Email me ’till I say stop

I can’t believe they dumped me!

For the past year, I’ve followed the American presidential nominations, and then the race for President. I was fascinated to see how each candidate used email (with links to viral videos, social networks, etc) to reach new audiences and engage potential voters.

And I followed the Canadian elections, both federal and municipal. This took significantly less of my time since there was significantly less email campaigning to monitor.

Since the elections, no leaders are engaging me in the important issues of the day.

No one is asking me to help them make this a better community, country or world.

I, like millions of Canadian and American voters who got into the rhythm of daily emails and political updates, felt summarily dumped when the votes were counted. (OK, Obama sent some thank you’s but he hasn’t migrated his audience to change.gov, the Federal NDP asked me for a donation to keep up the fight, and this week the Liberals sent me an email educating me about the Senate, but it didn’t give me the warm fuzzies.)

In this new media, social networking, on demand reality – there’s a new etiquette emerging. We expect contact. And that is a tremendous gift for campaigners. Anyone with an audience has opportunities.

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. With permission marketing and social media, you have a relationship with someone until they say stop (unsubscribe). Any candidate who stopped messaging their email lists after the election doesn’t get the value of the list they have built.

Again, we will be watching Obama to see what he will do with his immense email lists, his 121,000 Twitter followers and his 2 million Facebook Friends. But also I wonder what Gregor Robertson will do, or Elizabeth May. Win or lose, once you have an audience you have opportunities. Who is repositioning to re-engage and who is disappearing into the ether? What would you do? How are you engaging your list?

Engaged and awaiting contact,
Kim

Shea Butter Gifts Help Women in Ghana

I’m on the lookout for socially responsible gifts and I’ve found a real winner with the Shea Butter Market skin care products. The recipient of the gift will feel the benefits of pure shea butter, and the benefits extend to women and children in Ghana.

Through her company, the Shea Butter Market, Gifty Serbeh-Dunn has been working to help women in rural Ghana gain access to education for themselves and their children, and develop a sustainable income through shea butter.

Many women in rural Ghana are starting to make a cash income by harvesting and processing shea for the western market. The Shea trees grow wild and the women know how to pick the fruit sustainably and prepare it for market.

When Gifty started the Shea Butter Market in 2003, she started working with the Tapko Widow’s Group. They worked together to figure out how much product the women would be able to produce, when they would be able to work (so that it wouldn’t interfere with the farming season and destabilize their economy), and when they would need to be paid so that they could use the money to pay for their children’s education and seed for their farms. Not all western companies take such a collaborative approach.

Gifty says, “Shea butter has become so popular now, people are ripping off the women. They think they can make quick money or take advantage of the women’s ignorance of the market. We hear stories of companies buying at good prices, and then as they order more, they keep dropping the price. Also, the companies use scales and purchase by volume. The women don’t know how the scales work. They traditionally sell the butter by the ball. So now when we buy it, the women count the balls and then we weigh it and show them how the scales work. They are learning to calculate and sell for fair market value. We are applying to CIDA to get them some training in basic numeracy, and accounting. My goal is that even if Shea Butter Market doesn’t exist, that the women have the education to stay in business, and keep their children in school. Education has given me everything I have, so I just want to give back. I know these women and I know that when they earn cash, they make sure their children go to school.“

Last Christmas, there was a drought and 44 women Gifty works with lost their farm crops. They desperately needed $11 each to buy food and seed – just $11 would see them all through until the rains. Gifty, told a few people in her professional network about the drought, and in no time, 44 women (including an entire choir in Victoria) signed up to send the money. They also signed up to be friends. Because of the connection through Gifty, the Canadian women felt like they were helping out someone in their circle, so with the money they sent pictures and messages of support, and asked their new friends a very important question.

What do you think would be best for the development of your community? In gratitude for the assistance, the Tapko Widows Group answered. A Moranga co-op. Moranga is the new rage in beauty care. They can sell it in local markets and to overseas buyers. The women have been working towards co-operative farming for some time but this new plant is where they see a future. The Canadian friends were motivated by their conviction.

So this past summer, Gifty gave the women an unexpected gift from their friends in Canada. They have set up a micro-lending program and are starting the women off with $1,500, which is enough for the Tapko Widows Group to buy moranga seed and fencing for the seedlings. Their dream, shared with friends, is becoming a reality right now!

