Recently, both Google and Facebook have — within 24 hours of each other — initiated major manoeuvres to become the unequivocal masters of the inbox. With the social media migration deadlock still hanging in the balance after the launch of Google+, the email arena has been primed as the next battlefield between the information superpowers.

In the blue corner: Facebook is now gunning to consolidate its users’ social and email activities all under one roof, re-inventing itself as a major email service provider (ESP) by adding a few frills to its own in-house email service and promoting its use more aggressively.

In the red corner: Google is jostling to catalyse users of minority ESPs to leapfrog to their service and divert sign-ups away from Facebook via its clever “email Intervention” campaign. Centred on the classic friend intervention model, Google is betting on peer pressure to get those “behind-the-times” and “misguided” email users to make the switch, thereby creating a default entry point into its Google+ social network.

Strangely, however, there has been little in-depth reporting done on either development. While some might think that a little, unpronounced fistfight over inbox dominance pales in comparison to the tussle for social media hegemony, both Facebook and Google have products which span the scope of eCommerce and email marketers cannot afford to meet changes in their own backyard with benign neglect.

Email and social are different channels offering different benefits. Twitter and Facebook are great for offering casual connections to brands. For brands that you really want to hear from through opt-in campaigns, email is the right tool for the job. Now that social and email are meshing, however, marketers will need to evolve their techniques to make communications viable for either channel while addressing new adversities.

Google made the first move. They have created emailintervention.com, which is a simple site where Gmail users can send intervention letters to convince their friends to convert. Additionally, a “switch friends to Gmail” tab has been placed next to the settings field inside the inbox zone, channeling users to the same site.

Conversely, challenging major ESPs for their slice of email marketing revenue, Facebook has fully integrated its very own email inbox service into its existing direct messaging platform.

Since May 2011, users have had their own username@facebook.com email address available, to which emails and newsletters can be sent. Facebook is now rolling the product out in full steam and it is ceaselessly prompting users to activate their new Facebook-hosted email box as part of wider FB integrations, which include direct mobile messaging and video chat.

Just over a month after Google+ was first unveiled, it had signed up well north of 10-million users. Phase one of Google+ was clearly a success, but now comes the challenge of keeping those users around and engaged, and pushing past its current sign-up slump to uplift those treasured metrics and prove that they can stand toe-to-toe with Facebook’s social prowess. To address this gap, Google knows that it will have to pick off long-time users of competing email services to fuel its own growth. Facebook, in turn, hopes to stifle any increase in Gmail’s user numbers while skimming off the top of other major ESPs, with its shiny new mailbox.

Behind the scenes, an unprecedented paradigm shift is happening: Email is no longer a means used to support and punt social media. We are, instead, seeing an equalisation of these channels.

Gmail already provides an excellent environment for email marketing in terms of accurate frame-working for faithful newsletter display and image rendering, as well as enforcing spam protection by utilising reputation and content filtering. Facebook still needs to prove that it can offer users the same level of support and functionality as an ESP.

Sustained efforts from Google and Facebook to redirect all inbox traffic to themselves could spur the largest email client exodus of the decade.

Facebook’s hasty mailbox implementation could see tried and trusted email checks and balances sacrificed in a bid to lure in subscribers faster. Playing footloose and fancy free with deliverability fundamentals might see the majority of email newsletter campaigns sent through their service flounder.

With Google siphoning off as many email users as possible, there should be a noticeable increase in the amount of undelivered (or “bounced”) email sends as time goes on, since a large number of addresses used at other webmail clients could then become defunct.

Given the prevalence of both Facebook and Google, any extensive success in goading email subscribers can upset the proverbial apple-cart for email campaigns, as address lists become slowly invalid and loopholes open up for spammers.

The world of email is all about deliverability since it has a direct impact on your bottom line. Improving email deliverability is a highly specialised and ongoing process. It’s a balancing act involving business, technical practices and management of the greater email organism, inside and outside of your organisation.

According to this deliverability white paper, 17.8 percent of legitimate marketing emails failed to reach subscriber inboxes in Europe and 19.9 percent failed to do so in the USA and Canada last year.

