Email Marketing-Five Ideas to Remember When Improving Your Online Business Web Site

There's quite a lot to consider when building a business website, just as there's a lot to think about when building a retail storefront. It's easy to forget the basics when you're mired in the details, and some web designers love those details and are constantly trying to pull you to their levels even if you are doing your best to only consider the big picture.

Here are five simple ideas that you should keep in mind as you progress with your business website development project:

- Pages should load quickly. A bad side effect of complex designs with lots of graphics is that they load slowly. If they load too slowly, then your visitors-your potential customers-are going to become impatient and go somewhere else. This is also a very strong argument against including audio,video, or animation.

- Your business is the most important element. Web page designs where the graphical elements are more visually attractive than the information about the company do not engage the attention of potential customers. You only have a few seconds between when the page loads and when they decide to stay or not. Make sure that whatever the design, attention is inexorably drawn to your message about your business.

- Identify your business. It's a business website, so the most important element on every page should be an introduction to your business, products, or service. Articles are excellent additions to the site, but the top of each article should offer visitors a way to learn more about the company, and that link should be duplicated at the end of each article, too.

- Don't link to other sites. Many websites will offer you a link exchange; they will point to your website if you'll point to theirs. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but don't give them prime real estate on your site. Every link you have to another site siphons off some of those precious potential customers. If you want to link to other sites, create a separate "other useful sites on the web" page. If you do link to other sites, make sure those new links open up in a new browser window. Your website developer will know how to do this using the target attributes in links.

- Keep it fun and attractive. Attractive layout design is subjective, so we're not going to agree on the exact criteria, but sites that try to cram too much onto their pages are harder to understand--and therefore less inviting--than other sites with more open designs. There's lots you'd like to say on your website, but it doesn't have all be in the first paragraph!

Building a great business website isn't rocket science and doesn't involve large investments or state-of-the-art technology. It's like any other facet of your business; it's about clear thinking, focusing on the needs of your customer, and eschewing tricky and fancy for informative and useful.

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Using Dynamic Content to Send Targeted Information-Email Marketing

Dynamic content can make sending targeted content to recipients easy. Dynamic content allows you to created a single email message that delivers multiple versions based on recipients' demographic profiles or other data. The possibilities are limited only by the data you have for your subscribers and the content you have that is relevant to that data. Messages can be customized to replace groups of text or images based on variables such as:

- A recipient's personal data (such as state, status, etc.),
- Past purchase history,
- Past email activity,
- Website activity or,
- Any other data you have about your email recipients.

The possibilities for customizing messages with dynamic content tools are almost endless. For example, an electronics retailer could use dynamic content to deliver an email newsletter with an opening paragraph about computers on sale or a paragraph about new MP3 players. The actual paragraph that was delivered would depend on the recipient. Here are some more real-world examples of how marketers are using this powerful technology:

- Customizing updates by state, province or other geographical characteristics
- Substituting entire paragraphs of text or graphics based on demographic data
- Creating cross-sell offers based on previous purchases
- Alerting customers of consumable products (items or components that need to be
replaced on a regular schedule) or recurring services (which need to be performed
at specific intervals, such as oil changes and tune-ups).

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Easy and Smart Campaign Ideas for Mobile Marketing

To get your ideas flowing around what you can do with social networking, here are some campaign ideas you can try. More than any other tool, social networking is one you have to use in order to understand how it works:

- Market your social networking involvement off-line. Post signs in your place of
business and alert people that you are participating in social networking. This
can be as simple as posting a logo on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn (or what-
ever site you network you network in) somewhere prominently with your profile
page name. People who participate will notice it, and if they are interested,
they will befriend you. This would be especially good to get people to sign up
for your microblog coupons.

- If you think your audience might be interested in social networking but may not
yet be up to speed with how it all works, add an article in your company news-
letter to explain what social networking is and give a quick primer on what to
do.

- Promote your social networking in your online environment. Put a badge or widget
on your website. Use a signature line in your emails to encourage people to find
you on the social networks.

- Keep your eyes and ears open. When the next MySpace or Facebook becomes popular,
you want to be there. So listen and act on the news you hear. If you are active
in social networking, this will be easy because it will start to come up on your
conversations.

- Radio DJs can use a microblogging campaign to alert listeners to their on-location
spots and get people to stop by. Instead of only having one way (on-air Promotion
to listeners) to promote an event, you can grab people who are not listening to
the radio at all or who are listening to an alternative station by reaching them
via mobile.

