2010 May | Spiderworking.com's Social Networking blog

May 26, 2010

Newsletters Part 2. – Why we love MailChimp

mailchimp3

Last week we promised to tell you more about MailChimp our favorite Newsletter and mailing list management tool. So here are 7 reasons why we love MailChimp so much.

1. It’s Free

Completely free up to a maximum of 500 subscribers and 3,000 mails per month. However if you want to loose all the MailChimp branding from your mails you can pay either by the email or subscribe to one of their paid plans.

Once you’ve used the free service and your mailing list expands you probably will have no problem paying for it!

2. It’s easy to create pretty emails

Not only does MailChimp come with pretty pre-made templates for HTML emails but it is pretty straightforward to create your own template. It also has inbuilt picture editing software so that you can re-size your logo to fit the mail.

3. You can easily integrate the Newsletter sign up form into your website or blog

MailChimp helps you create a customised sign up form that can match the colour scheme and size of your site. Once created you can just grab the HTML to integrate it into your blog or website.

4. Fantastic Benchmarked Stats

Once you have waved off your latest Newsletter MailChimp will provide you with some great stats, how many people (and who) opened your email. How many links from your emails were clicked, how many mails bounced etc. It will also benchmark these stats against your industry.

5. Easy social media sharing

When you are sending out your campaign you can choose to share it on Social Media channels too. You also get your own link to your Newsletter which makes it easy to share.

6. Great info and tutorials

MailChimp offers great tutorials not only on using the application but on how to get the most from your Newsletters.

7. Scheduling

You can easily schedule your newsletter to go out at the time of your choosing. There is much discussion about the optimum time to send an email out, we tend to send ours out on a Tuesday or Wednesday at around 11am but the reasoning behind that is by no means an exact science.

Don’t forget that if you want to subscribe to our Newsletters for tips, special offers and news you can do so using the sign up form on the top right hand side of this site.

Tags: Newsletters —

Comments (0)

May 19, 2010

Newsletters pt1. – 4 tips for beginners.

You may not consider your email mailing list social media. It almost falls into that traditional marketing slot but it is a great way of communicating with your target market and if done well can keep customers connected with your brand and encourage more interaction… which of course inevitably leads to more sales.

So here’s our 4 top tips for Newsletter beginners:

1. – Permission

Make sure you have permission from your subscribers to add them to your list. It is a common mistake to start collecting email addresses and then send them unsolicited emails. There are several problems that can arise from this. Firstly if someone hits the junk button when they receive your email it puts a black mark against your email address, if enough people do it your future emails will be considered spam. If this isn’t scary enough imagine how annoyed someone might get if they start receiving your newsletter on a regular basis. Instead of receiving something they have an interest in they could start getting annoyed with you and your brand and articulating this to others.

2. – Great Content

As with all social media, provide valuable content! If you are sending a monthly newsletter don’t just try to sell something. Offer something of interest to your customers. For example, we try and offer a tip or a hint every month and a competition as well as a special offer. Hopefully this means that people will look forward to receiving our updates and read them fully.

3. – Catchy Title

Come up with a catchy hook for your email title. People are going to be less inclined to open a mail that is named ‘May Newsletter’ than they are one that says ‘Cool Twitter Tools and Free Social Media Audits’.

4. – Good Tools

Use a good Newsletter management tool, there are lots available, some by subscription and most with a free trial. We use and recommend MailChimp as it is easy to use and is free up to 500 subscribers. We’ll be talking more about the benefits of MailChimp in part two of this blog next week.

If you would like to receive the Spiderworking.com mailing list subscribe using the form on the top right hand side of this page.

Tags: Newsletters — Tags: interaction, mailchimp, mailing list, newsletter, Social Media —

Comments (0)

May 12, 2010

3 Great Irish Facebook Pages

This week we are going to share with you our three favorite Irish Facebook pages. All three of these inspire us to make our page better and we hope they will do the same for you. All three are also retail business pages, next month we will look at some great Facebook B2B pages.

1. Hairy Baby

hairybaby

My customers must be getting tired of me constantly referring them to Hairy Baby but it is a truly great and successful page.

What they do right

Post interesting content that encourages interaction – Just for fun Polls & questions.
Polls for market research. Hairy baby often ask their customers to collaborate on a new T-shirt idea. This makes users feel that they have some ownership of the brand and of course are more likely to buy the product when it is launched
Not all business. Most of the hairy baby posts are not about selling T-shirts, they are aimed at encouraging interaction and it’s working judging by the number of comments they get.
Accent. All Hairy Baby posts are written in an Irish accent which is genius! Their t-shirts are targeted at an Irish or ex-pat Irish market.
Letting the customers have their say – The wall is set to allow posts from fans and the page. What better way to showcase what your customers are saying about you.
Fun. Hairy Baby updates always make me smile!

Click here to Like the Hairy Baby Facebook page.

2. Puddleducks

Another page that anyone who has seen me speak in the last year will have heard me talk about.

What they do right

Aim content at their target market
Invite participation – they encourage people to post pictures of their children wearing Puddleducks products onto their wall. This not only encourages interaction but also helps spread word about the page across Facebook.
Giveaways – Monthly giveaways with the prizes always being relevant to their target market.
Cross platform promotion – A recent childrens art competition was promoted through Facebook, Twitter, the Puddleducks blog and the Pix.ie photo sharing site.
Not all business – lots of good links to other events and sites that would be of interest to families with small children.
Letting customers have their say – look at the Puddleduck’s wall and you will see lots of great comments from customers.
Fun- Splashing around in puddles is fun and this is a message that Puddleducks successfully promote. Again their updates make me smile.

Click here to Like the Puddleducks Facebook page.

3. Champion Sports

A familiar high street brand with an excellent Facebook presence.

What they do right

Posting valuable content to their target market.
Invite participation – They’re ‘Anyone but France‘ campaign has attracted 417 people to sign the ‘pledge’ so far. Again this spreads the word about Champion Sports across Facebook.
Not all business – lots of good links to videos and content about sports fan with the odd special offer thrown in.
Giveaways – in conjunction with their website they run competitions.
Fun – The ABF campaign mentioned above and most recently a recreation of the Hunky Dory ads with a less trim model is enough to make you smile.

Click here to Like the Champion Sports Facebook page.

The four things that these pages have in common: