We recently received a comment that exemplifies a lot of the fears that beginning email marketers have:

Hi,

If I do use software such as 1-2-All, isn’t my IP being shown to my ISP as sending out many, many emails. Won’t I therefore be shut down? I need to send out about 250 per day. I know that legally a spammer must attempt to hide his identity and (not or) be deceptive. I want to do neither, in fact my letterhead includes name, address, phone, email, etc. in every email. I am hardly a spammer. However, the ISP’s think that any email sent out from a hitherto unknown sender is spam. Perhaps socially yes, legally no. Regardless of the legal innocence of my actions, I need to get the word out. How do I do it?

Your response will be greatly appreciated.

Frank

Thank you for your excellent question, Frank. I hope this answer will clear things up for you.

You are correct that many ISPs will assume you are spamming if you start sending out a large volume of emails through your normal SMTP email server. It is generally not recommended, for example, to start sending large volume email advertisements through your Comcast, Time Warner, AOL, or similar email account, because doing so may jeopardize your ability to continue using the account normally for your own personal email. At the very least, you should check the terms of use before even considering using your primary email service for bulk email sending.

By default, ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software will send your messages directly from your web server. Depending on which web hosting company you use, this is often considered more acceptable use of your service. However, there will usually be limitations to the number of messages you can send. Many web hosts will limit you to 250, 500, or 1000 messages per day.

It is important to contact your web host prior to starting an email marketing campaign to find out what the limitations of your service are. You can easily configure our software to throttle its sending rate so that you do not exceed your account limits. The reason you need to do this first is because many servers will not report any error when failing to send messages beyond your quota, so it won’t be possible to go back and determine who did or did not receive your message.

Many web hosts also have additional packages available for purchase which will allow you to send a greater number of emails more quickly. If you are using a quality web host, then this will often be a very solid option for sending out your email campaigns.

As we enter into another holiday season, you’ll want to spend some time considering ways to fine-tune your email marketing campaigns. There are certainly unique opportunities for a variety of business sectors in this season. There are also some pitfalls that you should be mindful of if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your messages.

Everybody’s Doing It

The holiday season is the time of year when people are receiving the highest number of marketing and advertising messages. More than any other time, ineffective message are going to be lost in the crowd. To make your message stand out in the crowd, you’ll have to do two things:

1. Offer something very good
2. Be very specific about it

Just watch your own behavior as the holiday special offers come streaming into your inbox. Messages with generic or vague titles are likely the first to be deleted without being read. Whose got the patience? Try to use your title to encapsulate the full message in as few words as possible. Tell people exactly what you have for them, and the ones who want it will open and read.

The body of the email should be similarly punchy. How often do you ever spend more than 30 seconds reading a marketing email? You would have to be very, very interested in the information or offer you had received. You’re more likely to get a response from your readers if the email itself is short and to the point. If the email has done its job, your readers will follow your links to your more in-depth pages of product details, sales copy, etc.

Timing Is Everything

Before you send your messages, go back through your archives to see what time of day and day of the week your subscribers tend to open their messages the most frequently. While Sunday and Monday afternoon are the days when email marketing messages generally get opened the most, this can vary widely depending on what industry you are in and who your clients are. If you use our Email Marketing software, you can set your campaign to automatically send to each subscriber at the time of day that they initially subscribed to your list. This can be great if you have subscribers in many different time zones, because you can be assured that you’re sending during a time that they are awake and likely to be exposed to incoming messages.

We’ve been hard at work integrating our email marketing software with WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and now vBulletin.

You can now integrate subscriptions to your newsletters during the vBulletin registration process, so as to not force the user to submit multiple forms. The newsletter subscription will be submitted as soon as the user finishes registering for vBulletin access.

To include this on your own vBulletin registration form, download our vBulletin plugin and import it as a new product in the vBulletin admin section.