For more tips or information on a mobile marketing solution for your business, please check out this website: Text SMS Marketing Made Simple

Mobile Promotions and Location-Based Marketing-SMS and MMS

One of the best opportunities in mobile marketing is the capability to build brand awareness and goodwill with your target market. Mobile promotions help customers feel appreciated, and thus, feel more loyal to your brand. With the appropriate customer-tracking systems, loyalty programs can be layered in to create an even closer connection between your customers and your brand. This kind of deep connection can help drive sales, but it will also help create brand evangelists who will endorse your brand to all their friends, which is quite powerful.

Mobile promotion is also an ingenious way for companies to reach out to their customers and create a mobile presence without creating and maintaining a mobile website. The most common mobile promotions begin with SMS, MMS, and proximity marketing messages. These can be followed by coupons, discounts, or promotions that are sent directly to the customers' mobile phones. The coupons, or discounts can be redeemed in a variety of ways. After customers have opted in to your mobile communication, loyalty programs can be developed to optimize your customer interaction at the most granular and personal level.

The goal of mCoupons ( mobile coupons), is basically the same as that of traditional coupons. They should drive revenue by encouraging higher volume and repeat sales. They can also help increase product awareness and move overstocked inventory to make room for new, more valuable products. Mobile couponing can be much more tailored to the needs of the specific consumer and less costly than traditional print coupons. For the user, they are also nice because mobile coupons don't have to be clipped and carried around to be redeemed.

The most important consideration when you are developing mobile couponing strategy is the ease of use for the consumers. If the process for sign-up , delivery, and redemption of a coupon is too complicated or time consuming, users will not participate. To develop an effective mobile couponing strategy yo must understand the three elements of mobile couponing: coupon messaging, coupon targeting, and coupon delivery and redemption.

For all your text and mobile marketing needs, please check out this website: Text SMS Marketing

Advanced Mobile SEO Best Practices

The differences between mobile and traditional SEO strategies and tactics all stem from the fact that different crawlers are indexing and evaluating your website as is it was being displayed on a mobile phone. It is essentially the same model, with slightly different parts and different algorithms determining how the website will be ranked. That being said, some more advanced SEO strategies are specific to mobile search engine optimization.

Search engines index the Web page by page, but they also evaluate the power and historical value of a domain name or website as a whole. A domain name that has been around for a long time, ranks well, and gets consistent traffic is considered more valuable than a new domain that has little history, few rankings, or little traffic. Each page on a website is judged independently, but pages on a more established domain will generally perform better than the same page on a less established domain.

Because the search engines index the Web based on individual pages or URLs, you must have only one URL for each unique page on the website. Some websites get into trouble when multiple versions of one page are indexed in the search engines, either because the servers are set up incorrectly or because multiple URLs are being dynamically generated and used to represent just one page.

Having multiple indexable URLs that represent only one page of content is a problem we call duplicate content, or DUST ( which stands for duplicate URL, same text). This is a problem for traditional and mobile search engines because it crowds their indexes. Generally, the search engines will pick up only one of the duplicate results to rank in search results. The best practice is to ensure a 1:1 ratio between the number of URLs that will resolve in a browser and the number of pages you would like to rank in search results.

In some instances, server settings or ModRewrite programs can be used to eliminate extra versions of a page that renders in a browser address bar. A good example is htt://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com. These addresses both bring up the same page, but could confuse the search engines, because one page has two addresses. In this situation, you would want to see which of the addresses ranks better in search engines, and redirect or automatically re-write the other one to appear as the primary or "canonical" one.

Alternately, a canonical meta tag can be included on the secondary page, indicating the primary or canonical page there. That tag looks like this: and it explains that, in this case, the primary or canonical version of the page is the one with the 'www', and this tag would be placed on the page that doesn't have the 'www' included in the URL.

In the mobile world, things can get more complex, because some websites may have one page for the traditional rendering of the website, and another page for the mobile rendering of the website. They may even have one version of the traditional rendering of the website, and multiple versions of the mobile rendering of the website. In that case, you may need to use a mobile robots.txt, to explain to the search engine robots which content they should be crawling and indexing.

