Archive: November 2007
Email marketing no-nos redux
If you followed along with our ten things to avoid in your email newsletters on the blog earlier this month, you might enjoy our most recent Ask Emma Q&A newsletter. We go through ten email marketing no-nos once again, adding detail here and there and even referencing Jean-Claude Van Damme. You can read it here, along with anything else in the Ask Emma archive that strikes your fancy.
[tags] email newsletters, ask emma, myemma.com, email marketing[/tags]
Emma customers helping Emma customers
There’s nothing like a rockin’ party for a worthy cause … except perhaps a rockin’ party for a worthy cause with an ice sculpture.
I just wanted to brag about one of our customers, Vaco, whose recent five-year celebration (cleverly dubbed Cinco de Vaco) was not just about recognizing its staff or all its success in the recruiting field. Or dancing to 80s music. Or admiring the ice sculptures (though they are lovely, aren’t they?). It was also about helping Safe Haven Family Shelter, a fabulous Nashville non-profit working to fight homelessness. By the end of the night, Cinco de Vaco guests had donated more than $2,000 for families working with Safe Haven. Muy bien!
Social responsibility points go to Vaco for taking what could be just another corporate party and turning it into a stylish party for a really great cause. And if you’re in the Nashville area and want to find out more about Safe Haven, you can subscribe to their email newsletter here. And yes, we’re proud to say they’re dear members of the Emma community – they joined us four years ago as an Emma 25 honoree during the program’s first year.
[tags]vaco, safe haven, emma 25, nonprofits, myemma.com[/tags]
Photo by Steve and Angela Purinton of Pure Photo
Where email newsletters go to die.
I was cleaning out my inbox folders today and rediscovered my “to read later” folder, which is supposedly the handy organizational device that lets me “catch up” on “important” emails when I have “time.” I should probably rename it the email graveyard, because it’s where emails go to die. I don’t have to unsubscribe. I don’t have to delete it. I can just “file” it like a responsible subscriber and tell myself that I really will scroll through fifteen inches of articles later. When I have time. Uh huh. Sure.
In fact, most all the emails in my “to read later” folder shared a common trend of being really long and text-heavy, with no good introduction to what was inside. And I understand that some organizations – universities and non-profits, typically – will often have longer articles that they want to put in front of their subscribers. But if sending a novel is going to land your email newsletter in the email graveyard, what’s an email marketer to do?
Use landing pages. That way, you can tease articles with a blurb, then link your readers to the full article hosted on your site. It keeps your email short, sweet and tidy – plus, it directs traffic to your website (always a good thing). And if you’re checking your response results (you are checking those, right?) you can use the link tracking to see which articles garnered the most interest.
We actually just got an email from the stylish Emma users at Haverford College that’s a perfect example of the landing page newsletter done well. Check it out here, won’t you?
[tags] email marketing, email newsletters, landing pages, Haverford College, myemma.com[/tags]
Can’t video and email just get along?
We get a lot of questions about embedding video in emails. Typically they go something like, “Hey, can I embed video in my email?” People tend to get right to the point around here.
Anyway, we’ve found that attaching or embedding video tends to be a red flag for server and spam filters, and a lot of email clients don’t render or play video in the way you’d hope. Instead, we suggest hosting the video on your site, on YouTube or, if you’re an Emma customer, in your document library. Then you can include the link to the video’s online location in your email.
To show you what we mean, here’s an example from a fabulous email newsletter we got this week. It’s from the folks at Opportunity Green, which is a sustainability conference happening in L.A. this Saturday (we’ll be there, by the way, and if you’re in the area, you should come, too). They feature a couple of YouTube videos in their campaign, but they didn’t just opt for simple text link. Instead, they took a screenshot of the opening frame, player and all, included it in their campaign as a jpeg and linked the jpeg to their video on YouTube. We thought it was a great way to give a campaign a video-ish touch without affecting its delivery.
Update: We’re sorry to say that images in the Opportunity Green email are no longer available.
[tags]email marketing, email newsletters, sustainability, opportunity green, myemma.com[/tags]
Are you a friend? There are 51 million Facebook users and counting…
According to Facebook’s statistics page there are 51 million active users today. Are you one of the 51 million? If so, we’d love you to drop by and join our new Friends of Emma Group. Of course, membership is free.
We’ll be adding news and links to goodies in the coming weeks. Join today and add yourself to the discussions on topics like: email marketing, newsletters, new media, and any other topics that come up.
We hope to see you there.
[tags]Emma Email Marketing, Friends of Emma, Facebook, newsletters[/tags]
It’s November? Huh?
As you emerge from your sugar coma today, you may slowly realize that it really is November now, and the holiday season really is here.
And as bewildering as this whole “November” thing can be, it’s a really great time to be an Emma customer. That’s because today, November 1, marks the launch of our annual Emma 25 program. It’s the initiative where we ask our fabulous Emma customers to nominate their favorite local charities while we pick 25 of them and award them free Emma accounts (including custom designed stationery and complimentary service that’s renewable year after year). The idea is to help great non-profits do even greater things, using email marketing to communicate with volunteers, stay in touch with donors and spread the word about the fabulous work they’re doing in their communities.
Head over to our landing page – we’ve got full program details, honorees from past years and the form to nominate *your* favorite non-profit just waiting for you, amigo.
If you’re not an Emma customer but want yourself or a charity you love to be considered for an Emma 25 account, send some emails and make some calls to the folks you know asking if anyone out there uses Emma and would be willing to send a nomination on your behalf.
Whatever you do, do it soon (remember the landing page?) – we’ll be accepting nominations through Wednesday, November 21st, and we’ll announce this year’s 25 honorees during the first week of December…
…when we’ll all be emerging from turkey comas, amazed that, yes, it really is December.
[tags]emma25, myemma.com, email marketing, non-profits[/tags]
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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