Peter Butler - Smart Email

Should You Use Microsoft Outlook To Send Mass Emails To Your Customers?

November 19, 2009 by Peter Butler Leave a Comment

Unfortunately, MS Outlook isn’t really designed for sending email newsletters to a large list of customers.

Sure, you can send an HTML email to a few friends every now and then, but not to your entire customer list.

Here’s why…

6 important reasons not to send bulk email directly from your own computer :

If you send too many emails from your own computer, your Internet Service Provider will think you’re a spammer, and will most likely block you. It depends on your ISP, but this usually happens once your list approaches around 1,000 recipients or so.
If you send attachments with your email, you’ll inevitably run into bandwidth limit issues with your ISP. They’ll charge you more.
Send emails to thousands of recipients, and you’ll get all the bounce backs and auto replies from them. Will you be able to manually process them? Hard bounces should be removed from your list immediately, or your email address will be blacklisted by ISPs. Soft bounces should be retried a couple more times before removing them.
According to the CAN-SPAM law, if someone requests to be removed from your list, you must do so within 10 business days. Most people who send their emails from their desktop computers don’t have scripts to help them automatically process unsubscribe requests. They simply ask people to “reply with unsubscribe in the subject line.” That’s prone to mistakes, and that’s prone to a CAN-SPAM lawsuit from the FTC.
When do-it-yourselfers send email to their customers with Microsoft Outlook, they usually put their entire customer email list into the CC: field. Yikes. All it takes is for one customer to click “reply-to-all” then all heck breaks loose. Thousands of emails will be sent accidentally causing more confusion and upsetting your customers even more.
Outlook and other desktop email applications don’t come with tracking tools to show you how many people opened and clicked your campaigns.

A far better solution is to use a software package like Smart Email. It also has Client Relationship Management functions so you can keep track of all your leads, prospects and clients.

Email Marketing Management for Professionals

September 1, 2009 by Peter Butler Leave a Comment

One of the most frustrating things when you’re a professional is to get other professionals and people you meet to sign up for your stuff!

List building can be one of the toughest and most arduous tasks in business building.

Let’s say you’re at a function and you meet some great prospects. You know that they are perfect candidates for your stuff, even if it’s not right now, but when they are ready you want them to think of you first. Right!

You also know that unless they are hearing from you on a regular basis then you’re not “positioning” yourself how you could or even should. And to charge that premium rate that you deserve, you need to be in that “prime position”! Do I hear an “Amen” to that?

How many times have we heard that the money is in the “list” so we design our website to do that, have all the name capture stuff, the right double-opt in form protocols. Have to abide by the Spam rules and regulations right?

That’s great for your online visitors but what if you’re out networking?

Having the right opt in forms, auto-responders and email newsletter is a must for every serious professional and their website but how do you get these networking contacts into the same email list building stuff when you’re out and about? How do you overcome this issue?

I have tried it all when I’m at a function or even meetings like BNI (Business Network International) and the like.

You hand them your business card and say something like “Oh, go to my site and click on the big blue button and I’ll send you my Free Report.” And they never do!

So then you try signing them up yourself and say “I’ll send you my Free Report and all you need to do is to click on the confirmation email you’ll get”. And they never do!

Yes, you can add them into ACT or Outlook and even create contact groups but you’d still prefer them in that one list where you can manage them easily without it becoming a huge CRM (Client Relationship Management) drama.

What about an email marketing system designed from the ground up with the professional in mind! Awesome!

Solution! – Smart Email Marketing! Why is it awesome?

Because you can over ride the double opt in process is why! Do I recommend that for your online stuff? Absolutely not, you’d have to have rocks in your head.

BUT IMAGINE THIS! You can now say “Look, I have some info that will address that exact issue plus I have some other stuff coming out soon which I really don’t want you to miss out on. I’ll get that to you this afternoon. Is that soon enough?” and you grab their business card … or everyone in the group’s business cards!

You get back to your office, open up your Smart Email System and enter all their details and hit “send” and the auto-responder sequence begins, plus now they’re automatically in your newsletter list too. But this is where it gets even sexier – no other email marketing software will let you “log an event” so you can actually record that you met them in person and they said yes to your stuff and you did a manual entry.

Talk about guard your butt in these contentious times. It really doesn’t get any better than this. Here’s a short list of just some of the other sexy features:

Completely browser based (You manage it from wherever you are)
No per email fees
No list size limits or fees
Dozens of built-in templates
Step-by-step campaign wizard
Custom fields for personalization
Unlimited autoresponders
Split test email campaigns
Powerful, automated triggers
Full campaign statistics
Google Analytics integration
Automated bounced email processing
Full WYSIWYG campaign editing
Easily import/export contacts
Pause and resume sending
Automatic event logging
Built-in CRM functionality
Google Calendar integration
RSS email campaign archive

Here’s what Josh Williams of www.AdsOnVids.com.au fame said only last week…

“I have been helping businesses with online marketing for the last 6 years and have never seen a better email marketing and CRM system to recommend to my clients. When Peter first told me about this I thought it would be like most of the ones I’ve seen before, but I was blown away within the first few minutes of using the system. This is a truly phenomenal product.

