Whether you’ve had your Paypal abused, credit details stolen, logged into Facebook only to see a few naughty statements made in your name or whether you’ve electronically been pronounced dead sixteen times - we’ve all been touched by cybercrime.

We hear about it all the time: Online retailer Play.com recently reported that some of their customers’ personal data may have been compromised, and that their users might be sent spam e-mails containing harmful links. TripAdvisor users’ email accounts have been hacked in to during March. Millions of people were at an increased risk of email phishing after a giant security breach at Epsilon, which is having an effect on some of the USA’s largest concerns, such as JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Walgreens.

Our lives are becoming entwined with technology. Often we are forfeiting security and placing our privacy in jeopardy, all for the sake of speed and convenience. Electronic villains have had a rampant turkey-shoot at online users, almost nearly all the way back to the days of the abacus.

As long as there is a channel and a means, there will always be a certain amount of associated illicit behaviour: more or less guaranteeing that your granny will consistently be on the back foot, shielding her life savings from a kid learning how to hack mailing lists from knitting sites out of his room in Vodka-oozing Vladivostok.

But some brave companies are standing strong. GraphicMail, a web-hosted self-service email marketing provider dedicated to helping small businesses and organizations, has tightened its security once again, after serious new breaches in the email industry. The first quarter of 2011 has seen a surge of severe electronic security breaches via email marketing, and only the best measurements possible will stave off these consumer assaults.

With an infrastructure that is designed to protect clients’ sensitive personal data, all efforts are made to ensure that no person or entity other than the owner of the data can access it.

Speaking passionately about this cringing subject, Ernie Retief, CTO at GraphicMail says: “By using SQL server security together with IP restricted access, our data is secure. What this means is even if you have all the information about our setup, with all the database passwords, you won’t have access if you’re not on the correct IP address. “

This is accomplished by their top of the range Cisco routers and firewalls. Cisco is the industry leader in network speed, security and reliability. So all the holes are covered by Cisco-certified superheroes.

CTO Ernie elaborates: “Our application is also written with malicious attacks in mind. We use external companies to conduct monthly attacks on our code to look for any loopholes. We also undergo a network audit every few months to make sure our security is in order.”

As a regular user of email, you will, by now be aware of Gmail’s new Priority Inbox feature.

 Still in its BETA phase, but available to all Gmail users, it automatically sorts your inbox into (1) Important emails and (2) everything else. A ‘service’ which has been met with mixed reviews by email marketers. Whilst my own thoughts were pretty negative at the start, I have done some checking within the industry and am beginning to see the positive side. Mainly it will separate the wheat from the chaff and make it easier to focus on quality client leads and client-relationships. 

So, how do you proceed to ensure that you gain from the process?

1)      Emails, by their very nature, are direct and personal, which is why it is the ‘weapon of choice’ for building customer relationships. The benefit of a priority inbox means that for those of your customers who interact with you and your brand campaigns, your emails will be given a higher ranking, further enhancing their trust of your  brand in their inbox.

2)      The long term effect being that Generic messages simply will not get through which makes it even more important that the content of your newsletter is personalised and relevant to your readers and loaded with value. Use the available tools to test, segment your lists and to set up autoresponders for your campaigns.

3)      The Gmail subscribers who are recipients of your email will need to be able to identify your emails very easily if you want them to keep opening. So your business name and/or brand will have to be highly conspicuous in the ‘from’ name, the subject line or the pre-header. That will ensure that, if you’re campaigns are already successful your Gmail subscribers will be quickly aware if your emails are being marked down and re-set you as an important sender.

4)      You will need to concentrate some effort to ensure regular response from your subscribers to prevent your emails from slipping into obscurity. Encourage them constantly to interact and engage with your email newsletters. Make sure that all of your emails carry a very clear call to action, preferably one that encourages engagement, such as clicking a link, replying, or submitting a comment. 

Put simply, Gmail’s priority inbox has changed the email marketing landscape, whilst the benefits of email marketing remain as solid as ever.  It will force you to be better at email marketing which should reward you with an even greater ROI as quality campaigns will be the ones that bubble to the top of Gmail inboxes.

Whether you are new to email marketing or are a seasoned pro, GraphicMail will have, at some point, been a new piece of software to you and there were no doubt questions you had about how something in your GraphicMail account worked, or how to increase proficiency.  It's common, and totally understandable when you’re working in a technical application with as many features as ours.

When you're not sure about something in GraphicMail the easiest way to rectify the potential problem is to visit our Help Center.  The Help Center covers a range of topics and categories, offering step-by-step instructions on how to solve some frequently asked questions. We offer help documents, video tutorials and FAQs.

However, although we try to make these answer ALL your questions and direct you to the answer quickly and effiently we’re not sure how helpful the answers are to you as an individual user. So to solve this issue, and to assit all our users with any future issues or questions that may arise, we need your feedback so we can continuously improve on our help centre.

