It’s time to go under the knife again. The needs of customers and friends have increased (and probably those of anonymous readers too). Before I put on my surgical gloves, I’d like you to give me some suggestions on the sort of material you would like to see and the layout that appeals to you.

My blog is essentially about responsible and effective use of email marketing for business as well as developing personal PR. The issues important to you in your business are just as critical to me when developing material that will be useful to create encouraging results.

Here are some of the features already in place or coming up;

1. Email Marketing (How to do it, how to get good at it);
2. Applying marketing fundamentals to email marketing
3. Guerrilla Email Marketing tactics
4. List Building
5. How to be more productive in business by using Gmail
6. How to use free online technologies to support your email marketing strategies.
7. Do it yourself photo editing (how to)
8. Email design (for HTML coders)

I welcome contributors. So if you have great material you think is useful for my audience, why not make them yours too! Give me your comments.

ShoutLabs List Builder provides a systematic approach to building a high-quality email database.  You can use this system to build your business or personal mailing list.  In this article, I will provide you clear instructions on how to clean up your email database and prepare it for list-building. You should execute these stages in the following order. Read Full Article »

I love having different bags to carry my stuff. I don’t know if it’s simply because I love variety or only because I get bored easily. This week I’m looking for something stylish, and I’ve narrowed down a few bags I like. I’m in a dilemma. Perhaps you could offer me some advice? Read Full Article »

I’m a tipaholic. When I surf the web, I’m always drawn to articles that ‘quantify’ the number of benefits they contain. In another post, I’ll share my entire bookmark of tips with you. For email marketing, there are some fundamental you should not compromise on. Here’s 10 for all you tipaholics out there; Read Full Article »

Email is a fantastic platform that allows you to deploy guerrilla-marketing tactics easily and successfully.  Marketers often have lots to say but when faced with creating thousands of one-page flyers, they often tend to keep the ‘promotional’ content and discard the educational bits that play a vital role in acquiring customers. Read Full Article »

Do you know how many people you need on your list to make email marketing effective? The answer is one. Email marketing is not ‘just’ a numbers game. Essentially, no matter what size your database is, your email marketing campaigns will be more effective if they have 3 distinctive qualities; Read Full Article »

Do you use your regular email program like Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, Gmail or Hotmail to send mass emails?If you are, you should consider using specialized software to get the job done. The only option for you to send bulk emails using such programs is to Bcc your entire recipient list. Many times, you may have to send multiple messages because your ISP may limit the number of recipients you can include in the Bcc header. But that’s not the only shortcoming. Here are list of other issues. Read Full Article »

Email signatures play a very important role at the level of subtle communication between you and your prosepcts, customers and friends. Most email applications allow you to create signatures and style them with text effects or include images. In Gmail, you are only allowed to create plain text signatures by default. However, Jerome Dane has come up with a nifty solution that enables you to go crazy with HTML signatures in Gmail. Here’s a preview of what my signature looks like;

To use Jerome’s HTML Signatures for Gmail tool, you will need to install a plugin for Firefox called GreaseMonkey. Once again, if you’re using Internet Explorer, your Internet experience is quite limited. Here’s a step by step guide to setting up; Read Full Article »

Occasionally we meet marketers who complain that their emails are not reaching their audience. They tell us that emails they send to themselves and their friends end up in the Junk Mail folder. What can you do to improve deliverability in 2008? In 90% of such cases, our investigations return the presence of a combination of the following causes: Read Full Article »

Most email applications like Outlook, Apple Mail etc provide you with a ‘folder’ system to organize your emails. Gmail introduced the ‘labelling’ system to email archiving which essentially works like tags. The benefit of labels is you can assign a single message to multiple labels. Genius! That being said however, I was looking for a way to get the best of both worlds.

My search brought me to a the Greasemonkey Project which provides an add-on for Firefox (Sorry Internet Explorer users, it’s time to switch. You can easily do it by downloading Firefox from www.getfirefox.com). Just follow these 4 easy steps to organize better in Gmail.

Launch Firefox Browser.   Download and install GreaseMonkey. You will be prompted to restart Firefox after installation.   Install this script after Firefox restarts; http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/8810.user.js.   Refresh Gmail.   To create nested labels, give your labels names like; Customers/Customer A Customers/Customer B A label named ‘Customers’ will be created containing two Customers, A and B.

Folders4Gmail was written by Arend v. Reinersdorff. On the 25th January 2008, Gmail made some code changes that rendered previous versions of Folder4Gmail useless. However, by the 26th Arend had successfully updated the script and everyone’s smiling again. Scripts are only as useful as the reliability offered by their authors. This one’s safe to use. Go ahead, enjoy!

Email Marketing is an inexpensive way of communicating with customers and prospects. Depending on the crowd that you are targeting, there are certain ‘tricks of the trade’ you may wish to employ in order to have recipients be more open and responsive to your message. The timing and frequency of your messages are key contributors to whether your campaign will result with much success in attaining sales or driving your message agenda. Read Full Article »

As an email marketer, you will constantly face the issue of deliverability. Deliverability can be simply defined as the success rate of your emails reaching their destination inboxes. Too many marketers assume that once their emails are ‘blasted-out’, the problem is over. In fact, any problems will only become irreversible at this point. What then contributes to deliverability and what measures are in or not in your control to influence this positively? Read Full Article »

First of all, many thanks to the individuals and businesses that have supported us in the development of a real and promising email marketing culture in Singapore. We have big plans for 2008, from releasing version 2.0 to establishing a local coalition of email marketers, for email marketers. Since stepping into a new year without some reflection of the last 365 seems incomplete, we spent some time evaluation our actions and remember amongst other great achievements. Read Full Article »