Enhanced Email Marketing Tool for your website

Apr 22, 2010

Enhanced Email Marketing Tool for your website

Most email marketing systems are seperate from your website.

And that makes a big difference in how effective they can be.
Your website is often the source of your contacts and sales.
Managing your contacts well, can really enhance your business.

Typical email campaign software can't do this-:

1 You have a new blog article of interest to some of your subscribers

2 You decide to send it to a collection of subscribers (not all)

3 The post includes a YouTube video

4 The post includes a gallery of images or other specific content (you don't want included)

5 You want to include a special call to action for email recipients only

6 You want to know who reads the email how often and when in your CRM

7 You want the email to match your brand and read well on major email platforms like gmail and Microsoft Outlook

8 You want the email to be delivered from your personal authorised email address and not be regarded as spam

9 You want to send a test email to yourself as a final check before bulk sending

10 You want all this done in 5 minutes - time is precious

Most email systems cannot do this because they are seperate systems to your website, blogging system and CRM. We put them all together under one login and offer personal help to users. Virtually anyone can write a blog. Few can write a blog that works in search engines and can automatically be sent as an email automatically under the same system.

How your website traffic is measured

Every web server stores raw data on visitors to your site in logs.
A number of programs were developed to view those stats in a meaningful format.
Google Analytics (GA4) can be used to record stats. An email sent via a 3rd party system cannot include your Google Analytics tags in the online web version - ours can.
Google Search Console can also be used to see what Google search terms were used to get to your site.
The impressions numbers on Google Search Console give a great insight (discovery) into possible improvements to make to your site to attract new visitors.

What happens in an email campaign

A typical email system like MailChimp creates a 'view online' page on another location to your site.
That means none of the normal website measurement programs know if that page has visits.
It also means that when someone visits the online version of your email the browser is not caching your website.
Often when people see your domain name they go to your home page and later return directly to that page.
(This cannot happen on an email stored in the cloud elsewhere)
A sophisticated email campaign may require a specific webpage or landing page.
Some systems allow you to create seperate landing pages within the email program. Again not on your own website.
Google Analytics does not seperate email traffic from other direct traffic measurements, unless you add specific Unique Tracking Codes (UTM).
However this can quickly get difficult to monitor without familiarity with Google Analytics.

We developed our Email System to work from your site and server

Data can be very useful if it is easy to read and read in context.
An example may be noticing an email visitor is interested in product A and instantly being able to check the clients' history with your business.
What if you could determine which visitors to your website were interested in specific products or services?
What if you could then design email campaigns directly based on the visitor habits from previous email campaigns.
Peronalising emails improves the chances of success.
And what if you had someone to manage this for you?

1 Develop and Send the Email

2 Monitor it and look for opportunities

Our Email Manager is a system that fits in with our Content Management System. Creating components under one login enhances your control of your website. Instead of multiple products with multiple security issues and logins our system is self contained and does not have multiple external plugins to update.

So you can write and monitor an email for virtually any opportunity without any external software or apps or cost. No experience required because we create, send and monitor the email for you.

How your website email is managed should not be left to chance.

Create a stunning easy to read email

That means a clean and consistent layout, a clear and concise message, and calls to action in appropriate places. Our experience is many people will click directly from a text email even without the images downloaded. An email designed to work both in text view and graphical view makes sense. Responsive design ensures the email looks good on any device width.

Adobe Dreamweaver to create HTML Emails

Why not use the premier HTML software to create responsive HTML emails?

A base template from Adobe has hours of refinement. It is going to work across multiple email software systems. It contains work arounds for Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook, IE, iOS, Apple and more. Here is an example of an email built using Adobe Dreamweaver.

Send emails in batches

When you have a large subscriber base, it is important to be able to send emails in batches to avoid being flagged as spam. Small bursts of emails have a better chance of reaching their destination.

We monitor the server when sending emails. A slight time delay between each email sent in a batch also allows the server time to process and record link clicks.

Create Collections or Groups

Update 12 May 2023

Managing your subscriber base may include placing subscribers into specific groups for targeted relevant emails.

Enhanced for eCommerce

Update 12 May 2023

Send emails to specific groups who have purchased a product or signed in for an offer. Virtually any imaginable configuration of customer data can be the basis for a targeted email. Our eCommerce systems are very flexible.

Add Safe Short Links to your email

Short links from your own website, make so much sense. Say you want to measure the response of a specific button in your email, a short link is ideal for this. The link being created on your site allows you to judge the response rate to a specific item within your email. Many of the publicly available external link shorteners' domains are not recommended for email marketing because they are often listed on blacklists due to overuse by spammers. Know at a glance which clients are clicking specific links. Storing an IP address also gives insight into sharing of emails. When an email is shared and/or opened and/or clicked the IP address can reveal more information.

Managed from the server

Update 12 May 2023

When we send an email for a client, the email is monitored on the server live. That means that the people that created the system, actually monitors your email being sent live.

We help manage your domain name and DNS because DNS settings are at best confusing. Emails can be authenticated and given a better chance of not landing in the spam box, based on the DNS settings we setup.

We can help add external email addresses to your online system. Duplicate email addresses are managed both manually and automatically checked when an email is sent.

Do you need to remove a list of bounced email addresses quickly? Keeping your email addresses clean is ongoing work. Doing this efficiently keeps your email reputation high.

Using SQL For Email Marketing

Update 18 May 2023

Structured Query Language (SQL) is the language behind most databases. SQL is a programming language used to access and manipulate data in a relational database. When you access your own data directly with SQL you have an unprecedented level of access and infinite possibilities for fine tuning your email list.