Facebook and Google have both given birth to communications channels that provide services which are breaking down the distinctions between social and email, playing gambits that could alter the chemistry of email marketing and botch deliverability, unless you are intimately familiar with its precepts and intuitively adapting your send stratagems to compensate for social-email advancements.

What taunts ESPs into action is always going to be the subject of who has the most names signed up to their service. Whatever features or platforms you introduce, once show and tell is over, inflating user headcount is the priority. It remains to be seen if the communications heavyweights care more about magnetising new users to their service than how reliably your emails are getting through to intended recipients and how well spam is being fended off.



This article was first published on Memeburn

At GraphicMail we’ve just launched our Free Account on the North American market. You can list up to 500 subscribers in your free account, and send up to 5000 free emails a month – that is 10 sends to your entire list a month!

During the first 60 days, we even give you full access to our advanced features and our support desk via live chat, email and phone.

Once the initial 60 days have expired you have the choice to sign up to a monthly plan or alternatively remain on the free account. If you choose to remain on the free account, you will still have access to our core email and mobile marketing features and support via email.

Feel free to upgrade to a monthly account starting from $9.95 only (for 2000 monthly sends, that's a bargain!) at any time. With an upgrade, you secure yourself access to our full range of email and mobile marketing tools and you can contact our support team via email, live chat and phone FOREVER.

If you’re a small business or a startup, then this is your kick-start to successful email marketing.

Here are our affordable paid account options:

Monthly Plans - Pick the monthly subscription that’s best for you. We offer unlimited send and contact based subscriptions, starting from a mere $9.95 per month.

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Bulk Sends – Do you have more than 100,000 contacts, or do you send millions of emails each month? We have a powerful email marketing solution that saves you money.

Try it for yourself. Sign up for your Free account and get emailing now!

Today our Back to School promotion gets underway for our followers in the USA, who are surely by now bulk-buying pencils and paperclips to tie their families over for the new semester.

GraphicMail is offering you a free email, social and mobile marketing cheat sheet to kick start those email marketing minds.

All you have to do is download our ABC of email marketing white paper to win great prizes.


The competition closes on 31 August 2011, terms and conditions apply.

Original image found here

August has arrived, and with it the beginning of another Back-to-School season. It’s the time of year when parents are beginning to look forward to the first day of school and preparing with the necessary back-to-school shopping. 

A big part of a successful back-to-school email marketing program is knowing the best time to start promotions and; what types of  emails will drive the most customer responses. This can be daunting for many, so we thought we’d send you back into the classroom and help you get started with our ABC primer.

We decided to put some FUN back into school and offer you our free ABC email marketing primer packed with great tips to make a success of your email, mobile and social marketing promotions. And it doesn’t stop there – by downloading this primer, you  automatically enter our competition and stand a chance to win an iPad and other great prizes!

The back to school competition starts on 15 August – keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Download our Back to School ABC primer now to enter.  

While email newsletters that have images look stunning and perform better, not everyone knows how to upload images to their emails, what the differences are between linked and embedded images, how these affect send costs and - more importantly -  why. 

So here is a quick guide to all of the above 

Or for a step-by-step tutorial on how to upload and manage your newsletter images, visit our Help and Support Center.

Once you’ve mastered the essentials of uploading, storing and making use of images and have sent off a newsletter or two; you should notice that often the images within these don’t display once they reach the destination inbox and that there is a difference in the send credits charged for those newsletters - depending on whether you have linked or embedded your images.

Embedding images will come at a slightly higher cost in send credits - but this is for good reason:

Many email clients block images by default for security and privacy purposes. With image blocking so common these days, email marketers make use of either linked or embedded images, depending on their needs.

Linked images - These are not part of the message itself and are usually hosted by the message sender and referenced in the message body. The main advantage of linked images is that the message body remains small (in file-size). The main disadvantages are that such messages cannot be viewed off-line, and they usually have a limited lifespan, vanishing once removed from the server. So when you link an image in your GraphicMail newsletter, these images won’t show for the recipient unless they request the server to download them. If however they have marked you as a trusted sender, they can change the settings so they will always have the images downloaded automatically when they receive a newsletter from you.

