AJA-Online

Email marketing is one of the BEST tools that you can use to grow your business on eBay, Amazon and beyond. Sending out newsletters, sales and promotions to your customers is one of the best ways to sell more products more often.

However, there’s an important KEY to successful email marketing that most people overlook, and that is…

The TITLE of Your Email

In fact the way you title your email is SO important, the success of your email marketing campaign depends on it.

Why an Email Title is Important

In your eBay listings your 55 character listing title is the “map” that helps searchers find your listings in eBay’s search engines.

With email marketing, your title serves one primary purpose…To get your email OPENED!
Because an email that’s not opened will never be read. And an email that’s not opened will be the target of the delete key. Therefore it’s key to write an email title that will get your email opened and read.

The payoff for you? A great email title and newsletter will bring you more customer sales!

Motivating People to Open Your Emails

Most sellers tend to send out emails with fairly generic email titles. For example:

eBay Seller Email: Save money! Shop my eBay Store for great deals

New in my store

eBay: Great deals!

Check this out!

Winter Clearance Sale

And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with these email titles, there’s also nothing engaging about them either. They are all fairly generic email subject titles.

You certainly can intermix generic titles into your email campaign, but use them as the exception not the rule.

You might think that writing an intriguing email title requires a lot of work. Not so!

With the knowledge you’re about to gain in the next section (and a little help from a tried and true writers tool )you’ll be writing effective emails titles in no time!

5 Strategies for Writing Titles that Get Your Emails Opened

Next we’re going to look at 5 different strategies you can use to get those emails opened!

These 5 kinds of email titles will engage your reader and inspire them to OPEN your email!

1. Target your email title to your customers interests. The more specific the better. If you’re sending an email in which you want to promote your vintage lace linens, rather than using a generic email title such as “Check Out Our New Linens” create a more specific title such as “Introducing Our One of a Kind Vintage Lace Linens”

Generic title: Check Out Our New Linens

Targeted title: Introducing Our One of a Kind Vintage Lace Linens

As you can see, the 2nd title targets a very specific audience and arouses curiosity about the new, unique linens you’ve just brought in stock. Which brings us to our second strategy…

2. Arouse Curiosity. People are naturally curious. And we like having our curiosity peaked! An email title that peaks your reader’s curiosity is likely to get opened.

For example…

The owner of a pet products store could write an email newsletter with a title of…

“The Top 3 Things Every Poodle Owner Must Possess…”

A seller who wants to promote flat irons (for your hair) in their email marketing newsletter might write…

“How to Turn Your Unruly Hair into a Sleek and Shiny Mane”

By using an element of curiosity in your email title people will want to click on your emails and see what’s inside!

Note: Do NOT make your curiosity emails SPAMMY or MISLEADING. Curiosity alone with no substance will turn people off. If you are going to use an element of curiosity in your title, make sure you follow through on your promise and deliver the “goods” within the email content.

If you are promoting “The Top 3 Things Every Poodle Owner Must Possess…” – your email must follow through and share those top 3 things with your customer.

Misleading email titles are even worse. “Loose 150 lbs in 30 days” is simply untrue and will cause your readers to immediately delete your email.

3. Use Urgency. No one wants to miss the big “it”. That one thing they wished they’d known about. Email titles that convey urgency will ensure that your customers at least give your email a quick glance! (Once they’re reading you can grab them with your copy!)

Your email title can contain an element of scarcity.

For example:

“It ends tonight at midnight!”

“Only 4 vases left.”

“20% off for the next 24 hours.”

As with curiosity emails, urgency emails must follow through. If you’re promoting a sale that ends at midnight, it MUST end at midnight. Using a sense of urgency in your emails but not backing it up by doing what you say you’re going to do will cause your customers not to trust you.

And that will kill all chances of your prospect ever reading an email (or buying from you) again.

But if you DO have limited quantities of a product or the sale IS ending in 24 hours – writing an email title with a sense of urgency is a great way to promote it!

Note: Fostering a relationship with your customers that is built on trust is the best thing you can do to build a successful business! As the old saying goes “You must walk the talk.”

4. Tell a story. We all love stories. It’s part of human nature. Creating an email title that is a lead-in to a story can be very intriguing to your buyers.

For example:

“I Found These Beautiful Crystal Vases for You in Maine”

“The History Behind Our Hand Crafted Wall Clocks”

“Why 9 Out of 10 Customers Prefer Our New Steamer”

Then in your email continue on with the story that you started. Emphasize the human connection. Your customers want to buy from a person, not from a nameless, faceless eBay store or website.

5. Have fun. A little fun and humor in your email title can go along way. Have fun! Be creative.

This past holiday season I received an email from an eBay seller with a title that read…

“A Sale So Hot Even Santa Stopped to Shop!”

I opened this email immediately!

The Writer’s Insider Secret Ideas for Email Titles
Now you may be thinking… “This sounds like a GREAT idea but I don’t have a creative writing bone in my body.”

Well the good news is that a copywriting degree is not required to create a clever email title!

You see examples of good email titles are all around you. In fact, your next email title may be as close as the magazine on your desk!

Writers have an insider secret for coming up with good ideas for email titles, emails, advertising copy, articles etc….

It’s called a “swipe file”.

A swipe file is a collection of tested and proven ads, sales letters, headlines etc. You’ll use your swipe file as a springboard to write your own email titles.

Now you won’t be copying the headlines directly, but rather taking bits and pieces of titles and repurposing them for your own specific niche email!

For example, this title used on a recent People Magazine “The Real Reason People Gain Weight” can be re-purposed for your pet products store:

“The Real Reason Your Pet Gains Weight” (This could be used to sell pet exercise products.)

“The Real Reason Your Dog Keeps Shedding” (This could be used to sell dog deshedders.)

When you come across an email title or headline you like, simply make a note of it in your swipe file.

Note: In case you are worrying that this is plagiarism, it’s not!

Keeping a swipe file is a common practice used by advertising writers, authors, anyone who creates copy.

It’s perfectly legal to take an existing heading and target it to YOUR market. And while you can’t use the email title “Got Milk?” you can repurpose it to “Got Game?” “Got Candy?” “Got the Latest Shirts for Spring?” etc.

To help you find samples for your swipe file, simply take a look at the headlines on the covers of magazines in the grocery stores, tabloids, and newspapers. Look at the emails other companies send YOU.

When you look at these headlines with a fresh “eye” you’ll see that most headlines today are variations of existing headlines.

Newsletters in Your Niche

Signing up to receive emails in from other online retailers in your niche is a great way to get some creative ideas about how to market products in your category.

For example, if you sell in the Home and Garden niche, sign up to receive the free email newsletters from stores like Smith and Hawken, Plow and Hearth etc.

I guarantee you’ll get some GREAT marketing ideas!

Start Writing Better Email Titles Today

Email marketing is one of the fundamentals that you need in your marketing toolkit!

Lisa Suttora is the Founder/CEO of WhatDoISell.com, one of only 3 eBay Certified Providers in the categories of eBay education/consulting and product sourcing.

Lisa has been a featured speaker on three eBay Live! Product Sourcing Panels (2004-2007) and will return again this year to co-present on the top rated panel “How to Find the Products Buyers Want” at eBay Live! 2008 in Chicago.

