Jun03

Whether you are a blogger, a freelancer or a designer, you probably get overwhelmed when managing your email. This communication tool was supposed to make our lives simpler, but more often than not it does exactly the opposite.

In this post I’ll be sharing 10 tips you can use to tame your email. You’ll learn how to handle your domain email with Gmail, organize your incoming messages, process your inbox in batches, communicate quickly and manage the contacts effectively.

1. Handle your domain email with Gmail

One of the best things about owning your own domain is that you get to have an email address like me@mydomain.com. Unfortunately, most email clients that come with your hosting account look and function like they were released in 1999.

It’s actually possible to send and receive emails via your me@mydomain.com address through Gmail, and the process for doing so is quite simple.

Continue reading »

\\ tags: , , ,

Jan10

Just like a direct sales letter, the subject line of your email can make or break your campaign. If you don’t have a compelling subject line the chance of your email even getting read is slim.

According to a recent MarketingSherpa.com survey, 40% of email marketers said testing changes to just their subject line had a high impact on their return on investment (ROI). 45% said subject line changes accounted for a medium ROI and only 15% said that testing changes to their subject line results in a low ROI.

For every email you send you’ve got room for no more than 50 characters in your subject line, and today I’m going to share with you 10 tips that we use to increase the open rates of our email campaigns.

  1. Test the subject line – Take a look at email campaigns you’ve sent in the past. Which subject lines worked the best and gave you the highest open and conversion rates? You might find that for a particular topic there’s a general trend or subject style that resulted in higher open rates.

  2. The subject of importance – Try and put as much important and relevant information into your subject lines as possible. For example, if you’re sending out an email about a special offer make sure the product name and details on the offer appear in the subject line in a clear and concise format such as “$40 off ACME Widget Until - Today Only”. Continue reading »

    \\ tags: ,

Jan04

Thunderbird [1] is a free open source POP and IMAP email client developed by Mozilla.org, the same folks who brought you Firefox. Feature-wise it sits somewhere between Outlook Express and Outlook which means that it offers an upgrade to Express users and a downgrade to those who use the more advanced PIM features of Outlook.

All Outlook Express users should seriously consider switching. You’ll be rewarded with a more advanced product including built- in spam filtering, built-in RSS reader, message color coding, fast email search, anti-phishing measures, spell check as you type, inbox filters, Kerberos authentication, automatic updates and the ability to view your mail in conversational threads. On top of that, the product is more secure than OE and unlike the latter, is still being actively developed.

Further features can be added through free extensions. Notable among these is Webmail [2], an extension that allows POP3 access to webmail services operated by Yahoo, Hotmail, Lycos, MailDotCom, Gmail and Libero.

Continue reading »

\\ tags: , ,