Embedded Images - Unlike linked images, embedded images are part of the message itself. A message with embedded images can be viewed off-line and remains intact over time, as images are permanently attached to it. What differs is that the image itself is actually encoded, inside the message. You are not reliant on a web connection to view the images, because your recipients have it all on your system. As wonderful as that sounds the downside is a big increase in email size compared to downloading just the HTML and then the images afterwards. So embedding is clearly very different from merely including images in one's newsletter design, but do keep in mind that a message may contain regular attachments and embedded images at the same time. There is a slightly higher spam risk when embedding images, especially if they are big, so make sure to use the spam checker before sending off your newsletter campaign.

Are you experiencing that your images often get blocked by Email Clients?

Desktop and Webmail Clients block email newsletter images in different ways. For example, one email client might block images by default, another might require the user to turn on image blocking manually.

Take a look at the current default settings both for Desktop Email Clients and Webmail Clients, as discussed in our sending guide.

Image costs: Embedded vs Linked

Using images in your newsletter will amend the amount you pay per send. Your account has a certain number of 'send credits' and each send uses a single credit.  If you want to send attachments with your email, we may charge more than one 'send credit.'
   
For example, if you want to send attachments (like excel files or word docs) or if you want to send the images along with your emails (embedding), we'll need to use more bandwidth to send those larger files.

But don't worry, we'll inform you before the send is executed and state how many credits it would take to send your attachments.

Including images in your newsletters is a tried and true method of improving your email’s click-through rate, but since there is such a great deal of inconsistency between which browsers will actually display images, you shouldn’t rely on these alone to communicate your message. Avoid replacing too much text with images and make sure your email design gets the point across all by itself. And a last word on the matter: Be sure to add image alt text for those who do not see your images…

While you may believe that certain social networks and ESPs want your soul… they will actually be quite happy just to settle for a chunk of your personal data and possession of your email address.

Following the launch of Google+, for example, an airtight list of changes has appeared in Facebook’s membership policy to keep their users locked into their social platform, whether they like it or not. If you’ve been looking to defect form the old social imperium to Google+, Facebook is certainly going to make life very difficult for you.

Anyone who has tried to delete their Facebook account recently will probably have noticed it isn't that simple, since the opt-out option has been substituted for a deactivation alternative (which just means that you are no longer searchable) although the account still exists with all your information intact.

Transparency, it seems, isn't exactly a priority, and people everywhere are growing concerned with who owns our personal data and what they're doing with it. So you'd like to think that once you sign up to an account with any service or an email newsletter you would have some control over your data, or at least the option of deleting it.

In many cases, subscribers have no control over their personal information, and this is a cardinal sin of permission-based marketing.

The ability to unsubscribe allows filters to differentiate between wanted and unwanted messages/services. In the email world, there are still many marketers that view the unsubscribe link as necessary but unwanted, and try their best to hide it as far away from their subscribers as possible. The scary reality is that subscribers today don’t just use the SPAM button to register a complaint about emails they didn’t request; they use it as a convenient opt-out feature.

MarketingSherpa says that almost 39% of consumers have used the spam button as a way to unsubscribe from emails they asked to receive.

The reality is that the practice of concealing unsubscribe options is both contributing to everyone’s spam ticks as well as pushing the legal limits on privacy.

In the USA, the CAN-SPAM Act is a law that was prompted by the overwhelming flood of Spam infiltrating people’s email during the 90’s. Passed by Congress in 2003, it set national standards for sending commercial emails, requiring email marketers to include the following in email messages:

•    The subject line must clearly communicate the content included in the body of the email.
•    Emails cannot contain misleading sender information. Domain names, email addresses and routing information needs to be correct.
•    There must be a way for customers to “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” from receiving messages. If a person opts-out the company has 10 days to stop sending them messages. This unsubscribe option needs to be available for at least 30 days after the email is sent.
•    All commercial emails must include a physical address.

And the fine for spamming? According to the FTC, you could face a fine of up to $16,000 per email violation.

Getting permission and maintain a status quo of permission liberty is a foundation for delivering value - because the people on your address list are pre-selected for relevance – and for avoiding the contravention of SPAM laws.

