A short while ago, we launched the FeedMail application – and this easy-to-use feature will be seen by the majority of Graphicmail Advanced Mode users as a great benefit. It allows you to publish any feed, such as your blog, to an email newsletter which is then sent to your subscribers on a scheduled basis.

FeedMail will go fetch the content from your blog, or any RSS feed and format it in one of five stylish email templates. Having selected the template of your choice, you only need to supply us with the URL for your feed together with the frequency that you want it sent (how often you want us to fetch your feed and send it) and you can leave the rest to us.

Also – if you prefer to use your own template, you can supply us with a custom XML. We think you will agree that FeedMail is an extremely handy and easy to use application. Another accolade for The Graphicmail Development Team.

The way to a man's heart may be through his stomach - but sometimes, all you need are the right keywords.

Not only do we need the right choice of words to woo the opposite sex - we also need them for our clients. Most of us wouldn't refer to the relationship with our clients as a love affair,  but it is nonetheless an affair .
 
It is important that we choose the right words to entice our clients to visit our site. We need to apply an element of psychology - what words would they use to get through to you? Not unlike how we would encourage our loved ones. But unlike our real life romantic advances, the words we choose for our blogs and websites are not enhanced by poetical license. In fact, quite the opposite - they need to be clear and as precise as possible.
So... you don't consider yourself much of a wordsmith - maybe you already struggle with the communication channels in your personal/work relationship/s. You're accused of not hearing what she says and he doesn't react as expected to the words you say. So how to proceed to get the right keywords in order to promote your site with search engines?

We can recommend  two free keyword tools to help you.

1 - At the end of September, Google launched their new Beta Keyword Tool. Vertical Leap Search Engine Marketing's Paul Broomfield points out that the new tool can be found by clicking the ‘Tools’ (or ‘Opportunities’) tab and clicking on the keyword tool. You will then see the following beta link at the top of the page ‘Check out the new Keyword Tool (beta)’, that will direct you through to the new beta keyword tool. Thanks, Paul! In order for you to use the new Beta Google Keyword Tool, you will need to set up an Adwords Account. This is free of charge... until you decide to link a PPC campaign to your site (paid Google ads). Why not try it out?
 

NB: If you just want to do a general keyword search, for instance to get the right set of keywords for your content writing, use the seasoned Google Keyword Tool. You would still have to sign into your Google Adwords Account to see a full list of keyword ideas customized to your website (typically excluding those already in your account).

 
2 - WordStream have now launched their free new keyword tool. Similar to Google, you can just search for a keyword such as "email marketing" and wait for the return of related keywords that are relevant to your preferred search query. You can have the selected keywords emailed to you or just export them.  This keyword tool is recommended by Vertical Leap for use alongside the Google keyword tool, as it will be a great help in maximising your ROI by ensuring that you have all long tail keyword areas and permutations covered within your SEO and PPC campaigns.

This month all the young-at-heart will be out carving Jack-o-lanterns, playing pranks on their neighbours, watching scary movies - and doing tons of trick-or-treating! With all this going on, who has time for work? Well….. GraphicMail does! We decided to treat you to a really good deal. There are no tricks; (Honestly). We also haven't employed packs of werewolves to rip apart your mailing lists. And we haven't contracted any ghouls or devils to bewitch you.

Sign up for a free trial account. Play around with our easy-to-use email marketing service, and if you like it - sign up to a paid account from only £9.95 a month!

And what's the treat?

Once you sign up to a paid account of your choice, we will give you double the amount of send credits that you've purchased with your account for your first month.

Follow GraphicMail on Twitter.  Get the latest updates! Be the first to hear about the cool, new features from our lab. Grab email marketing news, stats, fun, promotions, call outs and more - from a team of European birdies. Robin, Kookaburra and Common Loon will all be chirping and tweeting with and for you. GraphicMail is a song worth singing!!

Yes, it’s true, we have jumped on the bandwagon. You can now become a fan of GraphicMail on Facebook! Get the latest gossip, staff pictures, new features, helpful email marketing articles and much, much more on Facebook.

Email marketing has found a new friend in social media. We're actively pushing out features which will enable you to link-up your email marketing campaigns to your social networking. Our FeedMail is being given the final touches which, when complete, will allow you to send your RSS feeds to your email addresses. We're also keeping busy upgrading our customisable footer to allow you to add different social sites into the footer of your next email campaign, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc..

We’re also working on you being able to publish your newsletter, eflyer and promotions from your GraphicMail account to all the major networking sites.

Next stop: Twitter.

Are you aware that Internet Service Providers are changing their spam filters? How does this impact on you as a legitimate email marketer? In their exclusive report , Pivotal Veracity recently highlighted the fact that the domain-based reputation has now arrived.  A number of top ISPs including AOL and Yahoo are said  to augment IP-based reputation systems with portable domain-based reputation systems for those mailers using DK/ DKIM authentication. This means that ISPs will “attach” your spam complaint rate, your unknown user rate, and your spam trap rate to your domain, in addition to your IP.  So even if you switch IP addresses, you retain your domain-based reputation – be it good orbad.

So what can you do to ensure emails get delivered?
First and most important, reputation is and will remain of your own doing  To be sure of a good reputation you must be using a domain in your “from” address that links to you.  This means - don’t use generic domains (like @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) as your “from” address.   If you do not do so already, start to use an email address with a domain within your control and for which you can begin to create a reputation.  For example, if your email address were jo@jofarm.co.uk your reputation would be based on the past and current behavior of the sends originating from the domain jofarm.co.uk and not just on an IP address relating to the server from which the email originated nor the sender from which it originated.  This will make each sender more responsible for the delivery rate of their mailings.   Both Yahoo and AOL are moving towards this structure and it will probably be in full swing in the early part of next year.  Other ISPs are expected to follow suit.

How can we help you to build your reputation?
If PivotalVeracity are right, then having your FROM domain properly authenticated, will become increasingly important. So if you haven’t already started to implement DKIM on your domain, it’s time that you should consider doing it.  The DKIM process uses public-key cryptography to guarantee that the FROM sender is actually the domain owner.  To implement it, the sender attaches an electronic signature to the email that is then checked against a signing module saved at the DNS. If you don’t know how to generate the public and private keys needed to implement DKIM, then GraphicMail's tool will create them for you.

What else are we doing?
Almost every ISP now bases the decision whether or not to deliver emails to client’s inboxes, on some ratio of the complaint rates that they receive from their clients against the number of sends originating from IPs or domains.  ISPs share these rates with ESPs using feedback loops.  So every time a client clicks on the ‘this is spam’ in their email client, they let us know that that client didn’t want to receive the message.

We help them close the opt-out loop by unsubscribing these clients and we mark those as complaints against the client’s account which advises them that not all recipients are happy to receive their email and we make the ISPs happy by reducing the amount of unwanted email being sent to their users and as a result they accept more of our mails.