Check out our new plug-in ! See how easy you can synchronise your GraphicMail contacts with your Outlook mailing lists and vice versa. 

How does it work ?
When you add a new contact or edit an existing one in Outlook or your Graphicmail Account, the other will be automatically updated to reflect the same changes.  ( You will be able to synchronise all of your contacts in one sweep, but remember that recipients have to opt in to your email marketing emails, so it’s important to keep a separate email marketing contact list as well as your general contact list in Outlook.)

So, if you’ve been using Outlook to do your email marketing and you’ve decided to sign up with GraphicMail to achieve a more professional approach with your email campaigns, you can now convert your existing list into your GraphicMail account very easily, with no need to do it manually. 

What do I need to do?
Because it works just like any other program on Windows XP/Vista or Windows 7, downloading and installing the plug-in is simple -and it can synchronise with Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010. You can download the plug-in from http://www.graphicmail.co.uk/downloads/outlooksync.zip

If this weren’t enough excitement for one email…….. you can also synchronise your Gmail or Hotmail contacts to your GraphicMail account.

Tomorrow, if you visit your Graphicmail Dashboard ( User Interface ) you'll see that it's a bit more user-friendly! Yes, without any change to the functionality of the application, we’ve changed the design and menu structure and on the way, added a few useful features.

So What’s going to change?
Well, for a start, the new Tips section; when selected, this displays tips relating to the particular section of your account that you're navigating

Another useful tool is our new Account dropdown. 
 

When you click on the dropdown menu you’ll see a display of how many credits are left in your account and when they expire.  If you're getting low, you can simply click on the 'Buy More' button and in seconds your send credits are topped-up.

Hope you enjoy these time-saving improvements!

Have any questions? Feedback? Email us at info@graphicmail.co.uk

We welcome the BETA version of our Inbox Preview.

With such a wide range of email programs to choose (Outlook 2007, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) - do you know if they render your campaigns correctly ?  To add to that list, what about all the range of smartphones and the iPad? Well, to test this question, you could have setup a myriad of email accounts and servers to check this for yourself. You could go to the expense of buying a bundle of smartphones and an iPad too Alternatively, you can now click a button in GraphicMail  and all the testing will be done for you. How? Well, we have just launched a BETA version Inbox Preview tool !
 

Introductory Offer

To help you to test it – we are giving you your first 3 tests free of charge!
Once you decide which bundle suits your best for you – we offer them in 10, 25, 50 and 100. So if you’re need is to preview 10 newsletters, you simply buy a bundle of 10, if you want to preview 100, get a bundle of 100 and so on – it all depends on what you want ; how often you send and how many tests you want to run.
Get a bundle of
•    10 for   £10
•    25 for   £23.75 (5% discount)
•    50 for   £40 (10% discount)
•    100 for £80 (20% discount)

These rates are once off – meaning that you only buy the amount of previews that you need, then, if you want to test more newsletters at a later date, you just buy the additional bundle from within your account ; 10, 25, 50 or 100. You will very quickly agree that this is the best investment that you can make for your email marketing campaign.
As the saying goes……..”You only get one chance to make a first impression”– so use the Inbox Preview to make sure all of your subscribers get an impressive newsletter.

How does Inbox Preview work?

It couldn't be more simple...

1)     Go to “newsletters” in your GM account, then the ‘Inbox Preview’ menu
2)    Select the email that you want to run your test on. (It will take a few minutes to run the test, as GraphicMail sends emails and takes snapshots of the inboxes for you.) 
3)    View the thumbnails of the various email clients. (To view in greater detail, just click on the thumbnail.  This will allow you to see if any changes are needed.)
4)    Make the necessary changes and test again.
Remember this tool is there to help you to save time on testing your emails, but you are responsible for fixing them. We do offer troubleshooting services or we can build templates for you, but this is not included in subscription costs.

Any questions? Comments? Issues? Contact our support team at info@graphicmail.co.uk

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.

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.

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

We are regularly told that one of the very best features of Graphicmail are the free, comprehensive reports available in our reports and statistics as it allows users to track & optimise their email campaigns. Now, guess what……? Our Development Team have been burning that midnight oil again and the fruits of their efforts means that you can now monitor the performance of your SMS/Text campaigns as well!

The SMS delivery statistics are very similar to the reports and statistics currently available to analyse email sends. So now, each time you send a mass SMS/mobile text message, you will be able to access a report to show you how many of your SMS sends were sent, how many are pending, how many were delivered and how many bounced. It also supplied a reason when your SMS doesn’t get through. It's just one other reason to use Graphicmail to ensure that your communications and campaigns work for you.

Everyone tells us that using Graphicmail is as easy as ABC – well here’s another slant on that …… it’s called A / B testing. It’s here to help remove most of the guesswork out of “What to say, what to send “ and to get you some feedback BEFORE you send – how’s that for a great feature ??

Before A / B testing you had to send out your mailing, then check your reports & statistics in order to analyse how the opens/ click throughs compared with previous sends so you could work at improving your next mailout. After all, your newsletters are all designed using a similar template layout aren’t they? Well you now have a friend in Graphicmail = the split test feature

A/B split testing has been developed to help you to assess which strategies and techniques work best for your email marketing campaigns, which, roughly translated, means that you can now test what your subscribers like best.

It works like this; you draw up different variations of your newsletter, then you send each of these different newsletters to separate percentages of your contacts.  This allows you to see how each of those percentages reacted to the different newsletters. You can then select the one that worked the best and send that particular newsletter to the remaining subscribers in that list. 

So, A/B split testing gives you two options:  The first one allows you to select 5 newsletters to compare – maybe they have the same content, but each having a different image or subtle changes in the layout/design or content.  (You don’t need 5 different newsletters in fact, you can just do a couple if you prefer.)  You can, as an alternative, test up to 5 different subject lines for the same newsletter – using different tones or varying the length.

So, if you choose to send the test to 10 % of your mailing list and you want to compare 2 newsletters, then 5 % will receive Newsletter-A and 5 % will receive Newsletter-B.  When you’ve checked which one was most effective/successful, that’s when you send the ‘winning’ newsletter to the remaining 90% of your mailing list and, as the system keeps note of those who received which version of the test, nobody receives your newsletter twice!

Wondering how to assess which one worked the best? 

It’s really easy, and it’s also your choice!  You decide what is most important to you and to your business:  You just check how many recipients clicked to open your newsletter, or how many clicked the link to your website.  The A/B split test automatically assesses according to your settings and you receive a report showing the statistics and the status of your send.

There are no restrictions, you can use A/B split testing as often as you like, in fact, the more you use it to test and improve, the better will be the results of your campaigns, increasing the likelihood that you will stay on top of subscriber trends.  The more, the merrier!

Use these as yet another opportunity to impress your clients with a festive, yet professional, newsletter.

Good luck with all your Springtime promotions and sends!

No doubt you’ve been waiting for this – a further improvement to the Graphicmail email newsletter software – in fact, not one! but TWO great new additions to the Subscriber Segmentation feature- so now, when you’re using numerical values, you can select either the “greater than” or the “less than” option. 

Really handy if you want to capture all of your subscribers who are, for instance, over 21 or over 40 or, perhaps all subscribers who are less than 65.

Maybe a small addition – but it offers great potential – give it some thought !