Thanks to the growth throughout 2011 we are preparing to migrate Nouri.sh to new, more powerful servers. We wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you to all our customers who submitted new features/ functionality ideas. We appreciate your feedback!

As always we remain open to new ideas. Our Q1 2012 development plan is now being reviewed. We welcome any suggestions from all customers until December 11th 2011.

So step up and help us shape Nourish and make it even better! We promise to review all ideas and take the best into development. Please post your comments here or email: my [at] nouri.sh

You are welcome to join us and share with us:
Nourish on Facebook | Nourish on LinkedIn | Nourish on Twitter

Thank you for using Nourish. Please invite all your friends and connections. Nourish is Free and Fun for them as well!

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!

Thank you for all your feedback and help with making Nourish better. Keep sharing with us!

A joyous and prosperous 2011 from all at Nourish!

* Already have a Nourish account? – Prepay for 10 months and get 2 free (offer is available for all clients)

* Pay for 22 months and get 2 free + a free template + support with website form integration – Sign up now and receive a template completely customised for your business. Choose your own colour scheme, logo and design for a completely unique look to your newsletter!

Express your interest using the comments form below or emailing me at
my @ nouri.sh

I will be glad to answer any questions you may have or assist you with choosing the best plan for your business.

Offers only available to the end of the month. Don’t miss out – sign up now for your Nourish early Christmas gift!

1. Social and rich-media campaigns won’t get much traction after mid-November. Once we get into late November and December, folks are just too busy running around and fighting traffic and the weather to spend much time with social campaigns. Same goes for rich media like video. A couple of years ago when video was all the rage, email campaigns anchored by video content evaporated once we got into the core of the holiday season. Not only are folks too busy, but during the holidays consumers turn to email for discounts and gift ideas more than anything else. Play to the channel’s strength. 

2. Discount codes will become more prominent in preheader messages and subject lines. Discount codes are highly relevant to shoppers during the holiday season. Activity last year certainly proved that. So if you’re promoting a discount code, make it super-easy to find. Instead of burying it at the bottom of the primary message, elevate it up into a preview pane banner, into your preheader message, or into your subject line. I’ve been seeing a fair number of retailers promoting discount codes in their preheaders this year — and the next step up is the subject line. Especially during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday time span when inboxes are deluged, discount codes in your subject line could attract subscribers to your email over a competitor’s. 

3. “Share with your network” (SWYN) functionality will be used more strategically. Right now SWYN links are found in the headers, share bars and footers of many emails, which is fine in general. But during the holiday season — and especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when you’re likely promoting your best deals of the year — consider giving your deal a viral boost by adding another SWYN call-to-action right next to the “Buy Now” button. Make SWYN a strong secondary call-to-action, not an afterthought relegated to the margins of your email design. 

4. Designing mobile-friendly emails is more important than ever. With the rapid adoption of Android-powered phones and the continued adoption of iPhones — both of which render HTML email pretty well — the distinction between email and mobile email is falling away. Soon mobile email will just be email. Couple that with the fact that email is the No. 1 activity on smartphones, according to a recent study, and this market segment is becoming impossible to ignore. Make your emails more mobile-friendly by (1) using an informative preheader message and putting it ahead of “view with images” links and other preheader elements, (2) narrowing the width of your email template to 650 pixels or less, and (3) using larger font sizes to counteract the effect of your emails being scaled down for mobile’s small screens. 

5. At least 50% of retailers will send an email on Thanksgiving Day and at least 70% will on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With email volume per subscriber continuing to rise, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are pretty much at the saturation point. Last year, many retailers began their Cyber Monday campaigns on the afternoon of the day before, giving rise to Cyber Sunday. I expect that phenomenon to repeat this year, plus I expect Black Friday emails to spill over into what I’ll call Black Thursday (a.k.a. Thanksgiving Day). Similar to activity on Cyber Sunday, retailers will increasingly make their Black Friday offers valid on Thursday afternoon, looking to lock in sales before the crush of email on Black Friday. 

Courtesy of Media Post 

 http://bit.ly/bnsQBV

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.

Below is just an outline of what an ipad could mean for your business and how it will change the face of email marketing forever.

Although the ipad is meant for personal rather than business use, it still has its relevance in today’s corporate world.  The benefit of sending emails to customers who have ipads (not that you would be able to get hold of this information) is that they are more likely to read the email. When at work consumers are busy working and replying to the more important emails, meaning your email often gets overlooked or seen as spam. However, this changes when the email is read on a device like an ipad as consumers often spend time browsing through their emails at a leisurely pace. 

The next issue is visibility. The preview pane in Outlook is small and people can only see the top of the email, which contains a header with the company logo and no real information, which doesn’t  convey your message well. Some webmail clients, such as Google Mail, Yahoo etc also disable images within emails. This helps to destroy your brand image and appears unprofessional. The best ones to test to ensure that the majority of your audience don’t experience any issues or irregularities in rendering are Yahoo!, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail/Google Mail and AOL. Test these periodically to ensure that email client changes and upgrades don’t affect your emails.Contrast all of this to the iPad. Images are displayed by default. The preview pane is much larger. This means that recipients be able to preview most of your email. There are also fewer distractions on the email client itself; Outlook has tons of sidebars, folders and options that not only take up valuable space but compete for attention with emails.

