Want subscribers to Like your email marketing newsletter? We’re making it possible!

You can now insert a “like” button in the header of your email newsletter.  When a subscriber clicks on the button, your email newsletter will automatically appear in their Facebook news feed – so all their friends will know they “liked” it too.  Of course, their friends will also be able to click on the link and read your newsletter, which is the perfect addition to your viral marketing campaign.

How do I do this?

You’ll find this setting in your account, under Setup and Options in the left hand menu – just select “Header/footer settings”.

Email marketing solution - synchronize your Outlook contacts with your GraphicMail account

One of the things we'll be bringing you quite early in 2011 is a new plug-in that allows you to synchronise your GraphicMail contacts with any of your Outlook mailing lists, and vice versa.

What will that mean?
Every time you add or edit a contact in your GraphicMail account, or in Outlook, the other will automatically be updated with the same changes.  (You'll be able to synchronise all your contacts in one sweep, but remember that recipients have to opt in to you email marketing emails, so it’s a good idea to keep a separate general contact list and an email marketing contact list in Outlook.)

So, if you’ve been doing email marketing yourself via Outlook, and you’ve reached the point where you’ve decided to sign up with GraphicMail to take a more professional approach to your email campaigns, you’ll soonb be able to easily convert your existing list into your GraphicMail account, instead of doing it manually.

How will I do it?
Downloading and installing the plug-in will be simple – it works just like any other program on Windows XP/Vista or Windows 7 and will be able to synchronise with Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010. We'll give you more details on where to find it in your account once it's live.

So, remember to keep an eye out in January for this new tool!

Remember:  We also offer you the ability to synchronise your Gmail or Hotmail contacts to your GraphicMail account.

Earlier this we launched TriggerMail, our advanced autoresponder feature; now we’re taking the next step: Soon you'll be able to access TriggerMail stats!

Just a quick recap before I explain what that means:  With TriggerMail you can set automated emails to fulfill a variety of functions, from setting recurring sends to sending out birthday wishes to all your subscribers on their birthdays.  (If you’re not familiar with TriggerMail, I suggest you take a look here or watch this video to get up to speed.  It’s a tool that can enhance your email marketing campaign tremendously!)

So, back to business:  What will TriggerMail stats mean for your campaign?

You’ve seen our Reports and Stats, right?  Well, TriggerMail stats will look exactly the same.  It’s an accurate, drill down report of each and every TriggerMail you send out.  You’ll be able to see who received your TriggerMail, who opened, unsubscribed, or clicked on a link in your TriggerMail and even who forwarded it or shared it on their social networks.

All these statistics will be available to you in easy-to-view graphs after your sends.  You'll also be able to export your TriggerMail Send Statistics, just like with all your other Reports and Stats.

This handy new analytics tool will be available shortly - we'll keep you updated.  Watch out for the call-outs!

To find out more about you can implement TriggerMail in your own campaign, read these tips I gave our blog readers.

It’s now easier to upload and manage images and files in your GraphicMail account.  We’ve added a very simple uploader that’s sure to make things a little easier – it’s not a big change, but it’s a handy one.

My favourite part is that we’ve also included a Google image search that allows you to quickly and easily search copyright-free Google images from within your account.  (Although we filter the search to display non-copyright images, a few copyright ones may have slipped through - it's always best to check with the site owners.)  If you find an image you like in the search results, you can simply drag the image into the folder of your choice.  This will make it much simpler for you to find and import images for your eflyer.

For a step-by-step overview on how to use this new tool, watch this video.

We introduce: the  Inbox Preview, BETA version

There so many different email programs out there (like Outlook 2007, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and so on) - do your campaigns render correctly in all of them?  And what about all the smartphones and the iPad? Well, you can setup lots of email accounts and servers to check your campaigns yourself, and get a bunch of smartphones too, or you can click a button in GraphciMail  and we'll do all the testing for you. We have just launched our Inbox Preview tool (beta version)!

Introductory Offer

Test it – we give you your first 3 tests free of charge!
Then decide what bundle is best for you – we offer them in 10, 25, 50 and 100. So if you want to preview 10 newsletters, buy a bundle of 10, if you want to preview 100, get a bundle of 100 – it all depends on how often you send and how many tests you want to run.

Get a bundle of

•    10 for   $10
•    25 for   $23.75 (5% discount)
•    50 for   $40 (10% discount)
•    100 for $ 80 (20% discount)

These rates are once off, i.e. you buy the amount of previews you need, and if you want to test more newsletters at a later stage, you simply buy an additional bundle of 10, 25, 50 or 100 from within your account. Believe me, this is the best investment you can make for your email marketing campaign.
You only get one chance to make a first impression with your clients – use Inbox Preview to make sure all of your subscribers get a looker of a newsletter.

How do I use Inbox Preview?

It couldn't be easier to do...

1)     Go to the inbox preview menu which is a sub item under “newsletters” in your GM acount
2)    Select the email you want to run the test on. (It will take a couple of minutes to run the test as GraphicMail sends emails and takes snapshots of the inboxes for you.) 
3)    Go and see the thumbnails of the various email clients. (To see it in greater detail, just click on a thumbnail.  You can then see if you need to make any changes.)
4)    Make the necessary changes and test again.

Remember this tool is to help you save time on testing your emails, but you're responsible for fixing them. We do offer troubleshooting services or we can build templates for you, but this is not included in subscription costs.

