To recap: A landing page is the webpage you direct traffic to from a specific email, ad or piece of marketing. Its goal is to convert that traffic into sales or sign ups.

Be Personal

When designing your landing pages the golden rule is to be personal. People like to buy from people, not computers, or websites. It’s inbuilt in all of us to relate better to other people. The more you personalise your message and offer, the more you increase the connection with your visitor. Why? Because it increases their comfort and trust when buying from you. A great example is to add your phone number to your site, as Brandon Eley points out.  Once a visitor realises there is a person on the other end of the phone to help, IF needed, conversions increase. The knowledge that someone is there to help is enough to reasure the user.

Likewise, if there is any way you can make your message more personal and targeted for your page visitor the better. At the most basic, you need to know where in the world they are coming from and what site or advert they are visiting from. Are they an existing customer? Do you know their name?  Can you tweak your message to include these details?

Link the landing page to the advert

Here is an example of an ad for Eircom Broadband on Google. Note the wording and information contained. Yet when you click through to the landing page, pictured underneath, where is the mention of the “Value Business Bundles”?

Repeat the Promise

You need to repeat the wording of the original ad and give a clear call to action. Repeat the wording and the graphics. It should be obvious to the visitor that they have come to the right page, with the offer they were expecting. The key point here is, you made a promise in the initial advert so you must fulfill that promise on the landing page.

Scantastic

Make sure your pages are scanable. Here is the text from the first third of an Amazon product page for Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow.

This amount of information should be overwhelming but Amazon didn’t become the leading online retailer by confusing and overwhelming shoppers. Here is the designed Amazon landing page for Purple Cow. What a difference.

You can see now how design and formatting of the content makes information much clearer and easier to find. This example highlights one of the misunderstandings of landing page optimisation. Your pages do not have to be short to be effective. It doesn’t even have to be that simple.  Your landing page needs to be long enough, detailed enough and clear enough to make the sale. It can be 1 page or 5 pages. No one size fits all, so you will have to test what works for you.

An interesting side note regarding the addition of review on Amazon. You have probably heard how reviews increase sales. But recent data from Amazon has shown that products with both positive and negative reviews sell better then ones with positive reviews alone.

The reason attributed to this is twofold. First, we are a suspicious bunch and we don’t trust something that everyone gushes about. The second reason is that negative reviews are not necessarily bad. A bad review from a large corporate CEO might tell a small business CEO that this is the book to buy.

Wording

Simple word changes can have a huge impact. 37 Signals wrote about some of the wording variations they tried on their Highrise CRM  sign up page. Here are three types used with the percentage increase in conversions for each one.

Their original wording had the worst conversion rate “30-day Free Trial on All Accounts.”  Variation no. 2 – “Sign-up takes less then 60 seconds. Pick a plan to get started!” gave a 30% better conversion rate. When you are attracting the level of traffic that 37Signal products do, 30% means a significant jump in revenue.

How to increase conversion with four amazing words.

Jason Fried said that they tested various phrases on the Highrise homepage for the call-to-action button. They had originally used various permutations of “Free Trial” and “Sign-up for Free Trial”. Then they tested the phrase “See Plans and Pricing” this resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups. That’s right. 200%.

Fried believes it’s because people are afraid if they click a link that says “Free Trial” then they’ll somehow automatically sign up for something and be trapped. However, “See Plans and Pricing” encouraged them to explore, without the fear of commitment.

Euocottage Case Study

This landing page from Eurocottage highlights a common failing for websites where they ask for too much information upfront. Ask for the least amount of information and at each step and clearly explain why you need this information in the first place. Explain to the user what the benefits are by imparting this information.

We redesigned this new landing page for Holiday Cottage search site Eurocottage.com. We simplified the process and gave users the information they needed to trust the sign up process. The new page is clearer and easier to use. It’s friendly and welcoming and is much more inviting to users. We are testing the new landing page at the moment. It will be interesting to see the performance rates for the new page. We will keep you posted.

Tools for testing

There are a few must have tools if you decide to try and measure and optimise your landing pages. Website Optimiser is a specific tool from Google for doing A/B and multivariate testing. If you use only one tool for testing this is it. Use Google analytics of course for basic numbers and tracking goal funnels.
5 Second test is an interesting site for checking what parts of your page people actually notice.

