Over lunch, one of the delegates mentioned she was looking forward to the email marketing session in the afternoon. She told a fellow attendee that she had a small list that she hoped to grow, but wasn’t really sure how she should go about it.

My ears pricked up when I heard the advice she was given, which went something like this:

If your list is small, I wouldn’t bother with an email marketing tool. Just use Outlook and email all of your clients using the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) function.

I try not to contradict delegates at my seminars (I believe there is no such thing as a bad idea – although some ideas are better than others) – but on hearing the advice she was given, I had to jump in, shouting across the table, “I’m sorry; you are wrong.”

Outlook is not an email marketing tool, and to use it in such a manner is, quite frankly, dangerous.

Why Outlook Is Not a Suitable Replacement for Email Marketing Software

1. No Unsubscribe Link: Bulk commercial email messages MUST include instructions for the subscriber to unsubscribe. Email marketing software includes a simple unsubscribe link and manages any unsubscribe requests automatically. While it is possible to manage unsubscribe requests manually, it is a clunky process and may result in subscribers receiving unwanted emails, which will undoubtedly result in spam complaints
2. No Analytics: It’s not just the carbon copy that is blind. Outlook does not allow the sender to see who has opened the email and clicked on specific lists. Analytics let the marketer see how successful (or unsuccessful) his or her email campaigns are and optimize accordingly
3. No Professional Design: All email marketing providers allow their senders to create beautiful HTML campaigns with ease, which are rendered perfectly (mostly) regardless of how the subscriber is viewing their email. This is not an option on Outlook.
4. Spam Complaints: If your Outlook account sent campaigns that received spam complaints, there is a very real risk that your IP address will be identified as a spammer, and you may have trouble sending any future emails from you address (including everyday [non-bulk] work-related emails).
5. Time Consuming and Expensive: Using Outlook to manage your email marketing campaigns is time consuming and could potentially damage your reputation (costing you money).

At iContact, we love small lists. And if your business wants to make a bigger splash via email marketing, we’ll help you grow your list professionally, efficiently and cost-effectively.

Communicating to a large audience has become both easier and self-perpetuating when taking advantage of the accessibility and wide variety of marketing tools available to raise awareness and funds. However, the most personal and effective method of connecting with donors is through email newsletters because it remains the most direct, non-intrusive, and engaging form of communication.

Direct pleas for donations, updates on programs and campaigns, first-person accounts, interviews with key players, comments and suggestions from supporters, upcoming dates and actions of interest, and more can make up parts or be the focus of an email newsletter. In fact, the more you share, the more people know and are compelled to continue their support. Giving periodic updates to grantors is also a way to supplement the quarterly reports and show them that you are being proactive and engaged with your funding base.

Email newsletters are also one of the main ingredients in any recipe for expanding social media campaigns and getting the most out of crowd funding websites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, but these also have to get noticed to go viral – so making sure your most faithful supporters know what’s happening is vital to start the ball or money rolling, so to speak.

Let’s face it – “out of sight, out of mind” applies when supporters become disconnected because needs are not identified, issues and consequences aren’t conveyed properly, actions and events are under-publicized, and victories and positive outcomes go unnoticed. Communicating all of the aforementioned along with organizational or specific program targets with both individual and institutional supporters is the key to bridging funding gaps and, in many cases, exceeding funding goals.

As a professional marketer, I shudder whenever I see the claims of less-scrupulous marketers, suggesting that online marketing will make you rich.

You know the kind of thing. There is always a young marketer, relaxing on holiday, enjoying the fruits of his or her (lack of) labor. There is always a lot of talk and never any real insight into what they are selling. Well, I’m here to burst their bubble. Email marketing (or any other kind of marketing) will not make you rich.

It’s not marketing that makes you rich. It’s having a great product and/or providing great service that will make you rich. Marketing is just the thing that reminds people about your product/service and keeps them coming back for more.

Marketing might drive initial sales, but it will never drive repeat business or recommendations if your product or service is not up to scratch.

In fact, if you are spending good money on marketing a bad product or service, then there is a very good chance that marketing will make you poorer.

