An e-newsletter is one of the best ways to build and maintain subscriber relationships. However, all too often, these emails are treated more like sales pitches than the resource centers that they should be.

Join Blue Sky Factory and OpenMoves, email content specialists, for our “Secrets to e-Newsletter Success” webinar this Wednesday to learn how to create the best e-newsletter for your subscribers.

Learn how to:

• Use e-newsletters to truly connect with and engage your subscribers
• Design your e-newsletter to combat the average 51 second attention span of your readers
• Keep your content fresh and relevant to your subscribers

Click here to register!

Date: Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM EST

Presenters: Joanna Lawson-Matthew of Blue Sky Factory and Ronen Yaari of OpenMoves
System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.3.9 (Panther®) or newer

“Blue Sky Factory delivers! Not only is your email deliverability far superior to any other service we have used, but your customer service is as well. We can always talk to a real person on the phone, which is rare in this day and age. We also find your Publicaster program to be very user-friendly and easy to work with. Thanks again to Blue Sky for helping us stay in touch with our valuable customers.”

Ron Samuelson, CEO
Samuelson’s Diamonds
www.samuelsonsdiamonds.com

Capturing customer intent can prove to be a difficult task if you do not use the right approach. I recently attended a webinar on this topic, hosted by Blue Sky Factory clients, Chris Brogan and John Stone of CrossTech Media and CrossTech Partners. Many of you may know Chris Brogan from his excellent blog, where he shares his insights as a social media expert. Chris joined John and covered how to approach this issue in “Capturing Customer Intent: Digital and Face to Face Channels.”

The purpose of the webinar was to explain how to capture customer intent from a company’s standpoint. These stages are attract, engage, transact, fulfill, support, and retain. All of the stages are equally important and Chris and John stressed the importance of communication in each stage. The key points I took away were:

• Consider content marketing and relationship marketing strategies right away.
• Build an audience intelligence solution.
• Listen across your touch points and across the web.
• Integrate your digital marketing and live event channels.

They also touched on social networking, blogging, and building strong relationships. It’s not easy to find a connected process to deal with all of these stages, but if you can get it right you have the opportunity to improve customer retention, create new opportunities, enhance service, and lower your costs.

 To view the recorded version of this webinar,  click here.

We hear all the time about how email marketing works to drive revenue streams and how it is one of the most cost effective ways an organization can market.  All true, but have you ever thought about using email marketing as a communication tool amongst volunteers within a very small organization to be more efficient?

I know of one such organization that wasn’t sure if email marketing was for them. Their existing database was very small and they were not sure if they could benefit from the services.  In the end they decided to take the plunge and to give it a “try”.

The organization began gathering emails just like any customer does and before they knew it, they had built the database to over 200 volunteers.  Being able to reach over 200 contacts with one keystoke and sending an email did wonders to promote this volunteer organization and meet it’s needs.  The results have been tremendous.  One email was sent to the list of volunteers requesting specific items to fulfill a specific need.  The cost of the combined items was approximately $1000, a lot of money to ask volunteers to secure when there is no budget to buy these items.  I’m told that the email was sent on a Wednesday and that the items arrived at the organization on Sunday.  Pretty powerful way to communicate.

If you are passionate about a cause that you work with and have a relationship with an ESP, it might be worth a call to see if they are able to offer you a discounted rate on an account dedicated to your cause, or some other creative partnership option. Not only does email marketing work in the business world but it works in the volunteer world of extremely small email databases.  It may not provide large monetary revenues but it provides rewards that are just as big.

Hello marketers, tech junkies, bloggers, tweeters, and everyone else familiar with Blue Sky Factory and or email marketing!  It’s been a few months in the making, but thanks to Keith and Noah, Blue Sky’s dynamic design duo, our new website (www.blueskyfactory.com) has finally been launched.  While we have stayed true to the Blue Sky Factory brand, there are some upgrades that make the site more streamlined and clean.

Let’s start from the very beginning.  We’ve pretty much completely redesigned the look and feel of the homepage.  By bringing our blog to the forefront of www.blueskyfactory.com, we hope to help visitors have real-time easy access to information about industry trends, best practices and everything and anything else email marketing related.   Other sections on the homepage include a rotating banner, listing some of our customers, information and links about upcoming events we are involved with as well as resources and white papers we provide, and a section featuring links to different subscription centers throughout our site.  Basically, the homepage creates a more user-friendly platform linking you directly to the popular features of our website.

 The team and creative services pages are two other noteworthy changes to the site.  The new and improved team page will let you get to know your friendly neighborhood Blue Sky Factory employees a little better.  Bigger more colorful photographs along with questionnaire answers from the employees themselves, give visitors to the site a more in depth, personalized look at the Blue Sky team.  The creative services page is also redesigned, allowing for a more organized look at the work our design team has created for our customers.

I could ramble on some more, but the best way to experience and learn about the new features is to actually get online and see it yourself!  Visit www.blueskyfactory.com  and let us know what you think.