Another advantage from a technical point of view is that the iPad email client uses the same rendering engine as the Safari web browser. This means that if something displays fine in Safari, it will appear almost exactly the same in an iPad email. And Safari will display things almost exactly the same as Firefox, Chrome and, if you’re careful, the later versions of Internet Explorer. Since Safari supports HTML 5, so does the iPad email client. One of the main features of HTML 5 is the ability to embed images directly in the page. If the iPad takes off this could lead to a boom in video email marketing.

I would encourage all email marketers to get hold of an iPad and start testing. You need to see how your emails look on this new device and make sure that they are rendering correctly. This is just the beginning of how email marketing will change over the next few years so make sure you keep abreast of the latest technological advances and social revolutions.

Above-the-fold
The part of an email or web page that is visible without scrolling down.  Typically represented by the Preview Pane.

Bounce – Hard/Soft Bounce
A hard bounce is the failed delivery of an email due to a permanent reason like a non-existent address. A soft bounce is the failed delivery of an email due to a temporary issue, like a full mailbox or an unavailable server.

CPA (or Cost Per Acquisition)
A payment model in which payment is based solely on sales or registrations.

CPC (Cost per Click)
Rather than paying a cost per 1000 emails delivered, or a cost per response, some suppliers charge a sum for all the recipients that click through the email.

CPM (or Cost Per Thousand)
CPM commonly refers to the cost per 1,000 emails for distribution.

CPR (or Cost Per Response)
This term is used to track responses, where the desired result is not purchase, click-through or cost per number of emails for the campaign).

Click Through Rate (CTR)
The number of people per 100 (expressed in percentage terms) who click through to a URL in an email, banner ad, text or graphic, to view a specific web page.

Conversion Rate
This reflects the percentage of people converted into buyers (or whatever action is desired) out of the total population exposed to the conversion effort i.e. email.

Distribution (Gross)
The total number of emails sent as part of a single campaign/distribution to all (SMTP) addresses on the distribution list.

Distribution (Net)
The total number of emails sent and successfully delivered as part of a single campaign/distribution to all (SMTP) addresses on the distribution list.

HTML Email
An HTML email is perhaps the standard form for email marketing. They are rich with colour and images and contain embedded links, banner ads etc. Marketers have to keep in mind that some recipients do not want to receive their emails in HTML. However, HTML messages often pull a higher response than plain text messages.

Landing Page
The page on a website where the visitor arrives. With an email campaign, it can be the page to which the email directs user via a link.

Links
Text links, hyperlinks, graphics or images which, when clicked direct the user to another online location.

Open Rate
The percentage of emails opened in an email marketing campaign.
Opt-in (or Subscribe)
Where an individual has positively indicated that he or she wants to receive email marketing from your company.
Opt-Out (or Unsubscribe)
Where an individual requests not to be included on an email list i.e. unsubscribe.

Personalisation
The practice of writing the email to make the recipient feel that it is more personal and was sent with him or her in mind. This includes using the recipient’s name in the salutation or subject line, referring to previous purchases or offering recommendations based on previous buying patterns (like Amazon).
Preview Pane
Here you can see a snapshot of your message without fully opening the it.  It is important that you are aware of this and do not include images within the first 5-7 lines.

Privacy Policy
A clear description of a website or Data User’s policy on the use of information collected from visitors and including what they intent to do with the data.

Segmentation
This is where you separate your email list so that recipients get different content/offers based on their demographics, buying patterns etc.

Soft Opt-in
Where an individual is considered to have opted-in, on the basis that they have provided their email address during a sale or during the negotiation of a sale and other conditions are met, including that the individual was informed of how the information they provided would be used and were provided with an opportunity to opt out.

Solicited email or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email)
Where an individual has actively invited the Data User to send the individual commercial email.

Spam
Spam is random, untargeted bulk email where recipients did not request communications from that company.

Split Testing
When the list is divided into a number of discrete cells to allow for a robust test across multiple variables such as subject line or email design. To determine optimum response, response rates are measured for each cell.

Targeting
Selecting a target audience or group of individuals likely to be interested in a certain product or service. Targeted campaigns tend to yield greater responses and fewer unsubscribers.

Tracking
Collecting and evaluating the statistics allowing you to measure the effectiveness of an email or an email campaign.
URL
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL i.e. web address) is a sequence of characters conforming to a standardized format, used for referring to resources by their location, shown in the address bar of a browser.
Viral Marketing
A type of marketing that is carried out voluntarily by a company’s customers i.e. word-of-mouth advertising. Tools such as send this page, article or website to a friend encourage people to refer or recommend your newsletter, company, product, or specific offer to others

Just thought i would drop in and let you know that Nourish is now featured in the Email Guide’s directory so please post your reviews here http://bit.ly/csrusl

We’d love to hear what you think!

Don’t forget we are also on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter so don’t forget to follow us online for the latest news and reviews.

Thanks

Andrea

andrea@nouri.sh