What is Video Email Marketing?

It involves creating, uploading and sending videos in the email messages that you send to your list of subscribers. It provides an opportunity to the sender to interact “face-to-face” with their subscribers rather than getting them to read through lines of text. Videos give a personal touch to your messages and therefore they result in higher click through rates.

How Does Video Email Marketing Work?

To send a video message to your subscribers, you need to be subscribed to the service (like GetResponse) that can let you send videos in your messages. You can use services of sites like YouTube, create your own video using a good software, upload it and then share the link with your subscribers. However, this process is more time-consuming and your message with a link will not look very professional.

An email software provider that offers this feature will easily let you record, upload, store and share your videos with your subscribers. Once your video is stored online, attach it to your message and a screenshot of your video will be automatically inserted in your message, which can then be sent out to your list.

When people receive your message, they will see a screenshot of your video and if they click on it, a new window will open up and your video will start to play.

What Can You Use Video Messages For?

You can take advantage of video messages by recording product demonstrations, training videos, testimonials, special announcements, holiday greetings, event videos and branding presentations etc.

Email marketing should be a part of marketing strategy of every online business in order to gain more revenues. To view the complete list of features offered by top 7 email marketing software providers, go here.

Return Path has a strong reputation and offers services to monitor how well the emails are delivered into the inboxes of subscribers. With this partnership, GetResponse will be able to leverage on Return Path’s expertise and ensure that their customers are able to have higher deliverability rates. Return Path uses several tools and experts that can determine why emails are not delivered or not delivered directly into the inbox and can offer solutions to improve email deliverability.

A constant monitoring is required to ensure higher level of deliverability and with this partnership the customers of GetResponse are going to enjoy better results, without paying anything extra.

For a desktop based software, you will pay a one time fee and download the product and then use your own email server to send emails. The software will help you manage sending a lot of emails but you still have to figure out which company will let you use their servers to send bulk emails. A lot of ISPs will not allow you to send bulk emails through their servers and similar is the case with a lot of ESPs (Email Service Providers).

Even if you are able to find a company that lets you send a lot of emails and you are able to use a desktop based software, you may eventually run into problems and sometimes you won’t even know that a problem exists. For example, most of your emails may end up going to the spam folders or may even bounce back.

If you are serious about email marketing, we recommend that you go for a company that offers remotely hosted email marketing software solution. Such companies actually specialize in sending bulk emails and they do a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure that your emails get delivered. These are also known as autoresponders, although that’s just one of the features that they offer. Here are some of the things that they do, which you will find hard to do with a desktop based software:

- Using static IP addresses
- Building reputation of the IP addresses and their domain names
- Ensuring their IPs and domain names do not become part of “blacklists”
- Keeping an eye on the delivery rates and troubleshooting deliverability issues
- Participating in feedback loop programs offered by most of the Email Service Providers
- Automatically handling bounce-backs
- Automatically handling subscriptions and un-subscriptions

These are just some of the major things that they do, which you may have a hard time doing. Even if you are tech-savvy and can handle a lot of stuff yourself, you may end up spending a lot of time using a desktop based software. And it is quite possible that 50% of your emails may not even reach the inboxes of your subscribers, resulting in a loss of efforts, time and revenue. We will discuss each of these features more in our upcoming articles.

We think that a serious email marketer should let the experts do the email deliveries and take advantage of the companies that specialize in email marketing. We have done a comprehensive comparison of the major online email marketing software companies that you can refer to, and choose the one that’s best suited to your needs.

The “smart” online marketers

I saw a job post from a CEO of a company recently that required a list of leads for the purpose of sending marketing messages via email. There are a lot of companies out there that sell lists and oftentimes they say that they have “opt-in” lists i.e. people who voluntarily provided their email addresses to them. In general, people who do email marketing know that messages should not be sent out to subscribers who did not “opt-in”. So it all sounds good to the buyer of the list and he or she goes ahead and buys a list of a hundred thousand leads. An marketing message is sent out to the list and about 10% of the people buy or sign up for their service or product. Not bad for sending a single message.

The problem begins after sending your first message

The real problem starts when you decide to send a second message. Quite possibly, the second time, most of your messages will end up in the spam folders instead of the inboxes and a number of them may bounce back. if that doesn’t happen the second time, it may happen the third or the fourth time. Let me explain what may and most likely will happen when you send out a bulk email message to a purchased or rented list.

Bulk email delivery explained

I have worked as an email deliverability consultant for about a year. For one of my clients, I had to go through thousands of messages each week and try to figure out why they landed in the spam folders instead of the inboxes. Most of the times I discovered that a URL i.e. a domain name and some contents of a message were not liked by an ISP and any message containing such URL or content always ended up in the spam folder. That happens when a number of subscribers at that particular ISP report the message as spam, the ISP blacklists the URL and some contents in that message and whenever another message containing the same URL and/or contents passes through the ISP spam filters, it is either bounced back or sent to the spam folders.

What “opt-in” really means

That’s because those subscribers never “opted-in” to receive your messages. They only opted in to receive the messages of the person or the company that is the original owner of that subscriber database. When people see something unfamiliar in their inbox, they say to themselves, “I didn’t opt to receive such kind of messages. Don’t spam me again,” and they hit the spam button. We do that all the times. ISP makes a note of that action and if a number of people do that, then they have a good reason to blacklist the contents of that message. Now this is something that is never revealed openly by ISPs, but people who work in the email industry know very well how spam filters work.

