Test Your Messages!

Email Marketing /

Test Your Messages!

We are bombarded by advertising to the point we have become the commercial, evident by the clothes we wear, the shampoo we use to the beer we drink. We think it’s normal for talking dogs to promote canned chili, or the mop we clean with, dedicate classic rock songs to us. And the pace of our commercialized society is blurring, as fads come and go as fast as Internet time – a rate so rapid that marketers have a difficult time predicting, no less promoting the next collectable toy craze or the latest fashion obsession.

Our commercialized society may be responsible for the current generation of “must haves’; consumers who want the latest gadgets to the latest fashion but our commercialized society has created a perpetual opportunity for the savvy marketer. The marketer who can understand and capture the “must haves” attention and sales will obtain their loyalty and repeat business. The savvy marketer knows they are competing in a worldwide market therefore they need to use the best marketing medium that yields the best results for their time and budget.

With all this world wide competition for the “must have’s” attention, time and money, you, as an Internet marketer using opt-in newsletters, have a major advantage over those who can afford product placement spots in the movies, or televised commercials and free samples. You have a list of people who signed up to receive your newsletter because your subscribers like what you say, like your products, like your opinion and want to continue hearing from you. The demographics of your newsletter is selective to your industry making your audience a truly “captive audience”. What you send them in email is important to them and to you. What you send them in email should be tested for:

Appearance: The way your newsletter is arranged, the colors you use, the graphics and included links received, all convey a message. Is it the message you want to appear in your subscriber’s in-box with all the right stuff? Does this format work well for all popular browsers and email clients; are there broken links and any empty spaces? Are all your elements correct, such as your charts and tables? And don’t forget to look at a text version of your newsletter, as there maybe some text version tweaking needed.

Subject Lines: Run your spell checker, and make sure your “From” lines have the correct information.

Content: Everyone makes mistakes, and using a spell checker is no exception. Did you mean to write “you’re” instead of “your” or “their” instead of “there”? Always have someone other than the contributors of your newsletter read and review your content. You will eliminate grammatical errors, or sentences that don’t quite make sense. AND always verify your facts.

Links: Test all hyperlinks. Click on each one to verify your internal and external links are working and that they take you to the correct page or website intended. Verify that your hyper links aren’t accidentally tied to local pages on your computer.

Readability: Once in your in-box, is your newsletter a good length to keep your readers interested or too much information in one sitting? Are you writing over your readers’ head or writing down to your audience. Consider running your content through Microsoft readability tool which displays information about the reading level of the document being checked and includes a readability score, which allows you to gauge your writing level.

Correctness: If you are personalizing your newsletters, check your dynamic content elements. Consider sending your newsletter to a sub-set list that uses the fill-ins from real data fields and the actual records that will be used.

In conclusion: Always test your messages. Your newsletters represent you, and with opt-in newsletters the impression you make is delivered to hundreds or hundreds of thousands with a click of a mouse. Make sure the newsletter they see is the one you intended for them to read. Send your completed message to yourself and your staff BEFORE sending it out to your entire subscriber base. This may seem unnecessary and requires a bit extra work but the benefits are immeasurable compared to the time it takes to do it.

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More about Announcement Lists

Announcement Lists /

More about Announcement Lists

You may have heard the word announcement list used in context with email blasts, bulk email, broadcast or mass mail. They all mean the same thing, the intention of sending out a one way message that requires fast communication, perhaps specifically timed and maybe aimed at a targeted audience. These messages can be sent to a small or large number of recipients for a lower cost than that of traditional postal mail, AND all with measurable results!

Announcement lists allow all sized companies to distribute information using email, about virtually anything they have an audience for; press releases, product discounts, reminders, offers, tips, invitations, software releases, and so on. Using an integrated database, such as offered with Dundee Internet Services Lyris List manager, announcements can be customized to the recipient’s individual preferences and sent in a sequence series at predetermined time intervals to each member who meet certain criteria. – All tracked with graphical results.

A company (and organization) regardless of size, is missing a great low cost marketing tool if they are not using announcement list technology. With their current database of customers, they need only to ask for their customer’s email address (and permission) to be added to their announcement list. Gas stations can send announcements to remind customers to tune up their car for spring, winterize their vehicle in early fall and offer other specials during the year. The local restaurant might email coupons for Father’s day, Easter and other Holidays with a special birthday discount to their customers two weeks before the event. Microsoft emails reminders’ to their software subscribers to update their software when a new release is ready, and the local book club announces their meeting dates and times. The possibilities for announcement list use are endless.

