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Some of us receive three to four different types of newsletters in our inboxes everyday. I get at least three newsletters a day. Some of these emails are from Dell, Borders, Banana Republic, L.L. Bean, Circuit City or from magazines and news sites. These emails I receive are nicely designed and offer an easy way to unsubscribe from the list and comply with CAN SPAM Act.

Most of these newsletters and emails are published through some sort of online email marketing tool or desktop software.

If you are looking to setup one of these tools for your organization or business, at minimum you should look for these three components:

1. Subscriber/List Management
2. Click Through Statistics and Analysis
3. Email Template/Design Management

Subscriber Management

Efficient and flexible subscriber management features are key to successful email campaigns and newsletters. With your email marketing tool, you should be able to import and export subscribers in text, Microsoft Excel and other text delimited formats. Some of the email publishers help to identify emails with wrong format, or incomplete email addresses. This is useful especially if you are importing 3,000-5,000 emails into your email list. Also, make sure you can group your list by different categories, which can help you to segment your audience. Let’s say you have an email list that combines all customers from Pennsylvania (PA) and New Jersey(NJ). Through your email publisher you shoud be able to separate and create a group for PA and NJ emails. In the future if you want to market geographically to a particular state or region you can send it to a particular group instead of everyone on your list. You should be able to segment your list by different categories that fits your organization’s target market.

Click Through Statistics

To track all the customer activity that happens after you send out your email newsletter, make sure your email newsletter offers a report on ‘click through’ rates for the links that you have placed on the email message. By looking at the number of users who interact with your newsletter, you can see how effective it is and which topics or links really work.

Email Template/Design Management

Some of us don’t know how to design an HTML email, which is perfectly normal and this is where the newsletter’s email template management comes in. If you have an email template within your newsletter program, you can easily manage the design and the layout of your newsletter. If you can afford to have a web designer create the design for you, that’s all good and you won’t use this feature that much. If you don’t have a designer in your staff then make sure your newsletter has templates that you can modify and use to launch your campaigns.

Email Newsletter & Marketing Tools

Below is a list of newsletter applications that I recommend using if you decide to deploy an email newsletter for your organization:

• MailChimp
• Topica
• Emma
• Campaign Monitor
• Microsoft List Builder
• Aerial Software – Email Marketing Director
• Get Active
• IntelliContact

Email Newsletter Best Practices and Tips

• Email Marketing Tips for creating email marketing campaigns
• Nielsen’s Alertbox: Design of Email Newsletters
• Email Marketing Etiquette: The Good, the Bad, and the Clueless
• How To Market Your Business With Email
• HTML Email Design Tips by MailChimp (in pdf format)
• The Basics Of Email Marketing
• How to Beat the Spam Filters
• Ten Steps To Improving Your Email Copy

If you have any other email marketing tools that you recommend, you can share it by commenting on this post.

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Cornell University in Ithaca, NY is looking for a Web Application Programer. Visit their web site for details.

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“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”

— Omar Khayyam

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Naturemill is a compost machine made for your home. You throw in there fish, fruits and vegetable peels and it spits out a compost ready to use in your garden. There are no odors or leakage with this machine. Truly genius! The price tag is $399. Visit their web site for details.

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St. John Fisher College is looking for a Webmaster. If you think you are good enough, apply online.

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“If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.”

— Arabian proverb

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So you already know that Apple has come out with Mac Mini to switch some PC users to Apple platform. These little MAC Minis go for $499 without a monitor, a mouse or a keyboard. As always, Apple has a done a great job of designing and styling their products that appeal to the eye no matter what they made. For PC users, we have to put up with crappy and bulky designs of PC manufacturers who only care about the speed of the machine….not anymore….

Finally it is here: PC Mini

I came across PC Mini which looks exactly like Mac Mini, except it runs on Windows XP and has Intel inside. Just like MAC Mini, PC Mini is sleek, light and has all the bells and the whistles you need. PC Mini is very useful for folks who live in a MAC environment but need a PC to test out desktop and web applications. Also, PC Mini is great for people who just can’t stand the bulky and ugly CPU units that take up a lot of space in their office.

Most of the people spend lot of money on a new computer but they do not even use half of the power and memory of their machine. PC Mini is also perfect for folks who need to do basic tasks on the computer: surfing the Internet, checking emails, writing or editing documents, and other basic tasks.

Features of PC Mini

• Built-in Wireless IEEE 802.11 b/g card
• High-speed Network Card
• Digital video interface (DVI)
• TV signal output
• Dual screen display
• High capacity DVD±RW / CD-RW burner─
• High-speed USB 2.0 port─
• IEEE1394 serial bus port

Visit the PC Mini web site to purchase one or see what it looks like.

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BBC News has an article that talks how web site visitors make up their mind about a site within 50 milliseconds. That tells us that web sites should be crafted carefully and designed in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, because it can cost significant amount of business to a siteowner who wants everything on the homepage and asks you to make everything bold and bigger.

When web visitors see a cluttered or badly designed web site, they hit the back button before you even get a chance to blink. I know I do it, if I see something like this, I am out of there right away. That’s why it is important to hire a professional web designer if you are a thinking about getting a web site for your business.

I know many people who say, “It’s okay, I can get my web site template for $15 at Template Monster.” However, someone else might have chosen the same template that you have or even worse, you can’t update the web site or add new pages because of the graphic limitations of the template. To those folks who choose Template Monster, I say “go ahead, but at the end you will end up spending more money on trying hire someone to update and fix something if your web site breaks.”

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I have always wonderered what happens to that web site that is listed on 10th or 20th page results among the million search results that Google or Yahoo returns if you search for any keyword.

For example, I typed in ‘Coffee‘ to Google and I got 139 million results. How is that useful for me? I am not going to go through all of those 139 million web sites. This type of search results and search engine rankings create real problems and sets limitations to site owners who are depended on business leads or product sales from their web site. Because we are limited by search engine rankings, we end up paying extra for online advertisements to get that traffic or sales that we need.

Today, usability expert Jakob Neilsen posted an excellent column on this subject in his Alertbox, titled “Liberating Websites From Search Engines.”

The article explains how Search Engines are sucking dry web site owners by Pay-Per-Click (PPC) bidding wars that hurt businesses and truly devalue the content of web sites. Nielsen suggests that by using PPC we are actually driving more traffic to the Search Engines. He also gives some solutions to liberate your site from solely relying on PPC and the Search Engines.

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If you need a free word processor that you can use from any computer, anywhere in the world I recommend using Writely.

This little online tool can let you write, save and share your word documents without using Microsoft Word or WordPefect. The only thing you need to use this tool is a computer with Internet connection and a browser. That’s it.

Writely is perfect for those of us who need to edit, publish and share documents online without depending on bloated software packages. Users can also collaborate on a document, revise it and even blog it.

That’s not all, you can also upload your Microsoft Word document to Writely and edit that document online. Once you are finished editing your documents online, you can dowload your document in Word (.doc) or in Html (.html) formats to your desktop.

Writely has done a great job with the interface and the usability aspects of their online tool. Two thumbs way up!

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“We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.”

— Rumi

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Sometimes I wish I could really express my anger in email messages to people who send me spam day after day about cialis or viagra or some other crap. I receive at least 50 or more emails from prince of Nigeria or from ‘Ultimate Pharmacuetical Shop’ with cheap viagra…it is very annoying.

Well, now I can reply to all these spamers with a voice email using Springdoo. Yay!

Now you can talk your emails and send a voice email to your spammers, friends or your colleagues with a click of a button. Thanks to good folks at Springdoo for making this possible.

Since all good things are free, Springdoo provides a free service. Check them out!

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