Email . . . Lookin' Good!Written by Todd N. Thompson
An often overlooked aspect of online marketing is importance of how your sales message is delivered. To say this in a more direct way would be to say, "does your email message arrive to reader in a format that is easy to read, easy to understand, and does is let reader know you are serious about your business?"Formatting your email for success is critical. Here is golden rule to follow. Never format your emails to be greater than 60 characters per line. If you go greater than 60 characters, some of your readers will have trouble reading your email due to how their email software renders message. Let me illustrate my point with two sample emails. Email Message # 1 Hello Jim, Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah .... Thanks, John Doe (Line width in this example is greater than 60 characters) Email Message # 2 Hello Jim, Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Thanks, John Doe (Line width in this example is set at 60 characters to guarantee a nice presentation in your customer's email programs.)
| | Use Your E-mail Address As a Branding ToolWritten by Wanda Losko
Even before you launch your website, you can (and should) begin to use your domain name. Why? Because it is worlds cheapest advertising tool and an excellent way to brand your business. How? By using your domain name in your email address and in your signature file. If your email address reads yourname@aol.com or you@bell.com - you are branding name of your Internet Service Provider. Why should you do it? Your ISP doesn't pay you for it. Indeed, you pay THEM a monthly fee!!! Quite likely you were not aware that you do have a choice here. Instead of advertising Earthlink, GTE, BellSouth, or AOL, you can advertise and brand your own business and your own name. In case you didn't know, here is how it works. For example, my own service provider is home.com -- but my e-mail program is configured so, that address I use in my "from" field says "wanda@loska.com". I can do that because my web host provides me with a forwarding service. That means, any message sent to wanda@loska.com is forwarded automatically to my *home.com* account. Don't think that you need to launch your web site to be able to do this -- even if you are not ready, you can use this feature. I suggest that once you get a domain name, you set up a simple page like this: http://internetsuccesscoach.com/bizcard.html -- but even this is not necessary. To use your domain name in email address, you only need to have a domain name and a decent web host. Yes, really. With domain name registration costs as low as $9.95 per year, and with web hosting fees around $15-30 per month -- can you afford NOT to do it? I don't think so!
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