Look what we found on Deliverability.com - a Christmas poem dedicated to email deliverability.

We thought it might make for some amusing reading amongst all that last-minute xmas mailer sending to your subscribers.

Remember: Santa Claus delivers, and so does GraphicMail! Stand a chance to win an iPod Touch with GraphicMail this Christmas.

Still looking for a snazzy or nostalgic seasonal template? Look no further - pick one of our FREE xmas templates when creating your GrahpicMail newsletter.

‘Twas the month before Christmas, when all through the land,

marketers were scheming to hit year-end plans.


Their e-mails were designed in great detail and care,

in hopes that all of their customers soon would be there.


Mail the entire list. Mail them all!

Mail away! Mail away! Mail away all!"


The executives were nestled all snug in their beds,

with visions of Q4 revenue dancing in their heads.


When back in the office arose such a clatter,

that delivery support ran to see what was the matter?


Away to their reporting tools they flew like a flash,

investigating each client’s mailing to look for the trash.


The data before them on the newly sent mail

gave all indications of why they did fail.


When what to their wondering eyes should appear,

but a slew of bounce codes that no one would endear.


Unknown User! Inactive Account! Mailbox Doesn’t Exist!

Blocks from the ISPs were hard to resist.


If only they’d listened and segmented their data.

Their mailing would have been delivered,  staying off of the ISP’s radar.


Relevance, hygiene, permission and more,

ultimately gets the campaign safely out the door.


Reach out to your clients now and give them a shout.

Make sure they understand what this is all about.


Eliminate unknown users, non-responders, and hard bounces alike, and watch delivery and response rates soar and spike.


It is important to take heed of this trustworthy advice,

because the ISPs know if you’re naughty or nice.


During this important mailing season we must get it right.

Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good-night!

Calling all Joomla users! A new Joomla extension allows you to quickly and easily add a signup form for your GraphicMail mailing list. A Subscription Form on your site is the BEST way for you to gather new subscribers, especially since this method supports opt-in email marketing, an approach that GraphicMail strongly advertises.

After installation, the setup page will ask you for your Login information; you will then be guided to the section where you select the mailing list that you want users to subscribe to and then it is only a matter of a few seconds to add the extension to your site. The time from starting installation to having the form on your site should be less than 5 minutes - absolutely everything can be done via the Joomla Setting; there is no file editing required at all.

Watch this space as there will be future open source Plug Ins from the GraphicMail Lab!

Let us know what you think about it – post a review in Joomla.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla one of the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

You might be a guru at designing email marketing campaigns and making yourself known within the social media sphere, but how much do you really know about on site website optimisation? Search engine optimisation is a combination of techniques employed throughout your website to ensure you move up within the search engine results. Google has a great webmaster SEO document that outlines the various methods to use when designing and developing your website. Even if you already have a website, there are plenty of tips and tricks in the document to help you along.

So, have you been ignoring your website and not bothering to stick to the fundamental rules of search engine optimisation? Is there any point in working tirelessly at promoting yourself online if you have a failing website that actually has so much potential?

Here are a few quick tips on how to improve your rankings. And believe me, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Lets pretend you own a hotel website.

Ensure you have meta tags

Meta tags basically provide a label and a description for a particular page within your website. The meta tags should be different for each page within your website and should contain information about that particular page. Meta tags are the first things that the search engines see; for them it's sort of a summary of the page they are about to look at. For example, on a hotel website the page about bright pink hotels should have meta tags containing keywords about bright pink hotels. Then, your bright blue hotels page should contain keywords relating to bright blue hotels. The words you use in your title MUST be used and repeated in your description meta tag and throughout the copy on your web page!

Consider each page in your website as an individual that needs a name and a description. My company is GraphicMail, and I am a page in that company but I am also an individual that has a name.

Your meta tags are placed in the header tags of your website HTML code; and the meta tags appear in the search engines results.

The meta tags are easy to insert into each page of your website. They must appear after the <head> tag and before the </head> tag. As a matter of fact, you can just copy the below text and copy and paste it into the header tag on each of your pages within your website.

Make sure you don't have duplicate content

Check you do not have duplicate content. I know you own a hotel website and you have supplied marketing copy for your pink hotel to numerous websites; but search engines HATE this and you will be severley penalised! Search engines see you as a school kid who has copied somebody else's work. A quick and easy way to double check for duplicate copy is to grab a few sentences and put it into the search engines using apostrophes. If you enclose text in apostrophes search engines will return results matching exact sentences. So, for your hotel website, type in "I love my blue and pink hotels because of their striking modern rooms and elegant finishes" into the search engine. If the results are returned and they are exactly the same, then modify your content.

Even if you have permission to use copy, tweak it. Make sure you have fresh, original content - and lots of it! Search engines love words!