Setting this up involves three quick steps:

1. Create new user profile fields for “Yes/No” radio options, and (optional) “Name” textbox.
2. Import the XML file to the Manage Products page in vBulletin admin section.
3. Fill in your ActiveCampaign Email Marketing details on the vBulletin Options/Settings page.

vBulletin users can also manage their subscription(s) to your mailing list(s) directly from their forum account.

For more information, additional screenshots, and instructions, visit our email marketing vBulletin integration page.

Are you using Twitter for your company/organization? Have you posted newsletter/campaign links in the past?

ActiveCampaign Email Marketing now makes it easy to post specific campaign links to Twitter and to track the results!

This new integration option allows you to choose whether or not you want to post it to Twitter with each campaign you send.  The software will then automatically post the subject and a campaign web version link to your Twitter account.

Just posting the information is a nice addition – but we took it one step further.  Full reporting. When a visitor views your campaign from your Twitter account it will track that visitors open, campaign links clicked, etc.  You can then view the Twitter post as a subscriber in your campaign reports!

This integration option is located on the List Settings page and is list specific.  For more information, additional screenshots, and instructions visit our email marketing twitter integration page.

There seem to be a lot of mixed messages in the marketing community when it comes to branding your company versus generating sales. On one side, you have the folks that insist that branding is critical to instill trust, and that you should not pollute your brand with incessant calls to action. On the other side you have the folks that will tell you that every single message you send out should contain a plain, clear request for the sale.

Traditionally, this ideological hurdle has been overcome by separating out your primarily brand-building messages from your messages intended to direct sales. The current economy has forced a shift toward unification, simply because there is generally less money to work with. The trend has been to increasingly opt for more cost-effective forms of advertising, particularly email marketing, as well as more consolidated marketing efforts.

Personally, I think this is a good thing. I fall square in between these two marketing camps. I think that yes, branding is critical and should not be ruined by constantly asking the client to buy. But, on the other hand, it is also important that your marketing messages contain some call to action. It doesn’t have to be a request for the sale. The important thing is customer engagement. Any small action you can get the potential client to take moves them closer to being a paying customer.

Because people need internal consistency. If they repost a cool video from XYZ company, they’re not merely somebody who likes cool videos–they’re also somebody who likes XYZ company. If someone forwards your email message to a friend, they will have an internal need to justify that action. So, they’ll tend to think more favorably about your company and your product after they forward the email than they did before.

Likewise, if someone purchases your product or service, your branding messages both before and after the sale will help to solidify the feeling that your company is reliable and that the purchase was well-founded. When people buy things, they tend to have one of two reactions: feelings of satisfaction or feelings of remorse.

If you can help your clients experience a feeling of satisfaction following the purchase, they will go on to invent and discover additional reinforcements for this feeling on their own. Otherwise, you will find that they devalue even the positive aspects of your product and publicize the ways that they have been duped by you. This is why a friendly and supportive followup email may be the most important step you can take to safeguard your business. Your contact following the purchase will help start your clients off on that path of security and satisfaction.

All of this adds up to the idea that branding and selling are much more strongly interconnected than marketers have had the luxury of believing during better economic times. Email sales should leverage and enhance your branding, and email marketing that is done primarily for branding should engage your clients in small behavioral commitments that encourage purchases.

Subscription Forms are excellent ways to promote your newsletter on any website, even Facebook and WordPress sites.

It’s often tiresome to have to manually update every webpage that you have embedded subscription form HTML on, when any changes are made to the form.

A unique idea might be to use our email marketing API to display a subscription form. This tutorial will briefly walk through how to use PHP and our API to display subscription forms. Then, when changes are made to the subscription form, you no longer have to update every instance of the form across the web!

Note: Please be aware that doing this will cause repeated requests to the external domain, which can slow down sites, especially those with high traffic. This example, more or less, introduces how simple it is to use the API.

Obtaining your subscription form ID

First, visit your Subscription Form page in the admin section, and choose which form you want to display on an external website. Click the “View” link next to the subscription form name. Then note the unique number at the end of the URL (in this case, 1001):

This is the ID of the subscription form. We’ll use this in our API call.

