1-905-844-4247 10am-3pm EST
Over the years I’ve tried about a dozen or so Email Service Providers (ESPs), and now I regularly use iContact.
If you’re thinking of switching ESPs, or are considering getting into opt-in email marketing for your small business or solo practice, iContact is making your decision a bit easier with their June 2010 promotion: save 15% when you upgrade your account (you start with a free trial account), and save an additional 15% if you also pre-pay for a year of service, for a total of 30% savings. Use the promo code June2010 to save now!
I recommend iContact to my clients who are looking for a service that provides:
In case you’re considering switching, I offer a service that does that for you and is included in my “ESP Account Setup” service. Please see my services page for more information.
Have you noticed in Gmail that some URLs are clickable and some are not?
Recently, email marketers, and other people who are using this powerful marketing channel, started noticing that some URLs are working and some are not! What’s the mystery?
I sent a few test emails to my own Gmail account and here’s what one looks like in this screen shot:

As you can see, links which contain a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, and no “www” are not functional links.
I don’t know if this is a deliberate “feature” or a bug in the Gmail web client, but as email marketers we need to be aware of this quirk, and find a workaround, which is actually simple: if you like to use some caps in your URLs for emphasis, all you need to do is add “www.” and they will work just fine.
Alternatively, you can use ALLCAPS.COM or onlylowercase.com and they should work as well.
This is only a problem in plain text emails, which email marketers usually use in auto-responders. If you’re using HTML to format your e-newsletter or other email marketing messages, all your links will work fine in Gmail.
Thanks to Denise Wakeman for alerting me to this problem.
One of two Email Service Providers that I use and recommend is MadMimi. Apart from having the best customer service I’ve ever had the pleasure dealing with, they have the most elegant, easy-to-use and powerfully simple email editor on the market.
Ever since the initial release of their service the creative crew at MadMimi have been steadily adding new features and improving this already great product.
The latest addition is the ability to add a set of icons that link to your favourite social networking sites. This simple feature will encourage your readers to connect with you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks. Just add your social media sites URLs and Mad Mimi will place specially designed icons to the bottom of your emails — no additional coding necessary!
Here’s a set of sites that are currently supported:
MadMimi is still free to use for lists of up to 100 contacts, and prices start at only $8/month for unlimited emails to up to 500 contacts. Test drive MadMimi today!
Check out also these related articles:
Cool New Tool for MadMimi
MadMimi Brings the Fun Back to Sending Email “Blasts”
Some statistics say that as many as half of your email recipients have image display turned off. Are you sure your email campaigns still present useful information even if your ezine subscribers don’t see the images?
When designing HTML email campaigns with images it’s imperative to test your emails in different email clients, such as Apple Mail, Entourage, Eudora, Thunderbird, and online email services, such as Yahoo!, Google Mail and Hotmail, to make sure they look good with images turned off.
Sending and email composed of just images may lower the deliverability of your campaigns. Some ISPs still employ email spam filters which flag any emails with high image-to-text ratios. So talk to your designers to make sure they design your email campaigns in such a way that the message still gets across, even if the images are not displayed.
Here’s a sample from my email production portfolio: A client of mine sends me a TIFF image of their promotion, as designed by their graphic designer. I then slice and dice the image to compose a well-behaved HTML email. This second image shows you how this same email looks without images. As you can see it still shows most of the information, as well as links.
If you can use most of these tips, you should be OK. Final tip: test, test and test again, and don’t forget your best friend: your email service provider!. Some ESPs may have tools to assist you in testing your emails, so be sure to check them out.
Here’s a related articleEmail Design: 3 Easy Steps to Perfect Email Display
When looking for a suitable Email Service Provider to provide you with the online system to manage your email marketing campaigns ask yourself these two questions:
This will narrow down your choices significantly. If you’d like to have people sign up on your website/blog/facebook to different lists and offer them different automated sequential messages (aka auto-responders) then my choice would be iContact - I use it myself and recommend it to my clients.
For the ultimate in ease of use, try MadMimi.com, I recommend them to my clients who are just starting out, with zero contacts on the list. MadMimi has the most easy-to-use interface of all the ESPs I’ve tried over the years. Their customer service is the best I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with, plus they keep adding features on a regular basis. MadMimi’s free account is a fully-featured one, but is limited to 100 contacts, and you can send as many messages as you want. Read my blog post MadMimi Brings the Fun Back to Sending Email “Blasts”
An interesting question regarding email subscribers vs. blog subscribers was asked recently on Linkedin. In a nutshell Lisa Bowen was wondering:
Can a blog-subscription email list be used for general company announcements and email newsletter blasts?
I personally separate the two types of subscribers and recommend that my clients do so as well. Although this practice may be perfectly legal under CAN-SPAM, I consider it not very ethical.
However, depending on how you phrase the ad copy in your pop-up, you may get away with it, e.g. if you say: “Sign up for updates from my blog and also receive my ezine.”
Be aware, though, that the spam issue is ultimately in the eyes of the subscriber.
Additionally, problems may arise when somebody opts out. Because these two lists are usually handled by two separate systems, you need to manually update one of them. Ideally, your email service provider would have some sort of RSS Feed plugin or connectivity. Email Service Provider MadMimi recently introduced this upgrade to their very slick email publishing platform. iContact has it, Aweber, too, I think. GetResponse also has a limited feature which allows you to send an automated email to your ezine subscribers announcing the new content is available on your blog, but it doesn’t actually deliver your blog content by email.
I use FeedBurner for handling email subscriptions to my blog and it can only collect the email address, not the name of the subscriber. This is just one of the reasons I wouldn’t use the blog subscribers list the same way I would any of my other confirmed opt-in email marketing lists.
What do you think? How do you let your blog subscibers mingle with the ezine subscribers?
I decided at the last minute to attend Boris’ latest email marketing workshop and I am extremely glad I did. The 4 hour session was filled with tons of valuable internet based information including how to improve your web search rankings and of course how to enhance your business sales through email marketing.
This was the best value for money seminar I have attended in many years.
A great seminar, Boris!Dennis Heathcote
Co-President at D&K Imports Inc.
DandKimports.com
Note: This testimonial was originally published as a recommendation on Linkedin
If you ever attended one of my seminars, please leave your own comment - Thanks!
Boris’s seminar was filled with incredible, usable information on how to make my business more visible on the web. His deep understanding of the inner workings of the web and email is apparent and his presentation is very interactive. This seminar is a must for anyone who is interested in learning internet/email best practices and how to maximize this effective marketing medium.
Boris’ Top qualities: Great Results, Personable, Expert
Nelson Martins
General Manager at DiPaolo CNC Retrofit Ltd
DiPaoloCNC.com
Note: This testimonial was originally published as a recommendation on Linkedin
If you ever attended one of my seminars, please leave your own comment - Thanks!
Did you know that 70% of all sales now start as research on the Internet - are your ideal clients finding you?
Invest 3 hours and I guarantee I will teach you how to:
![]() |
Attract Contacts (Generate Leads)
|
Build Relationships(or, How to Get Prospects to Know, Like and Trust You)
|
|
Close Deals(or, How to Convert “Friends” to “Raving Fans”)
|
Please visit the Contacts to Clients page to learn more and to register.
Posted by 2 Comments
I recently purchased a great little add on for MadMimi called BigTie! for MadMimi. It will automatically copy all of your blog’s subscribers to your MadMimi email marketing account.
I am testing it now and will publish a full article soon.