Our research shows that 6am-10am and 1:00-2:00pm are the best times to send email.  People open their emails during the day more than they open at night.  Weekday mornings are always better to send your email campaign before people actually start their work. They have time to respond or react your emails.

It is also hard to give a static answer about it. I am just giving you the results by simply looking at our own research.  It may not be truly right for your own business. You need to understand your own customer’s behavior and you need to know their local time as well. They may have different time zones.  You need to take into consideration before sending your campaigns out to your recipients.

Segment your list and reach your recipients at a time when they are going to be more responsive. You will see that it will impact on the overall results of your email campaign.

What do you think? Does sending campaign at a certain time change response rates? Let us know in the comments.

Monday: Your readers are usually recovering from the weekend and will catch up on emails from the weekends. They may have a number of things to do on this day and are not quite interested in offers or solicitations.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday: The best days sending your email campaigns. Your readers are more likely to receive your emails during those days.

Friday: Your readers are interested in wrapping things up and looking forward to finish their work.  They may not be fully interested in reading your email or may even forget to open it.

Saturday and Sunday: If you are sending a business email, your readers are generally out of the office on the weekends.

We would like to know Does sending campaigns at a certain day affect your reader’s response? Let us know in the comments.

1. Have you checked your spelling?
2. Is your subject line short and straightforward?
3. Have you checked your content for spamming issues? Just a quick reminder we test your email content on spam filters and provide you a report before sending to make sure that the content is spam filter friendly.
4. Does your “from” line have your company name or brand?
5. Is your email personalized with the recipient’s first name, last name or both?
6. Do you have an unsubscribe button especially on the top and is it working? Just to let you know we handle this for you. Sendloop’s one-click unsubscription link makes the process easier for your recipients
7. Are all the links working properly?
8. Have you previewed your emails using different email client services? You can preview and get screen shots of your email taken on 44 email clients in a minute
9. Have you checked your emails from your mobile phone? Sendloop shows you the screen shot of your email taken from  iPhone and iPad
10. Do all your pictures or graphics have links and work properly?
11. Does your email readable if it is not displayed on the email?
12. Have you updated your mailing list?
13. Are you prepared for the out of office responses?
14. Are you ready to handle the unsubscribe requests? We handle unsubscriptions for you and make sure that your mailings are compatible with anti-spam rules and regulations
15. Do you have a plain text version of your email?
16. Is your call to action clearly defined?

If you answer yes to above questions, your email is ready to go to your recipients.  Do not forget to track your results using Google analytics.

I don’t think so. They did not request information or give you permission for receiving them. Personally, I always mark the email as spam when I get something from someone I don’t know. Below I give you some reasons why you should never buy email lists;

If you buy email lists and send out to people, you will make a lot of innocent people mad. This is the worst tactic you can use. They may delete your email without even opening, mark it as spam, unsubscribe it or tell your email marketing service that you are sending out spams. We have an anti-spam policy rules. For example, if anyone violates our spam policy rules, first we stop sending process and we send a warning to the user, investigate the account, and take any necessary safeties to prevent blacklisting and to protect the deliverability of our Sendloop system.

If you get so many complaints, your company can be on the blacklist. This can have serious results on the deliverability of your emails. It may also damage your reputation. You also don’t know what you are getting while purchasing the mail list. Some of them may not be a relevant email addresses. You will waste your time and money.

It is always best to build your own mailing lists for your own email marketing campaigns. Building your own list in a right way may be slower, but your open rate will be higher and you will have a loyal relationship with your customers. You can collect emails on your website, social sites, events, advertising, promotions, offering free items etc. In the end you will have your own pure subscribers who need to get information from you. Don’t forget, when you are building your own list, you are building a relationship coming from trust and permission as well.

What do you think? Would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Upload pictures of the events to services such as Flickr or Picasa. You can also create a group in Flickr so everyone can share photos of the event. You can upload videos of the event to the video sharing site such as YouTube.