Be a pirate!

Be a pirate for your user. Sites like Amazon spend millions of Euro in usability and conversion tracking every year. Look at what the successful sites in your market are doing and copy them. No need to reinvent the wheel but try and make your own improvements. Landing page optimisation is not rocket science it is just a series of small simple tests. Devote an hour a week to it and track your progress.

Why bother?

You can spend 6 months building a level of traffic converting at 1% and to double that turnover, you can spend another 6 months.
Or you can simply test and tweak the landing page to convert up to 2% or 3% in a fraction of the time.

Recommended Reading

Seth Godin The Big Red Fez
Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
Landing Page Optimization – Tim Ash
eConsultancy
Marketing Experiments
Google Website Optimizer
Which Test Won

Image above from Scurvy Pirates

Webinar Transcript

SLIDE 1
Today, I’m going to tell you about email marketing. It’s probably not the shiniest, sexiest form of marketing that you have ever heard of today, but I can tell you it works.

Behind every good social network and twitter account there are email notifications updating you as to what’s happened.

And there’s a very good reason why email works so well as it does and that’s because almost everybody has it. There are 1.4 billion email addresses currently in the world and at least half of them are checked daily. So it is well worth looking at.

SLIDE 2
Email works best in two ways that I’m going to discuss with you today. One, look at it as a customer retention tool and two, look at it for sales and campaigns. I’m going to ask for a bit of audience participation here for the next step, I’m going to ask you all to stand up, please. Just to give you an idea, if you are sending out an email campaign, what kind of numbers you can expect and all the rest of the talk today is about how you can influence those numbers.

For the case of today each of you stands for 10 people. So we are sending out a campaign to 1000 people – for a particular sales campaign for a particular offer. So you send it out to a 1000 people, actually you’re going to test it first. You are going to send out two versions of the campaign, one to a 100 people and one to another 100 people and you’re going to see which gets the best response.

So from that you are going to lose 200 people. Can I ask the back two rows to sit down please? The best message and best creative you’re going to send out to 800 people. Of those 800 people, 200 will open it, so can I ask the next three rows to sit down please?

Of those 200 people who open it, 8 are going to click on your campaign, so can I ask just the front row to stand up and everyone else to sit down.

Of those 8 people, just one person is going to buy from you. So can I just ask one person to stand up? The rest of you may sit down.

So that’s one person of a campaign of a thousand newsletters that you just sent out. But it costs you about ten euros to send out that campaign, they have just bought a weekend from you for about 500 Euros. So, for an investment of about 10 Euros you’ve just brought in 500 Euros and that is from one email campaign that you just sent out. I hope you’re sending out a hell of a lot more campaigns throughout the year

I use that sort of as a baseline for you and also if you are using email and you are not achieving those kinds of results you need to seriously look at what you are doing. Email marketing offers one of the best returns on investment for online marketing. It is exceeded only by search engine marketing. Below that, at almost half the value are your paper clicks, Google analytics – it is direct, it is personal , it can be highly targeted and it is a really highly effective tool. So I am going to present ten checklists for you, and you can get them at the end of the talk, print them out, stick them up in your office and look at them every month that you are doing your email marketing.

SLIDE 3
First are you capturing subscribers everywhere? How many people are walking through your hotel today, and how many people are you actually getting email addresses for. You can get them in a lot more places than you might think. How many people came to your website today? Are you capturing their email addresses? People are going to huge efforts to try and find you, whether online or offline, they are going through the effort to get to your hotel. Grab on to them, don’t let them go – please. Eighty percent of people that visit your website never return again. Find a way to grab a hold of them. Capture them on the web, by phone, reception, bar, spa, golf if you do that. Capture them at dinner, have forms ready in different places and train your staff to ask: “I might not have the answer now and I know there is something you are interested in – how about we send you updates when it is on again?” – every opportunity you have.

And then if you run out, don’t just look inside your own hotel, look outside. Is there any way outside your hotel you can capture subscribers, linking them with different organizations, putting out offers, competitions.

Some of the most effective ways of getting subscribers is of course, ask, captured through your website. Look at co-registration deals with other organizations so you can share subscribers. Offer a course…I know one hotel that did very well by offering a wine appreciation course, purely by email. What they did is they repurposed all the content and information about the particular wines they were stocking from their wholesaler and they repackaged it as a course – one newspaper ad, very cheap, lots of subscribers. A lot of long term business from those subscribers.

