Personalization of your sales message is very important and most people don’t do it. You personalize a message as simply as adding the persons first name into the copy you are writing, so it speaks directly to them.

It’s really simple to do if you are using an autoresponder beacause you can add the name field tag of the autoresponder to the message. Very few people actually take the time to do this though. You really should, because personalizing your message is proven to increase response by 10% or more…

Now the spamming bastards of the world are trying it too! I’ve recently had some unsolicited email form these scumbags with very tardy personalization attempts. But at least they’re trying! Here’s a couple examples for your viewing pleasure…

This one is even made to look like an html newsletter, very sophisticated! Of course, having my actual email address name embedded looks really stupid, but it’s an attempt at personailzation and if my email was just Steve@ then it would work!

This is another, less sophisticated example;

I had to download a software update recently and got the following message from the software vendor, who are one of the largets providers of professional software tools in the world.

 

I don’t know about you, but this really pisses me off. I don’t really understand why companies have to use spam filters at all? Are they worried that their customers might be offended if they have to even look at spam or aknowledge its existence?

The problem is spam filters are generally a big pain in the butt! Very expensive to buy, install, configure and maintain and for what? So your Average Joe Whiner doesn’t have to see any spam? Well, thats probably ok but I know for a fact that the very same AJW is the first person to get on the phone when an eagerly awaited email has not been recieved. Er, sorry Joe, it looks like it was eaten by the spam filter. The the crap hits the fan all over again.

I’ve got the perfect spam filtering solution. It’s called Microsoft Oulook junk mail folder. Here’s how it works;

1. Email comes into my outlook mail client
2. Any email with an address that is not ‘whitelisted’ by me goes into junk mail
3. All other email goes into my inbox
4. A couple times a day I scan my junk mail subject lines, look at any that might be wanted
5. Any that are wanted i move to my inbox
6. If necessary I whitelist the senders email address or domain
7. The rest I delete
8. This takes me no more than 30 seconds a day

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I’ve been looking at a variety of options for allowing a simple email notification from Wordpress when a post is made. Although we are still heavily entrenched in email marketing and it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon, email marketing is still a big pain in the butt! It’s a pain to send email and a pain to recieve email, so I’m opting for a lightweight email notification system and hoping that RSS will be a big help in getting my messages out to my clients and subscribers.

The first thing I had to do was add SMTP email capability to Wordpress. It seems that the standard email function is a slack old send function expecting an open relay (tsk tsk). So I had to put in the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) plugin to enable me to send via SMTP with a username and password.

I used WP-Mail-SMTP. It was simple to install, i.e. point and click and simple to configure. There is even a test button so you can check it works on the config form. Nice. Thank you!

Then, after looking at a couple different post notification plugins I ended up selecting http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/. This is a bigger plugin, with a few config pages. Install was a snap. I still have to configure the messages, under settings>subscribe2 but the good news is you can easily create any message you want for your subscibers, optins and reminders.

You simple add a new page (easy in Worpress 2.5) to put the subscribe / unsubscribe form on and away you go.

I also noticed that Feedburner (now owned by Google) were offering email updates as a service, plus a ton of tracking options in the feedburner PRO version, which I believe is free. It would probably be the easiest option to go for if you didn’t have your own web design, development and hosting company!
http://www.feedburner.com