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For those of you who haven’t heard or used MailChimp before, this awesome online resource easily allows you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track reach and click results. If you are ever thinking (and you should be) of starting your online newsletter campaign to keep your customers informed of your product and services updates then MailChimp offers an easy ‘out of the box’ solution for news and email marketing management.

Version 8 What does it mean to you?
MailChimp has introduced Multi-User Accounts and Permissions which means you can now set up a MailChimp account and assign roles such as “Admin,” then grant permission to “Authors” who are allowed to design templates and create campaigns, or invite people in your organizations who can only “View” reports, and so on.

A breakdown of access permissions is as follows:

Admin: Highest level access to everything in MailChimp. Most importantly: account settings, billing info, the ability to shut down the account, and the ability to add other user types.

Manager: Most of the essential functions of a MailChimp account (creating campaigns, viewing lists and reports). Basically, managers can’t access account settings, change billing, export lists, or invite other users.

Author: Can create campaigns and edit templates, but cannot send them. You might give this access to an in-house designer or writer, or even to an outside design agency.

Viewer: Only has the ability to view campaign reports. Grant this to someone in the company who needs to see campaign results, but doesn’t need to be creating campaigns or fiddling with lists. If you used our VIP Reports feature in the past, you could invite people as Viewers instead, so you don’t have to share reports each time you send a campaign.

Interface Changes
If you have been assigned ‘Author’ permissions from multiple companies that use MailChimp, you can now easily manage all newsletters via the your login dashboard, by choosing which account to manage.

Once you’re inside MailChimp, you can switch to different accounts that you’ve been granted permission for, by using the navigation at the top right of the screen, which saves from constant logging out and in to different accounts. This feature alone could save you plenty of time, especially those who don’t like saving passwords in their browser.

as an Author you can create campaigns, but you can’t send them. So where previously you had the buttons to “Send Now” or “Schedule for Later”, you will now instead, only get the option to stipulate “I’m Finished,” which will then send a note to “Managers” and “Admins” so that they can log in and deliver the campaign.

Overall the new enhancements of MailChimp make it even easier to share and collaborate your online news campaigns with trusted professionals in and outside your company and with the added benefits of WordPress plugins for easy signup via your website and social media sharing, you’d be forgiven for not jumping on it sooner.

Visit: http://mailchimp.com/

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The role of the website designer is to construct an eye catching and appealing website backed by good programming and W3C compliance. If your designer is any good, they would hopefully construct your site pages with Search Engine Optimisation in mind even in cases where it hasn’t been explicitly applied for. In other words instead of naming your Company Information page file as ‘about.htm’ being a little more creative with SEO in mind and name it ‘business_lawyers_sydney.htm’ for a Business Law Firm in Sydney, therefore capturing keywords in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS).

Anyway getting back to our topic, you have spent hours compiling information and images for your new site and your designer has pieced together the puzzle and you now have a brand new website online and raring to go…..now what!

Many businesses wrongly presume that once their website is online they can sit back and watch the dollars and clients roll in as they are now ‘online’. Well let me tell you it isn’t that simple (we all wish it was!), but the truth be told this world wide web of ours is truly that WORLD WIDE and with millions of websites all competing for your clients hard earned dollars you need to make sure your website is seen and visited by as many as possible.

Don’t panic, this task may be easier than it seems with only a few easy to apply changes to your current business practices you can make your site a popular spot for web surfers which will lead to future business prospects and customers and their all important dollar.

Domain Email
I am surprised by the number of businesses still using a hotmail, gmail or aol free email account for the main business email contact. You’ve paid for a new domain name and hosting for your business why not put it to good use and create a email address for that domain.

Plenty of my customers don’t want to part with their @free_email as ‘everyone knows my email address’. Well heres a tip, people are smart and if you tell them you have a new email address and only use that new email account to send emails etc, they will start using it to reply to your messages too. I’m not saying get rid of your @free_email account all together but to use your new domain email as the primary contact for all outgoing correspondence.

What’s the difference I hear you ask, well those people that don’t know about your website or maybe even your business, will have an easier time finding your site when your domain name appears after the @ symbol. You’ll be surprised the amount of times emails are received and the first thing someone wants to do is check out your site for more information, well here’s one way which will help.

