Nourish is great for your Social Media strategy

Our customers know it, but we thought you may also want to know just how powerful Nourish really is when it comes to engaging an audience.

You know your business best, however one thing we wanted to make sure you have is a great eNewsletter. We have been developing Nourish as the eNewsletter solution that will empower you to differentiate in your Social Media strategy. Your ‘unfair advantage’.

Here is how…

Nearly all news sources on the web use RSS. How many of your readers familiar with RSS? Who knows?… But the good thing is that almost all of them are familiar with email. So this is where comes Nourish helping you to share your content in the format familiar to your readers.

Unlike other tools Nourish only lets you generate emails from an RSS feed. You can use a single or a combination of RSS feeds to streamline valuable and engaging content to your readers. Different feeds can be used for different campaigns, and even different template can be used for each of your newsletters. For example you can communicate with your clients using a different tone to how you communicate with your suppliers.

Nourish is easy to set up and intuitive. It makes managing a large list of subscribers effortless. The opt-out process, as well as subscribing/unsubscribing to individual campaigns is completely automated. Nourish can take the hassle of you managing any number of subscribers, starting from a personal blog to a large company newsletter.

Only those who have run multiple campaigns know how overwhelming that can be. If you aim to target multiple audiences or promote different products, Nourish has a great deal to offer you. It allows you to run multiple campaigns for segmenting your subscribers. Delivering the most relevant content to each group of your readers can boost your open and click through rates and reduce unsubscribers. Plus you have subscribers’ statistics at hand any time to validate the relevancy in the course of your campaigns to their audience.

Nourish allows you to manage multiple campaigns in one single account. Each campaign you create represents a different newsletter. Nice and simple! Unlike any other service Nourish does not limit the number of campaigns you can have.

We know how important it is for B2B organizations for example to segment their subscribers by industry sector. Your campaigns, and the content you deliver with each may vary on (for example) customer demographics, or by set products or services. Or perhaps you may need to have a more ‘independent’ newsletter featuring content from multiple sources.

It’s also easy to create a form for your website to add subscribers to one or more of your campaigns. We have developed a WordPress plugin called Nouri.sh Newsletter that makes this a simple 2 step process.

With the automated scheduling you are sure that your email campaigns go out at regular intervals, without logging in or any manual intervention from your side. Just set and forget!

And my favourite one: your readers like cool custom templates. Your Nourish emails can have your unique branding for a professional look of your campaigns. We can help with that too, just send your brand ideas to: my [at] nouri.sh

Unlike other similar services, Nourish will not force you to upgrade after a trial. Come join us for free today and keep it free as long as you wish!

Plus one: make sure you invite all your friends and contacts too. We’ll make sure they will also get it for free!

• Our standard discount to new customers is giving you 1 month free if you pay for 11 months.
• If you have signed up in 2010 we give you the option to prepay for 10 months and use Nourish for free for 2 more months.
• Either if you are new or existing customers you can receive a free newsletter template (worth $99) completely customized to your business’ unique look by prepaying for 22 months. On top of the free template you will get 2 more months for free.

To give you even more means for awesome year start we decided to extent our offering by introducing our personalized discounts. What do we mean by that? We will be happy to discuss your unique business requirements and prepare a custom proposal especially for you! Did I say at no obligation, just as a special gift from us!?

Just use the comments form below or email me directly at my @ nouri.sh to express your interest and I will be in touch promptly.

Don’t miss this out. We at Nourish look forward to helping you make 2011 your best year yet!

The internet search giant has come up with the priority system to help users cope with the amount of emails they receive in a day.

Users can switch on the feature in a click, instead of setting filters and creating multiple folders as they had to with previous services. Gmail will then adapt the way it treats incoming emails based on the account owner’s pattern of usage.

This will mean that email marketers will have to alter their approach to current marketing by following best practice to ensure their email reaches the priority inbox. Sending email based on data such as previous purchases will increase their relevance, meaning better inbox positioning with less competition.

