It’s important to pay attention to the length of the copy that you use in your newsletter. If your email becomes too “heavy” in content then the purpose of your email becomes confusing to the subscriber. For email to succeed as a form of communication it needs to be clear what you want your subscriber to do. Your subscriber needs to know why you are sending them an email. This reason should lead them to a clear call to action. The call to action defines the action your subscriber is to take after they open up your email. Most email marketers do not pay enough attention to the call for action. They painstakingly pay attention to every detail of their email template and creating engaging content only to leave the call to action as almost an afterthought. As a result “Click Here!” is the most frequently used call to action. Click Here is concise and there is no doubt what you want your subscriber to do but it doesn’t tell the subscriber why they would want to.

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With the thousands of users using ActiveCampaign Email Marketing every single day we have seen some amazing email designs.

Many users are often looking for inspiration or examples of what could be done with email design.  To help connect designers and non-designers we will be starting to highlight some of these designs and the companies that have created them.

If you have an email design that you think is amazing simply forward the email to design-gallery@activecampaign.com. You can include some basic information about your company as well.  You do not need to be a design related company.

In addition to sharing your design work you will you get free brand recognition and company details listed on our site.

We have been developing ActiveCampaign Help Desk 3.0 for some time now.  The progress has been very promising and we are looking forward to sharing screenshots and feature / change explanations in the near future.  As we have not posted an update yet I wanted to share a couple of the major features that have been completed.

Here are a couple of the major new updates that have been done already for 3.0:

• Views
  Create custom views, share them with users, and fully control what shows up for each view.  This replaces the old open or closed ticket lists
• Automation
  Without going into great detail (at this time) I can tell you that automation is going to be the heart of 3.0 and the potential uses and benefits for every users will be great.  Simply put it allows you to automate most parts of your help desk in a very customizable manner.
• Service Level Agreements
  Ability to setup SLAs with working schedules, SLA actions, SLA plans, etc.. along with generating SLA reports.
• Billing Logging & Reports
  A very popular feature request has been added.  Ability to have tickets billable, log billable hours per ticket, etc..
• Due Dates
  Ability to set due dates, actions when a due date is not met, etc..
• Companies
  Can be thought of as public user groups.  Have company members auto-join into setup companies, manage company users, etc..
• Updates
  Instead of “announcements” we have created an updates feature where you can post updates (similar to a blog view) and your users can see updates when visiting your help desk.
• Troubleshooters
  While we did have troubleshooters in version 2 we have changed how you create them (to be much easier) along with a number of options for when they reach the end of a series of questions.
• ActiveCampaign Knowledge Management
  As with version 2.0 we are including the knowledge mgmt/knowledge base application as a free module of the help desk software.  The new improved integration allows us to have the latest version of the kb product always integrated (where as in version 2.0 there was a delay when we released a kb update for it to be included in the help desk)

Those are just a couple of the hundreds of new features and changes made with help desk 3.0.  In the near future we will begin to post specific features & screenshots to give you a better idea of everything that ActiveCampaign Help Desk 3.0 has to offer.

Regarding the release date - we do not have a set date at this time.  Product quality is our top concern.  Once internal development and testing has completed we will announce the beta (for current clients) along with upgrading our own help desk.

We have recently published a number of new guides for email design and email deliverability.  Topics include setting up SPF records, DKIM, feedback loops, email design best practices, and more.

You can view our growing list of email marketing articles & guides  by selecting one of the following categories:

• Email Deliverability
  Learn how to ensure maximum delivery of your email campaigns.
  
• Email Design
  Learn how to design emails that will look great in all the email clients.
• Email Copywriting
  Learn how to write effective copy that will encourage your subscribers to take action.

We recently released an update to our email marketing software that includes a couple of new features that are useful when reselling our product.

Abuse Management

ActiveCampaign Email Marketing allows you to ensure your users include unsubscription links, require opt-ins, etc.. but until recently there was no built-in abuse management tool.

With the release of 5.0.22 you can let the software manage abuses and automatically have users suspended when they abuse the system.

The report abuse link can be added to each accounts mandatory footer (thus adding it to all their outgoing emails)  When clicked it will verify that they wish to report abuse and unsubscribe them from the list if they choose to continue with reporting abuse.