Announcement lists generally offer the following advantages:

• Fast and cost effective – mail quickly and effectively without the associated cost of traditional snail mail.
• Easy to Administer – Administrative tasks are automated. The software should handle the subscription management, bounces and other technicalities.
• Send one Message – No need to BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) or expose your entire database of names.
• Build Loyalty and Recognition – Frequent announcements is another way to boost your image while building customer loyalty and recognition.

Dundee Internet Services, Inc Lyris ListManager also offers:

• Automatic error processing – List addresses are automatically processed – bad addresses are flagged in the database.
• Highly configurable – Identify exactly who the “From:”, “Reply-To:” and SMTP “From ” are for every message.
• No membership limit – Specifically designed to send to a handful of subscribers to a large numbers of subscribers.
• Customized Announcements – Easily customized the message according to each recipient’s individual preferences allowing the list owner to take advantage of their customer database.
• Measured Results – Track your message opens and click-through to see whether your announcement is being read and which section of your announcement is the most popular among your subscribers (i.e. your discount coupon or your web site link.) This allows you to adjust your announcements according to what your recipients are seeking.
• Interactivity – Add a poll or interactive survey to your email announcements, building a two-way relationship with your recipients.
• Personalized Messages – Personalize your message with mail-merge. Use conditional content to create entirely different messages in the same mailing run.
• Segmenting – Create subsets of your list to send smaller portions of it all based on criteria you choose.
• Tracking – Track all the responses to your mailings with tracking clickthroughs, opens, and clickstreams.
• Referrals – Allow your members to invite others to join your list.
• Auditing – Obtain positive confirmation of mail delivery (or failure) as every mail transaction is fully logged, including the time delivered, number of retries, or error message obtained for a given email address.
• Database links – Use the easy import or export feature to manage your list members.
• Subscriptions – Set expirations dates for membership after a specified period of time.

Generate continual interest in your business or organization by using announcement list technology today.

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What Email Marketing Can Do For You

Email Marketing /

What Email Marketing Can Do For You

Which type of company are you?

Some companies play a percentage game, sending unsolicited bulk e-mail to hundreds and thousands of addresses with the hope of getting a “sale”, not with the hope of getting repeat business.  They aren’t looking for a long time business relationship with their customers; they just want to sell in quantity – but not our customers!

Some companies mail  solicited e-mail on occasion, without understanding the realationship or value an email list should have with their business.

Some companies send solicited e-mail to keep an ongoing business relationship with their customers so that their customers remember them and recommend them when it comes time to buy their product or service. These companies know what an email marketing list can do for their business.

What can an email marketing mailing list do for you?

Email communication is an excellent tool to use to distribute important information to your web site guests and clients.

Publishing a newsletter (e-zine); –

* 1. Establishes trust between you and your clients. Publishing a newsletter helps you establish you as a reputable internet business and over time inspire trust.
* 2. Brings web visitors back – when someone signs up for your newsletter, the mailing itself will serve as a reminder to them to revisit your site again and again, eventually turning your newsletter subscribers into paying customers.
* 3. Establishes YOU as an EXPERT.  By publishing a newsletter and writing your own articles (or talking about one of your products or giving helpful hits) subscribers will come to see you as an expert in your own field.
* 4. Builds Brand Loyalty. The familiarity they feel from reading your newsletter will reinforce brand loyalty to your site, turning many of your current subscribers who are prospects into future customers.
* 5. Keeps current and potential customers Up-To-Date- on new products and services. Web sites change but your newsletter allows you to share this important information with your current and potential customers, and bring them back for a new sale. Nothing is worse than having a client tell you he went to one of your competitors because he didn’t know you offered that same service or product.
* 6. Builds relationships- and allows you to build an opted-in email marketing list. Relationship marketing is important on the Web and publishing your own newsletter will help you do just that. The truth is most people would rather spend money with someone they like and trust rather than spend money with someone they don’t know.
* 7. Keeps your web site fresh in the visitor’s minds. This technique of “reminding” someone about your site is important; it really helps to keep a constant flow of traffic returning to your web site.
* 8. Allows you to measure your marketing success. Most companies find the need to advertise in the yellow pages and other places, in addition to having a company Web Site. You may have found most types of traditional advertising is difficult to measure – did you ever wonder how effective your adverting really is? With email marketing, however, there are specific reports and information available to you that can easily measure your marketing efforts.

