Tag: newsletter

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MailChimp’s Mobile E-mail Research

Recently MailChimp posted about their mobile e-mail research .  A lot of people read their e-mails on cell phones – 57% in Japan and 41% in the US, so it starts to be a bit consideration.

Lots of suggestions on the report:

  • Use a instapaper URL link to make it easy for people to read your e-mail later, on the desktop.
  • Avoid single columns that require left-right zooming.
  • Apple recommends a font size of 17-22pts.
  • Have big, easy to click buttons instead of tiny links on your calls to action.
  • On two column templates, have a smaller left column – otherwise your reader might not see that there is a right column.
  • On Gmail, the head element is removed so only inline CSS works. It also cuts content at 102 KB.
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Newsletter Plugins for WordPress

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News IconIf you want newsletter plugins for WordPress, you can find a whole bunch of them, with many different levels of quality and features.

One new plugin released recently is e-Newsletter by WPMU, which are well know for the quality and range of their WordPress plugins.

e-Newsletter has some great features, including professionally designed newsletter templates, unlimited groups and subscribers, tracking, and more.

Pretty cool. If you are looking for a way to send newsletters from WordPress, you should check it out at WPMU.

Pros: Easy to install and use, nice features, good support.

Cons: Not free. It uses your own host to send the e-mails, so the deliverability might be inferior to professional services. Plus your own host might have limits on total e-mails per month or hour. But that is a problem shared by pretty much all newsletter plugins for WordPress, or any self hosted solution.

Because of those reasons I personally use MailChimp myself.

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New E-mail Newsletter

Some time ago, I decided to move the e-mail newsletter from PHPList – which is nice but very limited in features, as well as by my server – to Mailchimp.

I did stall it a lot, but this friday I finally sent the new newsletter .

Overall, MailChimp's system is pretty neat. They have nice templates, and it's easy to add Facebook's Like Buttons (and many other social sites), archives, and track links. Their reports are pretty cool, and not only show your Open/Click/Unsubscribe/Bounce rates, but also have click maps of what links were most clicked, as well as a per country map of where your e-mails were opened. There are many other features, most of which I didn't use yet.

However, the tracking system doesn't work well with how my extra domains (Folderprint.com and STGThumb.com) are set up. So both of these (which add to 87% of the clicks) failed. 🙁

I was able to fix this for the STGThumb link, but not for the FolderPrint link, yet. So, to any customers that got the newsletter, I apologize for the inconvenience!

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Text-to-speech on e-mail newsletters

I'm looking into changing my e-mail newsletter from PHPList – which is pretty good for a free tool, but obviously lack features compared to pricy ESPs (e-mail service providers), and deliverability is of course smaller, as the ESPs spend a lot of time tuning theirs.

I'm checking out several ESPs, such as Mailchimp and GetResponse. One pretty cool feature added by GetResponse recently is E-Mail to Speech. It allows your clients to hear your e-mail instead of just reading it.

The quality of the speech is pretty good. I still prefer to read (which is much faster), but I can see busy customers – or customers on the move – opting to use it.

I'm pretty sure they'll post statistics eventually (unless they are awful ), and I'm very interested to see what the exact effect of this will be.