WiseStamp Brings Your Email Signature to Life

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

On the spectrum of really big marketing tactics, the email signature isn’t terribly sexy, but this little touch can say a lot about what you do and how you connect.

If you’re like me, you send a lot of email so why not make sure your email signature is working in the background for you. This doesn’t mean you need flashing lights and honking horns, but you should supply recipients, even those that contact you often, with all the necessary contact details, including social profiles, so that you are easy to connect with.

Creating an email signature, while not that technical, can take a little work and may even be limited on services like GMail. WiseStamp is a browser plugin (Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) that makes the act of creating multiple, highly engaging email signature profiles very easy. This free addon allows you to create rich HTML text, add images, add social profiles and even add applications such as your last tweet, your last blog post, or your latest eBay listing.

The signatures work in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and WindowsLive. Once you download and install the plugin you will see a WiseStamp option in your mail. The first step is to create your signatures using the simple online editor, connect your various social profiles and applications, and save your profiles. You can then toggle between personal and business signatures as needed.

Since this is a free application the default setting adds a little promo for WiseStamp at the bottom of your signature. You can remove this by opening setting and clicking that option off. On that same screen you’ll be given the option to make a donation. I recommend throwing a little coin to the creators of this nice tool. It’s good karma and it’s what makes the free app world such a cool place to hang out.

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Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.

The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time.

The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time.

TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid also says that now that a computer is prioritizing your email, intros will becoming even more important. Perhaps someone will develop a kind of SEO strategy for getting a prospect’s attention via email, based on the kinds of keywords Gmail tends to prioritize. That said, not doing annoying things in an email, like starting it with “Dear Sean” (not my name) or “Hey there,” both intros that I discovered in my inbox this morning, will always help your case.

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If you’re doing an email campaign to promote your business, one of the most important things you can do is write a quality email. I know this sounds extremely rudementary- but it’s one of the most important things in business. Especially considering the majority of our internal and external communication is via email now.

There is one line of that email that will be far more important than any other line, one line that can make or break your entire campaign. That line is your subject line- and it will usually be the key factor that will prompt people to open the email and look at your offer. Here are some things to keep in mind when you write your subject lines.

Proper punctuation, grammar, and spelling.

While you don’t want to seem overly formal, a subject line riddled with spelling errors or incorrect grammar will give a very poor first impression for your business. We should all know this by now. If you can’t handle coming up with subject lines on your own,  make sure that all your email subject lines are proofread by someone who knows what they’re doing to ensure that the they look professional.

One question that is often asked in this category is whether or not a subject line should have title capitalization or sentence capitalization. There really isn’t a clear cut answer, and marketing professionals have presented good cases for both approaches. What you absolutely should not do is CAPITALIZE EVERY WORD OF YOUR SUBJECT LINE. See how annoying that is? Don’t do it!

Choose your words carefully.

There are words that will make people more likely to look at your email, and there are words that will make them less likely. It’s easy to get confused when it comes to figuring out which words will have the most positive effect on recipients. When scanning their inbox, most individuals are going to look for phrases that cry out “I’m trying to sell you something!” While you should use emotionally charged buzzwords that are relevant to your demographic, you should avoid anything that sounds overtly sales-oriented.

Remember that there are words and phrases that can get your messages flagged as spam. To get around the spam filter of the email hosting provider for your recipients, avoid the following words and phrases in your subject line: free, “click here,” “work from home,” “information you requested,” “lose weight,” “million dollars,” “cash bonus,” and “satisfaction guaranteed.” Yes, some of these are good phrases (and ‘information you requested’ is actually one that is useful), but their misuse by vicious spammers has ruined them for the rest of us.

Watch your length.

There have been dozens of studies on the “magic length” for subject lines, and the end result is that everyone disagrees on what it is. Some say that subject lines containing 25 to 80 characters are “perfect.” The best approach here is to experiment with your specific demographic, while making sure your subject line is informational and interesting.

There have been highly successful subject lines that were only five words and others as long as 15 words. As with any aspect of marketing, try your own approach and see what works. Still, following these tips can help you maximize your impact and, more importantly, avoid getting your outgoing email server flagged as a source of spam.

Email isn’t something that should be taken in the business world. Yes, it’s easy to just shoot off an email with whatever subject and body you want- but if you want to get a response there’s typical email protocal you should follow.

Repeat after me!

I will not yell in all caps.

I will not put spammy subject lines including phrases such as “free” and “work from home.”

I will not tell my life story in my subject line.

I will make my email subjects useful, short and to the point.

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Turning an Email Address Into a Social Profile

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Ethan Bloch (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes

Imagine this scenario. You run an ad that directs someone to your landing page for a free report. They fill out the form, providing only their email address, and fifteen seconds later you receive an alert that tells you this person is a very high profile blogger, connector and influencer in your industry – just the kind of person you are looking for to pilot your new white labeled service.

The process described above is no longer fiction due to an innovative new service called Flowtown. In this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visited with Flowtown cofounder and CEO Ethan Bloch. Flowtown’s mission, according to Bloch, is to help businesses paint a really rich story about their customers by appending each customer’s social media activity to their record. Or, as they put it on their website – turn an email into a social profile. I equate this to the high tech version of the salesperson of past days that knew how to quickly establish some sort of common ground with a prospect or customer.

The use of social data in the business world has become so essential and so expected that I believe the day is coming when customer and prospects will assume you know a great deal about them and expect that they can discover a great deal about the people and companies that they are considering working with through their own social networks.

Bloch shares a quote from his cofounder Dan Martell that I think is so true these days – “you already know everyone you need to know, you just don’t know who they are”

The power of Flowtown is simplicity and the growing number of integrations with service providers such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Wufoo, and Unbounce.

In case you hadn’t gathered, I think Flowtown is a tool that every marketer needs in the toolbox.

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Fairfield Inn & Suites Small Business Road-to-Success Challenge

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