We’re making it possible!

Who “likes” your email-marketing newsletter?

We’ve now made it possible for you to insert a “like” button in the header of your email newsletter.  So now, when one of your readers clicks on the displayed button, your newsletter will automatically appear in their Facebook news feed – which will tell all their friends that they “liked” it too!  And because (of course), their friends will also be able to click on the link and read your newsletter, you achieve the perfect addition to ( or the first step on the ladder to ) your viral marketing campaign - and your email marketing.

You’ll find this in your account under >> Setup and Options located in the  >> Header/footer settings.

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.

It may be thanksgiving in America on 25th November but we are hoping you'll also be thankful for our changes to the Addressbook that are due to go live on the same day.

With all the lists, datasets, addressbooks, contacts, records, segmentation etc it may be that it all gets confusing and some may lose track of what does what and where to upload what, where and how - and what is the difference between a mailing list and a dataset anyway??

Well we've decided to simplify the whole process and improve the look, feel and navigation of the addressbook

So what have we done? In a nutshell we have simplified the way that the Mailing list and address books work. We've combined them both into one section within your account. This new section will be called "Lists and Contact" and you will be able to manage all you mailing lists and subscriber details from this single section within your account

We've also added a default dataset that will be extremely easy to use and will be pre-populated with the most commonly used fields, like Name, Job title, company etc. However if you are one of many advanced users you will still have the ability to tailor-make one or more datasets to your specific needs

Why have we done it? To make it easier to mange, manipulate and navigate all your lists and contacts

What does it all mean? Mailing lists + address Book = "Lists and Contacts"

What do I need to do? Nothing!

When will I see these changes? Thursday 25th November

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

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.

Kick off the new school year with the right gear:

our FREE back to basics email marketing guide AND…

New back to school templates!

These are perfect for all your back to school promotional mailings.  Simply log into your account and find them in our template library.

Happy mailing!

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.

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.