Check out the Shea Butter Market’s holiday baskets, and the new line of Moranga products at your local Choices or Capers. Or shop online at http://www.sheabuttermarket.com/

Gifty is originally from Wa, Ghana and now lives in Mill Bay, BC. Read the story about how and why Gifty started the Shea Butter Market

Vertical Response Fixes the Email Delivery Problems You Might Not Know You Have

If you are doing any mass email communication at all, I strongly urge you to use a professional delivery tool. Outlook doesn’t cut it.

I write and publish email campaigns for a variety of clients and I’ve worked with a few different delivery tools but my favorite tool, and company, is Vertical Response, affectionately referred to as “VR”.

Top 5 Reasons You Should STOP sending email invites, announcements, newsletters and coupons through software like Outlook or Mac’s Mail:

1. Ease Have you ever tried to send out more emails than your email client allows? Ugg. It is so frustrating to have to send batches, copy all the addresses into the BCC line, hope that you didn’t send the invite to anyone twice, and then watch your email box fill up with undeliverable messages.Using a delivery tool, you can send thousands of emails with one click. A service like VR will scan your recipients list, remove duplications, and report undeliverables in one email. So clean.And delivery systems offer a one-click unsubscribe service that automatically removes people from all your lists. That means you don’t have to go through all your database lists to remove people by hand, and readers don’t have to email you to ask to be taken off your list. They click an unsubscribe link on the email.
2. The Pretty Factor Humans like looking at things that are attractive. Although it is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we all know nasty, spammy, muti-coloured, text junk when we see it. And we dump it, which severely limits its effectiveness. Well designed HTML emails are gold.Marketers used to stick to text-only emails because not every email reader would support HTML emails. Those days are behind us. VR’s HTML editor automatically creates a text only version, which it sends to servers that block HTML. So you can pretty up your communications without compromising deliverability.What’s more, VR’s tools guide users to work within design best practices. For example, the HTML editor limits users to the 8 font options that display properly in all the major email readers. (VR tests on Outlook, Entourage, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc).  HTML is never going to look exactly the same from one machine to another, but if you stick to some basic guidelines you can create emails that are pretty stable and, let me say it one last time, pretty.
3. Deliverability Face it. People don’t open attachments, A) because they are worried about viruses, and B) because it requires effort. So don’t waste time making a PDF pretty. If people don’t open the attachment, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is.Also there are file size and spam filters that can get between you and your reader. VR and the other delivery services are in the business of being up on the best delivery practices. Most will limit your email’s file size to something acceptable to most servers. And they assign your email a spam rating so that you know if there’s a problem before you send it, giving you an opportunity to make changes and improve your deliverability (making it much easier to improve your results!).
4. Tracking I love tracking. Once an email is launched, VR has a live reporting feature that shows you what percentage of respondents have opened, clicked, bounced, forwarded or unsubscribed. You can even get reports that show you exactly who clicked on what.If you don’t have any indicators of how people are responding to your email campaigns, you may as well just pop letters in the mail or tape posters on walls. One of the biggest advantages of email communication is that you can track, react to, and strategize recipient engagement.I watch my open rates and click-throughs on all my campaigns. I look for dips, or peaks and try to figure out what the factors were. That helps me improve my calls to action, my subject lines, etc. Bottom line, tracking helps me create emails that readers want to open and respond to!
5. Cost If you are sending campaigns that are:

• a pain to put out,
• ugly/visually boring,
• suffer unknown delivierability issues, or are
• untrackable

  you are are wasting time and money for no good reason. Professional email delivery is so cheap! Every delivery system uses a slightly different pricing structure but they are all quite reasonable.With VR, you pay about a penny per email, or if you send large volumes you can get an even cheaper rate by paying a monthly fee. You can create, test and send 250 emails for a whopping $3.75. A list of 2000 costs about $35. It is almost embarrassing what you get in terms of marketing value for that.

If you aren’t using a professional delivery tool, monitoring best practices, and reacting to readers’ interests you are missing a big, lucrative and ridiculously cheap boat.

I’m happy to talk to you about strategies, or help you develop content, but I encourage you to sniff around Vertical Response’s site. This links you to a trial program that lets you create and send up to 100 emails through their system at no cost.

Other delivery systems include Constant Contact, Magnet Mail, Campaign Monitor and aWeber. There is a whole industry supporting effective email communications – quick, get on board!