Thursday, 4 February 2010

GraphicMail's Seven Steps to successful email marketing

Posted by Unknown at 12:39 pm Labels: , , , , , , , ,
GraphicMail checklist

Step One -  Set up your address Book



 Before you can personalise your emails, you need to collate the information  that you hold on each of your subscribers - just as you would do for all  your family and friends; you do this by setting up an Address Book. The reason for personalising your emails is to get your message read by as many  recipients as possible and personalised emails, for example; Dear Steven, carries, by implication, an underlying note that is seen by "Steven" and is translated as being of personal value to him. It is also possible to capture more information about "Steven" by using your subscription form to invite him to  give you more information.



 Because your Address Book holds all the personalised information on your subscribers, it can be linked to more than one mailing list



 Once you have setup your address book, you can edit contacts, delete contacts - you can also add additional contacts either individually or in blocks.



Note:

In Advanced mode you can setup multiple datasets. So, one can be your Address Book and another dataset could be (Possibly ) 'Unpaid Accounts'. You can therefore use the system to personalise a single email using these two datasets



 It may be that you don't currently want to personalise your newsletters but you do want to gather more email addresses



This is also easy - you just need to create a mailing list and setup a subscription form:



To create a mailing list - Click on > Mailing list, click > Create, give your mailing list a name and click to import. Then browse for the file to upload - this can be  Csv, xls, xlsx, txt (the import can be done with or without additional data). You can import directly from online email accounts, you can manually type individual email addresses or you can copy/paste a list.


Step Two - Setting up your subscription form

 ( This is ever-so easy - and following these actions generates the HTML code to create a subscription form that you can add to your website, Blog etc.)



First thing to do is choose your own design - or you can use our default design. Then Select the image that you want to use as the logo, next a background colour, then choose the text and attributes. Then choose the style of the links in your subscription form (for instance; subscribe, unsubscribe & forward-to-a-friend links)




Step Three - Create your newsletter

Click  > Newsletters - then > Create - then give your newsletter a name and select the folder where you are going to store it. You can select a template from the 100+ that are in your account's Templates Library, then click > Next and begin editing. Graphicmail Templates allow you to change the text, import images and add links using the simple editing tools at the top of the editor screen.



If you don't want to use a template you can insert your text directly to our editor from Word, or upload your own HTML template into the editor using the 'Code view'.


To insert images into your newsletter – either into your blank newsletter or to replace the images in one of the Graphicmail templates, simply click into Advanced Mode and proceed as follows.

A)     Browse for the images that you want to use and upload them into the Images Folder.

B)     Click into the editor and having placed your cursor in the newsletter cell where you want the image to be placed, click the > insert image icon, browse for the image, click insert and voila !

In Advanced mode, you can also import a Word document with images. However, if you do this, you will need to upload the images from your word document separately. This can be done individually or in a Zip file.

Remember when uploading images, the maximum file size is 200kb.


Step Four - Send a test email to yourself



We recommend that you send your test email to as many different email browsers as you can – just to see how it looks. It’s also a good idea to click the Spam Score button – this gives you a chance to check out the legitimacy of the subject line, the content and the images.



 Step Five - Edit your newsletter



It may be that you want to go back and edit parts of your newsletter – if so, just click >> Newsletters  >>Edit Newsletter choose the newsletter you want from the folder where you saved it, make your alterations, save them, exit and you’re ready to send



Step Six - Sending your Newsletter



Click >> Send and, in the screen that appears, select your mailing list from the drop-down menu, input your selected From Address, then the From Name, and insert the Subject Line.



Choose your newsletter from the drop-down.



IMPORTANT =  Double check everything!!

Discovering an important omission just after you have hit the send button is not a good feeling !!


Step Seven – Checking the send results – Your Reports and Statistics



You click on the Reports & Statistics and you see the mailing in a line across, click on the magnifying glass on the left and this reveals an overview which displays how many emails were sent, how many delivered, opened, clicked, forwarded and unsubscribed.

A single click on the + sign exposes exact metrics explaining why the email was not delivered, or a list of all the email addresses of those who clicked on a particular link

These lists can be exported as a PDF




Now take a look at Advanced Mode!

  • You can set up Trigger-Mails (autoresponders useful for anniversary dates, follow up trigger emails to subscribers who click on a certain link in your email etc)
  • Segment your subscribers and you can send targeted communications and marketing emails
  • Advanced reporting - check out the Reports and Statistics following each send; you can do this per Send or per Mailing List or by individual recipients
  • Upload and manage your images and files
  • And much, much more!

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