Here is a quick video to give you an idea of what our email marketing platform looks like!

If you are considering Email Marketing for your business, we are committed at Digital Street to getting you directly connected with your customers and prospective customers alike. Our services will help you create email campaigns that are targeted, optimized, and measurable.

Email Marketing is a low cost, high impact solution, and Digital Street does not require a long-term contract. Our pricing is based on a month-to-month service agreement with affordable plans that start at as little as $50.00 a month with a full-service approach on every level of account. Each customer we have, large or small, receives the same level of service.

To get you started, your dedicated account manager will set up an initial training session on how to use our Email Marketing platform. You will learn how to create contact lists, import contacts, and how to use other email editing features such as auto responders and triggers. We also offer complementary data entry services. The Digital Street Email Platform can enable you to capture emails from your web site by generating an e-newsletter signup form for your website. Sign up forms are a great way to begin harvesting emails for your contact lists.  Additionally, we will offer tips and best practices to ensure delivery and increased open rates.

Once you have your contact lists created and uploaded, you will begin training on how to build customized email campaigns using a variety of easy-to-use templates, or you can request a custom designed template from our art department. While creating a campaign, you will be able to instantly preview it on multiple email programs such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Outlook in order to ensure your email campaign is compatible with all of the major internet service providers and email programs.

Another great feature included in our service is the ability to receive customer feedback via surveys. You can create surveys with as many options as you wish and you will have the ability to track all of your survey results located conveniently within your reporting section.

We advocate personalizing your emails as much as possible in order to really stand out and create that one to one communication style. One way to personalize your emails in our system is with the use of Dynamic Content tags. Dynamic Content tags allow recipients to receive images in their emails based on the type of mail they have requested. For example, if a golf course has a combination of women and men golfers and they want to promote merchandise from their pro-shop, they could select a dynamic content tag to display women’s apparel for women recipients and men’s apparel for the men golfers. Also, you can add text personalization to the subject line and beginning of the email. For example, a subject line like: Subject: An email for “John Doe: from your favorite golf course.” can really stand out and get opened without hesitation.

Tracking emails is important to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns and if email marketing is viable for your business. After you have sent an email campaign, you can instantly view response data including open rates, links clicked, bounced emails, unsubscribed emails, and forwarded emails.

Additionally, our email marketing services include unlimited image hosting, multiple split testing, free built-in SPAM checking, and tons more. Find out how to get started with Digital Street’s email marketing services here.

There are so many businesses that fear the unknown and are frightened of starting email marketing.  Although many are still hesitant to move away from their tried-and-true snail-mail methods, others are rapidly discovering that email marketing is one of the most effective means of generating sales.
When Shop.org surveyed retailers for its State of Retailing Online 2009 report, it found that email was the most-mentioned successful tactic overall.

The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in February/March 2009 placed email marketing second only to search engine optimization for generating conversions.

And research conducted in 2009 by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that email outperforms all other forms of direct marketing. The bigger question, of course, is why? Of all the hundreds or even thousands of messages consumers are exposed to each day, why is email marketing so effective?

1.  Email Marketing Reaches Many!

It’s hard to find someone that doesn’t have at least one email address!  What this means for your business is that you can reach out to your entire customer and prospect base.

2.  Email Marketing Is Proactive!

Email marketing goes directly into your customer’s email inbox! They don’t have to search through a phone directory or newspaper to find your services!  With one click of a mouse, they can contact you directly to get a quote or more information about your services!

3. Email Marketing is Targeted

Most forms of advertising are based on the idea that if you hit thousands of people with your message, even though it may mean nothing to most of them, a few are likely to respond.

Email marketing is based on the idea of sending the right message directly to the right people based on their preferences, local market conditions, and other factors.

You can build a master list and then segment it by geographic location, marital status, gender, age, income, time of year, etc. Doing so eliminates a lot of the guesswork that makes other forms of marketing so inefficient.

4. Email Marketing Provides Data

We at Digital Street provide you with reports to show which emails or messages went through and which didn’t, so you can improve your next campaign.  You are able to run split tests, sending one offer or message to half your list and a different one to the other half, so you can get a better feel for what your customers want and what your prospects buy from you!

5. Email Marketing Allows You to Engage

It’s nice to get the immediate reaction from a customer who sees your ad just before going shopping. But your real goal is to build a relationship with a broader base of prospects so they think of you whenever it’s time to hit the stores.

Email marketing allows you to do that by bringing them shopping tips, updates on trends, seasonal items, and special loyalty-program deals on a regular basis. It’s a great way to engage them—and keep them engaged.

