Mobilize Mail Opinion

I have exciting news – we have added a Social Media Tag Library in your Mobilize Mail Account.

You can now reap the rewards by gaining more visibility for your business through email marketing.

Each time you mail out to your database (mailing lists) you can gain more views of your email content with the Social Media links in your email template – or in the message.

Image of links in a message.

You may be thinking right now…but what is Social Media?

The short answer is Social Media is a term coined for websites that provide platforms for interacting and networking. Some well known examples of social media sites are Twitter; Facebook; LinkedIn. You may have accounts with these sites, and your mailing list/database of clients, prospects will more than likely have one or many accounts.

With these accounts your email recipients can click a Social Media link (in your email message) to share your email message content with the people they are networked to through their social media account.

For example we have a twitter account called www.twitter.com/businesstalk. When we receive an email message that provides a social media link to Twitter (Twit This) we can click the link and share the email message with our 6000 followers.

You can see why this is big news!

You send a message to one person and they can share it with lots of people by clicking a link in your message and you can find out who shared your message by viewing your email campaign statistics. You may even wish to reward these people for sharing your emails with their networks.

Contact us ( support@mobilizemail.com ) to add the Social Media Links to your Template – a 15 min job.

Further Reading on Social Media

A Business Owner’s Perspective on Social Media – read article

Adding a signup form to your web site is an easy task which can be done in a few steps:

1) Copy the HTML signup code from your Mobilize Mail account and

2) Add the HTML code to the web pages you want the form to appear in.

Done!

Now you can add a signup form to your Facebook fan pages which only involves a few easy steps as well.

Follow the steps below to add a signup form to your Facebook fan page:

1) First copy the HTML signup form code from your Mobilize Mail account to notepad or textedit so its easy to locate.

2) Go to the Static FBML application and choose to add it. You prompted to select the fan page you would like application added to.

3) Edit the FBML application. Click on ‘edit page’ from your pages profile, and find the FBML box. Click the pencil edit icon in the header.

4) Paste the HTML signup code into the “FBML” box and add a name for the application such as “Newsletter”. Click the Save Changes button to save the changes.

5) Now add the signup form to your fan page by adding it as a tab. You can do this by clicking on the “+” sign on the tab row.

6) Now you have a signup form on your fan page!

A frequent question I get asked is “what can I do to increase the success of my email marketing campaigns?”.

To help I have provided some tips below:

Get to know your subscribers.

The most important tip I can give you is to apply common sense to your email marketing strategy.

For example before you hit the “send” button ask yourself this question: “if I was to receive this email from a business would I find the content of benefit to me?”. If you answered “hmm…” or “no” then imagine what your subscribers would think!

Don’t send your subscribers pure sales content. In order to gain a foothold in the minds of people you need to make them feel like they are getting value from reading your emails.

Respect your subscribers.

If your subscribers signed up to your mailing list because you told them they would receive interesting information about your products, services or a topic they are interested in then I suggest you do not send them content that is different from what they are expecting.

Ask yourself this: “would you be happy if you signed up to receive information on camera’s only to receive emails on their business partners new car yard?” What would you do in response? This will be the action that most subscribers will take as well.

Set a frequency of emailing your subscribers and stick to it.

One of the worst things you can do is promise to send out a monthly email and then change to send out fortnightly or weekly. This again comes down to respecting your subscribers. They signed up in good faith to what you initially stated so it would not be a great idea to break that promise. If you want to increase the frequency then create a new email campaign stream and invite the subscriber to join in your next regular email campaign.

Help your subscribers spread the word about your emails.

Your email service provider should allow you to add in links such as “Forward to a Friend” and “Web Version” to your email templates. This enables your subscribers to send your emails in a controlled and professional way to other people who they think might be interested in your content.

Segment your subscribers to provide more targeted content.

In today’s world people want targeted content sent to them because most don’t have the time to read through the irrelevant stuff to get to what they want.

I recommend you look at the click statistics of your email campaigns to see what subscribers are interested in then create new mailing lists based on the statistics. Then create targeted email content.

For example if your business provides legal services to the business community and you had the following 3 topics:

1) Legal advice for unfair dismissal submissions,

2) How a business can protect themselves from defamation cases,

3) How to reduce your legal costs.

The click statistics should tell you which subscribers are interested in which topics. You should then be able to create a new mailing list for each topic and add all the subscribers that clicked the relevant link into the new mailing lists in one click of the mouse button.

You now can really target your content to the right subscribers!

Partner with an email service provider.

There are many other smart ways to increase the success of your email campaigns. The most important consideration is partnering with an email service provider that not only has the advanced tools but the knowledge to customize an email marketing strategy that suits your requirements.

Online News Websites and Blogs reported chaos on the Internet in the first few hours following the death of Michael Jackson.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: ‘We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke” where 5000 tweats per minute were Michael Jackson related.

The number of Facebook posts tripled during the hour of Michael’s death.

Such was the surge in online traffic that Google returned an ‘error message’ for searches of the singer’s name as it assumed it was under attack. Wikipedia also crashed.

The Internet at its peak on Thursday night had 4.2 million global visitors per minute – where normal traffic is around 2 million. 84% (over 2 million) of the increased traffic was from from USA .

The race was on to secure domain names relating to Michael Jackson and his songs – Go Daddy registered over 3,700 by 1pm on Thursday – just hours after Michael’s death.

And finally downloading of Michaels songs on sites like iTunes and memorabalia sites like Ebay were flooded. We have witnessed the power of and maybe the limitations of the Cyberspace to communicate big News.

Sources: – DailyMail.co.uk; 411mania.com