In the section Messages->Compose in the upper toolbar of the text editor you will find a new button – Templates. There you can choose the adequate design for your email newsletters.

The advantages of using the templates offered by Womsend:

• You can choose from a gallery of 25 templates. Surely you will find something right for that you are searching for
• The templates are tested in about 25 email clients including Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Thunderbird etc
• The templates have dedicated areas for the logos of your business.

All templates are for free.

On Christmas everybody shops and the shopping season is about to start and the email is one of the most efficient ways to reach the prospects. The closer to the holidays we get, all inboxes are filling up with promotional offers so the most important thing to do is to differentiate and personalize the message. Everybody is busy and everybody wants to shop, providers are many and the offers as well.

Shopping is going online

Every year online store gain more clients during the holiday season. The value of online purchasing is bigger every year, especially on holidays. For example, in 2010 online sales have tripled compared to the ones in  2010. That’s why is very important to attract the online public to your offers. Consumers start to abandon crowded offline shopping to shop online with the effort of only a few clicks.

Test the email and the landing page

If you have a message and a design suitable for your subscribers and your are about to send the newsletters, do not neglect the technical aspects. Test the email for the most used email clients: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Thunderbird, Hotmail etc. Also check on the display of your online version on the most used internet browsers.

Also keep in mind that you need to optimize your landing page in order to get conversions. If you managed to convince the subscribers with your email newsletters you need to convince them once again when  you got them to visit your landing page. So, too many steps required to make purchase or if the users are not able to find the purchase button, these may be reasons for them to leave your site.

Ideas for holiday newsletters

1. Themed design
In December send emails that say something about the upcoming holidays through their design. A design template or just a header with that reminds people about gifts and holidays is better than the regular one. It will help you stand out, a different design and a holiday themed message will help you break the monotony.

2. Recommended gifts
The email newsletter sent during this period is not really necessary to contain only promotional offers. You can include in you emails recommendations of your products for gifts. Use the reviews of other consumers or the lists of the best selling products to make this recommendations.

3. Last minute offers
One type of subscribers you should not forget about about the people that don’t have any time or they leave Christmas shopping for the last minute. You can make some “last minute” offers and it is recommended to contain digital product that will not require any delivery.

What to avoid

The list is an important part of email marketing. Many may think that the bigger, the better, but the quality must not be neglected. When you are building your list one of the most important things is how you collect your email addresses.

1. Single opt-in: consist in including the email addresses in the list only be submitting it in a subscription form. The subscription to the newsletter it’s made without receiving any confirmation link in your email. Giving the email address when purchasing a product and giving the consent to receive commercial information is considered subscription to the email newsletter as well.
The advantage of single opt-in is that you can build o bigger list in short time, but it’s efficient when it comes to quality, not quantity.
The disadvantage of this subscription method is that users can give fake or non-existent addresses and even if they are valid, they may belong to other persons and this will lead to spam.

2. Double opt-in: the subscription is completed in two steps. The user is not directly added to the list when he submitted his address in the form. He will receive a confirmation email to activate a link if he wants to be added to the list.
The advantage of this method is the fact that you can build a list based on quality, with confirmed email addresses, avoiding the possibility to spam unwillingly.
The disadvantage of this kind of subscription is the fact that requires an extra step from the user, and some may get lost in the process. The confirmation email may not get in time, it may get in the Junk mail folder or it may not get to the user’s inbox at all and he is not able to complete the subscription process. The solution to make sure that the subscription process can be completed is to send the confirmation emails from an IP and domain with very good reputation – used only for sending this kind of messages. This how Womsend service send these emails to make sure that they will be delivered.

So the single opt-in is efficient if you want to have a big list, the double opt-in is the most recommended in order to have a good and qualitative list with confirmed email addresses.

It takes time and investments to build a list based on permission and prospects really interested in your information and that are looking forward to receive your emails, but the success of an email marketing campaign is not directly proportional with the size of the list or the number of emails sent. Permission brings better results and the possibility to build a relationship with the prospects.

Advantages of a list based on permission:

• Higher delivery rate
• Higher opening rate
• Lower spam rate

Without permission, sending email newsletters is called spam. This definition includes two requirements: sending bulk emails and having no permission for it.

The unsubscribe link

The permission given can be revoked at any time, that’s why subscribers should be able to unsubscribe to your newsletters whenever they want to. The unsubscribe link must be in every email sent. It is not a good ideea to make it less visible, with a smaller font or a less visible color. If your subscribers want to unsubscribe, give them the possibility to do it without hitting the spam button.

According to a study by Direct Marketing Association, email is at the top of marketing tools as being the most profitable. An email makes over 40$ for every dollar invested, comparing to catalogue – 7.3$ and online advertising 19.72$.

Why is email an efficient marketing tool

• Allows precise targeting
• Generates direct sales
• Builds relationships and loyalty
• It is measurable

Offers and promotions in email generate sales or subscriptions. Informative newsletters help offline sales by sending people to the stores, building awareness and a relationship and setting the basis of customer loyalty.

Email is a very profitable marketing tool, and using it in communication can be done with little costs and great benefits. With email marketing you can obtain remarkable results with little time and even fewer money.

If you are using Womsend,  it’s very easy to keep track of your subscribers activity. You can see which are the active subscribers and which are the inactive ones. This way you have the possibility to reactivate the inactive ones. They are an important resource and you don’t have to neglect them.

Our system calculates a score for every subscriber depending on his activity. When opens a message the subscriber receives some points, for a click he will receive more and for a purchase even more points. The subscriber will have more points if his activity in your newsletter is recent. The more time it passes since his last action, the fewer points he has.