Success of e-mail campaigns can be measured using the number of emails sent and seeing the number of emails opened, email bounces, unsubscribes and click throughs.  You can tell who opened your email, which links in your email motivate the most clicks, who forward your e-mail to someone else and hundreds of other reports produced as needed.  All this useful information can be used to send highly targeted campaigns to individuals most likely to respond to your offers.

How can this help you?

With email marketing your business has an opportunity to reach out to customers and prospects, increasing customer retention in ways that were not possible a few short years ago. Whether you do it yourself or use Dundee Internet Services, Inc, www.mailinglistservices.com,  e-mail should be a big part of your customer relationships efforts.

The possibilities are endless

Dundee Internet Services, Inc – Opportunities Delivered from one to millions

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Worse Email Practices for List Management

Email Marketing /

Worse Email Practices for List Management

In the real world an email address is worth money to someone, if not to spammers then to marketers, and certainly to the list owner who keeps track of their subscriber’s demographics for targeted email campaigns.   Because of their value, email addresses maybe resold several times.

Selling email addresses is big business, and you’ll notice most of the email addresses for sale are touted as being opted-in.  However, when mailed to, you may find a good number of these purchased opted-in lists contain a large number of undeliverable addresses.  Without actually having control of your own email list collection procedure, which should include a confirmation process, purchased addresses could be harvested from web sites or gleaned out of mail servers.  They could be computer generated, or have spam traps waiting.  AND besides being unreliable, unverified and untargeted, the good addresses among the bad are probably filled with addresses that have been heavily marketed to, turning your response rate to zip.

Purchased lists can get you in trouble; they can blacklist your server or get you ousted from your ESP.  They can turn you into a spammer. And you rarely have any way to find out where these purchased addresses came from or how they were acquired.

Using a purchased list is one of the worse mistakes marketers can make.  However renting a list is usually not, but there are issues using rented lists too.  List rental is an acknowledged practice in email marketing. For a fee, legitimate owners of rental addresses send an email to their list on your behalf.  They have all the stats and handle all the list mechanics.  You do not see the addresses on the list the rental list owner is sending to and you pay for each name used.  Do you get a guaranteed delivery rate?   Is the list current and are the addresses pertinent to your message?  There are so many more questions to think about.  To keep list rental issues in check, use a recognized list broker to contract a reliable list rental company.

Dundee Internet Services is not a list broker; we are an ESP, an email list hosting provider.  Using our years of list hosting experience while working with hundreds and hundreds of list owners, we complied this short list of what not to do when email marketing – Bad Email List Practices for Poor Results

* USE purchased email lists.  There no guarantee how the names were really obtained or if they are really have been confirmed; and you certainly don’t have permission to mail to the address.
* MAIL to your list from a different domain or company name without explanation.  (When you merge with another company or buy another company, do not email to your list from the new company address and assume all the recipients know who you are.   And do not mail to the new company list from your old address and make the same assumption.  Make a smooth transition from the old to the new by having the original owner email an explanation about the changes because of the merger or purchase.)
* DO NOT use sanity checks on your web site sign up addresses.   (Check to ensure the submitted address is technically correct and is a valid email address.  Do not assume that people will put in the correct address:  alice@enter.aol)
* DO NOT confirm addresses  ( Use closed loop confirmations or confirmed opted-ins.  When someone joins your list, confirm their email address to make sure it’s correct and they signed up for something they want.)
* DO NOT have a privacy policy or stick to the one you have.
* ASSUME you have permission from everyone to put them on all the lists you own, not just the one they opted-in too.
* DO NOT removed bad or opted out addresses in a timely manner.
* DO NOT track opens or click-throughs or use any type of user feedback.  (When you use tracking and feedback you will know when your mailings aren’t getting the expected response in a certain amount of time: the addresses may not be cost effective to keep the addresses on your list.)
* LIE to your ESP about list origins.
* USE SPAM-like or misleading subjects.
* USE SPAMMY content to trigger anti-spam filters.
* DO NOT act on complaints
* DO NOT comply with the Cann Spam Act or other laws.
* DO NOT collect demographics to use for target mailing.
* JUMP from ESP to ESP

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How to Bring in More Sales Using E-mail Marketing

Email Marketing /

How to Bring in More Sales Using E-mail Marketing

How to Bring In More Sales  From Your Customer Database  With Permission-Based Email Marketing Campaigns

Everyone knows it is always easier to sell to your existing customers than to your potential customers. However, existing customer relationships may not automatically translate into increased sales without effective regular communications, i.e. constant contact, between you and your customers. Dundee Internet Services knows how to build ongoing relationships with your customers that will help you pull in the orders.   Here’s how:

  1. Use the most effective customizable and analytical program available.
  2.  Apply ethical and sound marketing principles to ensure the greatest success of your email marketing campaigns.
  3.  Connect with your customers to make them feel valued.
  4. Always ask for an email address and permission to send them email.
  5.  Publish your privacy policy to assure your customers that you are not selling their data to third parties.
  6.  Respond to their questions and inquiries–acknowledge each person’s importance to you.
  7.  Follow up with more information.
  8.  Grab their interest with rich, high quality content.