For all your Email Marketing, Text Marketing, and SEO needs, check out this website: Marketing Made Easy

Integrating Mobile Marketing with On- and Offline Marketing

Although mobile marketing is powerful, it is not meant to stand alone. The goal of mobile marketing is generally not to engage the user exclusively on the mobile device, but to continually engage the user and keep your brand top-of-mind when they are out, living their lives. This kind of active and frequent engagement is also known as participatory marketing. When mobile marketing is integrated to your on- and offline marketing campaigns, it can become participatory and be fully utilized to create a deep and lasting bond. Integrating mobile marketing into both on- and offline marketing campaigns also helps create long term value in the customer relationship

Mobile marketing closes the gap between on- and offline marketing. Studies have shown that most people have to be exposed to a brand and a brand name at least eight times before they are cognitively aware of it, and another two times before it actually enters their consideration set when they are making a purchase decision. In the United States it is also speculated that more than 50% of major offline purchases are researched on the internet first, so appearing on the mobile phone when people are in stores comparing products can be very important.

The right mobile marketing can create a bridge between your customers online and offline experience ( online for the research phase and offline for the actual purchase). The lag time between research and the actual purchase decision can be long and usually is directly related to the cost of the item being purchased. The brand awareness created by an integrated participatory marketing campaign can be a key influencer to keep the purchase decision and the brand in the consideration set.

For all your mobile and email marketing needs, please check out this site: Marketing Made Easy

Mobile Search Engine Optimization

Internet access and Web search have changed the mobile marketing landscape. They are changing the way we think of mobile devices as a whole, making many things that were previously hard to access now instantly available.

Many of us have a hard time even remembering what we did or how we accessed the information we needed before the Internet. When computers were all (or mostly all) hooked up to the internet, it improved their utility exponentially, and the same is true of mobile phones. Mobile phones provide infinitely more value when they are Web enabled. We will soon become accustomed to even more instant access to the endless wealth of knowledge that the Internet provides, to the point that some day we might not remember why we found mobile phones so useful when they just made calls.

Searching on mobile phones is still not as good of an experience as searching on a traditional computer, but mobile searchers are motivated searchers. A mobile search is a clear indication of intent. People search on mobile phones because they need information immediately, and they cannot wait until they get back to their computers to find it. The good news for us marketers is that the information people tend to search for usually informs an immediate purchase decision, meaning they are ready to spend money, and they need to know where to spend it.

Interestingly, when the mobile Web becomes faster and less clunky ( and it will) marketers might have a more difficult time separating those searchers who are most likely to make a purchase from those who are merely surfing. The current mobile Web is slow and clunky and because of that, motivated purchasers are easier to spot. What happens when everyone with a smart phone can surf just for fun? How will the marketer sort the wheat from the chaff? Just food for thought......

Mobile search is one of the most useful utilities a mobile phone provides. Most activity on the traditional internet begins with a search, and the same is true on the mobile phone. In both traditional and mobile computing, many people set a search engine to their homepage. Searching is the way people find what they need. If you have a mobile website, it is critical that it rank well in mobile search engines.

Mobile search engine optimization ( mSEO) is a very new tactic for improving the reach and impact that your company's website can have on a mobile phone. The strategies and tactics change rapidly as the mobile search algorithms change and as the mobile handset technology improves. A large portion of mobile SEO is actually architectural. With sound mobile architecture in place, mobile SEO becomes much easier. If the architecture is less than ideal, the effort to optimize a website becomes harder.

Many different mobile search engines exist, but in most cases, the top mobile search engines in any country are the same as the top traditional search engines in that country. In the United States, these are Google, Yahoo!, and MSN/Bing. For mobile marketing, we must understand mSEO.

For more information on SEO, Email Marketing, and Text Marketing for your business, please check out this site: Pure Business Marketing Made Easy

Creating a Mobile Web Presence-When to Use the Mobile Web as a Marketing Tool

Unless your target market consists of people who never use mobile phones, your best bet is to create at least a simple mobile web presence as quickly as possible. We have reached a point in the marketing cycle of the Internet at which consumers expect businesses to have a website, even if it is a basic one. We will reach that point with the mobile web quickly as well. Your business needs to have a mobile website when consumers begin to expect a mobile web presence.

Think of this time as the gold rush of the mobile Internet. Now is the time to stake your claim. It is much the same as going back in time to 1995 and creating a website before all your competitors did. You can be among the first to have a mobile site and be available on the mobile web when your customers are looking for you out there.

Your mobile site can be as simple or as complex as your customers will need and use. Start out with a basic site. As consumer use of the mobile web increases from the occasional by a few people to daily by most people, you can continue to add onto your mobile site. Start with what your customers or potential customers want to find (not search, but find) as it relates to your business. Then gradually add more features as your customers' needs change and you mobile marketing strategy develops.