PHP

In PHP, set up your script to make an API call using the form_view action:

// Base API path
$path = "http://mysite.com/admin/api.php?";

// Initialize curl request
$request = curl_init($path . "api_user=admin&api_pass=test&api_action=form_view&api_output=serialize&id=1001&generate=1");

// Set other curl details
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

// Get the response
$response = (string)curl_exec($request);

// Close curl
curl_close($request);

// Set final result array to variable
$result = unserialize($response);

This will go out and obtain the information for form ID 1001, and set it to an array which we can reference easily.

HTML

Now you just need to write out the HTML for your subscription form:

echo $result["html"];

That’s it! The entire HTML structure of the form can be obtained through a simple API call.

Improvements

If you have a few forms you want displayed on various spots around the web, it might be wise to write a function for yourself, so you don’t have to repeat the curl code for each form you display:

function ac_api_form_view_html($id)
{
	$path = "http://mysite.com/admin/api.php?";

	$request = curl_init($path . "api_user=admin&api_pass=test&api_action=form_view&api_output=serialize&id=" . $id . "&generate=1");

	curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
	curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$response = (string)curl_exec($request);
	curl_close($request);
	$result = unserialize($response);

	if ($result["response_code"])
	{
		return $result["html"];
	}
}

Here’s how you’d call this function:

$form_html = ac_api_form_view_html(1001);

echo $form_html;

Two lines is not bad!

Going further

As mentioned at the beginning, using the API in this manner might result in slower site performance, since your script has to re-request the data each time the page is loaded. It might be wise to cache the subscription form HTML locally, then only re-fetch the updated data at a set interval, such as weekly.

Our Wordpress plugin performs the same type of caching, if desired.

Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions for the API.

Our email marketing software lets you embed subscription forms on other sites by simply copying and pasting HTML code.

To make things even easier, we’ve created a WordPress plugin that lets you display any subscription form on your WordPress site, with just a few clicks.

All of this happens without any copying and pasting. Simply supply your email marketing software URL, and login information, and choose what form you’d like displayed.

The form will then appear in the sidebar of your WordPress site:

It’s that simple!

You can even opt to request the updated form each time the page is loaded, so any changes you make to the form in your email marketing software will always be reflected!

Learn more about this plugin, and let us know if you have questions or suggestions!

Once upon a time, you could target a marketing campaign based solely on geography. Certain types of people lived in certain types of places, and that was it. There was an average American, ‘Joe Consumer,’ who was married and had a couple of kids, and liked mostly the same things that all the other Joe Consumers out there liked.

According to an AdAge whitepaper on the new 2010 census, those times are long gone. There simply is no such thing as an average American anymore. There is no dominant ethnic group, family configuration, or subculture.

Some of the more interesting findings:

• No household type neatly describes even one third of Americans
• Only 22% of American households are classic nuclear familie comprised of a married couple with children
• The single most common type of American household is now the married couple with no children
• The next most common household type is the single individual who lives alone
• “No racial or ethnic category describes a majority of the population.”
• The younger generations of Americans are increasingly more diverse than older Americans (and also more responsive to online marketing.)

What this means for marketers is that, if you want your product to have broad appeal, you will likely need to target your messages much more specifically than you ever needed to before. And if you want to do that in a way that is cost-effective, targeted email marketing needs to become a central focus.

Perhaps this is why marketing industry funding is increasingly being taken away from traditional print, radio, television, and billboard marketing. Each of these types of media target huge, disparate segments of the population simultaneously, which means they are simply becoming less effective as the population becomes more diverse. Instead, we are seeing marketing funds diverted to more targeted, individualized advertising media, such as email marketing.