Newsletters: Build trust and credibility with newsletters that are professionally written and formatted in a consistent, recognizable style.
Promotional specials and coupons: Designed to maximize the impact of your newsletter sales messages.

Landing pages: Designed and managed to complete more sales.
Learn more about what’s important to your customers. Knowing details about your customer will give your customized sales messages greater Impact. We can create offers specific to your customer, based on their buying history and profiles.

Methods to gather these details include:

  1. Create a member profile page for your customers so they can continually provide useful information about themselves.
  2.  Use survey’s to understand their buying decisions.
  3.  Use mail merge to customized one-on-one marketing.
  4.  Pay immediate attention to your customers’ needs.

Automated mailings can be triggered by specific user actions, so your customers can receive personalized messages when:

  1. They subscribe to your mailing list
  2. They purchase a product
  3. They abandon a shopping cart: What happened? Can we offer you something to complete the order?
  4.  They click on a link within your newsletter
  5.  Is it is time for a re-purchase reminder (with or without a coupon incentive)

AND what about testing, tracking and timing? Dundee Internet Services, Inc uses the most effective customizable and analytical programs available, applying sound marketing principles to ensure the greatest success of your full scale email sales and marketing campaign.

  1. How effective are your sales messages? We can find out … then fine tune!
  2.  How many people are opening your messages?
  3.  How many people click on the offers?
  4.  How many people forward your messages to a friend?
  5.  Which offers resulted in a purchase?
  6.  What time of day/day of the week results in the most sales?
  7.  A/B testing: does Offer ‘A’ or Offer ‘B’ perform better?

Enlist Dundee Internet Services to handle it all!  Results delivered from one to millions!
Ready to Get Started? Call us today (Toll Free 888-222-8485) or email info@dundee.net

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Announcement lists – who needs them!

Announcement Lists /

Announcement lists – who needs them!

 Announcement lists: these are typically used to distribute information about a product, a service, an event or other noteworthy information. In most cases, the organization that runs the mailing list controls what information, is sent out. The process for announcement lists is similar to that for discussion lists except, only approved people are allowed to send messages to the group. This could be just you, a number of people in your organization, or specific people you choose. Frequently, with many announcement lists, you will want to “import” in bulk, a list of email addresses who should be members of the mailing list. Dundee Internet Services, https://mailinglistservices.com  Inc using our list software, Lyris will also do this for you.

Announcement lists includes newsletters or e-zines, press releases, alerts, greetings, and a host of other one way communication scenarios.  Some Dundee Internet Services, Inc customers use announcement lists to send reminders, appointments, birthday greetings, Christmas greetings, electronic post card sale reminders and, coupons.  In one case a sale post card was so responsive with her customers; she increased sales by over 50% per quarter! https://mailinglistservices.com/custom-templates/

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No Spam

No Spam /

No Spam

“No Spam allowed” ~ Dundee Internet is a permission-based email service provider and as such expressly forbids the transmission of unsolicited commercial email and unsolicited bulk email.

When it comes to list hosting and email deliverability we protect our customers with list hosting services for opt-in mailing lists only. For over a decade we have continued to maintain a solid relationship with the major ISP players, such as AOL, Yahoo, and MSN etc., to resolve any arising mailing issues with them, quickly and efficiently.

Unwanted, unsolicited bulk email is SPAM. SPAM costs everyone money. SPAM raises the delivery cost of legitimate email: the price for receiving, storing and removing unwanted mail effects us all.

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Announcement Lists

Announcement Lists /

Announcement Lists

Announcement lists are a form of email communication where using a list of opted-in list subscribers list members receive information but do not interact with other list members.

Announcement lists are great for:
Company Newsletters
Research Announcements
Press Releases
School Newsletters
Service Bulletins
Coupon Specials
Media Publications
Recipe Sharing
Medical News
Nutrition & Healthy Eating News
Senior News
City or Township News
Product Announcements  AND so much more!

Order your announcement list for your company or organization.  Visit  Dundee eMail List Services at  https://mailinglistservices.com for more information.

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