For more information on mobile marketing, please check out this site: SMS Marketing

When to Use Mobile Advertising as a Marketing Tool

Mobile ads can be used for branding, mobile site traffic generation, and a range of direct response campaigns. If you have a branding budget and your target audience is likely to fall into the power mobile user group, then mobile ads are an excellent tool to increase your brand awareness. If you have a mobile site and want to drive traffic to it, then you will find that mobile advertising is an excellent source of traffic. When you want a campaign that is ultimately trackable and makes it easy to prove your ROI (return on investment), then consider building your mobile advertising campaign as a direct response campaign.

Mobile advertising is one of the fastest mobile marketing tools to implement. The major ad networks have self-serve options. You simply create your campaign and launch it. If you want a campaign that you can launch quickly, mobile advertising can fit the bill.

For all you mobile marketing needs, please check out this site: Mobile Marketing Made Easy

Why Mobile Marketing Is Like The Internet Was In 1997 (and Why It's Not)

The emergence of mobile as a highly integrated consumer device is now similar to what the Internet was in 1997, especially in North America. Early adopters who use mobile and those who use it as a marketing tool are similar to those who jumped on the Internet when it first appeared. However, many people may think the process of going online using their phone is a completely foreign concept. "You can go online on your phone?" Millions of consumers still think of text messaging as something that only young people do and have no intention of doing it themselves. Don't worry, there were also many people who thought the Internet was a fad and that it wouldn't last.

However, the emergence of mobile marketing is different in that the adoption cycle is faster. In fact, more people worldwide were said to have accessed Internet content on phones than from desktop computers in 2007. Mobile use by consumers is growing fast worldwide; users sent 2.8 trillion text messages in 2007, and the short message service (SMS) industry generates $100 billion a year.

Marketing with mobile now is also different from marketing with the internet in 1997 because marketers already have a working knowledge base. Businesses took years to figure out that the Internet was more like direct mail than t.v. We can use that knowledge base to figure out how to market with mobile effectively more quickly than we did with the Internet. In fact, many of the technologies, including mobile search and mobile advertising are similar to their Internet counterparts. Yet, they are distinct services and technologies with an uncluttered landscape.

Mobile as a medium is not like the Internet in other ways. Consumer use of mobile is already inundated. People use mobile already; they just need to begin to interact with businesses via mobile. With the Internet's emergence, people had to learn about the Internet and the World Wide Web to begin using in. Remember when people used to say, "Go to H-T-T-P colon back slash back slash W-W-W dot" and then list the website name? There was a big learning curve for consumers who had to be convinced to use the Internet at all. Now, people already know how to use their cell phones, and they have already been through the internet learning curve. Plus, there is an entire generation of consumers who have grown up with mobile as an integrated part of their lives and don't need any lessons at all; they just need to be presented with the right offer at the right time. Mobile marketing is weaving it's way into society more quickly than the Internet did.

For more information on Mobile Marketing check out this site: Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing for Your Mobile Marketing

One way to market your mobile technology campaign is through mobile "moving" marketing. Anywhere people in your target market are gathering or walking around, you can market to them with movable signs. On behalf of MGM Grand, mobileStorm designed such a campaign. A billboard was transported down the Las Vegas strip where thousands of people were walking up and down the street. The sign invited people to send a text message with a short code to place their names on a VIP list for a party at a night club.

A local restaurant can accomplish a similar tactic at a local arts and crafts fair or local festival by hiring or recruiting 10 to 20 people (or more for a big event) to walk around the fair in matching T-shirts with a text message coupon offer on the back of the shirts. The repetition of the matching T-shirts would catch people's attention, and the uniqueness of the offer would create a response. The point is to reach people and interact with them while they are moving around with their mobile devices. If you provide value to the customer and make them aware of it, you have a winning recipe. When Amazon.com first started, the company representatives attended BookExpo America, the book industry's biggest U.S. trade show, and had dozens of people roaming the trade show floor in bright purple T-shirts. Amazon was quite visible at that show. Think about how much more powerful that marketing could have been if Amazon included a mobile offer on the back of each shirt. Such a large company can even have several offers going at the same time; people would try to collect the offers.

For more tips and information on mobile marketing check out this site: Text SMS

How To Set a PPC Budget For a New Product

What if you're launching a new campaign and you don't have any data for your KPI's? How do you set your budget?

Google AdWords suggest the bids and a daily budget, but these are just their guesses. They have no idea of your average order value (AOV), close rate (CR), or your business model. Ignore their numbers.

