Technically speaking, it takes us 45 minutes to send around 500,000 emails. We can move this throttle up and delivery up to 1 millions emails every 50 minutes but beyond this we would be putting your email campaign at risk. This is because Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) require email messages be throttled to groups of 2,000 or less and sent at rates from 10 to 40 minutes apart. We can send email pretty darn fast, but ISPs, some email servers and spam filters on the other hand can’t receive bulk mail as quickly. Speed of delivery is then dependent how quickly they are receiving the incoming email messages which can vary from time of the day to time of the year.

If the company receiving your emails has a ‘ok’ mail server that handles all the incoming mails and the load of your email campaign hit their mail servers at once, it could automatically shut off and start rejecting the emails being received. This eventually means, a lot of bounces causing your email campaign not to be as successful. When you initially send mails through our system and it exceeds 25,000 emails, the sending rate may seem slow but as you grow your reputation, your emails will be delivered at a much faster speed and you will see the email campaign statistics right away.

We are really glad to see that Foodera chose us as their email marketing provider for delivering their emails to customers. Here is a picture of their recent Email Campaign. Isn’t it great? If you ever feel hungry and you live in New Delhi, this is one site to remember. Check them out at Delhi.Foodera.co.in

The simple technique to avoid this from happening to a…

Image – Browse or Upload the file by clicking on the existing image and insert the image as per the required pixels.  This helps the editor you are using (usually WYSIWYG editors) keep the existing formatting and to just replace the image file. Alternatively you can click on the HTML icon to edit the file location manually.

Hyperlinks – Start typing the text you want the hyperlink to contain from the middle. Then delete the unnecessary words to the left and right. After you have done that, select the hyperlink by double clicking or manually by using your mouse and replace the URL with the desired one. Click update for the desired change to occur. You can do this manually by directly typing into the HTML and clicking update.

Different Font Text – Follow the exact technique that we used for Hyperlink by typing the desired text from the middle and deleting the text from the left and right. You can do this from HTML source code as well.

This is just for novice users who want a quick way around preserving the links, colors and image formatting. I am sure there are much advanced ways to carry this task out or much easier way too. If you think of something more easier than this, do let me know by using the comment form below.

Just like a direct sales letter, the subject line of your email is usually the most important part of getting your readers to actually read your email. If you have a compelling subject line the chance of your email improves dramatically.

According to a recent survey, 40% of email marketers said testing changes to just their subject line had a high impact on their return on investment (ROI). 45% said subject line changes accounted for a medium ROI and only 15% said that testing changes to their subject line results in a low ROI.

For every email you send you’ve got room for about 50 characters in your subject line so use them wisely to improve your open rates. Below are some tips to help improve your subject lines:

1. Test the subject line – Take a look at email campaigns you’ve sent in the past. Which subject lines worked the best and gave you the highest open and conversion rates? You might find that for a particular topic there’s a general trend or subject style that resulted in higher open rates.
2. The subject of importance – Try and put as much important and relevant information into your subject lines as possible. For example, if you’re sending out an email about a special offer make sure the product name and details on the offer appear in the subject line in a clear and concise format such as “$40 off ACME Widget Until – Today Only”.
3. Personalize the subject line – If you have details about your contacts then you can use them in your subject line to get their attention. A subject line containing the contacts first name can sometimes out-pull one that doesn’t.
4. Avoid spam keywords – Most email servers automatically filter out any emails that contain spam keywords in their subject line – Words such as free, stock, ebay, password, mortgage, etc all trigger spam detection software so keep them out of your subject lines at all times.
5. Trigger curiosity – The best way to improve your open rates is to pique the interest of your contacts. A compelling headline that entices them to open and read the contents of your email can do wonders for your conversion rate. Headlines that trigger curiosity can sometimes work well for example: “Hi [First Name] – I have a question for you.”.
6. Make the offer clear – If you’re making a special offer to your contact then be upfront and include it as part of your subject line. People love bargains and special offers so let them know about it before anything else.
7. Emphasize the benefits – We use this technique for our newsletters. We always use the format of “Newsletter – [Benefit]“. In our case, benefit is always the title of an article contained in the newsletter, such as “Company Newsletter – 10 Tips for Better Subject Lines”. It works every time
8. Easy identification – Make sure your contacts know the email is coming from you. Deceptive subject lines can confuse people so always try and including your company name in the subject line. Also, make sure you set the “From” attribute of your email to include your name and your companies name, such as “From: John Smith <john@demo.com>”.
9. Exclaim nothing – Avoid using excessive punctuation at the end of your subject lines. Google bans punctuation from AdWords ad’s for a reason – too much hype can annoy and confuse people.

Why have Multiple contact lists?

Well, its purely for segregation purpose. You can have all the contacts in one single contact list. As per our previous example, we can have all the email it users in one contact list and we can use “Custom Fields” to separate out the paid users from free ones. Some of Email It users seems to have them to avoid confusion. For example in a church you might have youth group contacts and elder contacts. The elders undertaking youth group might be in both the lists and since you cannot have same email with different custom field values, you are better off having a contact list.

How to create a Contact List?

