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Email Marketing Needs To be Personal

John W. Furst

I just wrote a short forum reply for a friend on Triiibes.com who had asked,
“How can I increase the open rate of my newsletter?”

Here it is, I am sharing it with you.

A good point in time to deliver another email marketing tip after having stopped that series of articles for some time. Maybe I should revive the carnival? I have to think about it and check how many spam submissions I have received in the meantime. Well, I am preparing a guide, a tutorial for email marketing anyway.

The business in question is a European based specialist for colors trends and consults with designers in fashion, home design, …

Dear Carolina,

I find the content and design of your newsletter rather intriguing. However it's a constant challenge to keep readers engaged and interested over a longer period of time. Let me give you a couple of bullets to think about.

Just to start off the discussion here.

  • Make it more personal!

    Have an editor, a spokesperson write the newsletter in a colloquial tone. Introduce that character as a person with a back-story, and also address the reader on the personal level. An email is communication from one person to another. A newsletter should not be an exception.

    What about the idea of following the Editor - James or Jane on his or her personal journey through the universe of color and time.

  • Increase the frequency. Once a month is too infrequent to maintain and strengthen the relationship with your readers.

    You don't want to be perceived as the 57th agency which sends yet another trend report. You want to be perceived as “friend” who helps the reader through the jungle, who offers effective solutions for whatever the biggest problem in this industry is.

    Go beyond of just being a reporter.

→ Continue reading:

Making Funny Videos Made Easy

Being funny and entertaining seems to be one requirement, if you want your video to ‘go’ viral on Youtube or MySpace. I could add other attributes like
  • cool
  • sexy
  • informative
  • breaking news
  • silly

Seems like the Quickcam Orbit MP Webcam from Logitech can support you to achieve this goal.

Check it out (as found on the Web):



Amazing what software can do, isn't it. I did not find many reviews of the camera itself, but it seems that those type of gimmicks

I am sure this is not the only camera that can do this or similar tricks. You might want to shop around a little bit.



Technical gimmicks are indeed “cool”, but they kind of wear off very quickly — as usual — the content of your video itself is the most important part of it.

Before I go, let me list some other very big turn offs, which you find in the majority of Youtube and MySpace Videos:

• bad audio
• bad video quality
• too long
• boring
• too stupid
• …

I have posted an Amazon box here, just in case you want to check out this camera right away.

Yours
Jennifer