The above will no doubt be a familiar scenario for many who have commented on an acquaintances status or someone you know, without knowing most of their friends. The mass of irrelevant ‘comment’ emails that follow are pretty frustrating, causing many users to turn notifications off. Although turning off notifications would stop the flood of unwanted emails, it would also stop you being notified of comments you would be interested in.

Facebook have attempted to address this frequency and relevance issue and have announced the following:

Whilst the debate into the optimum frequency of send is normally applied to marketing emails, brands need to consider this issue even if they are ‘just sending notifications’ and ‘not trying to sell anything’.

Facebook is trying to sell its users something – a place to spend time whilst online. As such Facebook need to treat all emails as marketing emails and ensure they contain more relevant notifications at an appropriate frequency.

All users are different however and wish to be notified of activity to varying degrees.  It is good to see that Facebook is directing users to their preference centre, where users can decide the exact type and frequency of emails they receive – something all senders can learn from.

Facebook’s new found respect for its users is likely down to the emergence of its first main competitor in recent years: Google+.

For more information on the optimum frequency of sending emails, read Choosing the right email frequency by Sean Duffy.

Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

Endless chains of emails are sent between those giving feedback and the person making the changes. This person needs to make sure they do not miss any changes, while trying to decipher ambiguous change requests.

To address this problem, Emailcenter have introduced a tool to streamline the feedback process and improve communication. The video below demonstrates this, but here is a summary of the key features:

• Provide feedback by drawing on top of the email – remove ambiguity with visual annotations, so everyone is clear what the feedback means.
• Each comment is easily identifiable to the region and commenter, helpfully stored in one location, to make it easy to review all comments.
• Comments are archived for auditing purposes.

To understand how the Collaboration tool can make your email team more efficient, call the Support team on 01327 355871.

The rise of the smartphone over the last few years has been phenomenal. It seems as though almost everyone has either an iPhone, Android or Blackberry.

Whilst most B2C email recipients do not read their emails on their smartphones, the numbers are growing. In fact, according to a recent survey by Knotice 1 in 5 B2C emails are being read on a mobile handset.

With this ever increasing mobile activity for emails, we thought it was time to give you some tips on creating a mobile friendly version of your marketing emails.

I personally think that its more time efficient to create an online mobile friendly version (similar to a weblink) rather than setting up two versions of each email, but the tips below are valid for both methods:

• Make sure that you are sending a text alternative to your HTML version.

• Recommended width of 320 pixels (Max 600 pixels), the list below is in order of market share:
  1. Iphone – 320 pixels
  2. Android – 480 pixels
  3. Blackberry – 360 pixels
• Stick to a single column layout and make sure the content is left aligned

• Keep images to a minimum and make sure they are small in size

• Automatic text resizing – many mobile devices automatically resize your fonts, which can impact on the design. Use the CSS rule below to disable this:
  -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

• Space your links out! It can be troublesome clicking the correct link on a touch screen so make it as easy as possible.

• Is your website mobile friendly? It’s all well and good optimising your email marketing for mobile devices but make sure the landing pages you are directing them to are as well.

• Test your work – make sure that you thoroughly test your web version before going live.
  There are some great tools out there for this, such as Litmus.

If you wish to discuss any of this with us, then please email the client services team or call us on 01327 355871.

Synchronising lists between Salesforce & Maxemail

In Maxemail right click on the list you wish to add Salesforce data to and select ‘New Scheduled Imports’.

Here you will need to enter your Salesforce details & choose a report to import:

Using the Salesforce reports option makes it much easier to choose which customers to pull into your list.

Then you will need to map the fields from your Salesforce report with your fields in Maxemail:

Finally you need to define a schedule of how often you want the scheduled import to run:

Salesforce data will now be automatically imported into Maxemail without any manual intervention.

Viewing Email Activity against each contact record

All email activity is stored against each contact. Simply go to a Contacts page and you will see our tab listing all the emails they have been sent, and what they did with each email:

Click on this to get more detail on what they did with an email:

To get a detailed demonstration of Salesforce & Maxemail working together call your Account Manager on 01327 350921.