As the launch of the new GetResponse approaches, we’d like to give you some important information concerning the process of moving your current account to the new system. Here’s what you need to know:

Before the migration - schedule service disruption:

The data migration will begin on July 4, 2009 at 9 PM EDT and end on July 5, 2009 at 5 PM EDT, therefore service will not be available during that time period.

Note: During this scheduled data migration, all GetResponse sites will be down and you will not be able to access your account.

Your account during service disruption:

Please rest assured that no account data will be lost during migration! Your web forms will be working, however all processes related to sign ups will be queued and processed within 24-48 hours. That means that anyone who subscribes or signs up to your campaign will not be added to your contact list for 24-48 hours. If applicable, new subscribers will also be credited to your account within the same time period. Please note that new subscribers will not receive confirmation or thank-you messages immediately, but they will go out automatically after the above time period.

No payments will be processed on July 5. Therefore, if your recurring charge is set for this date, it will take place on July 6.

After the migration:

After the migration is completed, you will be introduced to the new GetResponse interface and the old version will no longer be available.

All the settings from your account will be carefully moved to the new system and will remain intact. You can be confident that no data will be lost.

As with most major migrations, the system may not be working perfectly from 2 to 3 days after the data has been moved. Please let us know about any problems you experience by contacting our capable Customer Service Team. It will help us to quickly address any issues.

We have performed migrations many times and, as always, we will do our best to conduct a smooth migration for the new launch. Again, you can rest assured that this process will not affect your account or stored data in any way.

If you have any questions regarding the migration process, feel free to contact us. We will be happy to answer any questions you might have!

Thank you for choosing our email marketing service! We hope you will be just as excited about this new version as we are!

Best Regards

GetResponse Team

Every day brings us closer to the launch of GetResponse 6.0, the biggest and the best release ever! The new version gives you a totally new interface, powerful features, multimedia, and much more.

Of course, we understand that change can be stressful, that’s why before the Big Day comes, we’d like to let you know more about what’s coming with the new and improved GetResponse. To review some of the new features, enhancements and new GetResponse for iPhone preview please watch our videos:

Attention Tweeple. We have decided to reward those “serious email marketers” who are first in line to take control of the power and possibilities of GetResponse 6.0. We will be soon launching an exclusive competition for @GetResponse followers to celebrate the launch of GetResponse V6.0.

Make sure to stay tuned! There’s lots more excitement to come!

Email Marketing – GetResponse

All of us want to build our opt-in lists. Your subscriber list is worth its weight in gold.

But, while many people brag about the size of their lists, the truth is that size means nothing if your subscribers are not responsive. Just because list member don’t unsubscribe, doesn’t necessarily mean they are paying attention to your emails.

A case in point is forcing your customers to opt in to get product updates and other information (i.e. affiliate programs), when you really intend to use it to blast them with daily offers.   You are forcing them to make a decison: continue to get information from you that they didn’t ask for or miss out on important product enhancement details.

Don’t make your customer sorry that they ever purchased from you. Consider maintaining two lists:

1. product updates and fixes; and
2. general email list

If you are adamant about emailing purchasers, at least don’t make the mistake of bombarding them frequently with third party email offers (especially if those offers don’t pertain to their original purchase from you). Otherwise, you not only stand to lose potential affiliate commissions, but also future product upgrades or new product packages.

Have you tested the responsiveness of your list lately?  Share your results below!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

Recently, someone wrote our support staff asking if it was safe to import free or purchased leads into their autoresponder system.

It is our policy (and the policy of most - if not all - companies such as GetResponse) not to allow these types of leads to be imported. Your subscribers must have requested information from you specifically. This is entirely different from them clicking on a link, filling out a generic opt-in form, and having their name sold to tens or hundreds of people.

While there are a number of ways to build a list, GetResponse provides an easy alternative with their service at GetSubscribers. This service can add targeted subscribers to your list each and every day without the need for them to confirm.

If you are looking for a simple way to build your list, you may want to check it out!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

This is the first in a 3-part series this month about email segmentation. Today, you’ll learn what segmentation is and why you may wish to use it in your email marketing. Next, we’ll talk about ways to segment your list. The final part of the series will review some common segmentation categories to consider for your list.

Why Should I Segment My Email Messages?

Let’s assume you have written an ebook and developed a web site about buying foreclosed property. Your prospects have opted-in; your subscriber numbers are growing day-by-day, and then…

… you start losing people faster than a skunk at a garden party.

