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Archive for the ‘email’ Category

How Can I Become A Marketing Maven?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

Let me introduce you to one of the best kept secrets and most underutilised assets in Outlook Contacts. And that’s Categories.

What are categories?

A category is a keyword or phrase that you can assign to a Contact (email, appointment, task.) You can assign one or as many categories as you like to each item.

Why are Categories so utterly brilliant? 4 Reasons:

Categorise and Target
By what is important to you (or, more wisely to them). You can create categories by industry, by company size, by their nature of business with you.
Organisation
Helps you easily find, sort, filter, or group contacts.
Track related but different items
For example all the meetings, contacts, and emails for a baseball committee you’re on or any business project. Create a category (Baseball or New Project) and assign items to it.
Minimises folder requirements.
For example, you can keep business and personal tasks in the same task list and use the Business and Personal categories to view the tasks separately.

If you like this tip please share it with your friends and colleagues.

Posted in contacts, Debbie, email, General, management, marketing, skills | Comments Off

Five Permission Email Tips For Marketing

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

1. Only email those who have asked. It’s the law

If someone hands you their business card, don’t assume you can just add them to your email list. Ask first – the best time to mention it is when you get the card in your hand. Say something like: ‘I’ve got a great online newsletter, would you like to get a free subscription? You can leave it if it doesn’t appeal.’ Nine out of ten times you’ll get an affirmative answer.

2. Always honour their requests to opt-out.

Make it a simple process. Since people often have multiple email addresses, include on your email the address you have sent it to. This can eliminate a lot of angst on their side and frustration on yours.

3. Allow your customers and prospects to give you their preferences.

Information: how much and how often do they want it? For example, if you’re doing a daily email – cater to those who might prefer to have only some of the information. This makes it more relevant for them instead of having to scan through the entire email.

4. Do not sell or rent your lists.

Your email list can be your goldmine, one of the most valuable assets of your business. Don’t ruin it by selling or renting your email list.

5. Give and take.

You don’t think people give you their email addresses out of the goodness of their hearts do you? They do it in exchange for something of value to them. A gift, Information. Education. White paper.Chance to win. Be creative, but truly add value.

6. Respond to customer email inquiries promptly.

Why is it that once someone hits that send key on their computer, they expect an immediate reply? They expect that someone is sitting at a computer ready to read and respond to their email. Have an email policy and enforce it. Ensure that you have a 24-hour turnaround if at all possible.

Tags: email enquiries, email marketing, privacy
Posted in communication, email, Outlook | Comments Off

Categorise Customers For Ease of Use

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Here are two great tips for enhancing your marketing database to make it more workable and accessible for you.

If you have information in a simple Excel spreadsheet, don’t have a different column for every variable. You’ll end up with an unworkable spreadsheet with too many columns. Instead, categorise.

The wrong way
You set up a column for customers, a column for prospects, a column for old clients and a column for suppliers.

The right way
One column is allocated and called Customer Type for example. All the different variables are then used within that one column such as customer, old customer, prospect, supplier. When you need to see or communicate with a specific type – for example you want to see all the prospects listed, you simply sort the entire list by Customer Type and all the suppliers will be listed one after another.

If you keep your information in Outlook or Lotus Notes Contacts, one of the least-known functions is Categories – a keyword or phrase that you can assign to a contact. Better yet, you can assign multiple categories to each contact.

Categories are utterly brilliant in many ways. Why? Because you can finely target specific customers. By creating industry, occupation, interest, purchase, service categories, for example, all you need to do is sort by category.

How do I create a category?
Open any Outlook contact. In the bottom centre you’ll see the rectangular Categories box. Click to open. Ignore the pre-programmed Microsoft ones. Click the Master Category List button, then type in your own. To view your contacts grouped by categories, go to View,
Current View, then Categories. In Lotus Notes, you’ll find it in the contacts section.

Article by International Speaker and bestselling author Debbie Mayo-Smith. www.debbiespeaks.co.nz Debbie@debbiespeaks.co.nz

Tags: categories, contacts, database, lotus notes, marketing, Outlook
Posted in communication, email | Comments Off

Your Secret for Coping with 100s Emails?

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

You know how important it is to save time. It’s one of the most valuable commodities today. As you know your Inbox can be a great time waster. You can have significant numbers of emails to read and answer every day. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your own inbox secretary? Someone that would read your emails and answer, file, forward, delete – well manage them for you. Bingo! You do. Let me introduce you to “Rules”, your personal inbox secretary. Rules could be a life changing experience for you. Every email (and most webmail programs) will have a Rule function. For emails you send and receive, you tell Rules what to look for and then what to do with the emails. It’s hands off for you saving you time and repetitive actions. You can have as many or as few as you desire. Rules won’t eliminate the actual number of emails you receive. They will help you prioritise which get your attention and eliminate the unnecessary ones. There are four steps to create each rule: 1. Set what to look for. For example from a certain address, not directly addressed to you, certain words in the subject line or the body of the email. 2. What to do with the email when the condition is met (move to a folder, forward to another person or your cell phone, answer it, delete it. 3. Specify if there are any exceptions. 4. Finally turn it on and yes – the best part of all – click to additionally run it through your existing inbox/sent emails. See how wonderful rules can be? So How Do I Create One? 1. Select the Rule icon from your Toolbar (Outlook only) 2. or right click somewhere on the email and select create Rule 3. Or right click the email (Outlook Only) Outlook on the Tools menu, click Rules and Alerts .Outlook Express on the Tools menu – click Message Rules – select Mail. 4. Click New Rule. Follow the wizard from this point. Bonus: Often rules can be found in webmail programs under options

Tags: email, inbox, Outlook, productivity, rules
Posted in email, Outlook | Comments Off

Activity equals success

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

If business is slow, don’t sit twiddling your thumbs waiting for the figurative telephone to ring, Listen to your gut for what would be good for your clients in this economy. Using your database, create your own activity. Activity Equals Success.

