Do you own a Smartphone? Email, text, IM clients/ colleuges from anywhere at anytime? Check out these 8 rules to Smartphone etiquette and see how badly you are misbehaving.

1. Be considerate: If you are contacting a client after hours ask if they are free to talk. Just because your friends may immediately respond to IM’s or texts doesn’t mean your client wants to. Have the same expectations as you would from an email correspondence.

2. Remember the concept of “business hours”: Follow the weekday 7am-9pm rule. Not everyone wants to speak to you late night or on weekends, you must respect that.

3. Only contact the people you talk to regularly: Texting a colleague that sits next to you is totally acceptable. Texting a client you rarely speak to is not.

4. Put your phone away during face-to-face meetings: There is nothing more annoying then having a conversation with someone who is constantly checking their cell phone. If you can’t focus during a 30min meeting what kind of impression does that give your potential clients.

5. Texts and IMs should be reserved for simple, non-critical topics: If your texts is longer then a sentence or requires deeper communication send an email or schedule a call.

6. Be wary of abbreviations and emoticons: Be aware of whom you are texting, if you would not include LOL or a smiley face in an email to them why would you via text message.

7. Never send sensitive information: Hackers can easily obtain this information and cause severe damage.

8. Stay professional: Be sure to still use spell check and write professionally via text as you would by email. Remember you are still conducting business.

Monday will mark another step forward for Facebook.  The social network giant is looking to expand its communication hub even further by offering an email platform.  Expectations are that this could have a very large impact on Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and other email systems.  The impact on email marketers has yet to be addressed, but it will certainly have an impact on the display marketing in current webmail providers as consumers make a switch to the Facebook platform.

With Facebook’s functionality already replacing traditional email services, it is likely the use of Facebook will grow as it offers an email platform. It will likely put its own twist on the typical webmail platform, however details remain to be seen.  A large concern over the privacy capabilities and policies of the company may hinder the popularity of such a service.

Stay tuned to see what the big announcement on Monday entails and how usable this email client is.

This is the time of year when all of us start shopping for our holidays gifts. Unfortunately, some are not able to afford the holidays, so they are looking for a short term loan to get them by. Leadpile wants to be able to provide those consumers with the much needed loan.

If you are generating payday loan leads and are looking for an additional place to try and place those leads, please reach out to Leadpile.

GOT WEEKEND traffic too??

Leadpile is looking for additional WEEKEND traffic for our *exclusive* lenders!

Acceptance: 7-10%
Payout: $20.00 CPA
Schedule: All day Saturday and Sunday
Basic filters:
*No military
*Checking account with direct deposit only
*Employed ONLY
*ALL pay periods accepted
Allowed traffic: PPC, SEO, Display and email

Q2 2010 North America Email Trends are in! Results show email open rates remaining steady while clickthroughs declined.
This analysis is comprised from 5.6 billion sent emails by Epsilon in April through June of 2010.

Here are some quick stats:

- Open rates increased 18% from the same time 2 years earlier
- Click rates (5.3%) decreased 5.9%
- Average volume per consumer is up 10.5%
- The non-bounce rate slightly increased from 94.1% to 94.8%

Mailers need to practice creating relevant email messages to their consumers, also cutting back on image heavy email and using text based email has shown higher clichthrough rates due to many email platforms blocking images within emails.

Feel free to share your email tips and tricks!

How many of us have a Gmail email account? How many of us knew there was an enhancement that was just rolled out to all Gmail email users?
DMNews is reporting that the new “Priority Inbox” will filter your e-mail messages into three sections: “important and unread,” “starred” and “everything else.” The new priority inbox will categorize your messages as they arrive to a consumer’s inbox. Gmail will be using various methods to predict which messages are important, including the people you e-mail most and which messages you open and reply to.
In regards to email marketing, does this mean the possibility of having to change your practices so you have an ability to effectively deliver Gmail emails? Some are saying no this is not going to affect email marketers, however how about those that are not necessarily practicing “good practices”? This new priority inbox might be filtering out those “bad” emails that many consumers will now be avoiding because they will show up at the “bottom” of their inbox.
Good update for Gmail…. or just a wasted effort to make your email better? You decide!

Email marketing can be tricky and tedious, following the 6 steps below can help you build your lifetime customer base.

Delivered: Once upon a time a valid email address was a sign of success. Fast forward to reality and just having an email address means squat. There are many more variables such as knowing what the consumer likes, when they shop and what offers they respond to so you can target the right message at the right time of day.

Opened: Open rates used to be used to simply optimize subject lines, now advertisers are learning more from this statistic. The consumer trusted your brand to open the email, you reached them at a convenient time and your message was of interest. One must also keep in mind that consumers may just be opening your email to unsubscribe.

Credible: Measuring the read rate of your message is a more accurate indicator of user engagement. A message should remain open for longer then 5 seconds to indicate the user has read the message and not simply clicked your unsubscribe link.

Relevant: Advertisers must use all data such as purchase history, RFM metrics and clickstream reports to build a successful targeted email campaign.