Get your product/service right first and the rest will follow. And yes, marketing is a big part of that.

Four Things to Get Right Before Spending a Penny on Marketing

1. Your Product/Service: Without these you don’t have a business. Make sure you have the best possible product or service before you go to market. A poor product/service could potentially damage your business beyond repair.
2. Your Pricing Strategy: Your pricing strategy should be based on a number of factors, including your target market, the quality of your product or service, the competition and your expected return. Even in today’s highly competitive landscape the cheapest doesn’t always win.
3. Customer Services/Sales Training: If your staff doesn’t understand what they are selling, you’ll never hit your targets. There is also a huge risk of overpromising and underdelivering as desperate sales representatives clutch at straws to make their numbers. An investment in training is as important as your investment in marketing.
4. Landing Pages/Conversion: There is no point in spending money on a landing page that fails to convert. Learn how to create the perfect landing page experience.

While the sins covered in this blog post might not rival the seven deadly sins featured in Dante’s Divine Comedy (and yes, I am making a vain, content-marketing attempt to jump on the Dan Brown bandwagon), we marketers are far from guilt-free.

So here goes. My name is John Hayes, I’m a marketer and it’s been forever since my last confession.

I’ll admit it, I’m a terrible procrastinator. It’s not that I don’t get things done. I just don’t get them done during the nine-to-five, and as a result, work eats into my life more than it should.

I guess I’m lucky in the fact that I love my job. But I also love my family and could do a better job at finding a balance.

During my working life, I have personally identified seven deadly sins that I’m doing my best to abstain from in order to become more productive. Perhaps you can identify with them.

1. Watching stats: Analytics are a huge part of any online marketer’s job. I personally find the analytical data provided by email marketing tools like iContact or events software like Eventbrite hypnotizing, and within minutes of sending an email I will often find myself hitting the refresh button again and again, watching my opens, click-throughs and resulting sales rise. Analytics are incredibly useful for optimizing your campaigns (and you should be doing this), but watching stats for the sake of watching them gets nothing done.
2. Meetings: I’m lucky in the fact that I now work remotely and therefore am rarely called into many unnecessary meetings. But in previous roles, I found myself sitting around countless boardroom tables, discussing absolutely nothing for hours on end. Yes, managers need to make decisions, and for any business to succeed, there needs to be an element of collaboration. But is it really necessary to include the whole team to make even the smallest decision? If you find yourself wasting too much time sitting in meetings, take a leaf out of the late Steve Jobs’ book and walk while you talk.
3. Waiting for other people: There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for people. When you make an appointment, that is the time you are meant to meet, not the time you leave your desk or run out the door. Over my career, I’ve wasted numerous hours waiting on people. Now, If someone is running late and hasn’t called me with an update, I wait 10 minutes before moving on to something more productive. If people are too rude to not turn up on time, show some self-respect and don’t hang around wasting even more time.
4. Getting Lost in Social Media: Social media can be like quicksand. It can suck you in, and before you know it, you’ve lost the day. If you (or your team) are struggling with a social media addiction, set some house rules and try and keep any non-work social media usage out of office hours.
5. Overplanning: They say a business that fails to plan, plans to fail. While this might be true, it doesn’t mean that planning should take precedence over everything else. If a simple plan turns into a lengthy document, you are probably missing the point of planning: the action that follows. I’m a great believer in restricting my planning to a single sheet of paper, featuring several bullet points, and then running at the task.
6. Seeking Perfection: If you look at everything in minute detail and then delay projects because things are just not good enough, you’ll never finish anything. Don’t aim for perfection; you’ll never attain it. Good enough is good enough.
7. Worrying about the competition: Do you spend so much time keeping your eye on the competition that you forget to watch your own business? Instead of following your competitors’ every move, ask your clients what they want from you.

What prevents you from getting the job done? Share your confession in the comments box below.

Today’s guest post comes from Daniel Smith, co-founder and CMO of BoostSuite. BoostSuite works with your email marketing to help deliver more leads and customers from your online marketing.