To set the initial advertising budget for PPC, you'll need to calculate your CPL, as follows:

1. Estimate the number of sales you expect to make in one month. Use the minimum number of sales that you'll need to stay in business.
2. Guess at your close rate. For every 100 leads, how many will you convert into customers? Ten percent is fairly conservative. After a few months in business, you'll get better at selling.
3. Use your close rate to estimate how many leads you'll need to be able to make the minimum number of sales.
4. Calculate your target CPL. Talk with a few people with experience, make best guesses, and be conservative.
5. Multiply the number of leads by the target CPL. That's how much you'll have to spend per month to buy the leads you need.
6. Divide the monthly budget by 30 days to get the daily budget for Google AdWords.

For example, you want to sell 100 Koi per month. You have a 50% close rate, so you'll need 200 leads to sell 100 Koi. If the target CPL is $10 and you need 200 leads, you'll need to spend $2000 per month in marketing. Divide by 30 days to get the daily budget ($2000/30 days=$66 per day).

Watch you campaigns every workday. Yes, take weekends off. You need a break from all these numbers. Besides, you'll find from analytics that there are few buyers on weekends anyway. Try different ads and delete the ones that don't work. Keep your ad group's average CPL within your target CPL. It takes about four to six weeks to optimize a PPC campaign, so the numbers will fluctuate. The CPC will drop, so the number of clicks will increase. This means you'll get more leads. You'll get better at selling koi, so your close rate will improve. When your PPC account has reached optimal levels, you can recalculate your numbers. You'll know the actual CPC, conversion rates, and cost-per-conversion.

For more information on PPC check out this site: Email Marketing Power

Press Releases in the 21st Century

With all these exciting new developments in online marketing, you might be thinking, "I can publish news to my website--why should I send out a press release?" Companies still send press releases because they're an effective way to spread the word about your company. Press releases, when written and distributed efficiently, can strengthen brand awareness, increase sales, and generate buzz about your company and products.

Today, press releases are used widely. As well as being sent to mainstream media journalists, press releases are now available online for customers to find through a web search, or read on a company's blog. Many bloggers and online publishers access these to read for story ideas close to their niche.

You can also use press releases to communicate directly to your customers, as well as bloggers, writers, and other key players in your industry. Press releases can be an incredibly effective medium for you to publish news and information about your company, products, or services.

For more information on Web Marketing check out this website: Email Marketing made easy.

Minimizing Spam Complaints

Spam is also known as unsolicited commercial e-mail. Although numerous stories, analogies, and myths exist about the origin and meaning of the term spam, one thing is for sure--consumers don't like receiving it.

Even if your e-mail doesn't meet the legal definition of spam, consumers can easily report you e-mail as spam and thus impede you ability to send e-mail in the future. For example, Yahoo! customers can deem your e-mail as spam with the click of a button. Most ISP's (including AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail) give their customers spam buttons to use to block suspected spammers.

If your e-mails are perceived as spam by your audience and you receive too many spam complaints, ISP's will block your e-mail server temporarily, and higher percentages can result in your server being added to a permanent block list.

Because consumers have control over the spam button, no e-mail marketing strategy is immune to complaints. Keeping your e-mails inline with the consumer preferences is the best way to ensure that you spam complaints remain below industry tolerances.

You can minimize your spam complaints over time by doing the following:

1. Ask for explicit permission to send e-mail when you collect e-mail addresses from propects and customers to make sure that your customers want your e-mails.
2. Make your e-mail content valuable so your e-mail list subscribers continue to want your e-mails.
3. Make your sign-up process memorable for your list subscribers and clearly identify your business in every e-mail's From line so your audience can verify the source of your e-mails
4. Use logos and colors in every e-mail that match your brand identity so that your audience recognizes your business.
5. Keep your e-mail frequency in line with your e-mail content and your e-mail list subscribers' expectations.
6. Use an E-Mail Service Provider (ESP) that provides an unsubscribe link in every e-mail you send and allows you subscribers to access their profile to change their interests.
7. Ask everyone who unsubscribes from you e-mail list to tell you why they don't want your e-mail.
8. Use an ESP that authenticates your e-mails.

