In part one of the email marketing series, I gave a brief introduction on how email marketing can improve your customer relationships and promote sales. I also covered the different types of email marketing, and the advantages of building an opt-in list. In part two, I discussed a few reason why you should choose a third party email marketing website instead of mass-mailing yourself and then reviewed some of the more popular email marketing websites out there. In part three, I reviewed MadMimi, Aweber, Benchmark, iContact, and CampaignMonitor. In this, the final article of the series, I’m going to be giving you 25 tips on how to get the most out of your email campaign.
Email Marketing Part 4: 25 Tips To Optimize Your Campaign
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February 15th, 2010
Making Facebook’s messaging system IMAP compatible
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January 26th, 2010
I’m actually surprised nobody has posted anything about this online, but it’s more or less possible to write an IMAP proxy for Facebook using their API. Sure, you could not write a full-fledge IMAP implementation, but you could get it to perform the most basic tasks, like reading messages (and therefore also store them locally).
I got the idea of making an IMAP proxy (or bridge, parser or whatever you want to call it) back in in August when Facebook announced new API calls to access the mailbox. Upon reading them, I realized that it could be used for a lot new things, such as this. Since then, I’ve been waiting for someone take on the challenge. I’ve been keeping an eye open for a projects in this area, but haven’t seen any. Therefore, I thought I might at least raise some interest and perhaps someone will take on the challenge.
Email Marketing Part 1: An Introduction
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January 20th, 2010
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that aims to reach potential or current customers through the use of electronic mail. Unlike mass media marketing, email marketing sends promotional messages directly to targeted users. Email marketing, when used correctly, can encourage brand loyalty, increase overall customer satisfaction and, most importantly, increase sales.
There are many advantages to using email marketing over other marketing and advertising methods, most of which have to do with the nature of email and how people tend to use their email accounts. One such advantage is the fact that sending an email message costs nothing; the relatively small cost of email marketing is incurred by using websites that help manage your contact lists, provide message templates, and send the messages for you.
Colleges Consider Eliminating Campus Email
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January 8th, 2010
With many colleges and universities running short on money, administrators are trying to cut costs wherever possible. It seems that one trend that a large number of schools are aiming to follow is the elimination of campus email accounts. A study done by the education-technology group EDUCAUSE shows that 10% of schools are looking at cutting campus email accounts.
According to school administration, the current campus email system is rendered useless because most incoming freshman already have established email accounts. While this may be true, the decision to cut the program runs counter to the wishes of the majority of the student body. In an ECAR study of 27,846 freshmen and seniors from 103 institutions, 82.5 percent of the students reported that a campus e-mail account was their preferred choice of communication. This fact alone should be enough to encourage schools to save the campus email system, but there are still more reasons that the schools may not have considered.
The Peek email device: Why?
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December 30th, 2009
If you have never heard about it, the Peek is very a simple device dedicated to one thing: email. It’s roughly the size of your average smartphone and comes with a color screen and a qwerty keyboard. That’s it. No fancy features, just basic email access in your pocket.
The Peek comes in two different versions: Peek Pronto and Peek Classic. The Pronto is priced at $59.95, and the Classic at $19.95. However, the phone is not very useful without a plan. The plans starts at (and you know what that really means…) $14.95 per month. For that price, you get unlimited email access nation wide (U.S.) from your Peek.
The problem is this: it doesn’t even beat your iPhone/BlackBerry on the one thing it was created for, namely email. This brings me to the big question: why would you ever get a Peek?
Ten Worst Email Gaffes of 2009
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December 22nd, 2009
On the list of offenses that can be committed via email, many of us are guilty of petty crimes. Whether sending a hasty email to the “wrong Bob”, accidentally replying to the entire department when you meant to send a heads-up to a co-worker, attaching the wrong document to a message, or perhaps mistakenly forwarding a message that contains past messages you’d rather the recipient hadn’t seen, most of the time an email gaffe ends up a non-issue or blows over pretty quietly. After all, to err is human.
Sometimes, though, it doesn’t blow over. When a steamy or scandalous email is leaked or sent to the wrong person, it can become viral, spreading at an exponential rate across the internet, and wreaking havoc with reputations. This is especially true when a large organization or famous politician is at the heart of the story. A media circus ensues, careers might end, and some people (we hope) learn the valuable lesson that email is not a secure medium of communication.
History of Xobni and advice from its founder
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December 10th, 2009
Xobni just posted an interesting video over at their blog. The video is a presentation by their founder, Adam Smith, given at MIT back in November. The presentation talks about Xobni’s journey from two guys writing code in an apartment to being featured in one of Bill Gate’s keynotes.
The video is embedded after the jump.
Email Search Part 3: Alternative Resources and Tips
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November 27th, 2009
In part one, I wrote a brief introduction to email search and discussed how reverse lookup works. In part two, I reviewed several email opt-in email directories, as well as a few free and premium email search and reverse lookup services. In this, the third and final article, we’ll delve into a few resources you can use as an alternative to the more standard email search methods.
Email Search Part 2: Free & Premium Site Reviews
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November 18th, 2009
In part one, I wrote a brief introduction to email search, explained the difference between email search and reverse lookup, and mentioned some of the problems that you may encounter when starting your search. In this article, I’ll be listing a few top email search services, both free and premium, talking about email search directories, and warning against email lookup services that turn out to be scams.
Email lookup sites can be divided into three groups: free search services, premium email lookup services, and email directories. A wise area to start when you’re beginning your search is in the email directories.
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Email Search Part 1: An Introduction
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November 11th, 2009
Email search (also called email lookup) and its counterpart, reverse email lookup, are two methods for finding information about someone by using information you already possess. Email search allows you to find out the email address of someone if you know their name (knowing the country and state or province in which they live also helps), while reverse email lookup is the term used when you’re trying to find out the name of a person who owns a particular email address. Think of it as the email equivalent of looking through your phone book’s white-pages section: you know the name and you’re using that information to find a telephone number.
Once upon a time, this may have been a frightening concept; now, though, many people count on the internet when it comes to reconnecting with old friends or finding an important email address they’ve misplaced. And given how much personal information many of us freely type into the websites we visit – social networking sites, personals or dating sites, auction sites, etc. — it seems like it should be relatively simple thing to find someone’s email address or real name. You just type in the information you have and out pops the information you need, right? Not quite.