Put out an e-book I know another B+B and what they have done is they have traveled around to all the local attractions and put together an ebook that can be downloaded for their area, giving them a tour guide. They put it on their web page and you have to subscribe to get access to that.

Ask for referrals from existing subscribers. Offer free stuff and any emails you are sending out, mention your email newsletter.

SLIDE 4
Just some examples of subscribe forms that are out there at the moment, I wont name these guys …it is a terrible subscribe form. They are asking for too many details and there are too many obstacles. Basically look at the fact that every additional element you are asking of subscribers, you are going to lose some of them. But at the same time, you need to try and capture as many details as you can from those subscribers as possible, and I will tell you how you might be able to do that.

SLIDE 5
I put this as a much better example of a subscribe form. They have got a reason as to why you would want to subscribe and they have a competition to enter in to stay in their sister hotel. If there was any suggestion there it would be to make a bigger pizzazz about the competition to get the subscribers, make it pop!

A particular technique for catching subscribers was from a hotel in the US called the Broadmoore Hotel and what they did was a trade conference and they offered a competition for a free digital camera. It was a particular trade conference for people organizing events. They wanted to promote their meeting facilities. So what they did was a competition for a camera and they got about 300 entries. And they set up a series of 3 email newsletters. The first email newsletter was to tell them “thank you for entering our competition, we will let you know your results shortly, also here is some information about other services we offer.” They did a follow up letter with “There is a winner/ come check our website to find out if you won and also, here are some other services we offer.” And then the third email was, “Sorry you didn’t win/ Here is another competition/ All you need to do is sign up to be contacted about details about particular offers we have.”

They spent around 15 thousand setting up the booth and the competition, and in return they brought in about 250 thousand dollars worth of business from that individual campaign and they still have the subscriber base to build upon going forward.

SLIDE 6
In terms of detail and capturing lots of information, there is a lot of information you can capture without asking. Email, first name, brilliant. In terms of city and country, with a little bit of basic technical know how, you can capture that information from their IP address. So there is no reason to ask for those if you can find the information any other way.

SLIDE 7
Have you asked for permission – which is always the big question. Of course you have to ask permission to mail someone, but there are two definitions of spam: The law and then the real world. The law says you can email another business if you have had any contact with them at least once. If they ask to be unsubscribed, you have to provide unsubscribe information. That is essentially it. If you have no business contact with them, you cannot contact them and if they have not asked, you cannot contact them. I would actually say to disregard the law – not in terms of spamming everyone, in fact quite the opposite. You have a new concern in that everyone you email now, and all their email clients have a big huge “this is spam” button on top of their email client. If anyone presses that, it all feeds back to the ISPs and it will build up a profile on your email domain that you are sending out from. If enough people click that, it will affect all of your business emails. People can forget that they subscribed. People use this as the easiest way to unsubscribe and it is going to affect your business. So it is important that you are sending out relevant information, that they clearly did subscribe and that you are providing information that they are going to want in the future.

There is a third concern regarding spam laws, and that is that you need to be concerned with the spam laws in the country you are sending to. So if you are sending to the US, subscribers in the US, their spam complaints come under their law. So please make sure that you have permission and that you are sending them good content.

SLIDE 8
Make sure you are capturing the details of the right person. You may be getting my credit card details and name on the booking but it is my wife who decides how the credit card gets spent.

SLIDE 9
If there is only one thing you do with your emails lists, do this: segment your users into tastes, events, dates, anything you can to narrow them down into particular groups. It is one of the most powerful and most underused aspects of email marketing. I suggest breaking them down into tourists and local, if you do a lot of local business. In terms of tourists, try and find out where they are from, the reason for travel, the dates they are traveling on and services used. So if they are heading over on a particular date, chances are they are going to have holidays the same time next year, so start sending out a campaign shortly before their holidays. If they are coming over for a particular date, find out why and maybe there is a chance you can attract them again next year. If they are coming over for your spa then you will know they loved your spa – so send them out offers just for that spa. If they are coming over for golf, same thing. One hotel group I was working with was actually monitoring at what particular time subscribers were actually opening their mail so that they would send a campaign again next week or next month at that same particular time because they knew chances are the people are sitting in front of their computer at that time.