She is the creator of the exclusive product sourcing strategies: The Product Sourcing Mindset, Power of 10 Product Sourcing and Product Sourcing with Idea Hotspots which have helped thousands of eBay sellers of all levels find products to sell on eBay and find their niche in the eBay marketplace.

A noted trendologist, Lisa is the Product Trending Editor for Product Sourcing Radio.

Copyright (c) 2008 WhatDoISell.com, all rights reserved.

To reprint or distribute this article contact support@whatdoisellsupport.com

Author: Lisa Suttora
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera News

Email marketing is one of the BEST tools that you can use to grow your business on eBay, Amazon and beyond. Sending out newsletters, sales and promotions to your customers is one of the best ways to sell more products more often.

However, there’s an important KEY to successful email marketing that most people overlook, and that is…

The TITLE of Your Email

In fact the way you title your email is SO important, the success of your email marketing campaign depends on it.

Why an Email Title is Important

In your eBay listings your 55 character listing title is the “map” that helps searchers find your listings in eBay’s search engines.

With email marketing, your title serves one primary purpose…To get your email OPENED!
Because an email that’s not opened will never be read. And an email that’s not opened will be the target of the delete key. Therefore it’s key to write an email title that will get your email opened and read.

The payoff for you? A great email title and newsletter will bring you more customer sales!

Motivating People to Open Your Emails

Most sellers tend to send out emails with fairly generic email titles. For example:

eBay Seller Email: Save money! Shop my eBay Store for great deals

New in my store

eBay: Great deals!

Check this out!

Winter Clearance Sale

And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with these email titles, there’s also nothing engaging about them either. They are all fairly generic email subject titles.

You certainly can intermix generic titles into your email campaign, but use them as the exception not the rule.

You might think that writing an intriguing email title requires a lot of work. Not so!

With the knowledge you’re about to gain in the next section (and a little help from a tried and true writers tool )you’ll be writing effective emails titles in no time!

5 Strategies for Writing Titles that Get Your Emails Opened

Next we’re going to look at 5 different strategies you can use to get those emails opened!

These 5 kinds of email titles will engage your reader and inspire them to OPEN your email!

1. Target your email title to your customers interests. The more specific the better. If you’re sending an email in which you want to promote your vintage lace linens, rather than using a generic email title such as “Check Out Our New Linens” create a more specific title such as “Introducing Our One of a Kind Vintage Lace Linens”

Generic title: Check Out Our New Linens

Targeted title: Introducing Our One of a Kind Vintage Lace Linens

As you can see, the 2nd title targets a very specific audience and arouses curiosity about the new, unique linens you’ve just brought in stock. Which brings us to our second strategy…

2. Arouse Curiosity. People are naturally curious. And we like having our curiosity peaked! An email title that peaks your reader’s curiosity is likely to get opened.

For example…

The owner of a pet products store could write an email newsletter with a title of…

“The Top 3 Things Every Poodle Owner Must Possess…”

A seller who wants to promote flat irons (for your hair) in their email marketing newsletter might write…

“How to Turn Your Unruly Hair into a Sleek and Shiny Mane”

By using an element of curiosity in your email title people will want to click on your emails and see what’s inside!

Note: Do NOT make your curiosity emails SPAMMY or MISLEADING. Curiosity alone with no substance will turn people off. If you are going to use an element of curiosity in your title, make sure you follow through on your promise and deliver the “goods” within the email content.

If you are promoting “The Top 3 Things Every Poodle Owner Must Possess…” – your email must follow through and share those top 3 things with your customer.

Misleading email titles are even worse. “Loose 150 lbs in 30 days” is simply untrue and will cause your readers to immediately delete your email.

3. Use Urgency. No one wants to miss the big “it”. That one thing they wished they’d known about. Email titles that convey urgency will ensure that your customers at least give your email a quick glance! (Once they’re reading you can grab them with your copy!)

Your email title can contain an element of scarcity.

For example:

“It ends tonight at midnight!”

“Only 4 vases left.”

“20% off for the next 24 hours.”

As with curiosity emails, urgency emails must follow through. If you’re promoting a sale that ends at midnight, it MUST end at midnight. Using a sense of urgency in your emails but not backing it up by doing what you say you’re going to do will cause your customers not to trust you.

And that will kill all chances of your prospect ever reading an email (or buying from you) again.

But if you DO have limited quantities of a product or the sale IS ending in 24 hours – writing an email title with a sense of urgency is a great way to promote it!

Note: Fostering a relationship with your customers that is built on trust is the best thing you can do to build a successful business! As the old saying goes “You must walk the talk.”

4. Tell a story. We all love stories. It’s part of human nature. Creating an email title that is a lead-in to a story can be very intriguing to your buyers.

For example:

“I Found These Beautiful Crystal Vases for You in Maine”

“The History Behind Our Hand Crafted Wall Clocks”

“Why 9 Out of 10 Customers Prefer Our New Steamer”

Then in your email continue on with the story that you started. Emphasize the human connection. Your customers want to buy from a person, not from a nameless, faceless eBay store or website.

5. Have fun. A little fun and humor in your email title can go along way. Have fun! Be creative.

This past holiday season I received an email from an eBay seller with a title that read…

“A Sale So Hot Even Santa Stopped to Shop!”

I opened this email immediately!

The Writer’s Insider Secret Ideas for Email Titles
Now you may be thinking… “This sounds like a GREAT idea but I don’t have a creative writing bone in my body.”

Well the good news is that a copywriting degree is not required to create a clever email title!

You see examples of good email titles are all around you. In fact, your next email title may be as close as the magazine on your desk!

Writers have an insider secret for coming up with good ideas for email titles, emails, advertising copy, articles etc….

It’s called a “swipe file”.

A swipe file is a collection of tested and proven ads, sales letters, headlines etc. You’ll use your swipe file as a springboard to write your own email titles.

Now you won’t be copying the headlines directly, but rather taking bits and pieces of titles and repurposing them for your own specific niche email!

For example, this title used on a recent People Magazine “The Real Reason People Gain Weight” can be re-purposed for your pet products store:

“The Real Reason Your Pet Gains Weight” (This could be used to sell pet exercise products.)

“The Real Reason Your Dog Keeps Shedding” (This could be used to sell dog deshedders.)

When you come across an email title or headline you like, simply make a note of it in your swipe file.

Note: In case you are worrying that this is plagiarism, it’s not!

Keeping a swipe file is a common practice used by advertising writers, authors, anyone who creates copy.

It’s perfectly legal to take an existing heading and target it to YOUR market. And while you can’t use the email title “Got Milk?” you can repurpose it to “Got Game?” “Got Candy?” “Got the Latest Shirts for Spring?” etc.

To help you find samples for your swipe file, simply take a look at the headlines on the covers of magazines in the grocery stores, tabloids, and newspapers. Look at the emails other companies send YOU.

When you look at these headlines with a fresh “eye” you’ll see that most headlines today are variations of existing headlines.

Newsletters in Your Niche

Signing up to receive emails in from other online retailers in your niche is a great way to get some creative ideas about how to market products in your category.