Email Signatures
You know the ones, those easily programmed options in Email programs which add your name and phone number at the bottom of the page for every new, replied or forwarded email. Well how about adding your website URL Address to this signature as well, that way every email sent will be advertising your website address.

Email Blast
By now you would certainly have amassed a large contact list of customers and associates, so why not notify them of your new website and ask them to comment on its design and ease of use, you never know you may actually get some more business or sales just from this simple email.

Business Cards
You must hand out 100’s of these little cardboard cards every time you meet a new business associate or prospective client so why not add your website URL Address here as well. I can’t tell you the number of cards I have received which don’t feature the business website; it seems criminal that there is such an omission

Signage
Be it moving or stationary, signage advertising your business is paramount to getting your name, brand or logo out into the public consciousness. So why not add your website to your current signage or even on the rear window of your car, truck or van and become a moving billboard.

Competitions
Think about running regular competitions on your website where visitors must find certain information contained ‘somewhere’ within your site. Using letter drops, print media or email blasts, ask your customers and associates to enter and forward the email onto their friends so they can enter as well and offer a prize worthy of peoples time while visiting your site.

For Example: Your site may be selling Ladies Fashions and the competition stipulates that visitors must find and name three brands of clothing available to enter the competition, thus ensuring those who visit will be aware of your product line and may even purchase someone if they like the range.

RSS Feeds
Are you prepared to write articles on your specialised service and products? Well if you answered yes then you should consider implementing an RSS Feed into your website. RSS or Really Simple Syndication allows you to publish relevant information to the WWW community. With dozens of News Aggregators around ready to pick up new feeds, your information and website URL will be published on numerous sites adding to its popularity with Search Engines and your customers.

News Updates
Websites can quickly become stale and tired when nothing changes, so along with your RSS Feeds why not establish a news information page with headlines on your home page to constantly update your customers with latest happenings.

Newsletters
You can create a simple HTML newsletter based on any Word Processing document which will look attractive to your customers and encourage them to click through to your website. You can easily paste this into an email editor and send to your customers and encourage them to forward or pass on the email to their contacts etc.

If you apply at least 1 of these rules you should be able to increase the popularity of your site almost immediately. Don’t forget that site promotion and popularity is an ongoing task to keep your website in your viewer’s consciousness, so if updating via a Newsletter works well, make a note to produce it monthly.

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An e-newsletter combines the benefits of company information and marketing opportunities with little cost to compose and savings realised by using email technology rather than traditional postal means.

Some things you need to consider when preparing your e-newsletter;

• Frequency – Make a plan to publish your newsletter on a regular basis
• Content – Keep the content focused on the audience, don’t try and oversell any product or service as these emails tend to get deleted very quickly.
• Size – Try to keep the newsletter to 3 – 4 bullet points, in short attention grabbing sentences that lead to full stories on your website.
• Bandwidth – Try not to over indulge your newsletter with too many graphics, keep in mind many users still have low speed internet connections and large image sizes will have an impact on downloading. Try to keep your newsletter to under 60Kb.

In this article we will show you the easy way to create a newsletter based on tables in Microsoft Word ready for importing into your email program for distribution.

Step 1: Open a blank word document and insert a table with 3 columns and 6 rows. I recommend merging the top 3 cells and the bottom 3 cells into header and footer rows so you can easily add the company logo on the header row and your address details on the footer row.

Step 2: Merge the left side rows of the remaining rows into 1 column.

Step 3: Add your logo image or Business Name to header area and Address details to footer area, don’t forget to add email and website URL links here as well.

Step 4: Formulate a welcome message to introduce your newsletter and its content.

Step 5: Keep the information in the newsletter brief and to the point, if you have more information on your website make sure you link directly to that article or news/product item on your website. Introduce bullet point’s news snippets with links in the left side column.

You have now created a HTML newsletter that looks like a webpage. Colours and graphics can easily be modified to suite your corporate colours etc. You now have a simple easy to edit Word Document ready for publication via email.

Save the document for future editing and then selecting the entire table copy and paste into an open blank email.

Tip: Send the email to a friend or your free email accounts (hotmail, gmail etc) to see how the finish product will look when your customer receive it.

If no formatting issues are found after test email is sent, send the newsletter to your predetermined list of contacts.

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