So how do you ensure that you are a ‘priority’?

Well Google will prioritize emails according to whether the account holder will reply to a message. Marketing emails – especially those sent from “do not reply” email accounts – will be at a disadvantage. It will also deprioritise emails that are routinely deleted without being read.

This means that emails should be as engaging as possible i.e. segregating your lists, following design and HTML best practice and cutting out irrelevant ‘blanket blasts’ to everyone. It might mean emailing less. Make the content interesting and avoid spam words to ensure that your email hits the ‘pinbox’.

So preparing for Gmail’s priority inbox is actually an exercise in being a better email marketer. Smarter inboxes like this are becoming more common, and most of the major webmail players have made noises about this recently, so you need to ensure that you adapt your marketing strategy accordingly.

Not all email is equally important to a recipient and so there is often a gap between email a recipient is happy receiving and email a recipient both wants and is expecting enough to complain about not receiving.

To ensure that your email deliverability is the best it can be follow these 7 steps

1. Verification

The number one step in the battle for deliverability is confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list. You can do this by using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the subscriber. They must click that unique link verifying that they own the email address and did actually request to subscribe.

2. Email Addresses

When asking visitors to subscribe, you should be asking for their “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Google or Hotmail. Free email accounts tend to be used far less.

3. Bounce Backs

Always remove undeliverable addresses as soon as possible. An address that consistently  bounces should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

4. Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and the difference between the two can be hard to distinguish. Always consider plain text emails too as deliverability failure is around 1.2% compare to 2.5% with HTML.

5. Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

• Advertising

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

• Language

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography.

• Images

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

• Attachments

Avoid attachments where possible by including a web link instead- where complete avoidance is not feasible. Many people are still afraid of the spread of viruses through opening of attachments.

6. Relationships

Where possible contact the ISP and let them know about your email service. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

7. Legal Practice

There are a number of laws relating to email deliverability. It’s important to keep up to date with current legal practice and you must make sure you periodically review your current practice to ensure legal compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link to remove the subscriber from future messages (which must be swiftly tasked).

This month we’d like to showcase a great example newsletter created by http://www.dgm-uk.com/ - DGM, the UK’s most experienced  affiliate network.

We designed a custom template to promote the DGM brand and give a more professional look to all their newsletter mailings. With well written content, this is an excellent example of a newsletter designed for hundreds of subscribers.

DGM empower their customers with control over their affiliate and search marketing campaigns, deliver more performance, and ultimately… more return on investment.

Take a look at their website http://www.dgm-uk.com and you will immediately notice the newsletter subscription box on EVERY page. Using the WordPress Nourish plugin makes this incredibly simple. You are more than welcome to sign up!

Thanks to Chris here is some valuable feedback about DGM’s experience of Nourish:

Why did you want a newsletter in the first place? We wanted to be able to provide a weekly touch-point to for our current and prospective clients to keep us front of mind.

Why did you choose Nourish? I was keen to reuse content already written on our blog and site so RSS was the way forward.  The fact that Nourish can aggregate more than 1 feed was the decisive factor, plus all sites are built using WordPress.

How easy was it to get going with Nourish and would you recommend us to friends/ colleagues? Pretty easy, except the template, but Nourish did that for us. And there were a couple of glitches with links not working. Took about a month to get up and running smoothly. And yes, I would.

How much has your web traffic increased thanks to Nourish? Too early to tell, but the visitors that have come through have spent the longest time on the site and viewed more pages than average.

Have you noticed more engagement on your blog with returning visitors? Mildly but can’t attribute that to the newsletter yet.

How do you intend to promote your newsletter to increase subscribers? The sign up boxes are on both the blog and the main site for organic growth.  Sales team will be encouraging people to sign up and will promote via Twitter, Facebook etc. We’re also going to increase the scope of the blog to include more interest pieces.

Hope you liked today’s feature. Stay tuned for new Nourish features to make sure your newsletters are smart and powerful!