Local, again, why, are they there for a birthday, are they there for an anniversary, it happens every year, are there particular activities are there some sports on TV, you can talk to them again next week when there is another football match, you can bring them in.

So please segment your subscribers. It is an amazingly powerful tool and it will actually drive your marketing, going forward.

SLIDE 10
Tell them you are not dead. There are three types of email marketing and the first is the email to tell them you are not dead, because if they don’t hear from you every month, they are going to forget you and they are going to think you are dead. I am suggesting that you should be sending out at least two different campaigns every month.

One is the “I’m not dead” email – “Hi, we are here, hope you are well, just touching base.” And the other is a particular sales targeted campaign which is based on your segmented list. View the “I’m not dead” email as a customer retention tool to build trust and relationship. And when you build that trust and relationship it will make your sales emails so much more effective and powerful.

Brand it, Keep it short and sweet, about 3 short paragraph articles, you don’t have to go into any great depth. Make sure it is useful and as was discussed earlier today, put in links to your other social media, your Facebook account your Twitter account that people can connect with. People like connecting with you through different channels.

In terms of what type of content you can be sending, Kieran earlier, at Ireland.com handed you a terrific tool as far as I’m concerned, the first time I had seen his talk today. But sending you information on local events, on local content, on things to do, things to see – that is almost providing all of your content for you that you can send out to particular subscribers. That is going to save you a huge amount of time.

There are free information, free content and articles out there, one is Ezinearticles.com, various quality in those articles but you can use them for free. There are images out there, Istockphoto.com is pretty cheap per image or you can use Flickr.com with creative commons which are basically images that people upload to Flickr, allowing other people to use them, you just have to link to their website.

SLIDE 11
Send out seasonal messages /how to guides.

SLIDE 12
There is a great video on Youtube on how to pack like a butler, which has 42 thousand views on Youtube. It’s Youtube. Why don’t you imbed that on your site and link to it from your email.

SLIDE 13
Cooking tips as the Kilkenny River Court did from their chef.

Of course, travel tips

SLIDE 14
Personal stories. The Shellbourne has one about a baby being born in the room.

SLIDE 15
You can aggregate news and send it on. Just attribute to where the news came from.
Break down reports into plain English for travelers.

SLIDE 16
Fun news, I know a good hotel that sends out a Good News Thursday. People love receiving that. Or share your own news.

SLIDE 17
Top ten lists are very effective, I think that keeps the TV station Channel 4 in business with their top 100 comedy moments every Christmas.
Share your expertise.

SLIDE 18
Keep it simple. Add value. If you can’t write 3 articles, write 1. But make sure it is of use to the people you are sending it to. Be useful, be personable.

Don’t spam and don’t attach big attachments. I got one from a hotel recently and it was a 10mb download. I was downloading it on one of the little Three mobile dongles and it took ages. I don’t want to know how much it costs and it was just a menu for the restaurants. It was very very disappointing. Please don’t do that.

SLIDE 19
The second campaign you send out each month is a targeted offer or offers, depending on your groups. After segmenting, this should be very very easy – because it is going to be driven by the data. You are going to know every given month whose birthdays are coming up.

If you are checking in with the rest of the hotel, you know who has not played golf in a while. Send them a reminder. Send them an offer. If they have played golf a lot, send them an invite to invite friends along.

You know when Mothers day is coming along. You know when people have taken holidays so you know when their holidays are due again next year..

SLIDE 20
Send a clear targeted offer to these people. If you have concerts on, send them an offer. If you know what particular music they have been to in the past.

SLIDE 21
Easter and Mothers Day day of course.

SLIDE 22
Even language can be targeted by. This is what we have done ourselves which is sent out in English French, Dutch, and German

But don’t target it too much because we had one hotel and golf resort send out a great offer for the ladies night for the over 50s. And no one replied because they did not want to admit they were over 50.

SLIDE 23
You have heard a lot of mention about social media today. It can actually be a hugely valuable tool for market research to help you decide when you are sending out your email. I set this up about a week ago on Twitter, through the Twitter search. Twitter search gives out a little RSS feed, Mark was showing you, and you can import that link into Google reader.