According to a Microsoft security report, more than 97% of all emails sent over the Internet are unwanted.

While everyone agrees that permission is important to building a successful list of subscribers, there is disagreement about what how you should, legitimately, go about this. Consider a typical website registration form which also allows people to add their address to the site’s email list. Notice how the “quality” of permission deteriorates as you move from Option 1 to Option 2:

Option 1: Check the box if you would like to get weekly special offers from us via email
(Customer must take a specific action to get on the list)

Option 2:  By registering at this site, you agree to receive weekly special offers from us via email. You can unsubscribe from these at any time.
(Customer is “forced” to grant permission if they want to register)

The permission ideal is where someone makes an informed and explicit decision to join your list or database. In the email setting, you are more likely to have problems such as possible legal issues, spam reports, delivery blocks and lower response rates the further you stray from the ideal. To see more on this, read GraphicMail’s list building white paper.

Remember, you don’t actually want the biggest possible list of email addresses. You want the biggest possible list of email addresses for people who have asked to get your messages. But it is your responsibility to inform readers why they’re receiving your email and how they can stop receiving them. Honesty is the best policy when it comes to unsubscribing. Ensure that your subscribers are clear on exactly what they are receiving and why they are receiving it.

Ultimately, the more appealing, straightforward and relevant your messages are, the less appealing that nasty ‘report SPAM’ button becomes

Original image found here

Hotmail has recently become the first major webmail provider to allow video displays in emails via HTML5 as part of their new beta client testing. This development could greatly alter the status quo for videos in email sends, if this roll-out becomes a standard feature and more widespread.

Experienced direct marketers know that promotions via embedded videos have the highest click-through rate of any email media. Before Hotmail’s support for HTML5 video, B2C retail email marketers could deliver HTML5 video in email only to iOS devices and some other less prominent email clients, which made the typical email video penetration rate a little trifling.

(Videos are potent sources of attraction. Before you noticed the headline, or any other text on this page, chances are your attention was first drawn straight to the video feed above.)

The possibility for HTML5 videos to be displayed correctly will depend on the web browser used by the email subscriber:

•    Firefox 4 and more recent versions of Chrome also support HTML5.

•    Internet Explorer 9 supports HTML5 videos, however earlier versions of IE do not.

Email marketers who push video feeds into their newsletter templates will need to tread carefully and not build campaigns that rely on the assumption that their recipients are using the latest versions of a mainstream browser.

Marketers should also do a survey to see what the most popular browsers are among their audience and weigh the benefits of HTML5 videos against the risks.

•    Use off-page video links and include suitable ALT text in case the videos do not display, or in the event that these do not render perfectly well.

Even though there has been some debate about the attention value of the lower page playing field, above the fold is still always the ideal perch for anything you want your readers to see and take an interest in first.

Because most people don’t like to read, email videos will definitely add more charm to your newsletters.

Time will tell if their solution withstands the rigors of the Internet, thought it will be exciting to watch the developments and performance of Hotmail’s video-friendly beta. Keep in mind that most email clients do not have the rendering capabilities to handle videos yet, as these are built on text dominant engines. Hotmail, on the other hand, is a browser client, and has created the scripting environment that can handle the basic rendering and audio needs. Of course, you can expect that other major webmail clients will begin to imitate this feature if it does prove to be reliably successful.

We have just gone live with our new client email newsletter support helpdesk.

What is in it for you?

You will get support and help with GraphicMail features when you need it, fast. You can get support via an email ticket, live chat, self-service via articles and videos, and remote desktop support. And your friends in need - our support team - are now able to monitor new help requests in real time.

Says our Support Manager, Torianno Topley; “GraphicMail understands that not everyone is a technological superstar and that business people often don’t have the time to become an ace in all aspects of email communication use, but equally need to produce results as fast as possible.”


Our new support helpdesk offers the following:


• We can share screenshots with you quickly.

• We give you a revised help-center packed with videos, tutorials and FAQs.

• The refresh rate of new support tickets is now real-time so response times will be more rapid.

• We give you troubleshooting wizards to promote easy navigation.