If you’d like to have your newsletter featured on our blog, please forward it to me at my[at]nouri.sh and we’ll showcase it in one of our next editions.

Here are some great tips for creating amazing email newsletters. And remember if you still need a little help getting your newsletter as bright as you want it, just drop me a line, I’ll be happy to help.

Mariana

Keep customers informed with an email newsletter

Do your customers know what’s going on in your business? How can you inform them of that press release or that award in a low cost way that’s non intrusive? Most businesses know they need to have an eNewsletter, indeed, many have attempted one, only to find that it doesn’t go out on schedule, the content isn’t quite perfect and it ends up taking ages to get right. This is where the free web service Nouri.sh really helps.

Here are our top tips to ensure you keepsubscribers subscribed and maximise open-rates and click-throughs:

1. Segment your subscribers: This is probably the best tip. Different readers want different information. Give some thought to your different groups of subscribers. For example you may want to use separate campaigns for: Customers, Prospects, Leads, Suppliers, Partners and Investors. With Nourish you can have multiple campaigns, each using a different feed category from your chosen blog(s).
2. Give subscribers multiple schedule options: You might have daily / weekly / monthly campaign options. Some people want to be in the know, while others want an occasional summary.
3. Use at least 1 image per article: Make it visually appealing, but not overly visual so that it reads like a promotional email. This can normally be achieved by adding images to your RSS feed. Put some effort into the image quality, photoshop images to enhance colors if needed.
4. Summarise everything: Instead of sending out whole articles in your newsletter, use the ‘read more’ tag to allow readers to get the gist of each article, then if they want to read it they are more inclined to click the link and before they know it customers are reading around your website to find out what’s new. Most blogs have the ‘read more’ tag built in.
5. Don’t send less than 3 items: If you don’t have any news, don’t bother your subscribers. It’s better that a campaign is skipped than sending a newsletter with 1 or 2 summarised items. If they don’t like either article there’s a high chance they’ll unsubscribe. If you don’t write a lot of content, it’s easy to syndicate someone else’s, just use the RSS feed from your trade association. Nouri.sh lets you use multiple RSS feeds for content in your newsletter.
6. Write good content! Sounds simple but in the haste to get news published it’s so easy to make mistakes. Always ensure your articles are proofed. Also too often we see over-optimised articles. Write for your audience with catchy headlines, don’t write for the search engine. Exclude optimised articles from your newsletter.
7. Encourage a debate and use Social Media:  If your readers post comments on your articles/posts/news get back to them, answer any questions show that you appreciate their readership. There’s nothing better than having someone else promote your news for you. Make it easy for readers to tweet your news, include links to your LinkedIn Group or Facebook Fan page for example.
8. Give something away Having a competition is a great way to get and keep subscribers. If you can afford to give away something good like an iPod or a case of champagne.
9. Use a neat template: A good template doesn’t need to be a work of art, it just needs to give the email a reliable structure, visible in a host of different email clients. Also use a text only version so Blackberry users can read you newsletter. Most good email syndication tools will take care of this.
10. Use a trusted server or service provider: It’s easy to get your server blacklisted if you try to do your own campaigns from Outlook. A web application like Nourish will mean your email comes from a white-listed server and that the email is trusted, thus avioding the junk filter.

We all know that we should be in front of our customers more. The chances are that you have great news, case studies and plenty going on, Nouri.sh makes sure that your customers know about it, best of all, it’s free!

Adding images to your feed might not be a standard feature of your blog or CMS. If you’re feeding off a WordPress blog, you’ll be glad to know its pretty simple. Just install the aptly named plug-in ‘WP RSS Images’ – written by Alain Gonzalez – and don’t worry about it being version 1.0; he got it right first time.

Once installed, you can configure the size of the thumbnail image to be used in your feed, which is automatically generated. Since only the first image can be taken, as my aussie friends say, make it a beauty.

Enjoy