Most small businesses have some sort of web presence. If you’re acquiring leads and customers through your website, you should be using email marketing software such as iContact to send email newsletters to these folks to provide regular updates regarding recent company/industry news, promotions, events, special downloads, and other items.

The key purpose of these email newsletter campaigns is to keep your customers informed and engaged, and to keep them coming back for more. They can also share your articles using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, spreading your message to your target audience virally with retweets and likes.

If you are a small business looking to increase the number of readers, or subscribers, to your email newsletter, you must first add a sign-up form to your website. Email service providers like iContact give their users some sort of sign-up form creator directly within their web-based applications. After you decide what information you need collected in the form (usually just an email address field is best for increasing your subscription rate), you can then create the form and get a snippet of HTML code that you can add to your website.

The question now becomes, “Where do I add this form on my website to get the largest number of new subscribers?”

Here are the top five places on your website where you should add the sign-up form:

1. Top of the Sidebar: This is by far the most obvious place to put the form. If you’re not placing your email sign-up form at the top of your sidebar, you’re losing out on valuable email subscribers. Placing it at the top matters as well. If you place it somewhere lower on the page, you’ll lose out on subscribers there, so keep it above the fold (the part of a webpage you see when it first opens). This may seem like common sense, but even some large websites and blogs fail to gather emails at the top of their sidebar.
2. After Each Blog Post: Another somewhat obvious place that’s oftentimes overlooked. You’ve already gone through half the battle by getting the potential customer/subscriber to your website because they are interested in what you have to say and you’re providing them with valuable information. They’ve read through the whole post and they’re feeling the warm and fuzzies. Now what? You should strike while the iron is hot by using a clear call-to-action driving readers to sign up for the newsletter so they can receive more information regarding the subject matter of the post. If you don’t ask for action when people are ready to do so, you’re stunting your growth.
3. The Footer of Your Website: This ties back in to item #2. If people make it to your website’s footer, they’re engaged with your content. And if they’re engaged, you want to ask them for action right away, which is why you want an email sign-up form in your footer. Another advantage of the website footer is that it appears on every webpage. Even if you forget to ask for a sign-up in the body of the page, you still have a chance to get a new subscription via the footer.
4. On Your About Us Page: You may not realize it, but a website’s About Us page is oftentimes one of the top viewed pages. Your visitors usually want to make some sort of personal connection with you, put a face with a name, understand the type of person who is providing them with this valuable information. Once they’ve made that connection, you should present them with the opportunity to get more information, for free, just by submitting their email address.
5. Across the Top of Your Pages: You may have heard about tools like Hello Bar and Viper Bar. They’re brand new and gaining popularity in the online marketing space. The way these tools work is that when visitors get to your site, these bars appear right at the top of the page, grabbing their attention immediately. It’s certainly worth testing it out to see if your subscriber numbers go up. Hello Bar offers a free plan along with a premium plan that offers more functionality. Viper Bar is free but only works on WordPress sites as it’s a plugin.

Try adding your newsletter sign-up form to these areas of your website today. You should start seeing your subscriber list going up almost immediately!

Do you have any other suggested places where the newsletter sign-up form should go? Let us know in the comments!

Sometime in the past decade, someone in a position to speak to a large number of people about email marketing said that sending plain text messages to email subscribers was good for their deliverability, their inbox placement rate, and their open rates.

I don’t know who said it or in what context, but I wish that moment had never happened. I wish it could be wiped from history, like in The Butterfly Effect.

Honestly, I’m not sure which is more baffling: the fact that this statement was made or the fact that it (and its falsity) has persisted for as long as it has.

Hoping this broad platform will help me set the record straight, I’d like to say that sending plain text emails to your subscribers has zero effect on your email’s deliverability, meaning the plain textiness of your email has zero bearing on our ability to pass your email off to the various ISPs out there.

(As an aside, that’s the definition of “deliverability” – an ESP’s ability to hand an email message over to an ISP. But I digress…)

Plain text messages also have zero impact on your inbox placement rate. Lots of factors weigh in on your ability to get into the inbox (as opposed to the spam or bulk folders) – domain reputation, IP reputation, content – but whether your email is HTML versus plain text isn’t one of them.