If your readers don’t feel you are talking to them, they’ll go elsewhere. Nobody likes to feel ignored.

In the post, “The #1 Tip for Writing Successful Emails”, we looked at defining our prospect and writing emails directly to that person. That’s the first step.

As your list grows, your readership becomes more diverse (unless you are in a very narrowly defined niche that would only appeal to a very small segment of the population in the first place).

Take our buying foreclosed property example. Those reading your emails might include:

• First-time home buyers looking for affordable housing;
• Renters who are tired of throwing their rent money away;
• Females worried about being “taken” in property purchases;
• New and experienced home flippers;
• Investors looking to buy property low in order to sell high;
• Investors with a rental portfolio;
• Baby-boomers looking for an affordable second home.

Wouldn’t you agree that these readers probably have varied areas of interest, backgrounds, incomes, educations, etc.?

One “personalized” email campaign cannot be all things to all people. The money from your list comes from your readers sitting back and saying, “This person really understands what I’m going through - my frustrations and my goals. I think I’ll follow their advice.”

By segmenting your list, it allows you to speak directly to the first-time home buyer. You can touch on the difficulty of finding affordable property and the frustration of settling for much less than you’d like because that’s all you can afford.

This varies tremendously to educating a real estate investor on the benefits of buying foreclosed property. For one thing, an investor probably has funding available, while the first-time home buyer is scraping a down-payment together. The investor wants to buy low and sell high and is primarily interested in the ROI of a property in which (s)he will never reside. The first-time home owner wants a HOME in which to live and, perhaps, to raise a family.

Two totally different conversations, wouldn’t you agree?

In the next part of this series, I’ll share some simple ways to segment your lists. And, finally, I’ll throw out some segmentation categories for your consideration.

If you have any questions or comments, please add them below and we’ll include them in the series.

Debbi Bressler
Email Specialist
Get Response

Nothing frustrates me more than receiving emails from people who make it next to impossible to opt-out of their campaigns.

This is NOT rocket science people!

There should be a link at the bottom of every campaign email, allowing your readers to click it and - poof! - disappear.

Don’t make your readers jump through hoops. Why force them to reply to your email - with special notations in the subject line - in order to get off your list?

They shouldn’t have to go to your website, where they must provide information they’ve long forgotten in order to fade away into the sunset.

Word does get around about the impossibility of removing yourself from some marketers’ lists. It becomes a running joke…especially if they quote their list numbers on their web site or in emails.

If your email opt-out process resembles the Roach Motel (ie. “Readers Opt In…But They Can Never Opt Out”), please fix it….

….TODAY!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
Get Response

Have you ever received an email with gobbedygook through it?

This occurs when people compose their email messages in a word processing program, especially MS Word, and then paste them into their email client or autoresponder message box.

Instead of seeing those quotation marks, for instance, all your readers see are hieroglyphics.

There are a few ways you can solve this problem:

1.  Type directly into your email without using a word processor at all.  (That’s usually what I do for this blog.)
2. Use Notepad for your message.
3. If you must use a word processing program, be certain to save your message as “Text Only”. After you’ve saved it in that manner, you can copy and paste it into your email.

What’s your favorite quick tip? We’d love to feature it here!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

A popular anti-spam organization, SpamHaus, was ordered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to pay $11,715,000 in damages to e360insight and its CEO, David Linhardt. e360insight sued SpamHaus earlier this year over illegal blacklisting of their mailings.

Additionally, SpamHaus was barred from causing any email sent by e360insight or Linhardt to be “blocked, delayed, altered, or interrupted in anyway”. The court also ordered SpamHaus to publish a public apology for deeming the group a spammer.

SpamHaus, a British-based organization, did not accept the US jurisdiction and believes that the order is not enforceable. “As spamming is illegal in the United Kingdom, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place” SpamHaus stated.

At GetResponse we use SpamHaus as one of the methods to filter inbound spam and prevent spammers from abusing legitimate email marketing and autoresponder campaigns. We regret that the US court system can be used as a weapon against a non-profit organization that strives to keep our mailboxes clean.

UPDATE

In a proposed court order dated 10/6/2007 Judge Charles Kocoras of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois calls on the organizations responsible for registering the Spamhaus.org Internet address to suspend the organization’s Internet service. Both ICANN and Tucows, the Spamhaus.org registrar, are named in the order.

A spam-savvy Illinois lawyer shares his perspective on the issue and believes that the outlook may be bleak for the anti-spam organization.

UPDATE #2

A federal judge presiding over a spam dispute rejected a marketing company’s request to suspend the domain name of an anti-spam group that ignored an $11.7 million judgment against it.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles P. Kocoras denied a proposed motion from e360 Insight, which sued the Spamhaus Project over its “black list” of spammers. Wheeling, Ill.-based e360 Insight contends it is improperly on the list because it is a direct marketer that does not send unsolicited e-mail.

Email marketing can be profitable for any business, no matter what kind of product or service you are selling. It is significantly cheaper than other advertising methods and it enables you to build credibility with your subscribers. As a result, you can generate more sales and profits.

The foundation of email marketing is a targeted, responsive and permission-based email list. If you have a list of subscribers that trust you and consider you to be an expert in the field of your interest, you are on the right track.

Below you will several list building ideas that will help you make the most out of your email marketing.

1. Provide useful, relevant and unique content. Your visitors will not give you their email address just because they can subscribe to your newsletter free of charge. You have to provide unique and valuable information that will be useful for your subscribers.
2. Add a subscription form to every page of your website. Make it elegant and accessible. Locate it at the top-left corner of your site, as that’s where the human eye will initially travel.
3. Make the sign up process as easy as possible. You shouldn’t ask for too much information upfront, because you will lose subscribers.  Collecting just the name and email address should be enough for most email marketing campaigns.
4. Address your visitors’ privacy concerns. Most people are worried that they will receive spam after giving out their email address. Tell your potential subscribers that you respect their privacy and link this statement to a privacy policy page.
5. Show an example issue to your visitors. This lets your potential subscribers review your newsletter before they sign up and determine if it is something they’d be interested in.
6. Create a web-based newsletter repository. By putting an archive of all of your newsletter issues you can make it more appealing for your visitors to subscribe. You will also generate additional traffic from search engines.
7. Contact other newsletter publishers. Let them know that you’d be interested to announce their newsletter if they’re up to do the same for you. This way, both of you can build your lists faster.
8. Give away useful free stuff. Write an ebook or a PDF report. Hire a programmer to create downloadable or web-based software. Then give it away to your visitors provided that they join your list.
9. Request that your subscribers pass it on. Word of mouth is a powerful viral technique that works great with email marketing. If your subscribers find the content you share with them to be useful and informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends. This can be a good source of new subscribers.
10. Let others reprint your newsletter, as long as its content is unmodified. Many webmasters and newsletter publishers are actively looking for high quality content, and if they reprint your newsletter, you will get new subscribers, traffic and links pointing to your site.
11. Include a “Sign Up” button in the newsletter. If you are using plain text instead of HTML, provide a text link to your subscription page. You may feel that this is not required, because the subscriber is already on your list, but remember that your readers will forward your newsletters to others, or reprint it online. You want to make it easy for them to subscribe.
12. Add a squeeze page. A squeeze page is typically designed only to build your list. It features a powerful headline and a couple of most important benefits that should make your subscribers salivate to sign up to your list. Once created, use a service such as WordTracker to find hundreds targeted keywords, and advertise on them using pay per click advertising on Google, MSN and Yahoo.
13. Include testimonials in your squeeze page. This is crucial. Put 1 or 2 strong testimonials from satisfied subscribers on your squeeze page. This can be in any format, but you may find that multimedia (audio or video social proof) is more “believable”. People like to follow footsteps of other people.
14. Blog religiously. Blogging is a great way to communicate with your potential customers, and it creates a nice synergy with your email marketing. Be sure to include your newsletter sign up form on each page of your blog.
15. Use co-registration service to build your list. Co-registration is a great way to build your email list. Your newsletter’s ad appears on other website’s and their visitors are able to check your subscription box and become added to your list. A good co-registration service can be found at GetSubscribers.com.

Simon Grabowski is an owner of the web-based GetResponse email marketing software that makes it easy for thousands of marketers and small businesses to send their newsletters and build their email lists. Try GetResponse free of charge at http://www.getresponse.com

If you are actively marketing on the Internet or doing just about anything online, you will find that your email address spreads all over the web in no time. Suddenly you are receiving dozens of emails every day, or if you are like me - even hundreds.

Handling an Inbox that stores hundreds or thousands of messages and consistently grows in size can be a real headache and a big frustration.

Managing email suddenly becomes a major challenge. The good news is that you can fight back and reclaim your inbox.

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