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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.

Bizcamp Dublin was an amazing day. Over 300 people came to the Guinness Store House to meet, share and inspire each other and it worked.
There was a wide cross section of people, from someone who sold their business for €135m to others who lost their job and are thinking about starting out.
I gave a talk on the day on what numbers to expect when doing sales via email marketing. Of course all business are different and achieve different results but this is something to be used as a guide against your own business and marketing efforts. If you are much lower then these numbers then you need to seriously look at what you need to change.
Keep reading the blog as I will discuss how you can improve and test conversion at each stage with a few tweaks.

The presentation was lo-fi on the day with just a flip chart and a marker. I prettied up the flipchart diagram for you here :)

Thanks to all who attended Bizcamp. You can find the other presentations on the bizcamp.ie site.

I just came across this great video over on the great SEO site SEOmoz.org. Scott Willoughby discusses how you should approach your email marketing in the context of your overall marketing push. He also highlights what type of content and communication works best in email.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Email Marketing and SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Group-Mail.com is a great desktop application for windows that allows you to manage your subscribers and send bulk mail to a lot of people at once. Below is a simple guide on how to send your Toddle email newsletter with Group-Mail.

• Browse on over to www.Group-Mail.com and download and install the application on your computer.

• Start Group-Mail and click on file, New Message

• Select File, Import, Web Page (URL)

• You need to copy the URL of the HTML version of your email newsletter from Toddle. This is the all singing dancing version with images and colours. You will find this link in the “ADVANCED SENDING OPTIONS” box on Toddle after you click send.

• Paste the URL of your newsletter and click OK
  You should now see a preview of your Toddle newsletter in Group-Mail.

• Add an appropriate subject to the newsletter and click send

• You should now get a confirmation that your newsletter has been sent.

• Thats it! Congratulations your Toddle newsletter has been sent.

Campaign Monitor is a great simple to use email newsletter tool built to send your email campaign, track the results and manage your subscribers. Below is a simple guide on how to send your Toddle email newsletter with Campaign Monitor and track who opened it and what they clicked on.

• Browse on over to www.campaignmonitor.com and sign up for an account or log in if you already have.

• Once you are logged in click on “CREATE/SEND CAMPAIGN”.

• From here you are guided through a simple 4 step process.

• Select “HTML and plain text” when asked.

• First you will be asked for the HTML version of your email newsletter from Toddle. This is the all singing dancing version with images and colours. You will find this link in the “ADVANCED SENDING OPTIONS” box on toddle.us

• Some of your subscribers reading the email newsletter will not be able to view the all singing all dancing version. Some might use email programs that cannot display it or they might have chosen to turn that option off. For these cases we provide an alternative version of the newsletter in nicely formatted plain text. Click the Plain text link in Toddle and copy and paste the text into Campaign Monitor.

• Then its a simple matter of allowing Campaign Monitor guide you to sending the newsletter. If you are anything like us you will waste a few hours clicking the refresh button after sending your email campaign tracking who opened your newsletter and what articles they were interested in. It can be very addictive!!

• Thats it. Simple wasn’t it. Enjoy.

Read why it might be a good idea to send your email newsletter through a third party like Campaign Monitor instead of sending it yourself.