So now you can vote on how helpful our FAQs were to you.   Next time you have a question, check out our Help Centre, and tell us if our help was helpful or not.  You can also leave a comment or additional question. Any constructive feedback is most appreciated!

To kickstart your email marketing for the new school year we’ve included our FREE back to school email marketing primer.  Swot up on the basics for a successful email marketing campaign – it includes how to increase your mailing list, design a top-marks newsletter and your test cheat sheet, we’ve even included tips to boost your campaign. 

It’s easy to follow and childs-play to implement – download your free Back To School Email Marketing Primer here.

A few months have gone by since our 6-part series of blogs highlighting the launch of our TriggerMail feature and our recent case study  about the benefits available, I thought that we should maybe take a look at the usefulness of autoresponders (AKA TriggerMails).
If you’re unsure what TriggerMails are, checkout our video or the blog series.

The benefits of sending automated emails are very clear; timesaving, strengthening customer relationships with such things as an annual ‘Happy Birthday’, but there is something else which was shared with you in our segmentation blog article ; Triggered (or Prompted) emails provide a way to target your readers – much the same as segmentation.

So, where do I start ?

If you’ve decided to give it a try, and I strongly recommend that you do, begin by setting up a couple of triggers; if you’ve captured the dates of birth for your subscribers, simply setup an email to be sent to them say, 3 or 4 days beforehand giving a list of items that you will happily discount during the week in which their birthday falls. It is a fact that Birthday email messages generate a very good response and conversion-to-sales ratio.

Basically you are able to integrate your segmentation and TriggerMails, allowing you to monitor a customer’s past purchases, their account anniversary, any reviews that they may have posted on your site, payment reminders, even their wedding anniversaries and then set TriggerMail to automatically send them an email relevant to that occasion.  It can be anything from congratulations and best wishes, to product information or discounts on something they might find of interest.

If the response from your subscribers is positive you can always find more ways of integrating evermore TriggerMails into your campaigns.

What reason would I have to set these TriggerMails? 

Think of this as just another way for contacting your customers and develop the relationship between them and your brand, it tells them that you understand them and their interests. The result is that you email them more often and, because your emails have more relevance, they respond in a more relevant manner.

Isn’t this likely to result in my readers thinking that I’m bombarding them?

No, although you will be keeping in touch with more frequency, it’s a more relevant contact and these contacts are prompted by your subscriber’s response to a date or product specifically relating to them. Not all the contacts in your list will have received the email, as you only sent the emails to small proportions of your list.  Also, because these emails are more targeted, the result will be a greater ROI than your untargeted bulk email sends.

But doesn’t this mean that I should stop sending out mass emails and newsletters?

Of course not!  Bulk sending your newsletter is the way to spread your message and to gather more subscribers.  After all, it is the one that all your subscribers initially signed up to receive.  Using TriggerMail is your way of refining those relationships more and pushing potential customers into becoming actual purchasing customers, or existing customers to make further purchases.  Autoresponders are there to complement your email campaigns by balancing your bulk broadcast emails with relevant, targeted emails sent to a specific, small portion of your subscribers and, because they’re automated it releases you to focus on other things – be it a reviving cup of tea or an in-depth promotional strategy.

Put simply, TriggerMails added to your campaigns help you to send the right message at the right time to spur your subscribers to action.

One of the most-often repeated questions I get is “ What is the prime sending time for my email newsletters; Monday?  Wednesday? Friday? ”

I suppose the REAL question is………… is there a ‘BEST’ time ?
 
 One of the most important components in your email marketing campaign is controlled by your subscribers – the part where they DO or DON’T open your email. So much of your time and effort has been put into the creation of your a newsletter – the images, text, layout, the research for information and yet, all of that could be valueless if the recipient just simply deletes it, or dismisses it as junk.

This is the time to consider timing your sends! Give some thought to what your subscribers would be doing on your scheduled send days. Will they be have the time to open and read your email? 

Many studies have shown that the most beneficial days to send are the middle of the week, mainly because this tends to be the busiest, so it would follow that your email has the most possibility of being opened and reacted to on those days. This is an observation but not a rule.

Monday and Friday should also be in your thoughts. As far as Monday goes, with plenty of week-ahead planning meetings, colleague catch-ups etc., it’s best to plan your email to arrive in the afternoon so that your subscribers have more time to read it.
Friday being a day when business people receive less email and, if they are able, they may invoke the ‘Poet’s Day’ rule (Push Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday) so send your message earlier in the day – or later if your mailings are B2C and you expect them to read it at home in the evening or over the weekend. So, what about the weekend? This is a bit more risky and you should only send if your stats have shown that sending (maybe to selected segments) at this time gives you a good response. If they do not show as active, it may be that they have been received and not checked and then lost in the Monday Mass of emails and possibly consigned, along with most of them, into the recycle bin.

