Top 10 Best Practice Tips For Email Marketing

If you’re using email to communicate with current or prospective customers it's important that you apply best practice to achieve the highest response rates possible, whilst retaining valuable contacts.

1. How To Measure Success

Ensure you outline what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are going to be and bench mark each campaign against them. KPIs could include:


Open rate
Click-through rate
Click to open rate (number of unique clicks/number of unique opens)
Bounce rate
Delivery rate (emails sent, measured against bounces)
Unsubscribe rate
Referral rate ('send-to-a-friend')
Number, or proportion of, spam complaints


2. Personalise Where Possible

Improve response rates by personalising the email content. The more you know about your customers such as their topics of interest, their industry or company size the easier this will be.

3. Use Clear Calls To Action

Ensure the content is clear, consistent and communicates a clear call to action.


4. Experiment With Subject Lines

Keep subject lines short and to the point and try to refrain from using words which will be 'junked' by spam filters. A/B test alternatives to find out what most appeals to your audiences.


5. Test With All Email Clients

Test your email content with all the top email clients and providers (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL etc) to ensure it can be seen by the majority of users.

6. Test To Improve Performance

Continuous A/B testing of templates, subject lines, topics and sending day & times can help to optimise open and conversion rates.


7. Images & Alt Tags

Avoid putting text within an image. Most email clients don’t automatically download images, therefore image content is not viewable on first sight. If you have to use text within images, ensure you use an ‘Alt’ tag reiterating the text within the graphic.


8. Avoid Spamming

Try not to send too many emails to your audience unless you know they want to receive them. If you make the mistake of sending daily / weekly emails to your database you may find out that consumers quickly opt out.


9. Keep It Relevant

Consumers like to receive messages that are relevant to them. Don’t try and sell them something they did not sign up for.

10. Promote Key Content At The Top

Make sure you communicate key messages at the top of your email content. Many email clients don’t automatically display all email content therefore the top content needs to be motivating enough to encourage consumers to scroll down.

Data from : Approved Index

http://epidm.edgesuite.net/RBI/ApprovedIndex/AIBUY/BuyerMWSept2010.html

New IPads

Nice New Asus Ipad (Eee pad)



ASUS Eee Pad will come in two varieties: the 12-incher running full-blown Windows 7 desktop OS underneath with an Intel Core 2 Duo ultra low power CULV processor, and the 10-incher running Windows Embedded Compact 7 with NVIDIA Tegra in its back. The form factor and everything else will almost remain the same. Both of these devices will give 10 hour of battery life (like iPad), and will feature webcams on the front for video chatting/conferencing. They’ll also feature USB ports for connecting other devices with the Eee Pad.





and here is the MSI Version

The price is the same as the cheapest iPad (£300) and the capacitive screen is effectively the same size (9.7" for the iPad, 10" for the MSI). The iPad runs iPhone OS while the MSI runs Android. That means the MSI will multitask of course, and Flash support in Android should be a given by launch time (though that isn't certain). It has a camera. It's running on an Nvidia Tegra2 chip which Ars Technica suggests puts it on par with the iPad's A4 as far as computing horsepower. And of course Android doesn't live in a walled garden.




here is a video




In a nut shell hold off from buying an IPad - I have seen even more..
Epad, Iped, list goes on..

Exporting Contacts from Thunderbird

To export your contacts from Mozilla Thunderbird, use the Address Book: to open Thunderbird's address book, go to Tools > Address Book from Thunderbird's main window.

note:

Thunderbird supports multiple address books: the export address book functionality will export the contacts from the selected address book. To export contacts from other address books, repeat the procedure outlined below for each address book.

After having selected the address book you would like to export, go (from Thunderbird's address book window) to Tools > Export

The Export Address Book dialog will open, and let you pick a file name, a location and a file format for your exported contacts.

Thunderbird lets you export contacts from your address book in three formats: LDIF, for LDAP directories, CSV (Comma-Separated Values), the most compatible used format (where contacts are listed on each line, and contact information is separated by commas), or Tab Delimited.

The CSV format enables you for example, to import the contacts you exported from Thunderbird's address book into Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, even Excel with a single click.

I found saving the file and opening it in exel and import, this is the quickest way to work with mail merge.

Here is a tool it must be install into Thunderbird and restarted.
http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/ImportExportTools-2.3.3.xpi

Full info
http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

hope it helps.