The smartphone industry is absolutely booming. An increasingly large number of consumers and business owners are using these devices every day.  One of the most useful features of smartphones is their ability to check email on the go. Recent marketing surveys indicate that around 60% of business decisions makers are checking email on their mobile devices.

If you want to reach your customers on their mobile devices, you need to consider your email design philosophy. Most traditional email doesn’t translate very well to mobile, because of this email marketers must adopt some new design philosophies. We’ve just released two of our templates that have been optimized for mobile devices. We will be creating more of these templates for our users as time goes on and demand increases. Using our “optimized for mobile” templates in Email Builder makes it easy for you to send email that is readable and visually appealing for mobile users.

Our templates will take you 90% of the way in the quest of making your campaigns smartphone friendly, but there are also guidelines you’ll need to follow when laying out your content. Here are the most important guidelines to follow to ensure that your Admail.net template stays mobile friendly:

1. Keep your font sizes small. Mobile devices have small screens and fonts over 12 point take up far too much space.
2. Image file sizes should be very small (if used at all) and should be no larger than 300 pixels wide.
3. Don’t pack together clickable links. Most smartphones today use touch screen technology and if links are too close to one another they can be difficult to differentiate when selecting.

Using our mobile templates and following these guidelines will optimize your email for smartphone users. Follow these rules and avoid alienating your mobile email users!

As the holiday season quickly approaches, it’s time to start thinking about your marketing strategy.

E-mail is still the work-horse of holiday marketing. E-mail marketing has many advantages over the alternatives. It’s cheaper, faster, and provides feedback almost instantly. Direct mail and other forms of marketing can’t do that.

Other forms of marketing, such as text messaging, are beginning to come to fruition, but they don’t have the reliability, accessibility and time-tested rates of success of e-mail. E-mail marketing has the highest ROI and the holidays are the best time to use e-mail to cash in.

Consumers are looking to buy during the holiday season. If there is any time that your offer will be welcome and have a high chance of being acted on, it’s during this short period of time. One great thing about starting a campaign during the holiday season is that it can get you off to a very good start with your email list.

If you provide an exciting offer during the holiday months, you can start a very positive relationship with your list members that can last all year.

One way to make the most out of your holiday marketing is to start early and do some A/B testing. By that I mean segmenting your list and sending out two or more different campaigns to different segments to see which gets the better response. This will give you insight into what your customers are looking for and will help you narrow down your most effective material. Starting early gives you the chance to fine tune your campaigns before the big push closer to the holidays.

This is also a great time of year to kick off a social media campaign through e-mail. Many companies have been providing offers solely to their Facebook or Twitter page members. Holiday exclusives for your social media customers and fans will help you build your connection with your customer base. The most common way this is implemented is by offering a coupon or online price only to those who have agreed to follow you on Twitter or are “Fans” of your friend page on Facebook.

The holiday season is crunch time for retailers all over the country, don’t let your competition beat you to the punch, cash in on the holiday buying frenzy with an effective and easy e-mail campaign from Admail.net.

How often should you send to your mailing list? There are two major schools of thought when it comes to determining the correct frequency of mailing.

The first philosophy, and the one which creates the most problems, is to mail very often. The marketers who adopt this strategy typically believe that it’s best to stay at the forefront of their customer’s minds. There are several problems with this type of mailing strategy. Foremost of those problems are over-saturating your list and sending out bad content. Your list members can only handle so many mailings before they begin to find them an annoyance, this, compounded by the unfortunate reality that good content takes time and thought to produce, will create high complaint and unsubscribe rates.

The contrasting theory of frequency is to send very infrequently. This is typically advocated by wary marketers because of the extreme negativity surrounding “spam” sending practices. By sending rarely, marketers have plenty of time to create great content and they don’t run the risk of burning out their lists. On the other hand, research has shown that if you don’t send often enough, your list can go cold. You may miss out on sales that you could have generated if your frequency was slightly higher.

So, as is true in most things, moderation is rewarded. Just how often you need to send is up to you, but for the sake of your marketing efforts, avoid either extreme. A no-brainer way to answer the question of how often to send is to let your list members decide for themselves. You can achieve this by asking them how often they’d like to receive mail when they sign up. Once you have that information, you’ll know how often to send. I do suggest you provide a way for them to change their preference later.

