Here’s a few images captured at this year’s PPAI EXPO. We really had a great time at the conference and met so many interesting people.

As you can see in the pictures, our booth turned out fantastic. The banners that we had made and the promotional video really gave our presentation a dynamic edge and attracted lots of interested parties to our booth. Thanks to everyone who made the expo great this year!

Click on any of the pictures below for their high resolution versions.

Social media has become an integral part of online marketing strategy. It’s a fantastic way to connect with your customers through the circles that they travel rather than through traditional advertising forums.

Social media marketing is a perfect companion to email marketing. They can each promote one another to increase the effectiveness of all of your marketing strategies.

Email is an effective way to promote your social media endeavors. You can provide links to your social media locations in mailings that you send out. This will inform your list that you are active in the social media community and drive traffic to these sites. The same principle works in reverse, you can use social media to collect email addresses for your mailing list. Social Media provides you with many opportunities to get to know and interact with your possible clients and industry peers.

The most important goal of any email marketing or social media campaign is to connect with your audience. Before you start either, you should sit down with your company heads and decide on a strategy. Discover who your clients are, what the want, and craft a social media story. If you attempt to spread yourself too thin, you won’t connect with anyone. Find out what your niche is and then promote it!

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!