 As you can see from this, each day has its own benefits and disadvantages. The rule here is Research and feedback (check reports & statistics). Experimentation is acceptable and could be considered part of the research. It’s important that you send to suit your subscribers in preference to your own preferred schedule.

Are you one of the many Graphicmail users who diligently follow the links to our blog that we post on Twitter and Facebook? If you are, you may have already seen the blog article about the online revolution. If not, it’s worth checking out as is this video which contains some social media statistics that you may find interesting. It’s becoming more obvious every day that email is recognized as the top performing direct and online marketing channel so, it makes sense that combining email and social media is going to have a massive impact and to help with this we have released a new way to compliment them both.

Social share

This tool lets you publish your email newsletter straight to your Twitter account.  The newsletter title together with a link to your full newsletter will then automatically appear as a tweet – with no manual intervention form you!

As Twitter each Tweet to 140 characters, you will be delighted to hear that The Graphicmail Development Team have created another helpful gadget called GMtiny which is our very own URL abbreviator – it shortens your newsletter link, reducing that overlong and unsightly URL to just a few characters. How handy is that?

Not content with that, we have already begun work to extend this feature so that you will be able to publish across even more social networks. Next one; Facebook! Keep watching, we’ll notify you when this happens.

But, if you’re not already involved, don’t wait for that, start now by using our new social share tool to enhance your brand exposure online. Expand your subscriber audience and give your sales a boost by engaging more fully with these potential customers.

And, don’t forget – Graphicmail is also on Facebook and Twitter. Go there now, be a friend and follow us. We really enjoy reading about what our followers are doing.

Whilst you’re at it, check out the Graphicmail tools which you can use to insert social widgets in your footer – then, after your newsletter goes, check the social widget statistics section in your reports.

For those of you still unaware or unconvinced about the benefits of Social Media, here’s a really good article by Chris Moerdyk of BizCommunity reviewing Erik Qualman’s book; Socialnomics. Chris does an excellent job of summarising many of the important aspects regarding the development of  social media, some of which will maybe make you consider, as they did me………………..

If Facebook gets more traffic every week in the US than Google - and YouTube has become the second largest online search engine, then it’s more likely that your customers will locate the product they are seeking on a social site like Facebook or YouTube than they will on Google. Which begs the question………..” What happens if they can’t find your product when they are searching their social media? ”

Social media is the online version of what has traditionally been referred to as ‘word-of-mouth’ : Qualman states that, “whilst 78% of consumers trust recommendations from their peers, only 14% place their trust in advertisements”. So what happens when your peers aren’t recommending you through their new word-of-mouth (social media)?

Social search has grown to become the new online phenomenon: Search engines are now giving preference to companies based on their social mentions.  In Qualman’s opinion we will not, in future search for products or services as they will find us using social media.

But how does this link with email marketing?

Graphicmail have for some time now, been providing a variety of ways to integrate your email marketing with social media because we want to help you and your business to be prepared for each new wave of online expansion.  Last year we provided social widgets for your email footer, allowing your subscribers to share your newsletters through their social network accounts. Now we’ve added a new social widget reporting tool allowing you to track those who shared what  with who and through which network they shared it.  Finally, we released our new social share feature in our newsletter

We’ve added to our reporting tools so you can now see reports on your Social Widgets activity

As you are by now aware, you can add social widgets to your email footer and link to social networks so your subscribers can now share your newsletter with their friends and connections using their own social profile – just by clicking on the widget.

So what’s in the social widget report?

The decision by your subscribers to share your newsletter within their profile on any of the social networks means that all of their friends and followers can view it too. This means of course that your newsletter and your brand are gaining exposure within an entirely new contacts network.

The report tells you the number of your subscribers who have clicked the widgets to share your newsletter, who they shared with and which network it was – providing you with an easy way to track the level of exposure that your campaigns are getting through social media and this media gets more and more in the spotlight, it is definitely one ‘bandwagon’ to climb aboard.

After you do, let us know your thoughts

Why does this matter?
It matters because it causes unwanted spaces to be added to your email marketing messages potentially breaking the layout of your HTML. Code that used to render perfectly may now render incorrectly.

The change appears to be affecting email marketing messages in Gmail webmail when viewed in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. However it does not appear to have any effect on HTML emails in Gmail webmail viewed in Internet Explorer.

The solution
This issue is similar to a long-standing Hotmail bug. However, although you can fix this by adding ” img {display:block} ” at the top of your email marketing messages in Hotmail, Gmail ignores this code so that fix will not work.

To ensure your HTML emails render the way they should in Gmail the following needs to be added to every image tag in your email marketing messages: ” <img style=”display:block” src=  ”

There is one exception: when you are displaying images directly alongside text, such as when you are wrapping text or putting images inside paragraphs.

Don’t forget your triggered and transactional messages
The change will not just affect new messages you create, it will also affect any triggered or transactional email templates you have already set up

originally posted by TheEmailGuide here