Life is just about to get much, much easier! Why? Because Graphicmail have just launched their sizzling new Drag and Drop Editor!  It’s simple! It’s easy! - And it’s efficient! No more hours spent designing that elusive template. This is going to make your email marketing-life a great deal easier.

For those users who struggle to create graphic-rich, visually appealing newsletters using unfamiliar design tools, well we think we’ve created an editor that will un-crease your furrowed brow. You’ll soon be pronouncing “ Easy-Peezy, Lemon Squeezy” ( or something similar ! ).

In use, it does exactly what it says - you drag and drop.  Everything is designed in blocks.  You start by selecting the template and layout of your choice, then you click in the block you want to edit and begin to type or insert your image. Not happy with the look? Just move the blocks around to different locations – you just click, drag & drop – easy! What’s even better is – if you see an error or there’s some part that you don’t like in one of the blocks, you only need to edit that one block and there’s no effect on the rest of your design. Timesaving and stress-busting are really good words here!

 All that said, if you do encounter some ‘teething troubles’ our Support team is, as always, at the ready to help you out.

“Revamp” is possibly the word that best describes our current mood with three new home pages and stacks of new features – all keeping us busy to make your email marketing easier – but we think this is perhaps our most user friendly and greatest time-saving and idea to date. Well, that’s what we think – what do you think?  Check it out by logging into your account now or, if you don’t yet have an account, simply sign up to your own 60-day, free trial account.  When you’ve done that, give us your feedback, so give it a try - then give us a shout and tell us how it operates for you.  Just remember:  Click, drag, drop, click, drag, drop, click…

This one is really simple; After someone completes the subscription form that you’ve setup in your website or on your Facebook page, this trigger automatically sends them the email that you have setup in the system. Once again, this can be immediate or time-delayed, it can be a simple ‘welcome and thanks for subscribing’ or it can include links to products/services on your website

This works the same way when one of your readers clicks the unsubscribe link, TriggerMail can be set to dispatch an email confirming their request.  The datasets are updated automatically, ensuring that your lists are always up to date.

Congratulations, you are now fully up to speed and date with our new set of TriggerMail features!  (If there’s something you’ve missed, scroll down and read the previous entries of.)   All while saving you time, effort and money.  We’ve even impressed ourselves with this one.

Well there you are; the complete 6 Triggers. With so many options, your clients cannot fail to be impressed by your new, wonderful communication skills – and how you always seem to know exactly what they want! It also shows how effective and easy TriggerMails are to set up - and once you’ve set them up - they do the work for you! 

…………………  Coffee anyone?

By now we know that you’re impressed by the endless possibilities that triggerMail offers – but here’s another one…….

Email Open triggers

This trigger works, as you have no doubt guessed, from the point that your subscriber opens their email and can be time-delayed to dispatch your TriggerMail after a specified interval after the subscriber has opened your email newsletter. 

There’s a real benefit here to ensure that your email ‘promo’ does not get overlooked because your reader is busy and unable to respond to the ‘Fantastic Reductions’ that your newsletter is promoting. You can use this trigger to send out a reminder email a couple of days later that nudges them with a subtle…….. “Just a reminder not to miss our ‘Fantastic Reductions’, they end in 3 days time”

Let’s face it, times are tough and not all your subscribers can react at the instant that they read your newsletter - and, on the point of tough times, this saves on your email marketing costs, because these follow-up emails only target those subscribers who have already showed an interest – with no send credits wasted on those who didn’t.  After all, your send credits are precious.

A welcoming end to invitations and RSVP’s getting lost.
RSVP triggers are very similar to Link Click Triggers as they are also activated by clicking on a link in your newsletter, but instead of linking to an automated email, the trigger updates one of your datasets.
You can perhaps see the benefit to this already…….before this update, maybe you would send out a newsletter /flyer notifying your subscribers of an upcoming event that they are invited to. Now, with RSVP triggers, you can add two links ‘Yes, I will be attending’ and ‘Sorry, I am unable to attend’ and set a dataset to track who will and who will not be attending.