Google reader after a week will show you these nice charts of when people mentioned that particular term, last week, last month and when during the day most people were mentioning that term. That gives you the data of when to send your particular campaign. Hugely valuable.

SLIDE 24
Automate your marketing. There is a huge amount you can automate out there. You can set up your mails to go out 12 months, 24 months in advance and you can even put them in a cycle because people aren’t going to remember what they got two years ago.

So we are talking what – 12 particular articles set up, or 24, and you do it once. You set up the automation through tools I will show you later that will do this. Then you sit back and concentrate on other parts of your marketing.

For bookings, events, locations, look at setting up an automated series of mails that can go out, associated with that.

An auto responder. Most of the email marketing tools do provide this as part of their feature set. And it is basically that when someone’s email address is added a set series of emails, for a particular amount of time is sent out to that user, one after the other.

SLIDE 25
I was at a hotel just about two weeks ago and I was looking closely at the customer journey in preparation for this and I was looking at how I might improve it and I so I booked the hotel and I just got a confirmation email and not a whole lot more. What I think should have happened, was that as soon as I booked, I got a follow up thank you email and then immediately an upsell email to try and offer me a deal on a dinner that night that I am staying, local events, do deals with local organizations. But I definitely should have been upsold because I want to have a good time when I am there. It is not really a sell if you are providing opportunities for me to have a really good time while I’m there.

Just before I arrived I should have gotten an email confirming all of my details, how to get there, my travel itinerary and possible other things I could see while I m there. And then afterwards I definitely should have gotten a thank you email and can we send you more information, check out our social media channels.
That is just my suggestion of a way that could have been used more effectively.

Again, as I just touched on there, upsell your customers and there are huge amounts of opportunities you have. When someone’s making that booking they have the credit card in their hand, they have trusted you enough, you want to take advantage of that, they want to have a good time. Help them have a good time by providing additional services. You are in a great position; you have the customer on the hook.

Upsell dinner, spa, breakfast, an upgrade in hotel room, but make the offer time limited in order to get them to respond very quickly.

SLIDE 26
This is an example from the Luxor in Las Vegas after a booking they send out information on their restaurant and their dinner.

SLIDE 27
I hope you are tracking your return on investment. For hotels, this is a general number, an average number for hotel rates. Expect an open rate of 27.5 percent,. a click through rate of 7.17 percent A spam rate of .08 percent and an unsubscribe rate of around . 49 percent.

SLIDE 28
The more you segment your lists and the more you target your messages, the more those numbers are going to go up. This is an example of the many tools that are out there. This is an example of the data they can give back to you. So you send out a campaign and this will give you information on who opened, what bounced, when they opened it, what they clicked, who they forwarded it to, and you can actually see that the three spikes in the graph are the mornings of Australia, here and the US.

Typical example of what the tools can provide: subscriber management, email templates, editing, personalization, sending, tracking.

SLIDE 29
Of the tools that are out there, here is a quick list. Toddle, which is our own service, will help you do the creative, the rest will help you do the sending, the managing. Expected costs: Vertical Response costs 10 dollars per month for about 500 subscribers. And that is subscription based whereas Campaign Monitor does per subscriber, so it is .01 cent per email you send it to.

There are web based applications or desktop based applications or groupmail which is another great service will charge a one off cost of 139 dollars

SLIDE 30
That is mostly it. Just manage, track and measure what you are sending out and make improvements each month.

If someone forwarded to a friend, why did they? If someone clicked on a link, why? How can you do more of that? Why do they unsubscribe and basically make next months email better.

SLIDE 31
I am over time so I am going to just flick through a few creative examples that I came across, I really like this particular design for an offer. It is an example of a competition with a clear call for action. A very clear offer and very few distractions and for a spa resort , nice how they made the design very effective for what they were offering.

SLIDE 35
That is it, Thank you very much. I put together a top ten list for you. You can download it from the website here. I suggest hanging it up and going it through every month. Thank you very much.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is the webpage you direct traffic to from a specific email, ad or piece of marketing. Its goal is to convert that traffic into sales or sign ups.

On the right is a landing page:

If I asked you right now to hand over your credit card would you do it?
Feeling nervous? Why? What do you mean you need more information?