In short, you can click on “Contact Lists” –> “Create a Contact List” –> Fill in the required details –> “Create”

But for those who want to know about each and every field listed in the wizard, please read along…

1) I am assuming you are logged into our control panel. From there on to the very left of your screen, you should see a label named “Contact Lists“. Click on it and that will open up the entire menu from which you need to select “Create a Contact List” from.

2) You will land onto the contact list creation wizard. Contact lists are used to store details about subscribers (people who have specifically requested to join your e-mailing list.) or leads (an individual or organization that expresses an interest in your goods or services). It may include their email address and other details such as name, company, age, etc.

The page is divided into four different sections – New List Details, Custom Fields, Visible Fields, and Company Details. While all those sections are important, if you dont want to dig too deep, just concentrate on New List Details and Company Details.

A) Lets go through the “New List Details” step by step…Some of the fields are usually filled out for you by default but you are free to change it. Do note that all these fields are List-Specific which means the details you enter will only apply to just that list you are creating.

• List Name – Give it any name for your own reference. Please be aware that the ‘name‘ will show in the subscription forms (For Eg. when one of your subscriber wants to unsubscribe)
• List Owner’s Name – This is the name that will be used when you send an Email Campaign out to this List.
• List Owner’s Email – This is used as a “From” address when you send your email campaign and when someone subscribes or unsubscribes.
• List Reply-to Email – This address is send along with your email campaign so if anyone clicks the reply button, it will the address you mention here.
• Notify the List Owner  - This option is selected by default but if you have a large number of subscribers…Its best to turn this feature off to avoid overwhelming number of emails.

That concludes the “New List Details” section which is a required section (something that must be filled out when creating a New Contact List).

B) Next section is named “Custom Fields” section. If you have created custom fields before, you can select them by clicking on them. They are used when you want to customize your email campaign further. For example, our contact list has a custom field called “Email Plan”. This custom field is used when adding new Email It users to our contact List. We offer a number of plans (monthly plans ranging in amount of emails a user can send and non-expiring plans which have specific email credits). Learn more about custom fields by searching within our blog.

If you haven’t created any Custom Fields, then you can skip this section and move on to the next section.

C) Visible Fields section is used to select or check the fields you want displayed when you click on View all contacts for each of your contact lists. Once you finished creating a demo contact list and added a few contacts, try click on “Contacts” –> “View all Contacts” – You will get an idea of what this section is all about.

D) This is the final section in Contact List creation – Company Details. It is important that all your contact lists have this information filled out. You can use this information as Custom Fields in your email campaign to comply with the CAN-SPAM act.

• Company Name: Some users complained about not having a company, so we suggest filling out your personal information or the organisation you are sending on behalf of.
• Company Address: This is to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act which states that this information must be sent in all your email marketing campaigns.
• Company Phone: This information is also required and must be inserted in all your email marketing campaigns.

That concludes it for now. I hope this brief tutorial on Creating New Contact Lists has been useful. Please use the comments fields below to let us know if you are having trouble anywhere along the way.

What this means in simple terms is…You get absolutely great speed no matter whichever part of the world you access our application from. This will surely ease off any moments of frustration from low speed so you can concentrate on more important things such as sending your email campaigns. We got many more features lined up for you so keep watching this space.

So go ahead, check it out and let us know if you have any troubles along the way. We’ll be here to help!

- Email It Team!

1) Point your mouse to ‘Subscribers‘ tab and click on ‘Create a Subscriber‘

2) Once the page is loaded, Enter the details of the ‘subscriber’ such as their ‘First Name‘, ‘Second Name‘ and their ‘Email Address‘. Please do remember that all these fields are mandatory. This allows you to personalize your newsletters (Dear ‘First Name’…). Then you select the ‘list‘ you would like them to be added to (you can choose as many lists as you like). The last field, ‘Notify user on subscription‘ simply means that he/she will be notified that you’ve added them to your mailing list.

There are also ‘Custom Fields‘ that you can add so your subscribers would have to enter additional information to subscribe. The information they enter can be used to personalize further.

3) Once you click ‘Subscribe‘ button after entering all the details, you’ll end up on the ‘Manage Subscribers‘ page which will list the subscriber you’ve just added with side-by menu that allows you to edit/delete that particular subscriber.

This is from the tutorial series, ‘sending an email campaign‘. Once you have logged into our control panel with the username and password you’ve received at the time of signing up, you should follow the steps below to create a mailing list, add people and so on.

Mailing list simply means, a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. (See our Glossary). You must create a mailing list to be able to send any email campaigns you might have created. To do this, please follow the steps below…

1) Point over the Mailing List tab from the Control Panel and choose “Manage Mailing List” from the drop down menu.

2) You will be presented with Mailing List page, If you have added any mailing lists before, you should be seeing them here. From here, please click on ‘create mailing list‘ button.

3) Here you will need to enter a ‘list name‘ which is used for personal identification of this particular mailing list, ‘Auto-reply‘ on subscription and unsubscription allows you to select a newsletter you’ve prepared to send your subscribers when they first subscribe to one of your mailing list and when they unsubscribe your mailing list.

4) Once you have clicked ‘save‘ button, your mailing list will be created. You can now see in a table, the list name you’ve given previously, the date it was created on, the number of subscribers and other important functions (edit, delete, clear).