But the biggest myth that needs to be busted is that emails that are composed in plain text receive better open rates than emails that are composed in HTML. I guess the idea here is that if it’s in plain text, the ISP will just pass it through straight to the inbox, having concluded, “This must be a personal message,” and the recipient will be able to read it no matter what device or browser they’re using, so they’ll open it every time.

Not only is that logic wrong because one doesn’t correlate with the other, it’s also impossible to prove because plain text emails don’t process opens at all. If it’s in plain text, there’s no image pixel to be downloaded, so there’s nothing to tell iContact that your recipient opened your email.

I know you can’t rewrite history. And as the old adage goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has time to put on its shoes. But you reading this far means the truth just caught up a little bit more.

Gmail without changes is like the ocean without waves; at some point there will always be some. Gmail recently updated iOS, Android and desktop versions of its email platform. They are now categorizing your emails into tabs to help you sort your emails better and have less clutter.

This is a big change and may be a challenge for email marketers. No longer will your email land in the general inbox like it used to. Read on to learn about the changes.

Once you have the new Gmail layout, you will notice tabs along the top named Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums (Forums is optional).

Even though the descriptions tell you a lot, here is what you might find in each.

• Primary – This tab will include messages from friends, co-workers, family, and anyone who you communicate or connect with on a regular basis.
• Social – Messages from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and any other social network you may belong to will be here.
• Promotions – This tab will hold messages from shopping sites like Amazon or Overstock. And email marketers better listen up, because this is where your emails may land!
• Updates – This is where statements, bills, and yep, you guessed it, updates will reside. If you bought something and a company sends out an update, this is where it will go. Google alerts and password reset emails will be sent to this tab as well.
• Forums – If you choose to add this tab when you set up your inbox, it will be where any forum updates or communications will be.

There is no option to add categories at this time, but you never know if they may add the capabilities later on. Gmail will also include starred emails in the Primary tab if you choose this option upon setup.

We are yet to learn about how this will affect email marketing, but what I am seeing so far is that retail emails will land in the Promotions tab and that webinar reminder emails may be sent to the Updates tab. Some of the emails I am receiving are miscategorized, but Gmail will allow you to drag them to another tab and it will learn from your actions.

This poses a challenge, because not only is it hard to get into the inbox, but you have to have the subscriber look in a specific tab. You should see more blog articles from us on how to best embrace this change. Stay tuned.

So, if you did not already activate the new enhanced inbox, go ahead and log into your account and click on the gear icon (cog) and choose “Configure Inbox.” You will be walked through the setup. Then enjoy freedom from email clutter!

Tell me what you think about the new tabs in Gmail in the comments.

Last week, Twitter announced the release of their newest Twitter Card, dubbed the Lead Generation card. This useful digital marketing tool gives the Twitter-inclined the ability to generate email sign-ups from their Twitter followers.

Here’s a look at how it works:

Now, on paper (err … on screen?) this sounds like a fantastic way to leverage your Twitter followers to the benefit of your email list. You might even be inclined to call this a win-win for marketers looking to cross-promote their email platform to a new audience.

But Twitter’s Lead Generation Card should come with a big old caution flag when it comes to implementation. Put yourself in the mind of your average Twitter follower …

You hop on Twitter while you’re in line getting lunch, scroll through the latest news and updates from your friends, and a nifty offer from your local coffee shop is nestled between a HuffPo update and a tweet from Ashton Kutcher. You think to yourself, “I like coffee, and I really like saving money. I should sign up for these emails.”

So you join the email list and go about your day. A couple of weeks later, when the coffee shop decides to send out an email you’ve forgotten you’d signed up to receive, maybe you’re in the middle of a busy spell at work, and you hit the spam button in your email client.

Your local coffee shop was just trying to take advantage of a really good resource to augment their email list. And all they have to show for their forward-thinking efforts is a ding on their sender reputation.

In order to effectively leverage something like Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards, you need to ensure that your email marketing game is sufficiently on point:

Do you have a dedicated list and welcome message?