Some information you are looking may include:

• Who are you?
• What am I buying from you?
• Is the service/product good?
• Do I want it?
• Do I want it now?
• Can I trust you?
• Who else thinks this is a good deal?

The tricky bit is to get the balance right; giving just enough information to get the conversion. Include too little or too much information, or add unclear messaging and you start loosing sales.

Typical components of a landing page are:
The typical components of a Landing Page are:

• The Primary offer
• The primary offer
• The total solution being offered
• Headline
• Sales copy
• Image(s)
• Pricing
• Call-to-action
• And anything to indicate a limit (number, time) to the offer.

Here is an example of a landing page for the site Rudder.com. It comes from a case study by WiderFunnel.

In this case study Rudder redesigned their landing page to try and increase conversion.
The resulting page managed an amazing 45% increase in conversion.
So how did they manage it?

Here is the new landing page. Can you spot a few differences?

An article over on I am a landing page designer offers a good explanation why this new page converts so well.

• The redesigned page swapped the main header copy and image positions – copy on the right, image on the left.
• The value statements are in bullets along with check marks. An image of a lock is placed next to the security statement.
• Lots of white space is used above the button to draw in the eye.
• Button size is increased and the call-to-action text is much more descriptive.
• A testimonial is placed directly underneath the button, as it gives that extra push.
• 2009 Webby Awards nominee icon is included along with an iPhone App notice and iPhone image.
• As Featured in the Press, icons of CNBC, TechCrunch and Cnet, logos added to the bottom of the page.
• The Truste icon was removed.
• McAffee and Verisign logos are also added.

In summary, adding these visual references and clarifying the layout of the page gives the user confidence in signing-up for this service. Benefits are clearly outlined and, most importantly, we know that Rudder is free and secure; a vital element, not to be ignored when dealing with issues of personal finance. Rudder has since redesigned again.

Redesigning order pages for maximum conversion


Here is an example of an order page for a free Audiobooks Catalogue featured over on Which Test Won. The old version is on the right, new redesign is below.

As you can see, in the redesign, an image of what you are signing up for is added. The most interesting thing about this new page is what’s been taken away. Sometimes simplifying things is the best course of action. In this case, the new Landing Page is much better off for this decision, as users know exactly what this form is for. You must be absolutely sure that every item, piece of text or image you add to the order page, adds to a visitor’s knowledge about why they’re signing-up.

In the first page version, the left and right column had no relevance to the purpose of the page. At the very least, they distracted a visitor or at worst, led a visitor to click away from the order page without taking any action. The result? The new order page resulted in 42% more visitors registering for a free catalogue, a dramatic increase.

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

The answer then, lies in not making a form ask for fewer details but just enough to secure the sign-up. Shorter pages are not the goal either. They need to be long enough to make a sale. See how SEOMoz added $1million to their revenue with a longer sign-up page. What converts best, on any landing page, is clarity above all else.

Part two can be found here.

Give us a shout on info@toddle.com if you would like to discuss improvements to your landing pages.

]]> http://www.toddle.com/stuff/landing_page_optimization/feed/ 7 http://www.toddle.com/stuff/copy-and-paste-your-email-newsletter-to-send-it/ http://www.toddle.com/stuff/copy-and-paste-your-email-newsletter-to-send-it/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:22:31 +0000 Alan http://www.toddle.com/stuff/?p=893 Occasionally emails do not arrive after you send them from toddle, and due to restrictive email filters in companies, they may not arrive as beautiful as they should. It is rare but it does happen.
So we have done some testing and have an alternative way for you to import your finished Toddle newsletter into your email client ready to send to your subscribers.
So far this is tested on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail (Windows Live) and Outlook 2003. This does not work with Outlook 2007 unfortunately. We are doing further testing with the other email clients.
• After you hit the SEND button in Toddle, go to the HTML version of your newsletter. You can find the link in Advanced Sending Options in Toddle under the sent button.



• When the new page opens displaying your newsletter, click EDIT > SELECT ALL and then COPY. This copies the entire newsletter into your clipboard.



• Open your email app and start a new message. Make sure your editor is set to HTML or Rich Text. Select EDIT > PASTE.



Now your email newsletter is ready to send to your clients.
If you have any problems with this or you are using this in any other email client not mentioned above please let us know how you get on.