It gets better! The RSVP triggers can be set up from a Link Click trigger too. It works like this:

You’ve got a reason to celebrate and want to share it with your distributors/customers and intend to send out an email newsletter to invite them all.  In the invitation you ask them to click either the “Yes” or the “No” link.  Using TriggerMail, you set up Link Click triggers for both the “Yes” link and the “No” link so that readers who click on the “yes” link receive an automated email that thanks them for confirming their attendance and giving ‘How to find us’ directions, whilst those who click the “no” link, receive an email saying how disappointed you are and hope they can attend any future events. It’s a good idea when setting up the Link Click triggers, to select a column in your dataset to be updated so that you can track attendance – same as the RSVP trigger.

Now that you have this new contact and tracking capability, maybe you’ll start looking for reasons to Celebrate!

If Triggers are grabbing your interest, then Link Click TriggerMails are really going to get your attention. This feature comes into its own when you setup links that allow your readers to ‘drill-down’ into the details of separate and specific products/subjects in your newsletter. You ‘Trigger’ these links using TriggerMail to automatically send a follow-up email providing the in-depth detail specific to that subject. You can even set the time-delay from immediate to ‘x’ hours after the link was clicked.

 A Car Sales Showroom can send out their general newsletter with lots of graphic images showing a wide range of car-styles; Sports cars, UPV’s, 4X4’s etc. each with a ‘Triggered’ link – those with an interest in a particular car-style; say the 4X4, click the 4X4 link and it sends them to the relevant section of the Company website – and dispatches the TriggerMail Newsletter giving in-depth information of the vehicle together with an invitation to call into the showroom for a personal viewing. A trigger can be setup like this for all models meaning that your emailed newsletter becomes a highly efficient sales tool.

This scenario can apply to any business

When a reader clicks the link to view that information, a follow-up email is sent to them 24 hours later You may also wish to offer incentives; perhaps receiving an email offering them a 10% discount a week later will give them that little extra push to rekindle their interest and make the sale.
Maybe send out a voucher to draw in business during those quieter periods. The automated follow-up can be a simple thankyou or information on a related product.
It’s easy to see now how these TriggerMail features all serve not only to advance your email marketing campaigns but also to increase sales.  Maintaining this regular communication with your readers will not only develop greater customer relationships, it will also cater for, and respond to, their individual interests making it even more likely that they will respond positively to your marketing approaches.

Not only is it very simple – it’s also very, very useful!

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could smooth out the peaks and troughs of the day and arrange your email newsletter mailing to go out at the time when it was most convenient for you – you know, when it’s quiet and you can concentrate. But that doesn’t usually coincide with the time that you want to send it, does it? Well, that’s where Graphicmail comes to your rescue again! We’ve created an autopilot mode for your email communications and it’s something that you can totally rely on to send out your emailer at the time that you want it to go, even if you’re not there to send it – it’s scheduled triggers :

You use a scheduled trigger to send your automated emails on a set date or at different intervals.  Sound familiar? Yes, of course ! Scheduled triggers are similar to the Anniversary Triggers in section one, but they’re even more specific. 

Remember those late payers who ‘forget’ that they are due to pay your monthly, quarterly or 6-monthly bill ? Well now you can send them invoices or payment reminders – or both by accessing TriggerMail from your account and setting it up to dispatch an email on the date or a few days before just to ‘nudge’ their memory. So even if Mr Hartley’s payment is due on the 9^th & Miss Robinson’s is due on the 27^th and you’ve setup your system to send 2 days before, Mr H receives his on the 7^th and Miss R receives hers on the 25^th. Alternatively, as you’re in control of the dates, you could arrange for them both to go out on the first of the month.