Any questions? Comments? Issues? Contact our support team at info@graphicmail.com or call 1-800-590-0028.

New Help Center voting icons

I’m sure you’ve all had some questions about something in your GraphicMail account.  It happens when you’re working in a technical application with as many features as ours.

When you get stuck with something in GraphicMail the quickest way to go about solving your problem is to go to our Help Center.  The Help Center covers a range of topics offering step-by-step instructions on how to solve some frequently asked questions. We offer video tutorials, help documents and FAQs.

The problem is that we’re not sure how helpful the answers are to you as an individual user. We need your feedback so we can continuously improve on our Help Centre. So we’ve enabled you to vote for our FAQs!   Next time you have a question check out our Help Centre and tell us if our answer was helpful or not.  You can also leave a comment or additional question. We greatly appreciate our clients' feedback. 

So - to the polls! Make your vote count :)

Remember when I told you all about how important it is to integrate your email marketing with social media?  (If you don’t you can read it here – there’s also a cool video!)

And then we made live our Social Share feature – a tool that allowed you to automatically publish a link to your newsletter on Twitter.  Remember that?

I asked you to watch this space for when this feature was extended to include more social networks. 

Any of this ringing a bell?

Well – we’ve done it!  It’s live!  You can now extend your email reach to include your Facebook friends and fans.

It’s simple.  Just like with the Twitter social share, you simply select which newsletter it is you want to share on Facebook, and a link to the newsletter will be posted on your wall along with a brief description of the newsletter.  It’s perfect for enticing more friends to sign up for your newsletter, or simply to share the information in your newsletter with them.

Log into your account and try it out!

We’re working on making it simpler to navigate your GraphicMail account. The new design will include an easy-to-use dashboard – it’s all about making your email marketing even easier.

And because I’m really excited about this, I thought I’d give you a sneaky preview:

Keep an eye out for these changes – they’ll be made live in your account soon!

A few weeks ago I introduced you to our new social share feature.  It’s a tool that enables you to publish your email newsletters on Twitter!

By now you’re probably up to date with the online social revolution – I think most of our clients probably have a Facebook fan page or a very active Twitter presence.  You practice social media marketing, and you practice email marketing.  So:  

Why would you want to publish your emails on Twitter?

It’s just more effort, right?

Have you ever thought what the difference (marketing-wise) is between social media and email?  Social media speaks to the masses – email engages customers on a more personal level. 

However:  Through social media you have access to a whole new audience of potential clients, plus there’s the benefit that you’re likely to reach people who are actually interested in your product.  Social media is the way I tell my friends what I “like” and if one of them recommends I follow a particular topic or person, I take them at their word.  After all, who would know my interests better than my social contacts? They’re bombarded with my status updates every day!  So, if someone recommends I follow your company on Twitter, I probably will. 
But how much information am I getting on your products in a 140 character tweet? And is it really enough to convince me to buy into your product/service/company?

So, our social share tool makes it easy for you to integrate your email and social media marketing.  When you send out your email newsletter, we give you the option to automatically post a tweet from you GraphicMail account that contains a link to your full newsletter.  That way, all your Twitter followers can also stay in touch with your latest news and they can get more insight into your company.  Ideally, they might become one of your subscribers, giving you the opportunity to target them more effectively. 

Still a little unclear on how that works?  Well, just to make life a little easier, we’ve added a video on social share to our YouTube channel!  It shows you how to set up social share for your newsletter and you get to see the feature in action.  Happy viewing!

I don’t know how many of you check out the links I post on Facebook and Twitter to our South African blog, but they posted an interesting blog article yesterday on the online “social revolution” – it’s worth having a look at. (You can also have a look at this video – it contains some interesting social media statistics.)

Why am I pointing this out?  Because, as I’m sure you’re up to speed on the dramatic way in which our online communications and marketing are evolving, it should be pretty clear that as online “word of mouth” social media is a must-have marketing, branding and networking tool. 
Being an email marketer, you’re probably aware that email has long been the top performing direct and online marketing channel – now I don’t know about you, but something tells me that combining these two channels (email and social media) should have quite a powerful effect…

Which is why, as promised, we’ve release a brand new way of complementing your email campaigns with your social media presence:

Social share

This tool enables you to publish your email newsletter straight to your Twitter account.  The newsletter title with a link to your full newsletter will then automatically appear as a tweet – without you having to log into your account to manually tweet about your newsletter.  Our developers have even added an additional gadget: GMtiny, our very own URL abbreviator.  As Twitter limits you to 140 characters per tweet, GMtiny will automatically shorten the link to your newsletter, cutting down that lengthy, unsightly URL to only a few characters.  Handy, isn’t it?

And this is only the beginning - we’re already working on extending this feature to enable you to publish across more social networks.  Next up, Facebook!  Watch this space, I’ll let you know when you can take your social sharing even further.

Enhance your brand presence online, increase your audience and subscribers and boost your sales by engaging more fully with potential clients – all with our new social share tool.

(While you’re at it, don’t forget that GraphicMail is also on Facebook and Twitter, so let’s befriend and follow.  I enjoy seeing what our followers get up to!)

Don’t forget:  GraphicMail also offers the tools to insert social widgets in your footer – for which we also provide social widget statistics in your reports.