Once a user group (account) has reached their maximum abuse ratio (by default this is 4% of all emails sent) their account will be “suspended”  This simply means that they will not be able to send any more emails until you (the administrator) decides to increase their abuse ratio, reset their abuse ratio, or leave them suspended.

As an administrator you will be alerted whenever there is a suspended account.  You can view each accounts current abuse, set the abuse ratio limits, send emails to the account from the email marketing software, and reset their abuse history.

How to set this up:

• Go to User Groups > Branding
• Add a mandatory footer for the account
• Include a link such as:
  <a href=”%REPORTABUSE%”>Click here to report this email</a>

Screenshots:

New Account Approvals

As you resell the software you are going to want to give your users access to the software right away while ensuring that they will use the software (and your mail servers) responsibly.  In addition to the new abuse management feature we have provided yet another layer of protection to assist with this.

With the new account approvals feature you can choose to require approval on the first couple campaigns each new account sends.  You can choose to require approval on the first 2, 4, or however many campaigns you wish.  When a new account has this setting they will be able to use the software and create campaigns.  When they click send it will notify them that their campaign will need to be approved by the software administrators and will keep it listed on their campaign list page with a status of “pending approval”

When there is a new campaign pending approval you can have email notifications sent to notify you and you will also see a notice if you login to the software as an administrator.  You can then view the campaign and choose to either accept or decline the campaign.  If you accept the campaign it will switch the status of the campaign to start sending.  If you choose to decline the campaign you will be able to enter a message that is emailed to the sender (regarding why it was declined) and it will change the status of the campaign to be a draft so that the user can edit the campaign and try sending again.

Once the user has had the set number of required campaigns as approved they will no longer need to wait for approval.

How to set this up:

• Go to User Groups > Edit
• Click “Require approval of campaigns before sending starts”
• Enter a notification email address (if desired) and choose how many campaigns need approval for new accounts

Screenshots:

If quality email marketing is something that you believe in and are passionate about, you may want to make it a central focus of your career. You may also have noticed that email marketing is thriving in a troubled economy or that it is becoming more effective over time.

If you want to go into business for yourself, then take a look at this article: How To Start An Email Marketing Service. But, as you likely already know, entrepreneurship is hard, and owning a business puts you in a position to manage a lot of operational aspects that you may not be fond of or even very capable in. And, since most new businesses fail in their first year, and few people have the startup capital to support themselves during the two year period that typically precedes profitability, you may find that a job in email marketing is a more attractive option for your individual career path.

What You’ll Need

1. Some knowledge and/or training in general marketing.

Make no mistake, email marketing is marketing, and so you’re going to need to know a few things about assessing your target demographics and analyzing the return on investment for your efforts. Email marketing happens to make ROI calculations unusually easy, as far as marketing goes, but it is still math and still something you’ll need to know something about if you’re going to land (and keep) a job as an email marketing specialist. You’ll also need specialized knowledge of advertising, sales, and marketing psychology to be an effective email marketer.

A good way to move into the marketing field is the same way you would expand into any other field: leverage your existing experience within your current field, and gradually expand your responsibilities such that you gain knowledge and qualification within the course of doing your job. In time, you will become qualified to hold a position exclusively dedicated to your personal interests and goals.

College education can also be extremely helpful in developing this type of specialized skill set. If you express an interest in expanding your marketing knowledge in a way that will benefit your present employer, they may agree to pay for some or all of your classes. Even if you do not go for a full degree in marketing, advertising, or psychology, you can still take a selection of courses that will help you on your way by bolstering your resume and expanding your abilities.

2. Basic technical ability and familiarity with available email marketing software and its usage

Email marketing has to do not only with user interaction, but systems interaction as well. You will need to be familiar with a variety of technical issues, such as server optimization, types of email servers, spam filters, and negotiating services with web hosts and ISPs.

You will also need to be proficient in using email marketing software, not only to compose and send messages, but also to track statistics, split test different techniques or compositions, and dividing lists for purposes of market segmentation.

Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to promote a business, particularly when that business is tied to a web site. It is natural for the user to transition from an email message onto the web site of the company which sent it to them, especially if you have taken care to match the design of your email to the look and feel of your site.

However, there can be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to email marketing, and most folks have difficulty thinking about where to get started. This article will provide you with some basic steps to help you get started, and give you some ideas about how to leverage any existing resources in expanding your efforts in this new medium.