Sounding good?  It gets better! scheduled triggers can even be set to the time that you want the emails to be sent, which can ensure that memory-joggers to work colleagues, payment reminders and/or invoices to clients or any other automated emails will reach their intended recipient at a time that will be convenient for them - and you - allowing you to ‘drop’ that email mid-morning, after that 3pm meeting or even during the evening for those who you know do their office work at home.

All achieved without lifting a finger or checking a calendar/diary.  Well now that the peaks and troughs are looking smoother just remember that you need credits in your account to be sure that your emails are sent - even automated ones!  But, of course, you can do that at anytime 24/7 as well! So check the send credit level before setting those triggers.

TriggerMail Series - Part 1

It’s a well known fact that the Tech-Team are constantly improving the GraphicMail product to add value to your email marketing and, to re-enforce that, we have a new Graphicmail feature called: TriggerMail.

It was born from the desire to expand upon the auto-responder service. TriggerMail steps beyond the automated email functionality, allowing you to choose or create a ‘trigger’ or ‘prompt’ to dispatch an email automatically.

Sounds exciting? Read on………there’s a complete suite of categories for the TriggerMails and we’ve listed them all separately below :

Let’s start with - Anniversary triggers.

As you would perhaps expect, the prompt to activate the Anniversary Trigger is the date. This can be any date; a client’s date of birth, the renewal date of their annual subscription or, indeed, any recurring date; weekly, monthly, whatever! You choose - and set the Anniversary Trigger to dispatch that ‘Birthday’ wish or ‘thanks and please re-subscribe’ message every year on that date – or, in the case of a subscription renewal, a few days before; just to ensure that their renewal does just that… Renews!

The question

With the advent of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, you would be forgiven for thinking that email marketing was becoming less popular as a marketing tool – but that would be way off the mark!

The dependability of Email marketing to help build trusted, reliable customer relationships has lead to it being taken for granted. leaving little or nothing to debate. Even Search Marketing Specialists, when asked about their strongest tactic in a survey by MarketingSherpa, gave highest votes to"email marketing to a house list". It is a fact that investment in email marketing is growing, although marketing budgets in general are being cut.

So Why The Success

So why is it that email marketing is so successful?

• People are able to interact with your email. They buy the products that you advertise, they click to register for events, they click to download information and view articles on your website and so on. All of this as a result of an email that you sent them.
• When an email contains content that is of value to the readers/subscribers, it promotes the building of trust and loyalty and cements customer relationships. In particular, it keeps your organisation at the top of the purchasing list when subscribers are in the market to buy.
• The Technology now available to you as an Email Marketer, allows you to target your email and customise it to the specific characteristics of each individual subscriber. Furthermore, you will receive a mass of useful statistics in return, following each email send. For example, you get an overview of how many of your readers clicked on each link in an email – plus a drill-down to see who they actually were. This reveals your subscriber’s interests, allowing you to address these in your future emails.
• Email is also a major tool to assist all your other Sales & Marketing efforts, you could, for instance, alert your readers to an upcoming an event in your Company / Store / Organisation or even pre-warn them that you have a promotion Voucher or Catalogue on the way to them in the post.

Of course, this kind of success doesn't happen overnight automatically. Your successful email marketing endeavour will always depend on the ongoing construction of your mailing list - a list of people who have asked you to send to them your compelling and valuable emails – supported by the technical infrastructure which ensures that your emails are dispatched and delivered reliably.

Get these basics right, and you will reap the rewards.

Step One -  Set up your address Book

 Before you can personalise your emails, you need to collate the information  that you hold on each of your subscribers - just as you would do for all  your family and friends; you do this by setting up an Address Book. The reason for personalising your emails is to get your message read by as many  recipients as possible and personalised emails, for example; Dear Steven, carries, by implication, an underlying note that is seen by "Steven" and is translated as being of personal value to him. It is also possible to capture more information about "Steven" by using your subscription form to invite him to  give you more information.