Consequently, whenever you send your message that includes your URL and/or your company name, it will always end up in the spam folder of that ISP. This can be really drastic for your online business because it will mean losing a lot of potential customers since a lot of people don’t check their spam folders.

The right way of buying or renting a list

The correct way of sending a message to a paid or rented list is that the list owner should send a message first to all of their subscribers clearly explaining that the list is being sold or rented and what kind of messages they should expect from the new list owner and also explaining the way to opt-out of the list. Unfortunately, this is rarely done.

Take the safer route or hire an expert

The best way to do email marketing is to send messages to your own list that subscribed to you via sign up forms on your own websites. You can also run ads and offer prizes in return for a subscription to your mailing list. There are many other creative ways to build a list than purchasing or renting one. I wouldn’t risk my online business for making short-term money only by sending messages to unknown lists. If you really, really have to send your message to a purchased or rented list that has not been transferred to you the right way (as explained above), then hire a consultant who knows how to get around the spam filters. Otherwise, just take the safer route of building your own list.

If you are using WordPress, then you will know how easy it is to download and activate plugins. They just make your life a little more easier. Instead of copying and pasting code for the sign-up form, you can simply install this plugin and within minutes have your sign-up form displayed on your website. You can dowload the plugin here:

http://blog.getresponse.com/getresponse-wordpress-plugin.html

Installation instructions:

1. Extract all files to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Go to wigets and configure you plugin!

This proves yet again how innovative GetResponse is. Have fun!
Compare the top email marketing software solutions here.

You daily list of tasks most likely includes (in addition to actually running other aspects of your business):

• Managing your email campaigns
• Writing your email newsletters
• Monitoring your email marketing software account
• Monitoring your Twitter account and send tweets
• Monitoring your Facebook and Myspace accounts
• Monitoring your LinkedIn account

If you are a small business owner, so much workload is going to take the toll on your health and eventually on your business.

ConstantContact recently introduced NutshellMail—an online application that helps you monitor four major social media applications: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.

You can sign up for free and can immediately associate your social media accounts with NutshellMail and it starts to send you any updates that you receive at your social media accounts. It will email you a summary of new messages. You can even decide at what time of the day you want to receive the emails.

The tool makes you life a little easier. And if you are still drowning in work, consider hiring a consultant to make you life more easier.

Let me share a story with you first. A few years ago, I stumbled upon the text-to-speech feature offered by Adobe Reader, a free tool offered by Adobe. Most of us have it installed in our computers so that we can open and read the file formats in PDF. I was in a car being driven by my friend and we were going to Canada from USA. He asked me to read a PDF file on his laptop. The laptop wasn’t stable because of the bumpy road and I was having a hard time reading the contents. So I started playing around with the features on Adobe Reader and I came across a “Read Out Loud” option.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Adobe Reader could actually convert the text to speech in the PDF file and we could actually listen to the contents played in a male voice. I could even adjust the pitch, the speed and choose to play it in a female voice. Soon I found out that it was not a feature that was very practical for me because by reading, I could actually browse through the contents much faster.

Email-to-Speech feature offered by GetResponse does the same thing. It is not really a new technology. However, if you are more of a “voicemail person” than an “email person”, then you will probably like this feature. Also, if you check your emails in a mobile device, like a cell phone, then it may be easier for you to listen to the email messages than to read them. For people who read their messages on their mobile phones while driving, which is a dangerous practice (and I have to confess that I have done it too!), Email-to-Speech will be more safer.

There is a monthly fee for this feature that is charged by GetResponse, which may turn off some customers, however, if you do email marketing and if you really want to make sure that your subscribers read your emails, or “listen” to them, then maybe you can try out this feature for a month or two and see if it’s really worth it.

Online Marketers Do Not Measure ROI For Their Social Media Camapaigns

There are many online marketers that are observing their SMM campaigns for only direct measurable results, however doing so will not provide a measurement of ROI. It will only show the improvements in the results of their overall SMM initiatives.

The Measurable Social Media Metrics

Listed below are some SMM metrics that are measurable:

• An increase in the number of Twitter followers
• An increase in the number of Facebook fans
• Analytics: overall Page Views, bounce rates and time spent on site
• Improvements in search rankings
• Backlinks
• Comments, pings and trackbacks

These metrics provide important information that shows whether an SMM campaign is successful, however it does not clearly show the results of the campaign. Most of the businesses and executives look for financial implications of running such campaigns. ROI can be directly measured using business metrics like new sales leads, increased business (sales), decrease in expenses and increased profitability.

How Should You Measure ROI for SMM Campaigns

The best way to measure ROI from your SMM campaigns is to create visual charts (graphs etc.) of the most important metrics that show results over time and then overlay with the key financial results. Here is an example:

Create a graph that contains an increase in the brand or product mentions over a period of several months against the monthly sales. This graph will let you see a direct correlation to an increase in mentions with an increase in sales. Overlay these results from various SMM campaigns and channels. When you look at the graph, you will be easily able to determine which campaigns and channels are having the best impact.