Posts Tagged ‘E-mail’

The other day I was looking online for something and stumbled across a great little website called MyLiveSignature. You can use the site to create an image file of your name or signature. Why might you want to do this? Well, if you want to show your name at the end of your blog posts (see mine if you are looking at the main page of this blog post) or in your e-mail signature, you can use regular text, BUT, it will only look the same way if the viewer or recipient has the same font installed on their machine.

You can create animated signatures if your heart desires it, but I just used it to create an image of my name. It is so simple to use, I am not going to walk through each step, but here is the basic premise. First you enter in the name you want to use. Then, the next screen shows you how your name will look in over 100 different fonts. Click through to view and then select the font that you want.

Next pick the size of the font. Then the color. If you want to use the image on a website or anywhere with a colored background, set the background to be transparent. For my purpose, I went with purple text. You can also set the gradient of the text so it looks more like a signature.

Finally, your signature will be displayed to you. You can right click on the image and save it to your computer.

You can then use this image file in your e-mail signature or add it to your blog posts! Quick, simple and easy to use. Have fun!

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Yesterday we walked you through how to add a Constant Contact sign up box to your website. Well today, let’s make it even easier with a Facebook application. With this new app, you can add a signup box directly to your Facebook Profile or Facebook Page.

Start off by either logging in to Facebook and searching for Constant Contact Labs – Join My Mailing List application, or just click the link in this sentence. Once you get to the facebook application page, click the link “Allow” to give access to the application.

Next enter your user name and password for Constant Contact to log in.

Once you are logged in you can then set a default contact list. You may also select and give users the option to sign up for other contact lists. Click to save the settings once you are done.

Finally, if you want to make sure a tab shows up on your Profile, which means other Facebook users can actually find the link to signup for your newsletter, go to your Application settings and be sure to Add a tab, and modify your privacy settings if needed. Easy!

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Last year I did a post to highlight some of the great things about Constant Contact. I still use the e-mail marketing tool and love preparing and getting ready to send out a new newsletter. Don’t do it as often as I would like, but I think it takes time to put something together that’s worth reading. Meeting new people and generating new contacts also takes time. Make it easy for people visiting your website to be able to sign up for your different newsletters.

If you haven’t already, go ahead and sign up for an account. Once logged in, click on the Contacts tab along the top. Then click on Join My Mailing List. This gives you various options, but the first one allows you to create a signup box for your website. Click to start the wizard to generate the HTML needed for the signup.

The first screen allows you to select the type of sign up you want. It gives you the option to have an online form, a button, or basic text links. Click through each of them to find one that you like the look of. Click the next button.

Next, select the different colors, fonts and text style you want to use. You can also select the words that will be used to make your signup box standout and attract visitors to actually enter their e-mail address and request your newsletter. Click the Preview button to see how it will look. When you are done, click the next button.

Finally, you are given the HTML code to add the box to your website. It also gives you the option to e-mail this directly to someone if you wish. This could be to your web designer if you have one. Make it easy for people to sign up for your newsletter. Get your signup box added today!

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I don’t normally gripe and moan, and usually I just try to give the facts. BUT, this post is based on the overwhelming increase of being bombarded with e-mails lately! Unfortunately, it’s e-mails that are unsolicited, from people I don’t even know. Or, people who I sent an e-mail to once, and they have decided I should receive an e-mail from them every week about their specials. Not cool!

So, this post is to explain why this is wrong, and what you can do instead.

To market your business in an effective way, best practise is to ask permission to e-mail  someone. Plain and simple. Asking is easy! Now if you meet someone at a networking event, they give you their business card, they are effectively giving you permission to contact them. Contacting them is one thing, but if you want to sign them up for your newsletter, give them the option to opt out. Don’t take it personally if they do, they might just not be interested at the moment, or like me and so many others, they might have subscribed to a million other newsletters!

Don’t just use Outlook or your e-mail client to e-mail. There are limitations set by many companies that if you e-mail to many people at one time it’s considered spam, therefore potentially not making it to all (or any) of your intended recipients. If you MUST e-mail this way, be sure to read one of my older posts The Power of BCC! It’s there for a reason, so use it. Another reason not to use your e-mail client (Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail) is that it just doesn’t look that good! There are only so many things you can do, and mostly you are looking at plain boring raw text e-mails. Not really exciting and enticing for people to read through.