So, here are the take-aways: don’t send too often, but don’t disappear from your customers lives either. Content is king. If you provide your customers with content that they truly want (offers, information, entertainment) you will have more leeway when it comes to frequency. Great content breeds good will and forgiveness from your list members. Last but not least, ask your customers what they want as far as mailing frequency is concerned! It’s easy for you and great for them.

Good luck!

A good newsletter is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your clients. If used correctly, your newsletter can entice customers to come into your store, provide them with valuable information, let them know about a special offer that appeals to them, or just keep your company’s name on the tip of their tongue.

It’s difficult to consistently send out a good newsletter. You want is to promote your own business, but you’re also try to do so while providing valuable and intrusive content. The best kind of advertisement doesn’t seem like an advertisement at all. Achieving this is no simple task.

1. Don’t over do it, don’t force it.

Send your newsletter only as often as you can produce interesting content. Nowhere is it written that you must send a newsletter weekly or monthly. Be self aware enough to realize when you have nothing to say. You’ll start to see recipients unsubscribe left and right if your newsletter becomes boring. It’s a real struggle to regain interest once someone on your list decides your email is boring or unhelpful.

2: Target specific consumer groups.

Create multiple versions of your newsletter based on customer interests. You can gather this information by giving people the ability to designate their own interests on your sign up form. Not only will you be able to use this data to target groups in your newsletter, but it can serve as a small sample of your overall customers interests. Sending multiple newsletters is more work because you may need to produce content for several different newsletters but the result is well worth it.

3: Don’t try to trick your users into signing up for your Newsletter.

Many websites will have the default action of signing up as a user of their site or using their checkout form result in the user signing up for their mailing list unless they opt-out by removing a check from a selection box. This is a common practice that you should avoid. Considering that sending email isn’t free, why waste your money on sending to people who don’t care about what you are sending them? These types of practices increase complaints and can cause you big headaches in the future. Why risk having people click the “spam” button in their email client because you tricked them into signing up for your mailing. Building trust with consumers is far more important than building your mailing list.

4: Include an explicit and easy to follow call to action.

You really can’t expect your customers to give you much of a response if you don’t ask them to. If you want them to do something in response to your email, you have to ask them and then make the action as easy as possible. If you want them to make a comment, give them a simple way to do it. The easier you make it for them, the more likely they are to go through with it (duh). Make your call to action clear. Ditch subtlety in this case, straightforward is the way to go.

Hopefully these tips will help you create and execute a better newsletter. For more email marketing best practices, check out this post.

Google has announced that they will be implementing a new feature across Gmail and Google Apps accounts. The new tool is called Priority Inbox and it may drastically change the way people interact with their email client.

Priority Inbox is a new feature that aims to help people organize and prioritize their Gmail Inbox. Through a series of data gathering measures including user input, Gmail will now be able to prioritize your inbox based on the amount of attention you have given messages in the past. Opening and replying to a message will indicate that message us more important, while deleting without reading or marking a message as spam will do the opposite. You can also manually rate a message as more or less important, which will allow users to customize Priority Inbox even further.

Priority Inbox will split Gmail inboxes into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”. Customizable filters will be available so users can automatically categorize messages as they come in. This feature will be rolling out for all users over the course of the upcoming weeks.

Image taken from the Offical Google Blog

Now that you know what Priority Inbox is, the question you are probably asking yourself is “How will it effect my email campaigns?”. To put it simply, Priority Inbox will further reward those who have already been pushing out quality campaigns and increasingly punish those who send weak campaigns or SPAM. Priority Inbox won’t just effect @gmail.com accounts either, it will include users of Google Apps as well.

Priority Inbox puts increased pressure on mailers to follow best practices, send well-designed and thoughtful mailing campaigns, and to get their recipients to add them to the address book. If you aren’t sending quality content, users with Priority Inbox will most likely burn out even faster than a typical user.

Rewarding good behavior and punishing the bad guys? Priority Inbox sounds like something that could be good for the industry as a whole. It will be interesting to see how it plays out on a larger scale. One thing is for sure, this is a good time to ensure that your email marketing program is sending quality campaigns. Stay tuned for updates.