For example, if you sell in the Home and Garden niche, sign up to receive the free email newsletters from stores like Smith and Hawken, Plow and Hearth etc.

I guarantee you’ll get some GREAT marketing ideas!

Start Writing Better Email Titles Today

Email marketing is one of the fundamentals that you need in your marketing toolkit!

Lisa Suttora is the Founder/CEO of WhatDoISell.com, one of only 3 eBay Certified Providers in the categories of eBay education/consulting and product sourcing.

Lisa has been a featured speaker on three eBay Live! Product Sourcing Panels (2004-2007) and will return again this year to co-present on the top rated panel “How to Find the Products Buyers Want” at eBay Live! 2008 in Chicago.

She is the creator of the exclusive product sourcing strategies: The Product Sourcing Mindset, Power of 10 Product Sourcing and Product Sourcing with Idea Hotspots which have helped thousands of eBay sellers of all levels find products to sell on eBay and find their niche in the eBay marketplace.

A noted trendologist, Lisa is the Product Trending Editor for Product Sourcing Radio.

Copyright (c) 2008 WhatDoISell.com, all rights reserved.

To reprint or distribute this article contact support@whatdoisellsupport.com

Author: Lisa Suttora
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera Times

The stress you feel from dealing with email would be reduced if you improve your email habits, the company email culture, and basic etiquette. You’d leave work earlier too. Here is a list collected from my seminars and an unscientific survey on my Web site.

Sending or responding to all to CYA (cover your butt).
Stop sending to all if all do not have a need to know. You wanted to make sure you were covered so youre sending everyone on a list your answerwhether they needed to know or not. Or youre sending a message to everyone because youre too lazy to select the appropriate recipients. Hold down your Alt key now and click and drag the Reply toolbar button away from the Reply to All button (in Outlook).

People trying to solve complex issues using email.
Youre part of a new committee, then the email messages start, back and forth, dizzying speed, the more they come, the more confused you get. Pick up the phone!

Dirty email messages.
These are those messages you receive loaded with those darn carets (>>>), or pages and pages of email addresses that werent protected using a blind copy feature. Is it too much to ask for the sender to clean dirty emails before sending it? Would you send a letter out on your company stationery like that? You can get rid of carets by pasting the message into Word and using the Find and Replace feature to find a caret and replace all of them with nothing. You can get rid of all the email addresses just by deleting. Clean it up, then send it.

Subject lines that dont match the message or ones that do little to let you know what the message is about
. Dont pull up an old message, hit Reply, and send me a message that has nothing to do with the previous one. Suppose you sent an email message two months ago that said, The monthly meeting has been cancelled. You pulled up that old message because the email addresses were already in it. But this time, you wanted to let everyone know that coffee and donuts would be served at this months meeting. At the very least, change the subject line, and also add enough information in the subject line so Ill know precisely what your email message is about (the way newspapers do when they headline an article).

Last-minute cancellations.
Canceling a meeting at the last minute and letting me know via email. I show up, Oh, didnt you get my e-mail? When did you send it? I left my office two hours ago, and now my whole day is shot.

Procrastinators.
People who wait until the last minute to ask you to do something as if you had nothing else to do. You know the work was in a pile on their desk, and while they were digging for something else, they found it, and sent you an email message, marking it urgent. Then when the deadline isnt met, its not their fault because they gave it to you.

People who call you instead of checking their email.
Youve done your job, and sent an email message to people with information they need. They end up calling you asking for the information because, Im too busy to check email. Please always call me with the information or at least call me to let me know you sent it. Pa‑leaese!

No response.
You send a legitimate email message to someone who has requested information. The message clearly needs a response, but nothing happens. If youre too busy to hit Reply to say No, you need to examine how youre working. Why did you make me waste your time and mine?

One-liners.
Thanks, Oh, OK. My goodness! You sent an email message to 25 people, and 15 of them sent you a one-liner. Next time, put No Reply Necessary at the top.

Underlines.
Dont underline anything in a message (or on a Web page) thats not a hyperlink. I always move the mouse toward it thinking itll take me somewhere.

My original message not attached.
When someone replies to my message without the previous message below it or attached to it, Ive already forgotten what I asked them in the first place.

Smileys, emoticons.
If you wouldnt put a smiley face or emoticon on your business correspondence, you shouldnt put it in a business-related email message.

Plaxo.
Those email messages from you asking me to update my contact information. Your best customer is getting 10 of these a day! And, I dont even remember who these people are. I went to the Plaxo Web site and opted out of receiving any of these annoying updates. Make sure you opt out for all your different email addresses.

Senseless auto responders.
How about the one that says, Thank you for your email message. I will respond to you as soon as I can. What a complete waste of my time to open this stupid response. Its almost like the letter carrier leaving me a message in my mailbox saying, I picked up your mail today. Ill bring you more when I get it.

Cute shortcuts.
Words from grown, business people using shortcuts such as 4 u (instead of for you), Gr8 (for great) in business-related email. Are you lazy, or just cant type or spell? If you wouldnt send a company letter out like that, it shouldnt be in an email message. (This is different from legitimate abbreviations a company may develop such as NRN for No Reply Necessary.)

Read receipt.
As if youre checking up on me to see if I open your message. I dont know why people waste time doing this because most people probably have this feature turned off in their email program.

Too many attachments.
You should get permission before sending someone an email message with more than two attachments. Instead of sending five PDFs, consider combining them into one document. (If you receive a message in Outlook with a lot of attachments, save them all at once. Click the File menu, Save Attachments, and save them as you normally would.)

Attachment and no body.
If you send an email message about an event and no explanation in the body, I delete the message (especially if its a large file that would drain my ink supply if I printed it). If the details are in the body of the message, I dont need the attachment. I dont need to see how creative you were with your flyer. I just need the information and can drag it to my calendar.

Abuse of my email address.
I register for an event, then every week, Im getting notices of deals, webinars, teleseminars, etc.

Recipient names not private.
No bcc and pages of email addresses in the message. (If you use Outlook, click View, bcc, and put the recipient names on this line.) And dont forward this message to your list without clearing these addresses first.

Passing on hoaxes instead of checking them out first.
What would make you believe that Bill Gates would send you $5000 just for sending an email message? And did you know that the Teddy Bear file you so willingly deleted from your computer was a legitimate Windows file? Check it our first before you send.

Who are you?
People I met briefly some time ago sending me an email message without reminding me who they are.

Messages without signature lines.
Your email signature is a great way to let people know more about you, especially when your email address is something like 129ye@hot.com.

Adding me to your email list.
I just met you, barely remember you, and Im already on your distribution list for your newsletter, thoughts for the day, and news you think I want to know.

Bad grammar and punctuation.
You cant hide behind an administrative assistant to clean up your act, so go take some classes and learn how to write and spell. Some messages are so bad, its like reading a foreign language, and it wastes my time trying to figure out your mess.

Work email abuse.
People sending me non-work-related email from their job. I dont want my name and email address showing up in company reports. (The majority of big companies monitor email.)

Unprofessional email IDs.
People who would send a business email message using addresses that begin with names such as cutesuzy, beingblessed, or hardliquor, and so on.