]]> http://www.toddle.com/stuff/copy-and-paste-your-email-newsletter-to-send-it/feed/ 0 http://www.toddle.com/stuff/use-twitter-to-tell-you-when-to-send-your-email-newsletter/ http://www.toddle.com/stuff/use-twitter-to-tell-you-when-to-send-your-email-newsletter/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:53:24 +0000 Alan http://www.toddle.com/stuff/?p=848 You can get vastly different results from your email newsletter depending on what day and time you send it.
Guesswork, testing different times/days and carefully monitoring your email stats is normally the best way to find out but i have a great shortcut for you…Twitter!

This is how you do it.

• First, go to http://search.twitter.com and type in a few keywords related to your industry. In this example the marketing manager of a hotel wants to target people looking for ‘hotels in Dublin’. This search shows all the people on Twitter talking about and looking for Hotels in Dublin.



• Twitter very nicely gives you an RSS feed of these results in the top right hand corner. Copy the URL of this link.
• If you have not already, sign up for a Google reader account.
• Click the ADD A SUBSCRIPTION button in Google reader. Then paste in the URL of the Twitter RSS feed.



• Click SHOW DETAILS in the top right corner and you will see a blank graph. After a few days this will show some fantastic data on what day of the week, month and time that people where talking about “Hotels in Dublin”.
• This is a great time to send out an email offer about Hotels in Dublin.





Happy emailing.
Tell us how you normally find the best time to send your email?

Thanks to Chris S Penn for this great tip.

]]> http://www.toddle.com/stuff/use-twitter-to-tell-you-when-to-send-your-email-newsletter/feed/ 28 http://www.toddle.com/stuff/sending-your-toddle-newsletter-with-awebercom/ http://www.toddle.com/stuff/sending-your-toddle-newsletter-with-awebercom/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:20:48 +0000 Alan http://www.toddle.com/stuff/?p=509 Aweber.com helps you in creating lasting customer relations though effective Email newsletters, Autoresponders, RSS to email and other email marketing tools.

Sending your Toddle newsletter through Aweber.com is fairly easy. Below I will explain all the steps invloved in the process.

• First, sign up with Awebber.com or log in to your existing account.



• Once logged in, click on Messages, then Broadcast and then on Create Broadcast Message button.



• Now, go to the HTML version of your Toddle newsletter. You can find the link in Advanced Sending Options in Toddle. Right click on the newsletter and view page source. Copy all of the code.



• Choose Basic Plain template in Templates. Enter your email Subject, and paste your HTML code in the text area for HTML message under Source tab.



• You can preview what your newsletter looks like in the Preview tab.



• Scroll down. You will find an area for text version of the newsletter. You will find the text link in Advanced Sending Options in Toddle. Copy all that text and paste it in Plain Text Message.





• Scroll down and enter additional information required for sending your newsletter. e.g. sending schedule, who to send to and so on. Then click on Save Broadcast Message. Your message will be sent immediately or saved for later according to the schedule options you chose.
• This is all there is to sending your Toddle newsletter through Aweber.com.
]]> http://www.toddle.com/stuff/sending-your-toddle-newsletter-with-awebercom/feed/ 2 http://www.toddle.com/stuff/how-to-send-your-toddle-newsletter-using-blue-sky-factory/ http://www.toddle.com/stuff/how-to-send-your-toddle-newsletter-using-blue-sky-factory/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:40:22 +0000 monica http://www.toddle.com/stuff/?p=569 Blue Sky Factory is an industry-leading email service provider and provides both full service and self service email marketing solutions to a global client base. Their leading web based platform, Publicaster offers enhanced deliverability solutions, detailed and customized reporting and analytics, and an easy to use intuitive user interface. Learn how to send your Toddle Newsletter through Blue Sky Factory’s Publicaster below.
• Go to www.blueskyfactory.com and sign-up. Log-in if you have an existing account.



• Once you have logged-in, click on Campaign Manager located on the Dashboard.



• You shall now enter the required information in the form. Click New Email when done.



• For the template, upload the content of your Toddle Newsletter by entering its HTML version URL. This can be found inside the Advanced sending options box at toddle.com.




• You shall now see the HTML version of your Toddle Newsletter.



