add sender to Contacts List”

Hotmail

• Open the email
• Click the “Save Address” button
• Click “OK”

Technorati Tags: AOL, Email Marketing, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Spam, Whitelist, Yahoo

Just in time for Valentines Day, the Lovelock Chamber of Commerce has launched the Lock Your Love in Lovelock E-Card. Go to Loverslock.com and click on the "Send a Love Card to Someone Special" link to send a special note.  Twelve Horses was commissioned to create this love card to help promote the Lovers Lock Plaza.  Visitors can purchase locks from local retailers and symbolically lock their love by connecting their lock to the chain links that surround the plaza. It’s a unique and romantic way to spend the day.

With the new features - mainly a revamped and unique user interface - set to roll out in Microsoft Office 2007, quite a few organizations will upgrade immediately. Over time, Office 2007 will become the de facto standard in office software. This will have an impact on email marketers and their designers. Here’s why:

In the current version of Outlook, the program automatically uses the same code to display HTML emails that Internet Explorer uses to display web pages. In other words, if the email looks good in IE, it will look good in Outlook. However, with Office 2007, Microsoft has opted to use the HTML rendering engine found in Microsoft Word. This is where the problems occur.

Microsoft Word is not a web browser, and because of this, it isn’t capable of displaying certain elements of standard HTML. Some examples are:

• No support for background images (HTML or CSS) 
• No support for forms 
• No support for Flash, or other plugins 
• No support for CSS floats and positioning
• No support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists 
• No support for animated GIFs
  (list via SitePoint)

It is unclear whether these are limitations of Word that Microsoft will address in the future or if this is to create a more stable and secure environment in Outlook (is it a bug or a feature). However, what it does mean is that HTML emails will need to have a more simplistic design. Any hopes of taking advantage of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or using technologies like Flash are gone. It also means basic elements like forms will also no longer be supported.

I’m undecided whether this is a step backwards or a correction. Items like forms, Flash, and JavaScript can be used maliciously creating serious security issues.  However, background images and animated GIFS are far from a problem. Either way, marketers will need to quickly adapt their campaigns or suffer the consequences of broken designs.  If you are unsure whether your email will have issues, call me at (775) 332-3000 and I will be happy to look at it.

Who knew that good ole Abe Lincoln was the master of electronic mail? Granted, his form of email was the T-Mail. Using telegrams wasn’t his crutch like email has become for many of us, but he knew how to effectively communicate. An now we can all learn from Lincoln, because Tom Wheeler has written a book called Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails in which he chronicles telegrams that Lincoln had sent and received.

Through studying these very important, and very historic communications, Mr. Wheeler was able to gain some high level discoveries that could help us write better emails:

• Understand the Hierarchy of Communication
• Words are Important
• Less is More
• Message Candor
• Take a Breath

I think the biggest take away for me after reading Mr. Wheeler’s site was that the mode is not as important as the message; however, the message has to be adapted to the mode. So the next time I hear someone criticizing the youth of today for using shorthand notation in an SMS text message or for typing brief short sentences in IM conversations, I will evaluate both the content and the context of the message. There may be modes that I am not versed in communicating in, but at the end of the day, the goal is still to convey the information that needs to be shared.

Technorati Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Communication, Email, Telegram

After listening to the 43 Folders podcast (episode from 10/29/06), where Merlin Mann interviews David Allen about using the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology on email, I decided to give it a try.  For those who haven’t experienced GTD, its a system of dealing and organizing inputs like email, memos, phone calls, stickies, etc. 

The idea seemed quite simple. When you read an email, determine if its actionable or not.  If its not, it falls into one of two categories:  A) its junk mail and needs to be deleted or  B) Its an FYI (for your information) and then needs to be filed.  If the email is actionable, you need to determine the next action and either do it right then or add it to your todo list, calendar or what ever tool you use to manage your day.  And then here’s the important part…once you add it to your todo list, make sure you file that email away like you did for the non-actionable emails.  At the end of each day, you should have zero emails in your inbox.  A lofty goal but I think it can be done.

Since I use Outlook, it has a view for displaying your inbox by date.  It shows your emails broken out by day for the current week then skips to last week, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, last month and finally the bottom of the barrel, older.  Since I had significant email in all these categories in my inbox, I knew it was too lofty to try and get these all down to zero. I focused just on the Today category.  Every time I checked and read email, I made the decision as to what was to be done next with the email and filed it accordingly.  Mr. Allen’s main point is that the process of making the decision is where most people get hung up.  Its a learned and practiced skill and you need to constantly hone.

I have been moderately successful.  A few of the days have had one or two un-filed emails.  One of the biggest challenges I found was remember to file emails after I replied to them.  Since the flow was read -> reply -> read next, I wasn’t taking the time to move that email out of my inbox.  Also, I think sub-consciously I was waiting for the reply to my reply before filing.  In this way, the original email would remind me to follow up if I didn’t receive the reply I was expecting.  To over come this, I realized I needed to mark a follow up item in my todo list if I was expecting a reply.  This liberated me to file the original email away.

I have been doing this very simple process for almost two weeks now.  It has made me more dependant on my todo list and less dependant on my inbox.  I’m more organized and I feel overall, I’m getting more things done.

tags: Getting Things Done, GTD, 43 Folders, Merlin Mann, David Allen, Email, Inbox

Great Article on email as a communication medium. Here is an awesome quote.

Though e-mail is a powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major problems. First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.

“It’s All about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood” by Daniel Enemark

Via DavidLaplante.com

Technorati : Email, Email Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Relationships

David Greiner has a great article on the thinkvitamin.com site describing when to use CSS and when to use html tables in your email communications. He also discusses issues with images and the preview pane and outlines capabilities in various email clients. I highly recommend it to anyone doing email communications to their customers or prospects.

Technorati : CSS, Email, Email Marketing

Being in the online marketing industry, I maintain a disproportionate number of online relationships. Blogs, forums, eCommerce websites, Web 2.0…you name it and I have a login. So on Saturday, May 27th, I wasn’t surprised to see my personal gmail account filled with birthday emails. I was surprised however to see who they were from. Three forums (they must use the same forum software), Disney.com (they take most my disposable income), Wine.com (I frequently use them for gifts) and Pepsi. That’s it.

Besides Pepsi, I did visit every site that sent me a message. A few of the forums I hadn’t been to in many months. This seems like such a no brainer to drive traffic and its completely automated. I’m not sure why more companies aren’t using this simple tool. Go figure.

Technorati : email marketing relationships

There has been some recent news about email service providers (ESPs) adding RSS functionality to their email marketing tools.   Details about the actual implementations seem to be sparse but I can only imagine two ways to implement this.

1) Add the ability to publish an RSS feed and track the click throughs a la Feedburner
2) Add the ability to take your RSS feed and publish it in a newsletter a la adrants

I don’t see a real value in option 1 as syndicating content into RSS is fairly simple and doesn’t require an email marketing tool to achieve.  I do see a real value in option 2.  If you review Yahoo’s white paper on RSS adoption, you’ll find RSS is far from mainstream (granted it is from October of 2005).  Providing your valuable content in only a format that has not hit critical mass is a waste of content.  By providing content in multiple formats you give your customers and prospects the option to consume it how they want, when they want.