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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!