Our tool incorporates SQL to-:

1 Clean up spam

2 Create queries that can be used to segment your clients

3 Manage your lists

4 Providing advanced reports

5 Add bulk clients and assign them to a Collection (group)

Having separate data in marketing software or CRM for your email contacts is redundant. When your website is gathering most of your clients, it makes sense to use that data as the base for sending emails and managing your email lists.

SQL is an advanced language that can make queries and calculations in an instant. It is very efficient at both storing and protecting data.

Example SQL Query: Find every user who has signed up since the start of 2023, who has downloaded our eBook and has not made a purchase.

Manage bounced emails efficiently

Any email marketing list will eventually have old emails or emails that are no longer in use. Managing email bounces manually on your database can be very time consuming.

The ability to clean your database in bulk allows us to quickly remove (adjust email addresses). On certain systems we can speed up the process by a factor of 100, from manually removing bounced emails. If you are using your time or an employee's time on removing bounced emails manually, there is a lot of time wasted.

Removing only emails that are no longer valid is also important. An email may temporarily bounce due to the recipient being away on holidays.

The process goes like this -:

1 Setup a filter that directs certain email bounces to a folder

2 Download all of those bounced emails

3 Manually check for obvious spelling errors (like gmail.con instead of gmail.com)

4 Extract the email address that are not valid and process in bulk

Segment your list on the fly

By designing the website around your visitors and potential sign-ups, we can design and group your visitors based on their preferences at sign-up. If you can think of a way of grouping data we can do that. For example sending location specific emails based on post codes may suit your operation.

You may want to send a follow-up email to collections who viewed specific emails over a time period.

Collaborate email design live with your team

A HTML email is a subset of a webpage. Designing and collaborating with a team can speed up the production of emails because suggestions can be viewed live on the spot.

Typical production timelines for emails is 1 week. Our system can reduce that to even a few hours. This allows timely responses to events.

Image Manager ImageManager is a key part of that system. In short this allows you to add news articles, images, audio, video and slide shows to your website easily.

Now we have improved our Email Manager system to be able to send emails directly from your news articles (blog).
These are graphical emails (HTML) specially made to present well in a wide variety of email systems like Outlook or our favourite Thunderbird.

The message is still clear and readable even if the user does not want to download the associated images.

Sound confusing - lets walk through how you may use this system.

1 You decide to add a news article to your site (great for Google)

2 You choose an image or upload one from your PC, phone, camera etc.

3 You decide to send this new article to your subscribers - simply select the article, select who to email to (or send to all) and your done!

This would take however long it takes to write the article plus about 5 minutes.
Your subscribers receive an email which shows the news article from your website specially adapted to be easily viewable via email.
They can then click the other articles to read more online.

The email would look very similar to this article you are reading now in your inbox. It could include a link to audio, video or slide show associated with that news article.

Email Manager can also send ordinary text emails and include attachments as well if required.
Everything is from one login and direct support is available from the developer of the product (Phil) if need be. Training is included - most users familiar with our system pick it up straight away.

Designing emails that are more likely to be read

If you have ever received an email from Telstra or any large Internet based company, it is interesting to check the approach they use in designing and sending emails. Here are some of the technical aspects of the code behind a Telstra email -:

HTML
charset=windows-1252
include html and body tags
link colours defined inline
Use tables
Arial font (no other options)
Minimalistic code
Their own internal short links (https://tel.st/)
Simple grey background with white 650px message area
Clear and clean, well written code (minimal inline CSS)
Use well designed buttons
Small header - more focus on message than images
Supported by relevant images

Business Email Tips

Gaining new subscribers the wrong way

Gaining new subscribers - the right way!

Immediately asking people to sign-up can be the wrong approach. It is a bit like knocking on someone's door you do not know and immediately ask them to buy your services. Many websites immediately ask new visitors to sign up. Without having developed a relationship with you to sign-up, you would need a high level of trust or a compelling reason for someone to immediately signup.

It can pay off to develop a good subscriber list as part of your overall strategy of networking and forming business relationships. When you send an email, it will get a better response if it is relevant to the recipient. Nobody begrudges someone sending an email that really communicates with a genuine offer, or useful information, even if they do not act on it immediately or at all.

If you need help importing your existing subscriber list into your website, we can help with time saving automated methods. Generally we can import any number of subscribers if they are in a format like a spreadsheet. We usually format emails by First Name, Last Name and Email. Databases have not changed much over the years, they still contain fields of data. Hence a spreadsheet also being fields of data can quickly be converted into a database field and added.

Measure the response

The email is sent from your server, your domain name with the online version on your website. The response to the email is measured with multiple tools. It is very exciting to see a well crafted email strike an emotional response with its readers. You can add notes to individuals who subscribe, these may also be people who have purchased from your Shopping Cart which is also one of our systems. Having notes on clients and automatic notes created when a link is clicked is an efficient way of keeping in contact with them.

Email Manager is just part of one integrated system, managed by the creator of that system. WordPress sites have issues with security of their plugins. There is more security and less publicly known information, meaning less opportunity for hackers. Our system is made with Java utilising its advanced security measures.

Myth: Don't Use Your CRM System For Email Campaigns

We say get a better Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), or build one. When an email is sent from the server of the website, it is simply a matter of having the correct email DNS settings. Using a seperate entity to send emails eg MailChimp means you have to maintain 2 copies of your customer list and set seperate settings on the email sending program.

A customer emails you to unsubscribe - with seperate systems you have to manually ensure both are updated - that is extra work.