Peggy, thank you so much for an absolutely fabulous seminar…The tips you shared and your book are absolutely wonderful. It [Inbox] is looking very good and I thank you for the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a long while, Sharlene Thompson, Director of Special Events.

Peggy Duncan is a professional speaker, trainer, consultant, author, and coach specializing in improving personal productivity. Her book, Conquer Email Overload with Better Habits, Etiquette, and Outlook 2003, will revolutionize how you manage email. Visit her online for more tips and strategies at http://www.PeggyDuncan.com

Author: Peggy Duncan
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Hybrid and Electric Cars

Should you gotten hundreds of emails and wondered how do they get into your inbox? You might think that someone you subscribed with had sold your email for a buck profit.

Well. dear valued reader, you’re wrong in that aspect. No one in his or her right mind. Or any Internet vendor will commit such horrendous and stupid act. Why? Insomuch as an opt-in lists is a precious asset for anyone doing business on the Internet.

Let’s say I’m an Internet user and I just got myself a new Internet account with an email address for my friends and family to get in touch. Now this is my personal and private email address. When a person decides to give that email address away to someone else, they expect that their privacy to be respected… That’s why we got a privacy act.

I like to give examples so you can get an idea what users on the Internet go through after they surrender their email address to a Safelists . What is a Safelists?? A Safelists is a group of people who let agreed to receive email opportunities from along with members in return for sending their own fortuity to all members.

Back to the example. We are going to call this user “Joe”. When Joe is surfing the Internet he finds something that call his attention, but to get more information he has to give up that private and personal email address to someone that is not a family member or a friend.

After singing in on the subscription box, next thing it happens is that Joe gets a confirmation email asking him to confirm his email address. All Safelists are “double opt-in” meaning a new member must verify by email that they wish to join the list. In turn he can receive the information he requested. He proceeds to confirm the email and get the information on his email inbox in the form of a link or URL to download the report.

Now his email is listed on someone elses opt in list. So. What happens next? Next day Joe open his email account and his email inbox is full with several hundreds of email messages offering him “the moon” and how to get rich quick on the Internet.

Do we miss the point? Yes he did signed in for information, but now he has an inbox full of email offers. He browses thru the list and suddenly figures out that he only gave the email address to this website that he had requested the free report. Remember what we said about a Safelists. A group of people who have agreed to receive email opportunities from other members.

Now he has a dilemma, since most of the information is not related of what he asked for, he’s not interested on any of those subject headlines. Next thing to do for him is hit the ’select all’ button and click delete. This will become more of a habit of Joe from now on…since every day that he opens his email his inbox is going to be full of a bunch of email that is annoying and he did not requested with different email address that that he does not recognize.

What happened? How the other people got Joe’s private email? First thing in his mind is someone sold his email address to make a buck? Now Joe is disgruntled and untrustworthy of signing with any other opt-in list anywhere. This happens every day to millions of users on the Internet.

Whats the real truth? He signed up on a free for all list or commonly call ‘FAA’ Safelists. What is a Safelists? A Safelists is a group of people who have agreed to receive email opportunities from other members in return for sending their own opportunity to all members. As all members have agreed to receive messages from the other members, there can be no accusations of SPAM or unsolicited emails made against another member. All Safelists are “double opt-in” meaning a new member must verify by email that they wish to join the list.

When you submit your email address to one of these list you’re bound to get hundreds of emails from their subscribers. Everyone that gets listed on the FAA page is entitled to send a “one time” email to this new subscriber email address. In turn your inbox ends up with hundreds of emails with offers.

The best first thing to do if you don’t want to receive any emails like Joe… Is to avoid signing up with your own personal email address on a Safelists .

What’s the solution? …Get yourself a second email address that will not be your primary email address and you can use this new email to subscribe to opt-in lists to get free reports and other information that you want to receive.

You can get a free email address at Yahoo.com, Google, etc. or you can search for other free email providers on the Internet.

You got to remember that most free accounts are not accepted on some autoresponders opt-in forms. Also you will need to check this additional email address to clean up your inbox every month or your account will be deactivated.

Remember that when you subscribe or submit your email address you’ll receive email in return. That’s the marketing rule of the Internet.

Pablo Montalvo writes about Blogs, tips, tactics, Internet, Business and e-book Marketing in his bi-monthly “Blog Tips & Tactics” newsletter.

You can sign up for his free newsletter at: –>
http://www.learnonlinevideo.com/bttsubbox2.html and get additional information at his

website: –>
http://greathowtoebooks.com

Author: Pablo Montalvo
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Excise Tax

Email is the most used service on the Internet and, doubtless, most useful. Many people use the Internet only for checking their emails. Email marketing can be useful only if done right. Otherwise, it can get you more harm that benefits. However, there are things you can do in order to ensure that your email marketing campaign is going to be successful. In this article we provide you with 7 email marketing best practices.

Deliverability

Deliverability is probably the most important issue in todays email marketing business. There are many spam emails and many legitimate emails are flagged as spam so they are not delivered. They are not getting thru ISP spam filters. Good deliverability ratio is the first step in successful email campaign because if your emails arent delivered then you dont even have an email campaign!

In order to ensure that your emails will have good deliverability you have to choose your email marketing vendors wisely. You have to check if they are on Blacklist or Whitelist. There are different organizations like Spamhaus project and SpamAssasin that have their own lists which are used by ISP. If your email service provider is blacklisted your emails wont be delivered! Also, you have to ensure that your domain name isnt blacklisted. In order to maximize your deliverability it is recommended that your email service provider offers Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

Your email newsletter should be CAN-SPAM Compliant. It is recommended that you require double opt-in subscription so that your subscribers have to confirm their request to be part of your email newsletter. Dont add your subscribers without their permission and you should avoid adding them manually even if you have their permission. It is good that they do it using double opt-in method. Also, avoid using pre-checked subscription boxes.

It is essential that you provide your subscribers with an easy way to unsubscribe from your email newsletter at any time, when they want. It is good that you offer one-click unsubscription process with an unique address. This way there will be much less requests from your subscribers that you remove them.

CAN-SPAM Law also requires from email publishers that they include their physical postal address so you should include it, too. Your have to show your subscribers that you are legitimate company which have a presence in offline world, too.

HTML and plain-text versions

It is essential to offer your visitors to choose if they want to receive your email newsletter in HTML or plain-text format. It means that you should regularly send both types. Sending HTML newsletters have more benefits than plain-text email newsletters. You can use email tracking only in HTML newsletter with image embedding, HTML newsletters have better click-thru ratio because they look like the real web sites. You can hide long URLs so that they will look professional.

However, some people prefer plain-text versions and reasons are different. They use email clients that dont support HTML emails. Another thing is that HTML newsletter types are larger than plain-text newsletters. Also, one of the reasons why some people dont receive HTML emails is security. In HTML newsletters some people can embed malicious scripts or use them for phishing (when they pretend that they are representatives of one company and when people click on a certain link they are taken to their web site that is designed almost identically like original). It is mostly used in financial fraud attempts.

From and Subject fields

Your From and Subject fields are very important for getting better open ratio and therefore to have successful email campaign. You have to remember several simple rules.

