Email marketing is one of the most powerful and effective forms of marketing used today and it is going nowhere. It is quick to deploy, offers immediate highly measurable results, enables advanced segmentation and personalisation and delivers a high return on investment.

A good email marketing program helps tie together your hotel’s entire buying cycle, from marketing and sales to customer service, connecting the guest with your hotel at all levels. You can easily process reservation transactions and handle customer service inquiries and feedback via email. Through the cycle, you can gather valuable information about your guests that can help you target sales strategies, refine your email database, identify market trends and uncover opportunities for new products and services.

A bad email marketing program is a one way communication piece where you are just stuffing “one size fits all” offers and deals into receivers inboxes.  Your list will fatigue quickly and your emails become less relevant.  It also means your churn rate is high as you need to constantly chase large numbers of new contacts to replace the ones that have become non-responsive on your database.

Our Top Tips for Email Success:

1. Never ever stop building and refining your email database 
2. Establish objectives of each campaign before you start
3. Build a message that is relevant to the recipients interests
4. Get to the point … quickly! You only have a few seconds
5. Target specific demographics within your database
6. Move away from one size fits all communication
7. Make sure your email designs look great on mobile devices
8. Test, test and re-test. Never stop refining your campaigns.
9. Determine your best time to send. Not all businesses are the same
10. Pay much more attention to the senders name and subject line.
11. Don’t hide your call to action. Make it obvious what you want people to do.  If it’s a button make it a BIG button.  If it’s a link to click on make sure it’s underlined.

To achieve the maximum results from your email marketing program requires experience, expertise and advanced technology as well as some time to get it right.  Amazing results are there for companies that spend the time.

Unsubscribe links usually sit at the bottom of your email so if your email has been clipped subscribers can't see this.  So what are they likely to do?  Just click on the mark this as SPAM button.  Ouch!  This situation could also damage your email reputation and deliverability.

For people to be able to read your entire email they have to click the View entire message link to open up a new window to see the entire email.  How many busy people do you think will do this?  It's more likely they will just hit the delete button.

Gmail clips emails that are 102 KB or larger. This only includes the underlying HTML file, not images that are loaded from an external location.

So to prevent Gmail from cutting off part of your email, all you need to do is make your HTML document as light as possible.

• Remove all comments from your HTML code. A comment like
  <!-- News overview starts here --> is of course super handy for creating emails in HTML, but takes up unnecessary space in recipients' inboxes.
  
• The same goes for tabs, double spaces and white spaces in your HTML code. Eliminate them from your email document before deployment.
  

Minimising HTML documents by hand is very time consuming to say the least. Fortunately, there are many online tools available that can do this for you automatically. Some examples:

Text Fixer
HTML minifier
HTML compressor
Mini Web Tool

If for whatever reason you're not able to minimise your HTML file below 102kb, then at least take the following steps:

• Put a clearly visible link to the web version of your email in the top of your email document. Because you host this version yourself, Gmail has no influence on the way it's displayed.
  
• Include an opt-out link at the top of your emails. This way you'll minimise the chance that the recipient will report your message as spam when they're not able to find an unsubscribe link.
  
• Use a list unsubscribe header. This'll allow you to include an extra opt-out button at the top of your emails, reducing the number of spam complaints.
  

Have you ever wondered, why is my final send total different to that of my overall list total?

Answer: EzyMsg excludes any unsubscribed, bounced, and duplicate contacts from your final send.

EzyMsg reads these as DEAD CONTACTS, with our recommendation being to remove those contacts. Find below steps to ensure that your databases are clean of dead contacts:

Got two or more columns of content in your responsive email design, but find them stacking in the wrong order when viewed on mobile devices? This simple coding technique will put them in their place.

When coding emails, there are likely times when you wish you had a little more control. For example, when creating layouts with the intent of stacking multiple columns (or technically, table cells) for easy reading on mobile displays, the natural order when using % column widths is left on top of right. But, how about if you wanted an image in a right-hand side column to stack on top of some text in a left-hand column? The answer is something quite unlikely - the dir attribute.

Quite simply, dir allows you to change the ordering of any HTML elements, although its original purpose is to adjust content for right-to-left text (as you likely know, the browser default in places that use Romanized text is left-to-right). It's also supported in every email client that we know of.

By applying dir="rtl" to a table (thus changing the order in which nested cells stack) and dir="ltr" to the cells within (to ensure the text reads left-to-right instead of, well, backwards), you can reverse the browser/email client defaults and reliably stack content when it's viewed on small viewports. Here's the simplified code:

An autoresponder is an email or SMS that is triggered in response to a customer’s action, such as a ‘welcome email’ in response to a newsletter sign up. Autoresponders are often under used especially considering they can receive a higher response rate than regular emails.

WHY USE AUTORESPONDERS?

• Generally receive a higher response rate than regular emails
• They're great at engaging your audience at the right time  
• Saves you countless hours on manual tasks

We've also created popular pre-built autoresponders which are now available in your account. They're super easy to customise and you can find them under the new automation tab.

If you already use autoresponders and advanced campaigns don't worry they'll all still work. But they've moved to a new home you can find them both now under the automation tab. 

The EzyMsg team are very excited to announce the launch of our new email templates which will make it easier to create beautiful emails.

Have a look at the gallery below to check out some of the awesome new email marketing template designs!

New files and images manager
We've also just launched a new files and images manager so you can do much more in less time.

• Select multiple images (great for bulk deleting / moving images)
• Drag files straight into the image manager
• Easily rename files
• A selection of free stock images and buttons.

Don't forget about the in-built image editor where you can edit your images directly in your EzyMsg account, no need to jump between different programs.

These new features are now available in your account NOW!
Login and take a look at the impressive new templates that will make designing beautiful emails that much easier.