Any time you create an external list-building effort, such as the Lead Generation Card, you need to make sure you have an online repository for these sign-ups. You don’t want them intermingled with the rest of your subscribers because you’ll want to track the effectiveness of the campaign and, also, you might want to send them source-specific content. In iContact, you can easily dedicate a welcome message for that list, giving them an instant point of contact for when they do sign up.

Are you prepared for an influx of subscribers?

The worst thing you could do is net dozens of new email subscribers and have nothing to send them. Spend some time creating an editorial calendar that will see you through your promotional period. Also make sure both your subscriber limit and message allotment have room for the upcoming growth.

Have you factored acquisition cost into your marketing equation?

Just because a list growth tool exists doesn’t necessarily mean you should jump to take advantage of it. Determine your average cost per email acquisition and decide if the cost to implement a Lead Generation Card would decrease that figure. If it ends up increasing your cost per acquisition, you’ll have to figure out whether the juice is worth the squeeze.

Finally, with all things list growth, there are a handful of variables you’ll need to consider before you jump in. Often, you’ll find that the tools you use end up mattering less than the content you put out there. If you’re trying to grow a list for shoddy content, it’s the content that will end up doing you in, not the list or the tool you used to build it.

“Email marketing wouldn’t work for me. All my customers are local.”

I hear these kind of statements all of the time. When I do, I normally reply with the following six questions:

• Don’t your local customers use email? (Of course they do.)
• Are your local customers busy people? (Who isn’t these days?)
• How often do you speak to each individual customer? (Not nearly as often as you would like to.)
• Would your local customers feel let down if they missed out on a great offer from you? (Yes.)
• Wouldn’t you want to speed up the process of your local word-of-mouth marketing efforts? (Of course you would.)
• Would you turn customers away if they weren’t local? (Not likely.)

The fact is, email marketing isn’t about the geographic location of your customers. Think about it: How often do you email people sitting in the same office as you just to make sure something gets done?

Email formalizes your relationships by documenting communications between you and your customers. It takes conversations (word of mouth) and makes a permanent record that can be stored, retrieved, shared and acted upon.

If you pride yourself on owning a local business, can you afford to let your local customers down by not keeping them engaged with email marketing?

Looking for more ways to market to your local customers? Check out this awesome guide to local marketing published by our colleagues at Vocus.

The best email marketing lists are grown organically and built entirely on a solid foundation of permission, but this doesn’t stop many marketers from attempting a number of short-cuts.

Some are swayed by offers of cheap email marketing lists, sold by brokers who promise vast quantities of data. More often than not, the promises of purchased lists will fall far shorter than even the most conservative email marketer’s expectations and there may be even more serious consequences to take into consideration.

I always like to warn marketers that there is no such thing as cheap or expensive marketing. There is simply marketing that works and marketing that doesn’t work. Even the lowest cost marketing strategies can be incredibly expensive if they don’t produce a return.

Sometimes this information doesn’t quite sink in.

While presenting a recent email marketing workshop, a young entrepreneur insisted on questioning my rationale for not buying lists. He told me that he could buy 200,000 email addresses for $200 and he thought this seemed quite cheap. I told him, this could be the most expensive marketing mistake he makes for a number or reasons:

• No relationship/No permission:  Even if the email address owner has given the list broker their permission to sell their data, they have no previous relationship with your company and therefore not given you permission to contact them. An email to a purchased list is as good as spam.
• Segmentation: Any segmentation offered by a list broker is likely to be very rudimentary and therefore offer very little benefit to the buyer.
• Data Quality: Beyond poor segmentation, email addresses provided by many list brokers are harvested (often via dubious online competitions or surveys) with no real focus on quality.
• Reputation: It only takes a few spam complaints to ruin your reputation as a sender. No reputable email marketing service provider will want to work with anyone who risks their reputation – you have been warned.

Remember: When you take ownership of a cold list (a purchased list will never be warm), no matter how the organization that compiled that list has sought permission to pass on their subscribers’ details, there is no foundation of permission between you and your paid subscriber. Therefore, any emails sent to this list (no matter what your list seller tells you) will have all the hallmarks of a spam campaign.