Email Marketing

There are around 6 billion active mobile phones worldwide which exceeds the world population. That's a staggering statistic. It's also a huge market. It should be noted that this number relates to all mobile phones, not smartphones specifically, so "dumb" phones as well. Most of these "dumb" phones allow you to perform two basic actions - make & receive voice calls and send & receive SMS messages.

Everyone I know (with the possible exception of a few members of my extended family who live in rural Ontario)  is overloaded with email. We complain that we get too much, we unsubscribe from seemingly endless lists, and we feel overwhelmed by inboxes that are bursting at the seams.

I'm ruthless about purging my inbox - anything that can be deleted, is. And I may well remove myself from one email list per day, at the rate I unsubscribe myself from things.

It takes quite a bit of time and energy to create an email newsletter.  Writing the stories, putting the newsletter together, assembling and formatting the images, proofing the newsletter, and managing the distribution lists--the list of To Do's makes for quite a time investment. 

Vertical Response, an online newsletter software, recently released an update to their editor.  WOW!  What an improvement.

One of our wonderful client-friends (we have a lot of those, which is part of what makes our work here so much fun) sent me an email this week with the curiosity-piquing subject line, "Where's the lettuce?" -- it contained a link to this article about the "missing ingredient" in a lot of email marketing.

Vertical Response is free for 501(c)(3) equivalent organizations, which is pretty amazing deal in the world of newsletter software.  Apply by emailing proof of your 501(c)(3) equivalency to nonprofits@verticalresponse.com and you will start getting 10,000 credits applied to your account per month.

Unsurprisingly, we're getting a lot of questions these days from our clients about how they can apply the online tools that helped Obama win the U.S. election. Typically clients come to us excited about one tool they thought Obama's team used particularly well, whether that's video, social media, email marketing, graphic design, or some other branch of the Obama web communications plan.

MarketingSherpa has a great article up now (free access until October 29th, so hurry) featuring copywriting tips from fundraising email specialist Karen Gedney.