Interactive: All advertisers want their customers to share their positive experiences. The more relevant your ads are to the consumer the more likely they are to blog, tweet or refer new customers to your products.

Engaged: An engaged user is one that continues to respond to your marketing efforts, it’s great to have a consumer purchase once but if a user is targeted correctly by the 5 steps above they will become a lifetime customer.

Can it be true? Is the cost of sending a letter going to be raised again? Investing now in the “Forever Stamps” may be a smart move to make in the near future. The postal service which has thrown around many ideas such as limiting mail delivery to 5 days a week, has announced that it would like to raise the cost of a first-class stamp 2 cents, from .44 to .46 cents starting in January 2011. Consumers who purchase the Forever Stamps at .44 will continue to be able to use these stamps for the full cost of postage even after the change.

With the changing time, economy, email, and so many things being taken care of over the internet the postal service has seen a steady decline in profits facing a potential $7 billion dollar loss in 2010.

Many of us can’t wait to put our next Twitter update, Facebook status change, or access our email outside/inside of work. However, with this accessibility to our personal internet “pleasures”, IT managers are looking at potential problems with how our nation’s employees are creating “issues” with the company’s security. Does accessing our Facebook accounts and other social media put the company you are working for at jeopardy of bugs and viruses? Its seems the answer is yes.
Internetnews.com is reporting, “The security implications of these devices cannot be overstated. Between bugs in the operating system software for smartphones to complex phishing and malware scams birthed and proliferated on Facebook and Twitter, CIOs are constantly playing catch up as employees continue to bring more and more devices and risk into the enterprise. ”

So how does our IT departments manage all of their employees desire to “stay connected”? Sounds like a new project our IT managers might want to consider because it does not seem that this sort of thing is going to go away anytime soon.

There are many challenges when it comes to email, what converts for 1 list may not convert for another. Lets look at 5 ways to increase your Click-through.

1. Text-only email: Majority of the emails people deem important are text-based emails from family, friends and co-workers. If you are currently only sending flashy HTML email creative try and A/B test on your next drop.

2. Story Format: You must provide something of value to your audience to gain their attention. Tell a relevant story to create interest in your topic.

3. Big Button: If your offer is compelling enough sometime all you need is somewhere for people to click. A “Learn More” button will bring in more clicks but less qualified traffic then a “Shop Now” button.

4. Multiple CTA’s: When mailing to large aggregated lists including multiple calls to actions can help increase click-through on the basis that different people may be interested in different aspects of a topic.

5. Digest: If you are offering a lot of content in your email newsletter try a digest format where you have several links at the top f the article navigating users to sections of your content.

I hope some of these tips help increase your email ROI!

A recent study indicated that the use of at least three social media options in email marketing campaigns lead to a 55% higher click-through rate.  The interesting thing is that only about half of email marketers are adding some sort of social element to their email campaigns.

The real ROI comes in the shared messages of these type of campaigns. Messages that included a sharing option generated 30% higher click-throughs than emails without the social sharing links.  Three or more generated 55% higher click-throughs.  Twitter alone showed a 40% higher CTR than without a sharing link.  Twitter appears to be the most popular option at 67.2% of all social emails with Facebook coming in a close second at 62.7%.

Think about it, you send an email to a million users in your email list.  If 55% of the users that click through your message and share it with their 130+ friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter, imagine how much ROI you are getting on that email campaign without any additional cost!  Folks, time to start A/B testing!

In an effort to bring an advantage to Hotmail over Yahoo or Google Microsoft is completing upgrades to the free Web mail service , the changes expected to be available in July or August. According to the Associated Press, the upgrades will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users’ key contacts and Internet social networks. It will also show a thumbnail preview of incoming photos or videos without having to open the attachment. The improvements are also going to make syncing Hotmail on mobile phones easier.

Currently Yahoo’s email service has 95 million U.S. users, Hotmail trails behind with 47 million and Gmail a close 3rd with 43 million.

Leadpile is very much familiar with email marketing and works with a lot of publishers that are generating traffic through this source of marketing. Because it has become so popular with companies trying to monetize data, and publishers trying to have a less expensive way to generate traffic, reading up on any new email marketing trends is important. DMNews brought up some key points about email marketing:
1. Permission and privacy: Various states are making rulings on cases that involve consumer’s information, so keeping up with not only CAN-SPAM but other legislation involving consumers privacy, is key to keeping your nose clean with the law.

2. Video in email: The next biggest thing is utilizing video in emails. If you are not someone that is utilizing this yet, you better start reading up now.

3. Partnership of email marketing and social media: Incorporating links to social media in emails is something that marketers picked up on last year, however the future of these two is going to be big. Perfecting the use of social media in email is something that all emailers will have to learn more about, because this is going to be something that is going to continue to emerge and you will need to learn to keep up with it.

“Nineteen percent of online marketing budgets are now allocated to e-mail, according MarketingSherpa, and 54% of marketers plan to increase their e-mail budgets this year, based on research from Econsultancy and ExactTarget.” If you are not a company that is looking at increasing your email marketing budget, trends show you might want to reconsider this!