1. Build up your mailing list

This is the big sticking point to getting started with email marketing. It’s not worth sending out messages if no one will see them, right? But how do you get a list of people to send to? This is where most people take a wrong turn and end up frustrated. Don’t bother buying an email list; it’s not worth the money you’ll pay and you’ll see few if any conversions. Worse, you may damage your ability to get emails delivered at all. Every time someone marks your message as spam, it is less likely to get delivered to everyone else. So you really don’t want to send your messages to anyone who doesn’t specifically want them.

So, you need to build up your own mailing list. Obviously, people will have to be interested in your products or services before they will be interested in receiving messages from you, so you must first have some kind of traffic to leverage into a mailing list. That can be web traffic or foot traffic. Existing customers make the best future customers, so if you have a brick & mortar business, keep a signup sheet right by the cash register or front desk. Train your staff to ask every single person who walks in to offer membership in your exclusive email list. Offer some incentives for doing so–discounts, the promise of special information or offer, anything that makes sense in your business model.

If your business is based around a web site, do the same thing. Make sure every visitor is exposed to an offer to join your mailing list, and give them a good reason to do so. If your web site is about information, then offer exclusive information not available to the general public. If you sell a product or service, offer discounts, special offers, or other incentives. Make the signup form prominent enough so that it cannot be missed and attractive enough that people can stand to look at it.

2. Create and send your messages

In an earlier post I gave a pretty detailed explanation of how to write for email marketing, so I won’t go into too much detail about copywriting technique here. But I will say this: write for your market, be clear and concise, and paint a picture for your reader. Subscribe to a few mailing lists for businesses you are interested in (especially your competitors) and pay attention to what you like or don’t like about them.

Then, write a few different versions of each message, switching up the writing style and approach. Use an email marketing solution to split test the various versions of your message against random samples of your mailing list. This way you will begin to learn what gets a response from your readers and what doesn’t. The things you learn about your market this way can not only inform your future emails, but the rest of your business as well.

It is easy to overthink the design of your email marketing messages. When you go to all the trouble of building a mailing list and writing strong, compelling content, you want to be sure that it is presented in an attractive format that gives your hard-won readers a positive impression of you and the things you have to offer.

The most important thing to remember when designing an email marketing template is to keep it very simple. Focus on readability first, and then add in small amounts of graphic flair to draw in and maintain your reader’s attention.

If you try to do too much in your layout, you are not only risking overwhelming your readers with too much visual distraction from your message. You also risk delivering them a message that will not display correctly in their email reader.

There is so much variance in the way that HTML will be displayed from one email reader to the next that it is extremely difficult for the average marketer to design a template that displays correctly for most recipients. A good alternative is to use one of our professionally designed email marketing templates, as these have been tested against every major email reader released in the last 10 years.

I have spoken with many users of our ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software who called in to ask for advice on how to best use CSS in their email templates. My advice? Don’t even think about it. The unfortunate truth is that there is a huge disparity between the way that even simple table cells are displayed in various email readers. You definitely want to avoid Flash and video in your email messages, and remember to include a plain text version of your message in addition to the templated HTML version.

Email marketing involves a unique form of copywriting that a lot of people, especially when just starting out, have difficulty planning and executing. There are many similarities with other forms of copywriting, but there are also some unique opportunities and pitfalls as well. In this article we will examine some of the elements of writing for email marketing and walk you through the basic steps of crafting your message.

As with writing for the web, there are a number of mechanical considerations that you must remain aware of. For example, just as web pages are listed on search engine result pages with brief “teasers” that describe the relevance of their content, email clients also display snippets of email messages. If the first line of your message is not compelling, it is therefore less likely that your message will ever be opened and read.

1. Target Your Audience

One of the most important aspects of any kind of marketing effort is to know your audience. Different types of messages and arguments will appeal to different age groups, ethnic groups, regions, etc. You’ll want to write much differently if your message is targeting businesspeople than you would if you were targeting housewives. Twenty-somethings respond differently to email marketing than fifty-somethings.

If you don’t know much about your market, then stop planning your email campaign and come back to it after you have conducted an appropriate level of market research. Without doing this you are just wasting time and money.