Let me give you a personal example. Last winter was going to be an exceptionally quiet one for business. While dropping the kids off at school at 8:25, I thought to myself “Why don’t I run some database marketing workshops around New Zealand and Australia By 9:35 I had segregated out my New Zealand and Australian newsletter subscribers, wrote a simple two paragraph plain text email to each group. I asked them to reply only if they were VERY interested in attending. A flood of over 700 emails had just arrived. Now two months later I conducted 14 workshops for 410 individuals, generated four speaking engagements and sold a lot of books. Let’s look at the aspects of this marketing campaign in relation to this economic climate.

Database
This entire exercise was marketed solely though my newsletter database. With the help of my readers, it was spread though their sphere of influence.

Targeted
Why burn the goodwill of your list by sending people in the UK, Spain, Brazil or Florida an email about an Australasian workshop? After the initial send, the communication continued primarily with those whom had expressed interest rather than the whole database.

Ease. Speed
From my initial idea in the car through to the final targeted execution and distribution of over 10,000 emails – only one hour had elapsed.

Inexpensive
The outlay was purely my time and that of an assistant helping with faxed forms and invoicing/receipts.

Not Fancy
It was simply plain text paragraphs. In fact I am 100% positive that the simplicity not only helped the email get through spam filters, it also was easy to digest and act on immediately.

Tags: email, inexpensive, marketing
Posted in Cheap marketing, communication, email | Comments Off

Getting past spam filters

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

We want spam filters to work well saving our time and bandwidth from this unnecessary waste. According to the Google enterprise and archiving security network Postini, for the first quarter of 2009, around 94 percent of all e-mail sent to their customers was spam.

On the other hand, we want our normal business correspondence to get through. Especially marketing and promotional emails that our customers have asked for and subscribed to.

Therefore it pays to understand how emails are screened, rejected or accepted.

The newer your email software, the more advanced the filtering will be.
Lists of known spammers or the Internet Service Provider (ISP) they use comprise Blacklists. Your ISP will deny messages coming from an entity on the blacklist. The bad news is all innocent clients of blacklisted ISP’s get blocked too.
Greylisting is when an ISP temporarily rejects all incoming email, anticipating that non-spamming sources will re-send the delayed email in a few seconds, minutes or hours. Your problem – the delivery of your email is held up in this process too.
- Spam filters also intricately examine the words and the technical composition of each email, primarily working on a point scoring system. It is up to each company’s discretion how strict or lenient they set the filter.
  - An extensive list of what Spam Assassin looks at is found on http://au2.spamassassin.org/tests.html. For example points are taken away for:
  - Large sized or non standard font colours
  - Message has x% of HTML code
  - Message has click here
  - Pass, forward on
  - For free
  - Order today, order now
  - Money back guarantee

Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet to get past the filters, except to be as circumspect as possible I’m afraid.

Tags: email, marketing, spam, Spam filters, spamassassin
Posted in email | Comments Off

Controlling Your Inbox Size

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Your Email folders grow as you send and receive emails. Create appointments and meetings. Set Tasks. Not only does the information become dated, it slows down the performance of your Inbox and wastes time when you search for items.

Your inbox also becomes dated, yet it’s important to keep records. And if you’re in a corporate environment with a limited mailbox size – dollars to doughnuts you’re always pulling your hair out to get under limit so you can receive emails again.

There is an answer to this problem. Plus it’s automatic and can be customized to a “T”. Your solution is called Archives (note – Outlook Express does not have this function).

Why is archiving such a great solution?

1. Effective record keeping
By archiving instead of deleting messages, you’ll keep records

2. Save disk space
Archiving uses compression, so archived items use less storage space. It is stored in a separate mail file, yet it opens and displays fully in your inbox..

3. Your inbox opens quicker
Because it’s lost weight. My cheeky way of saying you’ve shifted file size out.

4. Cut down on your clutter
Archiving removes items from your mailbox and puts them in the archive file.

5. Automatic
Archiving works automatically. You’ll get a little prompt saying “Want to archive your old items now?” And all you have to do is say yes.

6. Individual settings
In Outlook each folder can have it’s own archive settings allowing you to archive more or less frequently or not at all.

AutoArchive
AutoArchive is on by default and runs automatically at scheduled intervals, clearing out old and expired items from your folders (except Contacts). Old items are those that reach the archiving age you specify. It could be 4 months, it could be 2 months, a year. The choice is yours.

What AutoArchive does with items
AutoArchive can do one or both of the following things for you:
1. Permanently delete expired items
2. Delete or archive old items to an archive file.

The archive file is a special type of data file.
The first time AutoArchive runs, Outlook creates the archive file automatically in the following location:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername \Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst

If you don’t see the Local Settings folder, it may be hidden. See Microsoft Windows Help for information about showing hidden folders.

Mirror image of your folders
When Outlook archives, it will set up a list of folders that directly match what you have in Outlook. They’re all nested under Archive Folders in your Folder List. You work with the Archive emails the same way you work with items in your main Inbox.

If you decide you want archived items moved back into your main mailbox, you can import all the items from the archive file into their original folders or into other folders you specify. Or you can manually move or copy individual items.

Tags: archiving, autoarchive, email, folders, inbox size, Outlook
Posted in email, Outlook | Comments Off

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