Email marketing most closely approaches the one-to-one model of advertising that is increasingly coveted by savvy marketers. Targeted email marketing software allows you to subdivide your lists based not only on detailed demographic data but also on user actions. You can also use these divisions within your list to provide conditional, targeted content to each subgroup, ensuring that the most relevant and appealing messages are delivered to each individual list subscriber.

Our email marketing software allows you to embed subscription forms on any website. This provides the advantage of using our software back-end, in combination with your web presence front-end.

Subscription forms can be extracted as HTML, which can be placed on any site with minimal effort. This tutorial will explain how to embed subscription forms on Facebook pages as custom content sections. Facebook pages often act as extensions of your product or brand in social network surroundings.

First, make sure you have a Facebook page set up for your product or brand. Then, visit the Static FBML Facebook page and click “Add to my Page.”

Choose the page you’d like to add to:

This will add the necessary component to your page, which will let you take advantage of extended functionality.

Back on your own Facebook page, click “Edit Page.”

Scroll down to the section for FBML (under Applications), then click the pencil icon in the upper-right corner, and choose “Edit.”

This will provide you a form to edit the Box Title and content of the custom section. Provide a unique Box Title and body content for your section. Then we’ll add the subscription form HTML.

Back in our email marketing software, go to Integration > Subscription Forms, and choose a form to use on your Facebook page. It’s probably best to exclude all input fields besides email address, for the sake of space (the area where the subscription form will appear is limited in size).

Get the code for this subscription form by hitting “Update & Continue.”

Go back into the Facebook settings for you page, and paste the code into the FBML content area:

Hit Save Changes, and you’re set!

Your new content section will now appear under the Boxes tab on your page:

This is probably not the most ideal spot for your subscription form to reside, since many viewers may not visit the individual Boxes tab. A better spot would be on the main page, along the left side of the “wall.” To do this, click on the pencil icon in the upper-right corner of the Newsletter box, and choose “Move to Wall tab.”

This will neatly place your subscription form on your main Facebook page, along the left-hand column:

You’re all set!

One last thing you might consider is the redirection process. Once a user submits the form, they will be taken to your email marketing software site, and out of the Facebook interface. This could be an interruption to the user who may have wished to remain on the Facebook site.

To provide a better experience, adjust the redirection settings for your subscription form. Have the “Successful Subscription” option redirect to your Facebook page URL:

We talk a lot on this blog about the fundamentals of effective email marketing campaigns:

• Building relationships
• Establishing trust
• Solving problems

If you stick to those fundamentals, you’ll not only sell a lot of product, but you’ll also avoid the type of lawsuit that Toyota is now facing as a result of its “Maniacs” campaign to promote the Toyota Matrix.

An overly-creative advertising team at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles created a set of email autoresponder series for Toyota, each designed to make the recipient think that they were being stalked by a maniac. Then they used the video below to get pranksters to sign their friends up for these autoresponder email campaigns.

AdAge reported on one of the thousands of recipients of these bizarre messages, Amber Duick, who is now suing both Toyota and the Saatchi ad company.

Ms. Duick received a series of rambling messages appearing to be from a rabid soccer fan and riot participant named Sebastian Bowler. She received links to his Myspace page, copies of hotel bills that Sebastian Bowler was apparently holding her responsible for, and indications that he was on his way to her home to visit her in person.

According to her attorney, Ms. Duick “was terrified. She slept with a machete next to her bed and she slept with mace. She could barely sleep or eat normally.”

It was not until the ninth email message that Ms. Duick was informed that “she had been punked” and the whole ordeal had been part of a marketing campaign for the Toyota Matrix. Ms. Duick is probably not likely to purchase a Toyota vehicle in the near future.

This is a classic example of a poorly thought out marketing strategy backfiring. You don’t need to be a renegade artist to effectively sell your product, and in fact it is probably better if you’re not. All you need to do to effectively market yourself online is to follow the old tried and true principles of good business. The new media is an awful lot like the old, just a lot faster. You start with a high-quality email marketing software package, offer good reasons why your product solves your reader’s problems, and track your results.