6. Email Marketing is Less Intrusive

Unlike telemarketing calls, email marketing doesn’t interrupt a prior activity to deliver a message. Opening email is the activity your customers and prospects are engaged in when they see your message. If you’ve done a good job of building that relationship, they’ll look forward to seeing what you have to say.

7. Email Marketing Works

According to the DMA’s (Direct Marketing Association) research, email marketing generated a return on investment (ROI) of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. You’re unlikely to find that kind of ROI from any other form of marketing or advertising—the best reason of all to launch an email-marketing campaign.

When done correctly, email marketing allows you to become (and remain) visible to your customers and prospects with highly targeted messages at a minimal cost, all while delivering outstanding, measurable results that will ripple far beyond your pond of current customers.

I’ve been publishing an e-mail newsletter or e-zine since 1995 and have learned a thing or two about formatting — usually from my own mistakes. In this article I’ll be talking about e-mail newsletters, but the same principles apply to all business e-mails that are sent out to customers, including transactional e-mails. Let me start from the top of the newsletter and work down, pointing out as we go e-mail formatting best practices.

1. Give Recipients a Reason to Open

While the Subject: field isn’t exactly formatting, it is the single most important line in your entire newsletter. Unless your subject line interests your reader, they’ll often pass your e-mail by without opening — even if they know you. Time is short. The question that the subject line must answer is “What’s in It for Me?” How will this e-mail benefit your recipient, your subscriber, your customer?

I strongly recommend personalizing the subject line to include the recipient’s name. I know that some spammers do this. But they do it precisely because a personalized subject line dramatically increases the open rate. Seeing your name stops your eye long enough to consider the e-mail more carefully.

Nearly all modern e-mail programs enable you to insert fields into your e-mail, but you’ll need to capture your subscriber’s name during the subscription process. Won’t asking for a name decrease the number of people who complete the subscription process? Some. But I’m convinced that using the person’s name is important to the process of building a relationship — and that’s what e-mail newsletters can do exceedingly well.

2. Identify the Sender Consistently

When your recipients are sorting through their e-mail inboxes – discarding junk and deciding what to open – they’ll look at two fields: the Subject Line and the From: field. If they don’t recognize the sender, chances are they’ll delete the e-mail without reading further.

Always make clear who the newsletter or business e-mail is from. Using only an e-mail address as the sender is the mark of a novice. The sender needs to be some person or organization that your recipient recognizes. For a long time my newsletters were sent from “Dr. Ralph F. Wilson.” More recently, the From: field is “Web Marketing Today.” Chose as sender the most recognizable name in your organization.

This field must be consistent. Don’t switch from one sender to another. What you’re trying to do here is build recognition, so when recipients see the sender, they’ll open the e-mail because they have come to value your content. On the other hand, if you don’t really offer value to the recipient, your name will become a reason to delete the e-mail.

3. Select HTML — Most of the Time

You’ll need to choose between formatting your newsletter in HTML or plain text. For the most part, the text e-mail letters I receive come from “old school” senders who cut their teeth on e-mail before HTML was available. Newer senders almost always use HTML — and for good reason.

HTML e-mails offer several advantages:

• Click-through rates are perhaps twice that of text e-mails.
• Tracking codes can be used in links to help you determine effectiveness of your e-mail offers. Such codes make the URL too long to display in a text newsletter.
• Attractiveness and readability are enhanced with color, graphics, and font choices. Yes, there’s a downside here, but we’ll discuss that later.
• Product pictures and formatting make HTML a natural vehicle for retailers to send out a mini-catalog of sale items.

Text e-mails offer other advantages:

• Universal readability. Text-only e-mail programs had about died out. But with the advent of cell phones as an e-mail platform, that’s changed.
• Consistency. Many large corporations and government agencies routinely strip out HTML to protect against viruses, so HTML e-mails will be viewed by end-users in unpredictable ways. If you want it to look exactly as you intended, text is the way to go.
• Preference. Some readers prefer plain text over HTML, perhaps because they have a cell phone or work for a large organization. In my subscription forms I pre-check HTML, but find that about 15% select “plain text” anyway.
• A slightly higher delivery rate is available with text only messages, since bare HTML is considered more likely to be spam. For this reason I always send my HTML e-mails combined with text as “multi-part MIME” rather than sending HTML by itself.

E-mail best practice is to let your subscriber select the format. Since I format a text version of every e-mail for the multi-part MIME version, it’s not much more difficult to send a text-only version to those who request it.