It is important that your From field be consistent. You have to choose one name, whether it will be a company name or personal name and use it constantly. Once you change your From field it is most likely that your open rates will decline.

Speaking about Subject field, it has to be short and catchy, to grab attention of your subscribers. Your email has to stand out in usually overloaded inboxes. It is important that you dont shout so instead of

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH

use

Exclusive Interview with

It is very good that you make your subject field standardized and that the title be something related from the content of that current issue.

For example, if you have a newsletter called Email Articles your subject line can be something like this:

[Email Articles] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue #10, August 29th, 2005

If your email newsletter has a longer title, for example, Email Marketing Articles you can use this:

[EMA] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue #10, August 29th, 2005

Personalization & Segmentation

Personalization is connected with Subject fields, too. Some people like to include first names of their subscribers in subject lines in order to have better open ratio.
Personalization is also very effective when it is used in editors welcome message or in articles.

For example,

Dear !*First_Name*!, welcome to the 10th issue of Email Marketing Articles.

Segmentation is the most important part in marketing. What am I selling and to whom? It is not the same to sell your software to novice users (newbies) or to seasoned users (knowbies). Also, it is not the same to market your software to small business companies and corporation. It is good that you make a good segmentation of your email newsletter. Best way to do that is to include several additional fields at sign-up process. Of course this doesnt mean that you have to ask 15 questions from your new subscriber because many people leave when they see that there are many fields to fill. After that, you will make several email newsletters for each membership type.

Timing is everything

Another very important thing in creating successful email campaign is timing. In almost every email marketing statistics you will find information about when to email your subscribers. So studies show that the best time for sending email campaigns are days from Tuesday to Thursday. However, it doesnt mean that someone cant have successful email campaign sent on Sunday. If you send your emails in days that are not prime time you can have a chance to avoid competition that will mail their campaign in prime time. Tuesday-Thursday are generally best days for mailing because, as you probably know yourself, too, not many people like Monday (remember that song?). After a good weekend, Monday is usually reserved for some consultation with the management about weekly plans and task. Friday is, on the contrary, favourite day for many people, because they are planning their weekend. People often come home earlier on Friday so your email can be buried in their inbox until Monday. And in Monday, to be deleted with many others (we have already wrote about Monday). On the weekend people usually dont work but many will still check their emails.

Also, you have to decide how often you want to send your email newsletters. It will depend on your content. If your email newsletter about latest industry news you can send your newsletter once a month, because then it wont be latest news anymore. If you send a corporate email newsletter with news about company and useful articles from your area of expertise, monthly frequency is usually the best one.

You have to make several email campaigns and see which ones get you best results.

And when we talk about best results the next logical step is tracking.

Tracking

How do you know if your email marketing campaign was successful? You have to know how many people opened your emails, what was your click-thru ratio, your subscribers behaviour on your web site after they had clicked and finally how many subscribers purchased your product.

With user-friendly Group Metrics you will be able to do that and also to make polls to get even better view of your email campaign.

Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com

Author: Dejan Bizinger
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital pipeline

I’m so, so really bad at it. I mean, I’m purely awful. I receive so much e-mail a day that it’s basically just read, delete, read, file, read, delete, read, delete. I have e-mail from over a year ago that I should respond to. I usually wait so long that I just figure it’s been too long to reply now, and then I file it away.

Does this sound familiar? Thanks to a world-wide adoption of email by businesses and individuals, this is the sort of problem that ordinary people are facing everyday. Up until a few years ago, most of us did not have the added pressure of having to deal with incoming email on a continual basis during our work day, or of having to check it from home at least once a day. We could sit at our desks or computers and work on an urgent report with our phone taking voicemail or being redirected – and strangely enough the world didnt collapse around our ears because we were not immediately responding to emails. I believe time management skills now need to also include managing email. While I am no expert in this area, I am able to keep my email under control using some of the following techniques, which I would like to share with you.

Schedule your email time: You could block off periods of time in your day that are ‘no email’ or reverse, block periods of time where email is acceptable. Personally I find that I can work better if I deliberately switch my email off while I have other work to handle, as I find that if I leave it running then email gets an automatic priority, often to the detriment of whatever task I was involved in at the time. I believe you must decide when to read email – this control should not rest with everyone out there who sends emails to you. For example, I will not log onto my email until I have completed one hour at my desk first thing in the morning; this means I can plan my day, deal with issues from the previous day, set up meetings and do necessary paperwork. Having set up the day to cater for my own needs, then I will log on and see what email awaits me.

I have found that if I log on first, hours can go by where I deal with often petty things, read and forward because the mail was not relevant to me, get engrossed in gossip, respond to personal greetings or jokes, or go off on a tangent with work I had no intention of dealing with on this particular day. If I have at least some chance to put my work priorities first, I find that I am not so tempted to spend great amounts of time with email that does not require my immediate attention.

Keep email quiet: If none of the above suggestions are possible, and you need to keep your email running while engrossed in other tasks, then at least consider muting the speaker on your computer so that you do not receive an audio notification of the email arriving.

Be realistic about answering your email: I allocate time when I need a break from a task to go and deal with my email, because even though you make think that it will only take five minutes to check your email, invariably something will require action from you – a reply, reading an attachment or supplying some information. This means you are then forced to work reactively, when perhaps you had other priorities over and above the 15 minutes you had allocated to email.

Sound the alarm: Employ an egg timer, a miniature clock alarm, a watch alarm or set a Microsoft Outlook Calendar reminder to jog your memory to when you have spent enough time with your email. If you have to leave your house or office at 10am for a meeting, set the alarm to buzz just prior to that time.

File it: Set up folders for your incoming work. I know this sounds obvious, but it is surprising how people many simply leave all their email in the Inbox. Go to File, choose New and then Folder. Make as many folders as you need, based on your work and the categories of emails you receive or based on who has sent them (you will know best how to categorise them). Making email folders is the same idea as labeling manila folders to put in a filing cabinet. When you need to keep an email drag and drop it with your mouse in the relevant folder.

Sent mail: Think about making folders for your outgoing emails have a folder structure under the sent folder based on who you are sending email to, and move the important ones you need to keep into those folders. The sent folder can also end up with an unmanageable amount of email in it, so consider doing this and make sure you include the Sent folder when you do an email clean up and delete.

Deal with the email, dont just leave it all in the Inbox: There is nothing like a bit of extra stress from looking at an email inbox containing 300 400 emails, some opened, some not; have you replied, did you forward it, it all becomes too hard. Try and make it a practice to read it and deal with it – respond, delete it, forward it or file or it, but dont just leave it sitting there in your inbox thinking you will come back later. It is the same principle that is applied to stacks of paper of your desk, once you leave the email without dealing with it, the next time you come back you will need to waste time and re-read the emails to work out what you need to do with them.

Clean out regularly: Try and go through your inbox and sent box say once a month (e.g. nominate the first or last date in the month), give it a limit of 15 minutes and start cleaning out old emails. This also ensures your system runs more efficiently as well as making it easier for you to find things that are really important.