Get quality links pointing to your website

Links pointing to your website from another website count as a VOTE. Try get as many good quality votes as possible. Make sure links come from are websites that are industry related or news websites. If you are a travel website, find other travel websites that are good quality and ask them to put a link to your website from theirs. Normally they will ask you to do the same for them. It’s called reciprocal linking. Just ensure you don’t exchange links with a bad website ! 

Even more importantly, links that come from authority websites like news and educational insitutions are considered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you are in travel, you might want to try and get a link from Lonelyplanet.com.

Link between pages on your website. Remember, each link is a vote – so why not create internal links between important pages within your website?  If I am on your hotel accommodation page, then write something like “now you have booked your pink hotel accommodation, try book car hire in Greece”. Then link that to your car hire in Greece page!

There are many different ways of having links (votes) pointing to your website. If you own a product, try get a product review done. It’ll boost your brand online and provide links to your website. 

The more quality votes you have, the more chance you stand of winning in the search engines!

Submit articles to free article directories

If you have keywords that you would like your website to rank for, then write a decent article targetting those keywords. Submit the article to ezinearticles.com or any free article directory. Do remember to put your company name at the footer of the article and link it to your website.

If I have created a travel website and used all the important words like hotels, tours, packages throughout the website and also want to rank for keywords like self-drive holidays, then I would write an article using this keyword. It saves having to create a random page within my website.

There are many, many handy ethical tips and tricks when it comes to improving your website rankings. Download the Google PDF mentioned above – it’ll become your bible!

Part 2 of SEO tips coming soon…

Carolynne

GraphicMail once again proves to be right up there with the innovative email marketing people! We have set our lab rats free to go mingle with the social crowd, and they’ve found out that email marketing and social networking are best friends!
Most couples in love will agree that one of your most intimate zones are your feet. Our developers have therefore decided to start showing their newly found relationship through our footer.

We offer you: Social widgets for your email campaign footer!

Whether you are a member of a social network or not, fact is that most of your readers probably are. They are members of virtual social groups such as Twitter and Facebook, that allow them to connect with “friends”, to exchange ideas, product reviews, personal notes etc. The idea here is that when you send your next email newsletter, you add social widgets to your footer so when your subscribers receive your email, they can forward it to their friends via their social network of choice. They will have the option to choose from one or many of the following social networks: Facebook, Twitter, DiggIt, MySpace, Delicious and Google Bookmarks. So. They will receive the newsletter,  click on the social network link in the footer, which takes them to their social network site. They are then prompted to sign in to their social network account, and the newsletter link (URL) will be pasted into their status line or news headline automatically – that’s it!

It’s a simple tool that will have a major word-of-mouth effect for your business and products. What better advertising than having your own clients recommend you to all of their friends, virtual or not!

And how do you set it up in your GraphicMail account?

It’s simple and easy to set up. All you need to do is navigate your way into Settings >> Header/Footer settings and click on the “Email Footer” dropdown. Select “Add social media links on all emails” and you’re done! We’ve only added the major social network platforms for now, but there will be more in the future.

Social networking is doing wonders for our brand. We now announce our promotions, new features, email marketing tips and more on Facebook and Twitter .

We want to help you build your reputation in the social sphere, too and experience further online success, which is why this nifty, extra feature has been added to your list of footer customization choices.

Join “The Book”, Tweet away and Digg your articles…

Santa Claus delivers, and so does GraphicMail! Yes, folks, GraphicMail is playing Santa this year and has decided to give away some awesome prizes to a random selection of our Twitter followers and Facebook fans. To stand a chance of winning an iPod Touch, free accounts and custom-made templates with the GraphicMail Santa, simply follow us on Facebook or Twitter before 24 December 2009.

Good Luck!
The fine print ...

Put the Ho back into your email marketing. Our designer Santa has whipped up some festive new templates for you – they are free and we show you how to have fun with them.

How do I get them?

If you don't have a GraphicMail account, it's about time you get one and become one of the cool kids on the block. If you're already a cool kid, simply sign into your GraphicMail account and click on Newsletters > Select Templates. The templates are categorized, and you’ll find the xmas templates peeking out of Santa’s bag at the top of our library. To choose your unique template, tick the check box provided and click on “add templates to my account”. A green message will appear at the top of the page, notifying you that the template has been uploaded. In the menu, click on Newsletter > Create.  Give your newsletter a name and select your new template from the dropdown. 

I want different images in my xmas templates - how do I do that?

Sure. You will need to go into the editor for this. Choose the newsletter with your xmas template and click on “edit”. Select an image by clicking on it, and then click the image button in the toolbar. A popup window will appear; displaying the attributes and current settings of your image. Height, width, alignment, image border and vertical spacing are the changes that can be made to the image.
In the popup window there is also a feature that allows you to replace/insert and upload images from your hard drive into your newsletter and straight from your image folder. You will need to click "update" to complete the process.

