At long last...

We have completed the buildout of the newest section to our website. It's the email marketing section, and it's aimed at helping out our current email marketing clients.

What does it contain?

  * An easy-to-use login interface
  * A pricing list (so clients can remember their monthly levels)
  * And the coup de gras: A list of articles that serve as resources for our clients, offering tips and hints on how to get the most out of their email campaigns

Our clients benefit from an email marketing system that allows them to maintain their own Audience lists (in which they can put as many names as they want); manage their own Campaigns (send whenever they want, use text, colors and images, all within a template that maintains the graphic branding of their website); and Track results.

Tracking results is perhaps one of the most important features of this email marketing program. The tracking component allows clients to see who receives an email message, which inboxes bounce, of those received what links are clicked on, and which audience members click on which links.

Pretty heady stuff. Want to know if your audience cares more about the blue lollipop or the red lollipop, send them an email and track their responses. Even better, send detailed red lollipop info the next time to the audience members who showed interest in the previous campaign.

If you don't have an email marketing program with JLB, but you want to know more, have a look at our new email marketing section... 

If your company is growing and your client base is building, sooner or later, you're gonna want to send a message to your loyal customers.

The first step: Obtain contact information. In particular, you need to capture first names, last names and e-mail addresses. Most folks are willing to share at least that much, especially if they like your services or products.

The next step: Organize that information into a format that will easily import into a database. The easiest way to categorize client information for a database is to put it into a spreadsheet, like Excel. You can put each segment of information into separate columns.

After you've got your info compiled and organized, it's time to decide how you want to send your message. Let's face it, this is 2008, and if you're still sending your marketing e-mails with Outlook, you're sooo 1995. It's slow, cumbersome and won't allow you to format exactly the way you want. Worse still, if your e-list has more than 100 or so e-mail addresses, your server won't likely process the entire transaction. And you'll be foreced to send the message multiple times to various segments of your list.

There are waaay to many solid e-mail marketing programs out there for you to toil in the past. Constant Contact, iContact and StreamSend are just a few. But our favorite (by miles) is an easy-to-use program called EMMA.

Who's EMMA? She's a delightful, powerful and comprehensive way to send messages, track messages (see which ones bounce, see who opens the e-mail, see who clicks on which links within the e-mail), and tailor your messages to your audience. If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you can use EMMA. Better still, you can have graphics in your messages (photos, logo, colors, etc), and it won't hinder your message from getting to someone's in-box.

I could go on and on, but that's enough for now. In the coming weeks, JLB WORKS is going to build out a new e-mail marketing section on our domain, and we'll open it up to the world (especially our clients) to use.