 The results are in from our Mobile Device Survey:
* 70% of you use a mobile device to view emails
* 41% of you receive HTML emails with images on these devices?
* 64% of you save emails on your mobile device to view later on your PC
* 62% of you use the view in browser link on your mobile device

Social Media’s growth and influence on the web continues to explode. We’re interested to see what kind of tools you use! Click here to share your thoughts, and look our for the results in the near future.

Most email marketers agree that their subscribers can sometimes be impulsive and unpredictable. Often at times they ignore messages or respond at large to a particular email. A lot of us don’t have a clear cut understanding of why one subscriber may take action differently than another subscriber.

 Let’s face it: the interest of your subscribers are d ifferent. If you don’t recoginize the differences you may be in danger of losing the value of your message and the attention of your subscribers. To read tips on giving your subscribers, click here.

 Don’t miss another issue of Factory Direct, our monthly newsletter. Click here to sign up.

Have you ever wondered why people are opting out of your emails? Don’t be afraid to ask! You could learn some very valuable information from sending a simple survey to your unsubscribers.

This information could help you improve your email program and retain more subscribers in the future. To learn how to stop beating yourself up about your opt-out rate and use the unsubscribers as a learning tool, read our latest article from our monthly newsletter, Factory Direct.

What the Changes to the CAN-SPAM Act Mean For You

Though it’s taken quite awhile, 3 years to be exact, the CAN-SPAM Act has issued a final rule, which will take effect on July 7, 2008.  Recently, I attended a webinar on the recent changes to the Act, hosted by Unsubcentral and the ESPC.  John Engler and Justin Weiss discussed the new rules in “Total Compliance: What the Changes in the CAN-SPAM Act Mean for You.”  While the changes will definitely be beneficial to the industry, there has been some confusion surrounding certain topics.

The purpose of this webinar was to dig into the new commercial email requirements, which are of particular interest to email marketers.  The webinar first discussed the birth of the CAN-SPAM Act and took listeners through a timeline, showing how we got to where we are now.  The presenters then went on to discuss the four new points of the Act, which are:

1.       Liability being attached to “persons”

2.       Multiple-sender rule

3.       Uncomplicated opt-out mechanisms

4.       Physical mailing address requirements

The presenters also discussed the guidance given by the FTC on the usage of the “forward to a friend” option and how to know if you have a compliance obligation.  This new guidance states that emailers must comply with the CAN-SPAM requirements whenever the forwarding action is induced (i.e. offering a special discount or free gift for forwarding) by the marketer.  Some marketers have been confused by this language, and the presenters gave a great explanation of who is obligated to comply and when.

One of the many questions asked was, although the new rules will not be enforced until July 7, 2008, can marketers start following them now?  The answer was, of course, yes!  Marketers are certainly allowed to get a jump start on the new compliance rules, but won’t be punished for not complying until the due date of July 7, 2008.

For a more in-depth look at what these changes mean for you, view the recorded presentation of this webinar here. As an email marketing firm, our suggestion is to learn and comply with these new regulations sooner rather than later (and of course, before July 7th).  If you have any questions about these new rulings, please contact your Account Manager or email us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com.

Summertime is made for vacations. Whether you go for spontaneous weekend jaunts or carefully planned extended stays, vacation is always something to look forward to. Travel and tourism destination emails are valuable tools to help prospective visitors gather information about your destination. With the economy on a downturn you want to make sure your email is noticed. An AOL/Zogby Travel Survey showed that 57% of Americans will be spending less on vacation in 2008 than they did in 2007. So how are you going to lure these prospective visitors to come and vacation with you?

When promoting a travel destination you want to make sure you give your contacts time to prepare for upcoming events. These folks have signed up to receive information from you so make it count. For recipients that are planning extended vacations you have a wider window of opportunity to send relevant content. If you have not done so yet, try segmenting your list by people that travel with children versus people that do not. For instance, the season opener of a theme park might be targeted to people that travel with children. Not to say we don’t all love to ride a roller coaster when given a chance but individuals with children would be more apt to interact with that announcement than others.

One of the easiest groups of travelers to target are the weekend travelers that decide at the last minute to get out of town. If you have an event or special happening on a weekend and you want to promote that event quickly, send an email out around Wednesday before the weekend event. Also, make sure to segment and target to contacts based on geography. Only target the email to folks that are within easy driving distance of your destination. Not only does this give the recipient time to make plans to attend said event, they will be able to get there in a short amount of time.

Even though there is no tried and true day and time to send an email you must make sure if you are promoting a particular event that the recipient receives the email in plenty of time before the event to make plans to attend. I recently received an email on Sunday June 15th, Father’s Day. The offering was a listing of restaurants that were promoting Father’s Day dinner specials. Seeing as how I rarely check email on the weekend I did not receive the offer till the Monday after Father’s Day. Poor planning, as I was obviously not going to be able to act upon the offer.

Be sure to include a very visible link to a calendar of events on all your emails. If your reader is not able to plan a visit that weekend or within the near future, a link to the upcoming events will allow them to peruse what is happening and make plans accordingly.

Have a safe and fun summer.