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Archive for
October, 2006
A truly exciting time for email, and Oprah agrees…
October 30th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
I had the opportunity to be in the audience for an Oprah show last year. This is not easy to do and I have my sister-in-law, Marnie, to thank for spending days on the phone, on hold, in her quest for Oprah tickets. Phil Keoghan, of the Amazing Race was a guest on the show and gave us a copy of his book. All in all, a very exciting experience. How does this connect to email marketing? Well, it does!! Oprah has just revolutionized email. Don’t believe me? Check out this recent Jeanniey Mullen article, Oprah Revolutionizes Email. There’s some great statistics that will support what we think…email is a highly effective marketing tool and it is an exciting time for email!
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Everything is scary at Halloween, I guess…
October 26th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
I just finished writing Top 10 Scary Things in my Inbox this Halloween for our next issue of our monthly ebulletin, Expresso (to broadcast today) when this terrific article popped into my inbox, Boo! 5 ghoulish email tricks to avoid. It’s informative and fun - and will get you into the spooky Halloween spirit!
Read my article, Top 10 Scary Things in my Inbox this Halloween, and sign-up for Expresso so you don’t miss anymore great articles!
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Beware… the preview pane strikes back!
October 25th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
Ok I’m sure we all know about the preview pane - specifically the horizontal one that displays the top 200-500 pixels of your email before someone actually opens it.
Well if you’ve stopped worrying about optimizing your emails for preview pane - perhaps because Outlook 2003 defaults to the vertical now (not as much of an issue) or because a lot of mail clients don’t use preview panes - than I’d say it’s time to start worrying again!
Yahoo! Mail has just released a beta version with a quite small preview pane. MSN Live Beta version has it.. and I have a funny feeling it’s going to become pretty standard. Even our ISP’s new webmail has it!
So in light of this, I want to take a few minutes to review some important considerations for preview panes:
- Consider what you put “Above the fold” - While it probably looks really lovely to start your newsletter off with a nice big image - with preview panes, it can be a big waste of prime real estate.
- Limit your “housekeeping” text - It’s always great to add a “view this in a web browser”, “add me@email.com to your address book”, “See a french version” (for fellow Canadians) or your standard permission reminder. However, having too much of this will clog up your preview pane view and result in fewer opens. If you send a regular newsletter, maybe keep one or two lines, and revolve what text you use with each issue.
- Think desirability - Like the From name and subject line, what displays in the preview pane will aid in the decision to open the email. So put some juicy tidbits from your newsletter in pane view to entice the undecided to open.
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Write great bullet points
October 24th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (and again, and again) that bullets are a great way to make your emails captivating - they make for easy scanning, and they are a great opportunity to make your most important points visible. But how do you write great bullet points that people will read?
Well, Copyblogger - a great resource for writers - recently posted a great article called “little known ways to write fascinating bullet points” I definitely recommend checking it out!
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Optimizing for Snippets
October 24th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
Snippets are those little pieces of text that show up in your Auto Preview (Outlook) or just after the subject line (Gmail) and many email marketers don’t even think about them - but they can make the difference between opening and not opening your email
Jeanne Jennings over at ClickZ writes a great article about Optimizing for Snippets.
One thing not really mentioned in the email, but I’m an avid user of both Outlook and Gmail, and not only is this feature important IN the inbox, but also Outlook, (and Gmail if you use GoogleTalk) will pop up a little box with this important text along with the subject and from name while you are working on something else. So if you can really make the most of the snippets - it can make the difference between dropping everything to read YOUR email instead of ignoring it all together.
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What’s this RSS stuff all about?
October 19th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
So in September’s Expresso e-bulletin, we focussed on RSS & email. It included a quick survey that asked our subscribers about RSS. It wasn’t too surprising that 54% of our readers didn’t even know what RSS is since it is still in its early adoption phase. I’ll be honest, before starting this blog I didn’t know a whole lot about it either, and although I do tend to be on the cutting edge of technology I admit that new things still scare me.
I’ve also noticed through the magic of analytics, that many of you, our blog readers, don’t use RSS, so I want to take a minute for a quick explanation and encourage those who don’t know to at least learn just a little about it.
RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary (usually reserved for the techies) or Really Simple Syndication (for the rest of us) and it’s a powerful tool that very basically alerts people (through a specialized reader or even email) when new content is published. Content can be anything really, but it’s commonly used for news, blogs and podcasts.
You use RSS by downloading or signing up for a reader (I use newsgator) and then when you see this symbol on a site or blog:
 you can click on it and paste the URL into your reader to subscribe.(or commonly you’ll be directed to a page where you can select your reader and it’s added automatically) then all you have to do is check your reader whenever you feel like it.
But if that sounds complicated or labour intensive, you can always subscribe by email (being the email junkies we are, we’ve included a signup box over to the right) and you’ll get an email up to once a day with all the new content.
I hope I’ve said enough to pique your interest to find out more. At the very least I hope I didn’t make it sound to confusing!
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IAB Canada Interactive Roadshow
October 18th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
Today our Ottawa team attended the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada’s Interactive Roadshow here in Ottawa and it was fantastic!
It was well-attended, and the presentation was very informative and entertaining. Paula Gignac, President, IAB Canada, facilitated the presentation and was an excellent and very knowledgeable speaker. Also a representative from comScore spoke about latest trends in the Online world, and reps from Yahoo!, Canada.com, Sympatico/MSN and others presented some great case studies about interactive advertising.
The Roadshow continues with Montreal (Oct. 24) and Toronto (Oct. 26) leading up to the “Big Day!” a full day of presentations in Toronto, Nov. 2. Unfortunately I can’t make it, but if you can, it definitely seems worth going to~!
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IAB Marketer & Agency Guide to Email Deliverability
October 17th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
The Interactive Advertising Bureau has put out an excellent guide to email deliverability that covers everything from the seven filtering methods effecting your deliverability, to how to measure deliverability and most importantly how to improve it.
Definitely worth checking out. See it here…
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Looking for Perfect Balance?
October 12th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
Ok, ok…so I haven’t been the best blogger here at cardcommunications. Kelly has made that perfectly clear. So…let me contribute to our e-Buzz blog by pointing you to another blog that I love to follow called The Perfect Balance . Chris Nadeau, a fellow entrepreneur and one of our newest business partners, talks about family life, cool technology, running a business and hockey. (I really like the hockey part). Check out Chris’ blog!
That’s all for now…
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Email Addiction on the rise
October 11th, 2006 by
Kelly Rusk
Hi, my name is Kelly, and I am an email-a-holic!
Good news is I’m not alone,
eROI did a study and found that some disturbing facts!
Find out some of the numbers…
However, it could be worse! I could have a Blackberry (Crackberry?)!A couple weeks ago we went on a Kayaking tour on the 1000 Islands…and guess what Carolyn brought with her! Yes, On the boat! She was disappointed they didn’t have any tiny lifejackets for it. Watch out for pics coming soon!
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