SmartEmail is very easy to use and offers amazing value. I recommend this to all of my clients – if you haven’t signed up yet for a free trial, do it now! I’m sure like me, you’ll find investing in Smart Email one of the easiest decisions you could make in online marketing today.”

So what’s holding you back on getting serious about building your business? You know the money is in the list and with a Free Trial valued at $49.50 plus a coaching call with me! It’s a no brainer really!

I’m only offering 3 Free Trails for September so call NOW To Reserve Your Spot! Like Right NOW! (Why only 3 Free Trials? – because I will actually guide you through how to get started, as in me personally and I’m very busy – I’m writing this at 9.10 on a Monday night!)

You can either call me on 0413 733 272 or Book My Smart Email Trial NOW!

Or you can wait until October! And only then if you’re lucky and quick! Don’t miss out!

Email Deliverability 101

July 8, 2009 by Peter Butler Leave a Comment

Email deliverability can be tricky. You have to deal with spam filters, blacklisting, whitelisting, bounces and more. In this article I’ll share with you 20+ tips to make sure your emails get delivered.

Frequency and subscription

Never send an email to someone that won’t be expecting to get an email from you. Make sure all your sign ups are clear and are double opt in
Make sure you regularly (7 or 8 days after every send to allow for delivery attempts to non existent domains) remove emails from your list that are bouncing or you may end up sending to spam traps
Send a smaller email weekly rather than a large one monthly. This will allow you to keep your list more up to date and will keep your newsletters as something expected to your users and less likely to be marked as spam. Smaller emails are also easier for your customers to skim amongst their other emails.
Always include an unsubscribe link in your emails
Test and make sure the unsubscribe link actually works. If the unsubscribe returns an error they may just mark you as junk instead of letting you know it’s broken
Never try to hide who the email is coming from
Make sure who the email is coming from is going to be who the subscribers expects it to be coming from
Make the unsubscribe process easier than the subscribe process

Email content and design

A pretty email is nice to look at but the most important thing is getting your information to your subscriber so don’t get too fancy with the design. Lots of design elements will get stripped out by mail clients and Outlook 2007 will display hardly any of them
Don’t use spam like words and phrases in your email
If you include a text part (and you should) be sure to have the content of that be a true text representation of the text in the html version
Don’t include too many images in your email (1-2 per email should suffice) or some filters will flag it
Don’t use a similar colour for your text as the background it is on (e.g. medium gray text on light gray background) or some filters will see that as trying to hide text
Don’t use images or send attachments that are too large. 300Kb should be the absolute max size of the email so be sure to make sure the total for images and attachments comes in well under that (adding a file to an email will increase the size by about 30% just in encoding it) so you need to take that into consideration too
Make sure the content of the email is what the subscriber signed up to receive. Don’t send them emails about sprockets if they only wanted to know about cogs.
Don’t include a single large image in your email if you can avoid it since this is how most spam nowadays seems to operate

Automatic Response Email Marketing!

July 8, 2009 by Peter Butler Leave a Comment

Put automated email marketing to work for you!

Research has shown that people need to be “exposed” to your products or services at least seven times before they will purchase. Your web site can help, but emailing your customers using automatic “follow up” emails can get the job done much quicker.

What is an autoresponder?

If you haven’t heard about autoresponder emails, they allow you to automatically send as many follow up emails to your web site visitors as you like. Once they sign up to your mailing list, you can use SmartEmail Marketer to schedule a series of 3, 4, 5 or even 20 follow up emails to be sent to each subscriber at separate intervals over a period of time.

For example, if someone subscribed to your mailing list today, you can schedule a series of 3 autoresponder emails to be sent to them automatically by SmartEmail Marketer. You might schedule the first one to go out 24 hours after they have subscribed with more information about your products/services.

The second might go out 48 hours after, with a free eBook or more content, and you might send the third one 72 hours after, including a link to buy your product with a discount. The possibilities are endless.

It’s a no-brainer that autoresponder emails can help increase sales, and the best thing is that once you’ve setup the autoresponder, you don’t need to do anything else — SmartEmail Marketer takes care of everything and will send the autoresponder emails automatically, at any time of the day, 7 days a week.

How does it work?

Using SmartEmail Marketer and your newsletter subscriber list, you can increase the revenue that your web site generates in just 3 easy steps.

Here’s how:

Import your existing subscriber list or create a new list and collect email addresses from your web site visitors.

Create a series of smart autoresponder emails which you can schedule to be sent to your subscribers at recurring intervals.

You can even target specific subscribers with your autoresponder emails. For example, you can choose to only email subscribers who are male that live in Melbourne or Sydney.

In your autoresponder emails, include information about your products, links to your web site, special offers, promotional discounts and more!

Reap the benefits of more orders, downloads and leads thanks to your autoresponder emails doing all of the work for you!

Check out the “behind the scenes” and in the mission control panel area demo right here!

Or just get started turning your website “browsers” into a money making client list right here and now!

Turn More Leads Into Buyers and Clients… all On Auto-Pilot.

July 7, 2009 by Peter Butler