Email Rules: why not set up a couple of rules for your incoming email where your weekly joke, or daily inspirational message or emails from particular people are immediately filed in a particular folder, that way you check the folders when you a ready to read the messages. I suggest you read about rules in Outlooks help menus, but just to get started, you create a rule for a message by right clicking the message, then choosing create rule, and specifying the criteria for the rule. For example, you keep getting spam from a particular person, so you could create a rule and specify that when mail comes from that email account it is to immediately be deleted (deletion being one of the rules you can choose).

Delete email before it gets to Outlook: Go to your e-mails server first thing via their website (e.g. Telstra.com or Optusnet.com.au) and delete all the spam and rubbish email before it even arrives in your email outbox.

Good Subjects: Ask your email contacts (personal and business where possible) to utilize the subject lines. This will help you to ascertain whether your incoming mail is urgent, a follow-up or trivial, because knowing the urgency of a message will help you to determine how soon you need to read and respond to the contents.

Extra email addresses: Consider setting up additional email addresses for personal use, or work-specific use. Most internet service providers provide you with 5 email addresses otherwise use a free one at Hotmail or Yahoo. This has the added benefit of stopping some unsolicited email or advertising arriving in your work email inbox and allows you to use that secondary account when you visit websites that require an email address before you can use them and you do not necessarily wish to give out your legitimate email details.

Good luck in using these strategies to work more effectively with your email.

Angela is a workplace IT Educator, counsellor and social researcher. Her area of interest is in how technology intersects with human relations. She has recently finished her PhD in Education and expects to be awarded in April. She can be found at http://angelalewis.com.au

Author: Dr. Angela Lewis
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Electric Pressure Cooker

Learning how to get the most organization from your email software is very likely the most important skill you can learn to conduct a successful online home business.

There are three primary email applications on the market that folks use to manage their incoming POP3 email. Those three are:

• Microsoft Outlook Express
• Eudora
• Netscape Mail

In order to get the most from your email software, there are three key processes that you should learn. These processes are concerned with data organization, saving time and email database management.

SET UP EMAIL FOLDERS

Organization is key to any emails that you intend to save. Having 2000 emails in one folder is a sure-fire road map to confusion and lost communications and information.

You are the best judge as to how to organize your email into topics that provide an easy method of retrieval of the information when you need it most.

Fortunately, the primary email browsers make it easy to organize your information. By allowing you to create folders within your email software, you can file specific emails into folders dedicated to the topic of the email.

To create new folders:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: 1. Click File – Folders – New — alternatively, you may also right click an item in the Folder window — and then type in the name of your new folder. Highlight the folder above where you would like your new folder to be placed, and then click OK.

EUDORA: Click on Mailbox – New — or right click on Eudora in the folders window and then click on New. When the window opens, type in the name of your new mailbox and click OK. If you want to create a folder to place other mailboxes into, click the checkbox before clicking OK.

NETSCAPE MAIL: Click File – New Folder. Then from the drop-down menu, select the folder that you wish to be the folder directly above your new folder, before clicking OK.

FILTERING EMAIL

Email filters are a tool to help you save time and frustration. Have you ever lost an incoming email under the deluge of email coming into your mailbox? With filters, you can direct the important email or not-so-important email into certain pre-ordained folders.

As part of the war against spam, most ISP’s use filters every day in an attempt to keep the spam out of your mailbox. In fact, I even use filters to sort my incoming mail trying to catch the spam my ISP missed.

Dont be fooled into thinking you need some special software to filter your email. Setting up filters is actually quite easy.

To setup email filters:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: Click on Tools – Message Rules – Mail. A wizard will open to help you create your new email filters. Just follow the instructions provided to direct mail based on certain criteria into certain folders.

EUDORA: Click on Special – Make Filter. Once again, just follow the instructions in the Filter wizard.

NETSCAPE MAIL: Click on Edit – Mail Filters. Then click on New in the wizard. Once you click on New, you will be taken to a new wizard window. Follow the instructions here, then when you are done, click on OK. This will return you to the first window where you will set up the sorting order of your filter.

CLEANING AND COMPRESSING YOUR MAIL DATA

This is an important part of your email management. When you no longer need an email, it should be deleted. When you first delete an email, your software will send the email to the Trash Bin. Your email is not actually deleted until you first empty your trash bin.

Emptying your trash bin compresses the mailboxes from where the email was originally filed. This is absolutely paramount to the protection of your email data. If you go too long between compressing your email data, then your email data could become corrupted and you might need assistance in recovering your email data.

Even after you have emptied your trash, Compressing Folders is a recommended step to prevent other data corruption. Once you understand that an email does not actually move from one folder to another until the folder is compressed, then you can better appreciate this advice.

As an example, when Email A comes into your main Inbox, the data connected to Email A appears in two files. One file contains the header and body of the email. The other file contains only the email header information.

When an email is moved from one folder to the other, only the header information is actually moved. The body information will not be deleted from the original folder until which time the original folder is compressed.

This explains the purpose of emptying the trash AND compressing folders. If the email was simply moved from the Inbox to another folder, then emptying the trash is not enough. The original placement of the email is not actually removed from the file that contains the body information until the message has been designated for compression.

To empty your trash:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: Click on Edit – Empty ‘Deleted Items’ Folder. To compress the remaining folders, click on Tools – Options, then click on the tab for Maintenance. Then click the button that says, “Clean Up Now”. Once the compression is completed, click OK.

EUDORA: Click Special – Empty Trash. To compress the remaining items that need compression, then click on Special – Compact Mailboxes.

NETSCAPE MAIL: Click on File – Empty Trash Folder. To compress the mailboxes, click on File – Compress Folders.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that you utilize the tools for emptying the trash and compressing the mail folders. Protecting your email data on a regular basis is good practice for avoiding disaster in your mailbox.

So many of us rely upon our email software to keep our online business running smoothly. Once you master the tools provided in your email software, your online business will run smoothly also.

Let me share one important lesson I l’ve learned about computer software. One should never be afraid to try new things. Learning how to get the most out of your software relies upon your willingness to dig in and learn how to use it.

Once you learn how to use your software to its full potential, then your life will be greatly simplified and your effectiveness will be dramatically improved.

About The Author

Stone Evans owns the Home Business Resource Directory where you can find everything you’ll ever need to start, run and grow a home based business at: http://www.Home-Business.com

articles@home-business.com

Author: Stone Evans
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera Information

Are you looking for a way to communicate with your customers? You are probably aware that one way to make contact with your clients is through email.

Did the word SPAM just fly through your thoughts? It is a common concern among small business owners who are considering whether they should venture into using email as a way of communicating with their clients.

If you are reading this communication, you are probably versed in the basics of standard email tools, such as Outlook or online email. You may even use these tools now to contact customers, on a one on one basis. There are many other tools available, such as auto-responders, which make email communication more versatile.

Email can be an inexpensive and easy tool for connecting with customers. If you take the proper approach bulk emails to customers is not SPAM. A bit of knowledge can help alleviate any fears you may experience, so here are some definitions that pertain to this critical business skill.

SPAM – unsolicited email sent to an individual without asking their permission. Many times the intent is commercial, but it can range from jokes to advertising. The legislation in this area is becoming quite strong. Fines and other criminal consequences exist in most countries.