Create an event page and post it online. You can create Facebook event and registration page. Promote the event on social sites such as twitter and Linkedin and also try to promote it in your newsletters and your blogs.

Create a landing page. Create an event specific landing page, so you can promote your event easily in social media sites. You can try EventBride or BrownpaperTickets for online registration and ticket buying.

Shorten and customize your URL. You can try bitly or goo.gl to shorten your URL in order to save some space on sites like twitter where you can have limited space.

Cross-promote. You can post your event on some other professional sites calendar. It will give an opportunity to reach out new audiences for your event. You can try to use some sites like Eventful or Yelp to post your event on their calendar, so people can be updated about the event and they can get an opportunity to track your event.

Create hashtags on twitter. Include hashtag by using as many key words as possible.  After you include hashtags on your promotional event, you can create search column in your twitter dashboard in order to check what people are saying about the event.

Use Location. Use location-based services such as foursquare. People can check the events through their smart phones or other devices.

Use broadcast channels.  You can turn your event into a small slide show. You can give some information from the event or conference on the slide show. Slideshare or Youtube are some examples where you can create and insert links onto your event page and begin to link to the event site from those channels.

Follow up. Follow up with attendees after the event and thank them for coming to your event and ask for feedback. You can post pictures and videos directly or give links to the page. For your next event you can also link to your past event and show it to future attendees.

What have you done to use social media to promote your events? I’d love to hear your experience!

You need to be good at content creation in order to provide interaction, social sharing, and engagement. Below is a list of content ideas that will help you to develop or improve your content based on your potential customer’s values or needs.

1. Share research or survey results about your company, industry, product, event, etc.
2. Produce a case study featuring your product or service
3. Interview with an expert, a customer or an employee
4. Write an educational, do’s and don’ts and how-to tips articles
5. Share your company’s or services new application or development
6. Share behind the scenes of your company or service
7. Identify common problems of your customers and give some suggestions on the articles
8. Give reviews about products or service using direct people to third-party websites or articles
9. Showcase your partners or sponsors
10. Give information, news and statistics about your company or industry
11. Talk about a topic or hobby that you like in some of your posts
12. Write about an event you or your company is attending and after the event write how it went and share some pics or videos from the event
13. Share your companies success
14. Relate your articles to the season. For example Sendloop wrote blog posts and released a newsletter last month about how to get a success from email-marketing campaigns for holiday promotions.
15. If you attend a seminar, webinar or conference write an article about it

Don’t forget to ask your subscribers what they would like to read in your email newsletters and next time make sure you provide it for them. If you think there are more content ideas we would love to hear from you in the comments.

Use double opt-in. You can reduce the threat of blacklisting by implementing the double opt-in in your emails. After the recipient signs up, the opt-in conformation can be sent to your subscribers to conform their subscription. This way recipient can recognize your newsletter

Clear subject line. Make your subject lines clear and easy to recognize for your recipients. Make sure it doesn’t look like spam or spam characteristic words. Avoid using all capital letters and exaggerate amount of using exclamation points in the subject line

Keep your list up-to-date. Make sure you keep your list up-to-date. Because the email recipient can change the address or no longer use to that email address you always send

Keep your list clean. You should always keep your list clean by recording bounced emails (undeliverable emails) and unsubscribe requests. You should delete them from your list. You need to delete also inactive users from your list as well. Your list should not have an invalid or improperly formatted email addresses. Check your email list and delete those addresses and also monitor the black list report. We do this automatically for you and keep you away from invalid email addresses

Ask your subscribers to add you to their safe list (white list). You should ask your subscribers to add you on their contact list after they join your mailing list to prevent your emails being identified as spam

Send emails consistently. Send emails regularly. Mail servers always look at e-mailers sending history and you can also prevent recipients forget why they signed up. Besides, try to send emails on the same day at near the same time

Use relevant content. Your emails should have a relevant content for your recipients. If you send an email including inappropriate content they will report your email address as spam

Add unsubscribe link. Make sure to place unsubscribe link at the top of your emails and make it super easy for your recipients unsubscribe it. We handle unsubscriptions for you, so you do not need to worry

Use consistent from address. By using a consistent from address, your subscribers will get used to receiving your emails

Minimize graphics and the size of emails. Make your emails small and if you use graphics keep the size minimum

Next week, we’ll share the technical process of improving email deliverability. You can check back next week for the remaining blog post about how to improve email deliverability rates.