 Because your Address Book holds all the personalised information on your subscribers, it can be linked to more than one mailing list

 Once you have setup your address book, you can edit contacts, delete contacts - you can also add additional contacts either individually or in blocks.

Note:

In Advanced mode you can setup multiple datasets. So, one can be your Address Book and another dataset could be (Possibly ) 'Unpaid Accounts'. You can therefore use the system to personalise a single email using these two datasets

 It may be that you don't currently want to personalise your newsletters but you do want to gather more email addresses

This is also easy - you just need to create a mailing list and setup a subscription form:

To create a mailing list - Click on > Mailing list, click > Create, give your mailing list a name and click to import. Then browse for the file to upload - this can be  Csv, xls, xlsx, txt (the import can be done with or without additional data). You can import directly from online email accounts, you can manually type individual email addresses or you can copy/paste a list.

Step Two - Setting up your subscription form

 ( This is ever-so easy - and following these actions generates the HTML code to create a subscription form that you can add to your website, Blog etc.)

First thing to do is choose your own design - or you can use our default design. Then Select the image that you want to use as the logo, next a background colour, then choose the text and attributes. Then choose the style of the links in your subscription form (for instance; subscribe, unsubscribe & forward-to-a-friend links)

Step Three - Create your newsletter

Click  > Newsletters - then > Create - then give your newsletter a name and select the folder where you are going to store it. You can select a template from the 100+ that are in your account's Templates Library, then click > Next and begin editing. Graphicmail Templates allow you to change the text, import images and add links using the simple editing tools at the top of the editor screen.

If you don't want to use a template you can insert your text directly to our editor from Word, or upload your own HTML template into the editor using the 'Code view'.

To insert images into your newsletter – either into your blank newsletter or to replace the images in one of the Graphicmail templates, simply click into Advanced Mode and proceed as follows.

A)     Browse for the images that you want to use and upload them into the Images Folder.

B)     Click into the editor and having placed your cursor in the newsletter cell where you want the image to be placed, click the > insert image icon, browse for the image, click insert and voila !

In Advanced mode, you can also import a Word document with images. However, if you do this, you will need to upload the images from your word document separately. This can be done individually or in a Zip file.

Remember when uploading images, the maximum file size is 200kb.

Step Four - Send a test email to yourself

We recommend that you send your test email to as many different email browsers as you can – just to see how it looks. It’s also a good idea to click the Spam Score button – this gives you a chance to check out the legitimacy of the subject line, the content and the images.

 Step Five - Edit your newsletter

It may be that you want to go back and edit parts of your newsletter – if so, just click >> Newsletters  >>Edit Newsletter choose the newsletter you want from the folder where you saved it, make your alterations, save them, exit and you’re ready to send

Step Six - Sending your Newsletter

Click >> Send and, in the screen that appears, select your mailing list from the drop-down menu, input your selected From Address, then the From Name, and insert the Subject Line.

Choose your newsletter from the drop-down.

IMPORTANT =  Double check everything!!

Discovering an important omission just after you have hit the send button is not a good feeling !!

Step Seven – Checking the send results – Your Reports and Statistics

You click on the Reports & Statistics and you see the mailing in a line across, click on the magnifying glass on the left and this reveals an overview which displays how many emails were sent, how many delivered, opened, clicked, forwarded and unsubscribed.

A single click on the + sign exposes exact metrics explaining why the email was not delivered, or a list of all the email addresses of those who clicked on a particular link

These lists can be exported as a PDF

Now take a look at Advanced Mode!

• You can set up Trigger-Mails (autoresponders useful for anniversary dates, follow up trigger emails to subscribers who click on a certain link in your email etc)
• Segment your subscribers and you can send targeted communications and marketing emails
• Advanced reporting - check out the Reports and Statistics following each send; you can do this per Send or per Mailing List or by individual recipients
• Upload and manage your images and files
• And much, much more!