SPAM Filter – software programs that attempt to stop SPAM. They search for phrases and words that would suggest that the email is SPAM. The program then decides if the message is okay or deems it SPAM and disposes of it. These SPAM filters are not just in your mail program, but also instituted into corporate networks and even at the ISP level. The filters on your email program, gets rid of offending mail by putting it in your junk folder. Suspect email filtered by a corporate network or ISP filter, will be blocked completely, so you will never see it.

SPAM triggers words that can cause anti-spam software to block your emails. You will want to avoid these words so that your emails have a higher chance of arriving to the intended recipients inbox. Filters vary in sensitivity with many operating on a point system. You need to realise that use of these words (or overuse) will cause anti-spam filters to mark even legitimate email as SPAM. This means that your email never reaches the intended recipient.

Watch out for phrases like:
Click here – For free – Great offer – Order now – Check or money order - Cancel at any time – Cash Bonus
Congratulations - Dear friend – Amazing – For only – Guarantee – Special promotion -Winner – Increase sales

Blacklist – SPAM filters may identify locations on the web that send large amounts of emails. If a source or server is sending SPAM, the location is “blacklisted” added to a blacklist of unacceptable sources of email. Internet Service Providers use these blacklists as a tool to block SPAM, by preventing email from the listed addresses from getting through. If your address appears on a blacklist, the majority of your email messages will never get through to the recipients.

Whitelist – a list of allowable email addresses, domains or IP addresses. Some ISPs use whitelists to identify legitimate servers or companies that send bulk emails. Bulk emails are allowed from those identified, as it has been verified that they are sending information only to people who have requested it.

Email software also contains both white and black lists of senders, as an aid for filtering SPAM. Many subscription services request people to add the sender to listing of allowed senders in their email programs, to assure a better chance of delivery.

Auto-responder A software program that monitors an email address, sending out a preset automatic response upon receipt of an email message. This type of software often has a number of facilities such as sending a sequence of emails, selecting an appropriate response from a variety of email messages, or allowing for subscriptions to be added or removed from a database.

Mail Server – A software program that transfers email from one computer to another computer. The program on your PC talks to a mail server that manages a large number of user accounts. It sends and receives your email, passing it across the web.

eZine – an electronic magazine containing information of value to the subscriber.

Subscriber – a person who gives a service permission to send them email.

Double-Opt-In – A subscription method that requires a user who has made a request to become a subscriber, to confirm that they want to receive the information they have requested. This could be by clicking a link in the email or replying to the confirmation request with another email. About 40% of people who subscribe will also follow through and double opt in if asked to do so.

Now lets get to the nitty gritty of this valuable skill.

Communicating with your customers by email is a skill. Using email allows you to keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis, without breaking the bank. If you use your own software program the actual cost of emailing 5000 people is zero very cost effective. Even if you use an online service, the cost is just pennies per email.

There are various online bulk email services to help manage your email database. Look for one that allows you to easily track, the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. It is a good idea to have some tools and systems set up so you can check on how many people opened, read and acted upon your email. Like any other form of marketing, testing should be done on your email campaigns to see what works and what does not. Then you can do “More of What Works.”

Another option is a bulk email software program. You will want one that manages your email database and has auto-responder capability. Both systems have their own limitations but are far superior then trying to send out bulk email through Outlook.

Before sending email, you need to use a SPAM checker to ensure that the content of your email is not identified as SPAM. If you are using an online service or bulk email software, it should have a built in SPAM checker.

To communicate with your customers by email you need a list of subscribers. To build this list you must request that your customers become subscribers, preferably using a double-opt-in mechanism.

Put a link up on your web site to gather visitors email addresses. If you use an online service email service, this is usually very straightforward. The user will click on the link and fill in the web form, which is submitted to the service, which then responds with a confirmation email. When they confirm this email by clicking on a link, they are added to your database. From there you can send bulk emails with ease.

They are now your subscribers. You will want to send them information on a reasonably regular basis. Now some pointers here – do not only send sales messages. Although a special promotion can provide a valuable benefit to the customer by saving them money, it is imperative that you provide information of value that doesnt require them to make a purchase in order to benefit from it. Give your subscribers beneficial information and they will be keen to receive your email. Send an eZine on a regular basis. If you have valuable content they will be watching their inbox for it’s arrival. Carefully limit the amount of pure sales you do using email marketing.

How often you send email will depend on your clients. About once a fortnight is usually often enough to maintain contact without offending subscribers. You can try it more often and see how many of your subscribers complain and unsubscribe.

Ritchie Hale is founder and owner of ELAH Group Pty Ltd. As a consultant he has shown large, global corporations how to gain leverage in the areas of Marketing and IT. As a personal coach he has turned small business owners and individuals in to goal getters. Ritchie is dedicated to helping small business owners grow their business. Visit him online at http://www.elahgroup.com

Author: Ritchie Hale
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cool mobile gadgets

Unwanted email includes messages that have malicious software attachments, are part of some kind of fraudulent scheme, or are associated with cyberbullying, online child predators, or other illegal or undesirable activities. There are many kinds of unwanted email, with most sharing one or more of the following traits:

* They make demands on your time and energy, but provides little or no benefit.

* They have unexpected and potentially harmful attachments.

* They are intended to harass, embarrass, or intimidate, the recipient.

* Chain letters, bogus offers, rumors, and other information that lacks authority, usefulness, or validity.

* They encourage visits to web sites associated with malicious software, fraudulent activity, or inappropriate content.

* They make unsolicited offers for some kind of commercial product or service.

As long as your child has an active email address, there will be someone willing to send your child email he or she does not want to read. While no technique or toll can get rid of all unwanted email, You can help your to child reduce the chance that someone sends unwanted email by taking the following steps to make his or her email address less visible online or offline:

1. Choose mailing lists carefully: Encourage your child to join only mailing lists that send out useful and worthwhile information Also, your child should only join mailing lists that have an easy procedure for removing an address.

2. Avoid having an email address published online: If your child has to put an address on a web page, use a secondary or throwaway address that can be cancelled if it starts to get too many unwanted emails.

3. Make it hard for a machine to read an email address: There are many “email harvesting” programs that automatically search for email addresses on web pages, blogs, and other locations online. These addresses are then sold in bulk so that businesses can then send unsolicited email to unwilling recipients. One way to make it harder for these automated email-gathering programs to read the email address is to add a space after and before the “@”sign in the address. A human would have the good sense to remove the blanks, but a program would not. Another way is to display the email address in a graphic rather than with text.

4. Don’t volunteer to receive email: During the registration process, many online services like email accounts or social networking sites ask if you want to receive product updates, newsletters, or other information by email. If this happens, the safest option is to decline. If your child does decide to receive this kind of email, only allow it if the site makes it easy to get taken off a mailing lists.

5. Use a secondary email address for administrative purposes: Anytime you do something like register a new product or sign up for a new service, there is always the chance that your email will be misused by that company. Encourage your child to use a secondary or throwaway email address for these purposes. If that business starts to send unsolicited email and refuses to stop, then your child can simply cancel that backup email account.

6. Be very careful with online marketing offers: Online marketers frequently use contests, surveys, coupon offers, and other enticements to get users to provide their email addresses and other contact information. It is very likely that an email address will end up in one or more mailing lists and that this email address may end of receiving many unsolicited emails. If your child is going to provide an email address for any kind of online marketing effort, make sure that it is a secondary or throwaway address.