Example of a Sendloop Banner

1. Make sure your target customer is engaged enough to click the banner ad
2. Create a landing page on your website and do not forget to add a mail list subscription form. If you don’t have time to create a landing page, create a banner that directly goes to the sign-up or pricing page on your website
3. Display some graphics and text combined. Use bright colors like green, yellow or blue on your ad. On the other hand avoid black, red or white colors
4. Create fresh looking banners to get the direct attention of customers
5. Use different banners and refresh them often to get the clients full engagement into your business
6. Make your banner clean, simple and attractive in order to get clicked
7. Use eye catchy layout to attract the potential client and make them to click the ad
8. Offer some incentives about your service or products such as discounts, gifts or coupons or even free trial to your potential customers who click the ad
9. Use attractive phrases such as “Click here”, “Enter here”, “Visit now” on your banner ad Place the ad in popular and appropriate sites for your business.
10. Always track your clicks. You need to know how well your ad is doing. If you don’t like its performance you can always change the colors or content of your ad

Successful banner campaigns can be really effective if you want to drive more traffic to your website. However banner ad alone is not enough in order to make them loyal customers and to generate brand awareness. If you get your potential customers’ emails through the subscription form (sign-up form) on your website, you can easily start to have a relationship with them by sending your email campaigns.

I gave you some tips on our blog today and if you know more tips please share them on comments.

• Ask your subscribers to tell their friends about your newsletter and make them to subscribe
• Try to link to the other websites or blog posts that you find useful for your subscribers. When you recommend them, they may take a look at your site and may do the same favor for your site
• Add a link or button on your website or in your newsletter and ask your subscribers to tell their friends about your service or products
• Write useful and informative newsletters for your subscribers
• Make a sign-up list and carry it with you when you attend any networking events
• Keep your blog readers informed of new posts when they sign up for updates
• Post relevant videos on YouTube or pictures on Flickr and do not forget to include your website address
• Submit your article or newsletter to targeted websites such as ezinearticles.com or hubspot.com
• Sponsor other people’s contests and get exposure for your newsletter
• Add your newsletter sign-up link to your signature of all of your emails
• Use co-registration service to grow your list. Your newsletter or website appears on other websites and potential clients may subscribe your newsletter
• Create your own affiliate program that let your affiliates promote your newsletter in return for a reasonable commission

Wishing you all the success as your list grows. If you have any other ideas about email list building, please share them with us in the comments.

Building a solid email list is the most important part of an effective email marketing campaign. I cover some effective methods in this blog today that you can use it to gain more subscribers over a short time. Here are some tips for Part 1 enjoy reading!

•  Add a subscription form to every page of your website
•  Make the sign-up process easy for subscribers. Just ask their names and email address
• Offer a valuable free gift in exchange for sign-up such as a coupon, discount, audio/video or a special report
• State your privacy policy to your subscribers in either your subscription box or a link that has a separate privacy policy page next to your subscription form
• Post your newsletter archive on your website and make an invitation to subscribe on every page
• You can use a pop-up window that has a subscription form and the reason to subscribe
• Join a Joint Venture give away events to reach your potential customers
•  Display your newsletter into your social networks as such Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Linkedin
•  Build an opt-in form into your Facebook page and give links to your landing page via twitter
•  Write a free ebook or an article and ask opt-in prior to download
•  Hold live webinars (a web-based seminar) and ask for newsletter opt-in during sign-up process
•  Blog seriously to communicate with both your potential and existing customers

If you want to get informed about Part 2, our other posts or our service, you can follow us on twitter or on facebook.