Never mind the pictures, I want a whole different template - can I design my own?

Well, this is a bit like wrapping your own present, but sure, if you don’t like surprises and prefer being in the know, you are more than welcome to design your own template. You can create a template in HTML (use Notepad if you’re an old guru, and an HTML software like Dreamweaver if you need a little help), or you can upload your template directly from Word. You can design your entire newsletter in a Word document and import it into your account. How do you do that? Go into “import/export” under Newsletters > Editing.  Under the "Get HTML from" section, click on the button "Word". It’s a kind of magic….

Did you know?

Choose from over 100 FREE HTML newsletter templates for different occasions, seasons and industries
Have a unique template designed by our inhouse experts – find out how.

GraphicMail is now a member of the Return Path Certification program. Our email practices have been audited and approved by Return Path. We are part of the largest, most respected whitelist program in the industry. As a program member, we are part of a network of trust that covers more than 1.3 billion mailboxes!

A colleague of mine decided to do a bit of research and compare "once off" purchased marketing software with the GraphicMail hosted email marketing solution. Before making assumptions about once off marketing software, we decided to do a bit of product testing to see if going the hosted route really is better. It only seemed fair to gain a bit more insight and arm ourselves with knowledge before vigorously blogging away about the subject. Truth is, although a hosted solution is not for everyone, we still find it far more useful than a once off solution because of its advanced and progressive functionality.

We stumbled across the following during our testing.

1) Templates on once off programs seem to be outdated. Hosted solutions must stay ahead of their online competitors, which is why you’ll find updated template libraries and new templates added for various seasonal holidays.

2) Once off programs don't seem to have advanced features, just the basics of newsletter creation and sending are available. GraphicMail, for example, offers extra features such as a microsite (an archive of old newsletters), RSS feeds, API's, an ROI calculator and a subscriber segmentation tool.

3) Only basic tracking and statistics tools were available with purchased packages. You could only track new subscribers, unsubscribes and bounces. GraphicMail allows you to track links clicked and how many sends were rated as spam. The hosted solution provides an opportunity to really drill down into subscriber behavior, allowing you to send a more targeted campaign.

4) Not possible to integrate your customer database, CRM, CMS, or e-commerce shopping cart with an API on a purchased package. With the GraphicMail API you are able to integrate GraphicMail's functionality into your existing application or website.

5) Once off programs have to be downloaded onto your computer, which always bares a risk of inviting a virus to your PC. It also takes up memory on your PC. With GraphicMail all you need to do is log into the application.

6) There are extra costs if you need the purchased product on more than one PC. In other words, you will need a multi license version. This can end up being fairly costly, not to mention that you cannot access your account from anywhere else except those specific computers. All that is needed with a hosted application is your username, passwords and access to a PC.

Not all email marketing software packages are the same. Some are more advanced than others and they vary in price. When cross comparing various purchased email marketing packages, consider signing up for free trials with hosted solutions. That way you can compare the various features and what best suits your needs. Make your decision an informed one - this is your brand you are promoting!

Below are just a few of the innovative, forward thinking features that GraphicMail, a hosted email marketing solution, can offer you:

• Flexible monthly and pay as you go pricing structures and a FREE trial
• Over 100 free email newlsetter templates in the template library which are updated regularly. New templates are added for festive holidays.
• The in house design team will create custom made templates for an extra cost.
• A WYSWIG editor for creating and modifying newsletter templates. Easy to use for those with and without HTML skills.

• Updated help center, FAQs, video tutorials and a knowledgeable in house support team (There is no outsourcing of support!)
• No downloading of application necessary, no licenses required and you can access your account from anywhere in the world.

• Build and manage databases of mailing lists from within the GraphicMail application.
• Upload, store and control all of your images and documents within the GraphicMail interface.

• Send thousands of emails from within the application, instead of slowing down your own server. 
• Advanced email campaign tracking and statistics. Drill down into specifics of your report such as which subscriber clicked on a link and monitor how many people have opened your newsletter. 
  
• Profile your subscribers and create segments based on certain criteria. This functionality allows you to send more targetted email campaigns.
• Compliant with US can-spam standards and the EU privacy directive.
• Customize footers with your logo
• Each user gets a Microsite where all your archived newsletters are kept. A microsite is basically a mini website. It will look something like this: www.graphicmail.com/hollywoodcats
  
• Become a reseller of the GraphicMail product.
• Advanced features such as RSS to email, automated trigger emails, schedule sends, importing databases are available.
• Boost your brand online by submitting a case study or testimonial and receive links to your website and a company logo on the GraphicMail website.
• Once you have an account with GraphicMail, you will access to numerous promotions