7. Remove your email address from mailing lists: Remind your child to remove her email address from any mailing list that sends mailings she no longer wants or needs.

8. Follow the rules for school or work related email addresses: If you or your child have an email address issued by a school or workplace, then that email should only be used for related activities. When schools issue email accounts to students, or businesses create accounts for workers, their rules typically prohibit use of the email for personal purposes. If an email is needed for personal use, it should be very, very easy to get an email account either from the ISP you use for accessing the Internet at home, or from the many online providers of free email accounts like Gmail and Yahoo.

9. Do not volunteer your email address: If you have an opportunity to provide an email address, but is not necessary to for someone else to have it, then don’t provide it. This goes for online activities as well as for offline activities.

10. Consider using a fake email address: If someone insists on being provided with an email address, and you have no need or desire to receive emails from this person, then provide either a fake email address or one that you no longer use. Obviously, if you have a legal obligation to provide truthful information, then you should provide a real address. But for situations such as an annoying person at a party who insists on getting in touch in the future, a fake email address will be very useful.

These steps will not totally solve the unwanted email problem, but if your child were to consistently follow this tips for keeping email addresses less visible, the result will be less time spent clearing junk out of the inbox and extra time spent doing more enjoyable things online.

Additional Resources:

Spam.Abuse.net — http://spam.abuse.net

Stop Spam Here — http://stopspamhere.ca/

Top 10 Ways to Stop Unwanted Email — http://www.speedbrake.com/email/nospam.htm

About the Author: Dr. Todd Curtis is the creator of the web’s most popular airline safety site AirSafe.com (http://www.airsafe.com), the director of the AirSafe.com Foundation, and an expert in the areas of engineering risk assessment and risk management. He has applied those basic principles to the problem of managing Internet use, and has put many of those insights and lessons learned into his book Parenting and the Internet (Speedbrake Publishing, 2007), an easy to understand how-to guide that parents can use to manage the activities of their online children. For more information about the book and how it can help you, visit http://books.speedbrake.com

Author: Todd Curtis, PhD
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable pressure cooker

Need for Privacy

People have become hypersensitive about their privacy during the last few years. They now expect that their details will be used only for the purposes for which they have been provided and not shared by original trustees. This is especially true of email addresses because of the huge volume of unsolicited commercial email (spam) circulating the web.

In Australia and elsewhere, there are statutes requiring privacy when collecting and using personal information. (In Australia the Privacy Act (Commonwealth) was recently amended to include private sector use of personal information eg, medical records retained by private practices).

In an increasingly litigious society, there are not only sound business reasons, but legal reasons why you should ensure the strictest standards of privacy are applied to personal information of which you are custodian. Despite this, numbers of people using email unwittingly reveal the email addresses of other people to whom they are sending email.

This article tells you how to maintain client confidentiality when sending email to multiple addressees by using Blind Carbon Copy or BCC.

Blind Carbon Copy

The term Blind Carbon Copy is a hangover from the dim, dark ages before word processors when we used typewriters (some of you have probably never seen a typewriter). To produce multiple copies of a document, one had to place a sheet of carbon paper between sheets of plain paper so that the type key impact on the top sheet would be copied to the second sheet (and any subsequent sheets).

It was a somewhat messy, but proficient process. When one wanted to send an original letter to one person and copies to several other people without showing each recipient who the other recipients were, a BCC annotation was made on the original. Each copy displayed only the name and address of the individual recipient, but the BCC notation on the original showed to whom the copies had been mailed. A BCC looked like this: Bcc: Mr Tom Jones, 14 Weaving Court, East Melbourne VIC 3000

Some email programs allow you to enter email addresses into the BCC field and send them. When you do that each recipient receives your message, but the names of other recipients are not displayed.

That is why they are called blind they are not seen.

By using the BCC feature you preserve the identities of those who are on your mailing list and ensure that anyone receiving your email cannot email your list or harvest their email addresses and sell them.

Your Email Program

When you obtain an email program, make sure it has a Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) feature. Programs such as Outlook Express and Outlook 200? have BCC capability. Although I have never used it, I’d be surprised if Eudora and other common email programs didn’t have it too.

If when you click to send a new email your email client displays only the To and Cc boxes it may be that the Bcc feature IS available, but is simply not displayed. Try the View menu or Help menu to see if you can find a Bcc option.

If your email program has a BCC option that you can select as a permanently visible option, select it. If it doesn’t, you may need to think about getting a new program.

How to Use BCC

When you send email messages to multiple addressees and you do not want each addressee to know who else has received a copy, use the Blind Carbon Copy field.

Simply enter all the addresses in the BCC field separated by a semi-colon, comma, or whatever your program uses. When you click the send button, your email will go to each individual with only his or her name in the To field. None of the recipients knows to who else the email has been sent.

Outlook 200? will allow you to send BCC addressed email without an address in the To field. Other email clients require at least one address in the To field before they allow multiple recipient addresses in the BCC field. Test the program you use to see if it needs to have an addressee in the To field. If so, address it to yourself. (Surprisingly, email programs usually allow us to email ourselves … that’s why I receive so many emails from Jennifer Lopez (just joking).

If you need to make an entry in the To field, place your own email address in that field and everyone elses address in the BCC field.

Disadvantages

What you need to know about BCC is that some spam filters automatically delete email addressed in the BCC field so it never reaches its destination. This means that while sending BCC is okay for privacy, your email might not always reach the intended recipients.

A problem I had with Outlook Express 2002 was that if I sent my email using BCC I couldn’t print a hard copy of the sent message with the addresses on it. I had to write address details on my file copies for record keeping purposes.

If sending BCC email is likely to be impractical for you, then you need to consider upgrading your email client from the standard run-of-the-mill version to a professional version. That’s what I did.

Email Management Programs

If, like me, you distribute large quantities of email regularly to newsletter subscribers, clients, club members, colleagues or anyone else, you will be better off getting a program designed for high volume mailings.

I use and sell a heavy duty bulk email program that lets me do simply, many tasks not easy to achieve with standard email clients like Outlook 2002. For example, the program I use will allow me to:

1. Automatically record subscriptions to my newsletter
2. Personalise each email with a recipient’s name or any other information I choose to include eg, place of residence
3. Send as HTML or plain text with or without attachments
4. Do a partial send to my distribution list eg, if I wanted to email everyone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, clients 64-73 of 3,000 or all persons whose title is Ms I can do it

By having a separate program for bulk emailing, I overcome the problems involved with privacy and reduce the likelihood that my messages will be eliminated by overzealous spam engines.

If you rely on email to carry out business activities (and who doesn’t?), it may be time to consider how well your email strategy meets the needs of your business in today’s security conscious society.

Copyright Robin Henry 2005

Robin Henry is an educator, human resources specialist and Internet marketer whose firm, Desert Wave Enterprises, helps individuals and businesses improve their performance by using smart processes, smart technology and personal development. He lives at Alice Springs In Central Australia. Visit Desert Wave Enterprises to read more about this topic.

Author: Robin Henry
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