Subscribers will have activity scores from 0 to 100. The most active subscriber will have the highest score (100) and the others will have scores according to his. For example, a subscriber with the score 100 is twice more active then a subscriber with the score 50.

If you have a Womsend account, you will be able to see the quality score of your subscribers entering the section Subscribers ->All subscribers and at every contact you will see a value named “Quality score”.

Segmenting list according to subscriber activity

You can use this feature to segment subscribers according to activity criteria.
You can create a segment based on a higher and lower limit of the quality score. This way you can have a segment with the most active subscribers to repay them and you can have a segment of your least active subscribers to you can come up with ways to reactivate them.

Relevance is one of the most important things that you have to keep in mind to optimize the results of your email marketing campaigns. To raise the relevance of your sent emails you have to do an efficient segmentation of your list.
In email marketing you need segmentation because your list of subscribers is not an homogeneous group, and sending one kind of message will not meet the expectations of the majority. Still you don’t have to confuse lists with segments.

Lists and segments

The list is a group of contacts that changes only when you add or remove some of them or when someone subscribes or unsubscribes for your newsletter. Lists are useful to organize the subscribers.
And also, a list can be made with confirmation from the subscriber or not. This means that when someone subscribes to a newsletter will not receive it until he will confirm his subscription by clicking on a link in the email received right after he subscribed.

With Womsend you can create and edit lists by going to the section Subscribers->Lists.
When you create a subscribe form, you have to associate where the people that subscribe to your newsletter to be registered.

The segment is a group of contacts based on a specific criteria. For example, you can make a segment with all the male subscribers, age segments (between 25 and 35 years) or subscribers from a specific city, according to want you want to communicate. A segment can be static or dynamic, you can set the segments to update automatically. For example, if you segment by age, when a subscriber no longer meets the criteria he will be eliminated from the segment.
To create segments using Womsend go to the section Subscribers->All subscribers. First you create a filter (the criteria by which you wish to sort subscribers), the you will be able to see all the subscribers that meet that criteria. Then you need to save all of them as a segment.
To edit the name, description or “Update automatically” option go to the section Subscribers->Segments.

The lists are group of contacts in which users are registered when they fill in the subscribe form and the segment is a group that you can set as an administrator of the lists, according to some filters. The subscribers does not have the chance to see or choose in which segment he is.

Preference page

Through the preference page your subscribers will tell you alone which information they want to receive from you. On this page you will put the lists and they can choose which is the list they want to be included in. Be careful: on the preference page they will not see the segments of your list, they will only see the lists and a short description. Subscribers aren’t able to see the segment they are included and neither have the possibility to choose between segments. To find out more about adding the preference page to your emails read this article.

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Womsend has a new feature through which the subscribers can choose themselves what information to receive. You have to set up a preference page addressed to your different lists, based on the different information you to communicate  to the users in those lists and put the link to this page in your emails.

The preference page is very useful when you have a large range of products and services and a subscriber isn’t interested in all of them. And receiving emails with irrelevant information may determine them to unsubscribe. This page will allow you to personalize your communication and give information about their specific needs.

Set up a preferences page with Womsend

In your Womsend account, you enter the menu Configurations  - My account and you choose the tab Preferences page. There you add the your lists. Users will see it as a list where they can choose the one list they want to be a part of.

There you can also set the banner that will appear on the page’s header, with your identity elements, a title that will appear at mouse over and a link to a landing page from that banner. If you will not put a banner and link that area will remain blank.

How to add the preferences page in an email

After you set up the page in your account, you have to add a link to it in your emails. It’s very simple. You ca do it adding directly the tag {PREFERENCES_LINK} in the email body, either you select in the message editor  “Womsend utilities> Add preferences link”.
When a user will click on the link the system will generate a unique URL for each subscriber to be able to track each user that subscribes or unsubcribes to a list on the page and what is the message he came from.

Encourage subscribers to set their preferences

Using the preference page you will have lists very well targeted and you will be able to send relevant information in your campaigns. But just to make sure of the efficiency of the preference page you need to encourage your subscribers to set their preferences.
An idea is to send an email to present the new feature and say that they can enter the preference page to choose a segment relevant for their specific interest.

Social media plays an important role concerning gaining and maintaining clients. In the same time, email stays one of most important communication tools in marketing. Integrating the two means having more chances to get where your clients and potential clients are.

The real potential of integrating social media and email comes from their capacity to engage the target in a conversation, it’s the opportunity to determine people to talk about your business in social networks. Still, the two tools are different, emailing means individual communication, while social media targets more people at once.

How to integrate the email and social media

1. Links in newsletters
First step in integrating the two tools is offering links to your profiles in social media. This way you can use your email list to build up your presence in social media. Invite the subscribers to follow you on twitter and like you on Facebook or any other social networks you are on. You will have a starting point to share your content in social media. Sometimes it’s not enough to just put the link in your newsletter and expect people to click on them. You need to attract them with a reason to enter your profiles. For example, you can invite them to click to participate to a contest you are organizing on Facebook.

2. Invite fans to subscribe to your newsletter
In the same way that you use your email list to attract fans in social media, you can do it the other way around – use your presence in social media to determine users to subscribe to your newsletter. For example, on Facebook you can develop a tab that contains the subscription form to your newsletter.

3. Links on the unsubscribe page
This is a feature of Womsend and it can help you in the situations when your subscribers don’t want to receive your emails anymore. If you use Womsend you can put links to your social profiles on the unsubscribe page for the ones who want to stay connected to your news in another way. More about this feature you can read here.

In conclusion, email and social media don’t eclude each other, on the contrary they can be integrated very well to serve the same goal: promoting your content and enlarge your reached audience.

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