For all your email and text sms needs please go to: Email Marketing Power

Five Steps Toward a Data-Driven Organization

Because analytics lets you measure your strategy and tactics, it gives you the ability to make decisions based on objective data. With analytics tools, you can carry out tests and see what actually works. You can compare campaigns and channels and then rank them by the generated revenues. Here are five steps for implementation of an analytics strategy:

1. Identify you business goals: These are the company's strategic goals, such as the company's unique value for customers.
2. Identify business decisions or actions to be taken: What campaigns and tactics can the company use to reach these goals?
3. Establish benchmarking: This includes the trends for the recent past. It also customer surveys, voice of customer (VOC), panel interviews, and competitive intelligence to determine the competition's market share and the company's position in relation to competitors.
4. Set a time frame for the goals: This depends on how quickly your organization can move. Generally, you should expect four to six weeks to get campaigns underway. Don't try to launch too many initiatives at first. Start with one or two; let everyone learn how they work, and ramp up slowly.
5. Measure the results: Determine the KPI's, develop reasonable budgets, and collect the data. See how you can measure customer engagement, customer satisfaction, and so on.

This is not a one-time process. You won't do this once and expect the issue to be settled. This becomes an ongoing process that is reviewed again and again. You continually reevaluate your company's goals and strategy, look into new channels (which seems to pop up every 15 minutes), and use your tools to manage your campaigns.

For more information on all your email marketing needs go to: Email Marketing Power

SEO-Identifying Your Ideal Keywords

There's a growing number of tools to assist you with identifying search terms. Google has it's own keyword tool, which is free and easy to use. Just enter a generic term, press a button, and you'll receive a long list of variations. You can sort that list based on relevance, average search volume, last month's search volume, and advertiser competition; there's even the option to export it as a spreadsheet for later use.

From this list, you can filter out irrelevant keywords and conduct further searches based on the shortlist. Using the Google keyword Tool should help you uncover many options, and once you apply some of the variations above, such as plurals and misspellings, your keyword list should look quite healthy.

While these are extremely helpful, you should look to other sources of information--such as you competition--for ideas. This can be as simple as looking for words on their web site that have a high density--that is, they appear frequently. It is also helpful to observe the kinds of words and phrases people use to describe you products and services on community forums, or on applications like Twitter and Facebook. You might go as far as running a small user test--for example, asking people to search for horse equipment--and observe the keywords they enter.

Want to learn more about Online Marketing? Check out EXM Marketing

Managing Your Email Lists

Tools such as an Excel spreadsheet or your email program's address book are ideal for keeping track of a small number of contacts, but they're poor solutions for managing an extensive number of contacts.

Your regular email service is fine for everyday mailing needs, but will likely crumble under the pressure of sending thousands of messages. What's more, many Internet service providers consider large quantities of incoming or outgoing email to be spam, and will act accordingly--usually by blocking your messages and blacklisting your mail server. Ouch!

Instead, I'd recommend choosing a reputable email distribution service--one that's been running email campaigns for years, has solid management tools, and servers with the horsepower and bandwidth to deal with thousands of emails. The best ones will provide help with email templates, generate delivery and readership reports, and even test the content of your messages to see if they're likely to be picked up by spam filters.

When you're shopping around for a solution for list management, look for the following features.

• Easy integration with your site: It should be easy to add a form to your site that's directly linked to your list management tool. Some solutions even allow you to connect with your customer database and match email subscribers with their purchase histories.
• Profiles and segmentation: It's handy to have your visitors' email addresses, but what about their age, gender, or geographic location? An efficient list management solution will let you collect this information and use it to help segment your subscribers into groups.
• Import and export lists of subscribers: It should be easy for you to add or extract email addresses en masse, ideally by importing or exporting a list from a common format such as a Comma Separated Values (CSV) spreadsheet.
• Easy unsubscribe options: You'll damage your reputation and may even be in breach of the law if your users are unable to unsubscribe in a timely fashion. A good list management system will provide this facility, and a great one will let you know when it happens.

For more information on an email marketing solution for all your needs go to: Email Marketing Power

Branding Your E-Mails to Enhance Your Image

Branding is the use of graphic design elements to give your business a consistent and unique identity while forming a mental image of you business' personality. Examples include:

• Graphics and logos unique to your business
• Text and fonts that differentiate your business
• Colors used consistently to give your business identity

Branding your e-mails helps your audience to immediately recognize and differentiate your e-mails from the unfamiliar e-mails they receive. Keeping your e-mail branding consistent over time allows your audience to become familiar with you and your e-mails as they receive multiple e-mails from you.

Branding your emails with colors and design elements requires using HTML. If you don't know HTML, look to your ESP. Most ESP's allow you to customize your e-mail templates with your branding elements. If you aren't using an ESP to send your e-mails, an HTML designer can help you create a custom look and feel for your e-mail templates.