• For the Text version, click View Plain Text. Open the Plain Text version URL that is also found in the Advanced sending options and copy the entire text into the editor.



• Click on Save.



• There you go, your Toddle Newsletter has been successfully imported and sent using Blue Sky Factory!
]]> http://www.toddle.com/stuff/how-to-send-your-toddle-newsletter-using-blue-sky-factory/feed/ 3 http://www.toddle.com/stuff/sending-your-toddle-newsletter-with-constantcontactcom/ http://www.toddle.com/stuff/sending-your-toddle-newsletter-with-constantcontactcom/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:13:46 +0000 Alan http://www.toddle.com/stuff/?p=413 ConstantContact.com can help in creating create high-impact emails that are as professional as your business. It’s the easy, effective, affordable way to stay connected and build strong,lasting  relationships.

Sending your Toddle newsletter through ConstantContact.com is easy. Below is a simple step-by-step guide.

• Browse to www.ConstantContact.com. Create your new account or log in if you already have an account.



• Once logged in, click on Create an Email.



• Enter a name for your email campaign and click Next.



• You will see a list of templates. Scroll down and in the left column you will find the link Use My Own Code. Click it.



• For creating your Toddle Newsletter email campaign, you have to select XHTML as your Email Format.



• Scroll down to select Advanced Editor. This will provide options where we can enter our Toddle newsletter HTML code and Text.



• For HTML, open the HTML version of your Toddle newsletter. It’s link can be found under Advanced sending options in Toddle. When the Newsletter is open, right click and slect View page source. Copy all the source code.



• You have to paste the  page source code in the area for HTML code.



• Copy the text in Plain text version of your Toddle newsletter. It’s link is also under Advanced sending options in Toddle. Paste this text in the specified area for text. Click Save & Return.



• This will take you back to where you can enter other information needed for you to send your Email Newsletter Campaign. You will have options to enter Email Subject, your own Email information, Email Greetings, your Address, the Contact List that will recieve the newsletter and some other information that will help in creating an effective campaign.



• You can save the created email as draft, or send it right now. Also, you can schedule it to be send automatically at a specific time and date in future.



• This is all there is to sending your Toddle.com newsletter through ConstantContact.com.



]]> http://www.toddle.com/stuff/sending-your-toddle-newsletter-with-constantcontactcom/feed/ 2 http://www.toddle.com/stuff/toddle-3rd-party-email-marketing-software/ http://www.toddle.com/stuff/toddle-3rd-party-email-marketing-software/#comments Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:31:16 +0000 Alan http://www.toddle.com/stuff/?p=391 You have a huge variety of ways to send your email newsletter from Toddle.
It works with email clients such as Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail etc by arriving in your inbox ready to forward on to all your clients and customers. It could not be any simpler.

For the more technical email marketer who may want to use one of the many advanced email service providers to manage their subscribers, email distribution and tracking we have great news. You can still use Toddle for its simple editing and award winning email newsletter design, then simply import it into your email manager. Below are a few simple guides on how it works.

Toddle works with many many more services then this, we just have not finished the guide yet. But you can try it yourself. If your email marketing software allows you to import a html file, a URL or copy and paste in code then Toddle can work with it.

• Campaign Monitor
• Group Mail
• Spinnaker Pro
• iContact
• Campaigner
• Constant Contact
• Vertical Response
• Blue Sky Factory / Publicaster
• Aweber.com

Check back often as more guides are added all the time.

]]> http://www.toddle.com/stuff/toddle-3rd-party-email-marketing-software/feed/ 0 http://www.toddle.com/stuff/christmas-email-newsletters-ecards/ http://www.toddle.com/stuff/christmas-email-newsletters-ecards/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:22:49 +0000 admin http://www.toddle.com/stuff/?p=165 Save a few trees this year and send your clients and subscribers a Christmas ecard.
We have released two Christmas email templates just in time for the holidays.

Christmas Wrapping                                               Christmas Gift



As always these templates work great with Outlook, yahoo mail, hotmail, gmail etc…

Of course you can add some Christmas cheer to any of the existing newsletter templates by adding some seasonal images from the always great iStockPhoto.com for as little as $1 an image.
Here are a few of our favorite images. Just search for ‘Christmas’ or ‘Santa’


Log in and get started now.

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