You also need to build up your email marketing list, which should always be highly qualified and doubly opted-in. Don’t bother buying email lists. The better qualified your email list, the more people will actually receive and read your message.

2. Determine Your Ideal Outcome

If you don’t know why you’re sending an email message, then you shouldn’t do it. There should always be a very clear and specific goal that your message is trying to achieve. Often your ideal outcome will be to have your recipients respond to your message by completing a purchase. But that is not always the case.

Many time people want to send out email campaigns to increase brand awareness. This requires a different approach than a direct-sales strategy. You may, for example, want to consider a viral email marketing strategy by offering incentives for your readers to forward your message on to their friends.

3. Establish A Connection

The way you do this is going to depend on the previous two factors. If you’re selling lifestyle and entertainment products to the 18-25 crowd, you may want to grab their attention with a fresh or amusing graphic. Businesspeople at the prime of their lives may want you to get right to the point and tell them what you have to offer before getting into too much detail, while an older or less time-crunched demographic may be more intrigued by a loaded question about the state of their life or business.

4. Tell Them Why They Want To Take Action

This is basic sales writing. Don’t tell them about what you have to offer them, tell them why they want it. Tell them how it makes their life better.

This can be tricky if you’re not writing direct sales copy. If you’re trying to get the message recipient to forward your message to a friend, for example, you can’t just sit on your hands and hope it happens, because it usually will not. Offer up the reward: “Imagine how hard your friends will laugh about this video.”

You want to be as specific as possible here, and offer up as many details and benefits as you can. Focus on the ways in which the individual reading your message will personally and directly enhance his or her existence by taking this action.

5. Inoculate Against Objections

As with every other type of copywriting, you want to introduce potential objections that your reader might have while they consider your proposition. By bringing up these arguments yourself, you are able to provide counter-arguments that assuage the doubts that your reader did not even yet know they had! If you do this effectively, the reader will not only want to comply with your request, but will want to get others to do the same.

6. Ask Them To Take Action

Once you have told them what a wonderful world it would be if they were to comply with your request, and systematically annihilated their doubts, that is the time to formally pose your request. If you want them to go to your web site and buy your product, say to them “Click on this link to go to our order page, then click on the button marked ‘Check Out’, enter your payment information, and Click ‘OK.’” If you want them to forward your message along, tell them so.

Because online marketing is one of the few industries experiencing growth and prosperity in the present economy, a growing number of entrepreneurs and online service providers are aiming to expand into providing email marketing services. This is an outstanding business opportunity, particularly for businesses who already offer internet- or marketing-related services to their clients. In this article we will briefly review the steps you need to take to succeed as an email marketing service provider.

Your business plan

The first step, of course, is to determine who your target market is and exactly what you will be offering them. There a full sections of library devoted to the topic of how to write a business plan, but the basic are simple:

• Market Analysis
  • Who will your customers be and what are their needs?
  • What is your competition like? What opportunitities exist and what barriers exist to realizing those opportunities? How do your particular strengths and weakness affect your chances of success?
• Product Development
  • In this case you know you intend to provide email marketing service. What does that include? Will you be building up your clients’ email lists for them? Writing advertising copy? Or will you simply be providing access to a web-based email marketing system that you will maintain?
  • You will also want to evaluate your costs, including man-hours, and develop a pricing scheme based on consideration of these figures, how much profit you need to justify your efforts, and what price you think your market will bear for the services you’re offering.
• Sales & Marketing
  • How do you intend to go about promoting your new service? Do you have an existing customer or subscriber base that you can leverage to get the service going?
  • Ordering & fulfillment logistics

Things You’ll Need

• Hardware
  • No matter what type of email marketing service you’ll be running, you will need to invest in a solid server & ISP or a hosting package that is capable of accommodating your projected usage volume.
• Software
  • You will need to buy bulk email marketing software with a sufficient number of user licenses to accommodate your projected initial needs (the order page is here).
• Wetware
  • You will need to effectively market your service. If you have an existing client base and are offering the service to them as a way to add value or expand upon your existing services, then you definitely have a huge advantage here. Otherwise, you will have trouble competing with major service providers like ConstantContact and AWeber unless you find a specific niche or untapped client base. As with any other type of business planning, this is where your ability to exercise some serious ingenuity comes in.