Consider using a service like Constant Contact or Aweber. I did another post to find out if Constant Contact is worth it. I have never used Aweber but have heard great things about it so be sure to check out both before you decide. You can use templates to create professional HTML e-mails to get your messages across. A big plus with Constant Contact is that people can opt out, and also confirm that they still want to be signed up for your e-mails. They can also forward them on to other people to prompt their friends or contacts to sign up.

Sending people e-mails and NOT giving the option to opt out is rude. It shouldn’t be up to the recipient to just keep deleting them if they don’t want to, and many people don’t want  to appear rude by responding with a request to be removed. Think about your own e-mail techniques and tactics. Are you guilty? It’s ok, we have all committed e-mail sins at one time or another.

Fancy a gripe? What frustrates you? We all get so many e-mails every day, sifting through those unwanted ones is a pain! Share your stories below!

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As small business owners, we all have something in common, a lack of free time! I recently came across a free Outlook “add-in” that can save you time in many areas. Social networking is the thing to be doing, building those relationships, communicating as much as we can. Xobni is a free plug-in that you download to your computer. It interfaces with Outlook to provide you a faster, streamline way to search through your e-mails, find people through different social networking venues, update your contact records accurately, find attachments and keep track of conversations.

The download is simply. Go out to their site, simply click the download button and run the install that is displayed. You will need to have Outlook closed to do this. If you forget, you are prompted to close it anyway so no worries there. Once you are logged back into Outlook, you will see a new section to the right of your Outlook client. Xobni will begin indexing all of your e-mails, sorting them, grouping them and providing some fun statistics. Who do you e-mail the most, who e-mails you the most, who responds the fastest to you and so on.

Here is where the cool stuff begins. I get an e-mail from a happy client saying thank you for some recent work I have done.

The e-mail is from Valerie Pegg at Best Fit Pet Sit. As a client, obviously we have communicated before. One of the first things I can see are the number of e-mails that we have sent one another. She ranks #4 out of all of the people I have communicated with. Looks like I am a bit of a stalker having sent her 223 and only received 25! I send a lot of group e-mails so I can see that I e-mail her a great deal. I can also see that I tend to e-mail her most later in the evening and vice versa.

I can also see her contact information at the top of the Xobni plug-in. She is on Twitter so I can also see her Twitter feed if I want to. If I wasn’t already following her, I could simply start following her from there. I can also tweet my own status right from there also, still staying within Outlook and not having to go out to the Twitter website.

Further on down I can see Valerie’s network. The network includes people that we have both communicated with on an e-mail. Rodney Camren is one of the people in her network. This means that Rodney is a shared connection or contact between the two of us, we have both been included on e-mails that are sent to him.

Conversations allows me to view a string of e-mails between Valerie and myself. I can see everything I have sent to her and received from her. This allows me to quickly sift back through the communication we have had with one another. There is a search function at the top that I can also use to type in key words. If I remember Valerie telling me about an event she is going to be at, I can use keywords to type in and see all e-mails including those as a match.

Files exchanged shows any attachments that I have either sent to her, or have received from her. Again, if I remember her sending me something but forgot to save it, I can easily get back to it from here. Appointments can also be searched through, but only with the Xobni Plus version which you have to pay for. At $29.95, pretty darn cheap!

Along with Twitter feeds, I can also review her profile on Facebook, Linked In and see if her company has a profile on Hoovers. Xobni has also made it easy to send the recipient your availability by automatically formatting an e-mail including information based on your outlook calendar. Simply clicking a button will create a new e-mail for you to send out to a contact or new client.

Finally, you can review daily, weekly, monthly and yearly stats with Xobni Analytics. This allows you to review your e-mailing habits, see if you are making the most of your time, and the times you are most likely to get the most amount of work done.

I swear I don’t work for Xobni, and no promotional kick back to be seen, I just think this is an amazing tool! The more you can do to save yourself time, the better. Plus, this is FREE! You can’t get better than that. Try it, if you don’t like it, or don’t “get it” just remove it, nothing ventured, nothing gained. This is the way forward for e-mail management, time saving, faster searching, and it’s pretty fun too!

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