Control your email
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If you are an Internet marketer then you are going to receive a lot of email! Spend a few minutes setting up the Google-mail tools to keep your email under control.
Inbox/Spam
It is fairly obvious what these are for. Google will put your emails into one of these two folders, based on the track record of the sender and the settings you have in place.
What is spam?
Spam (also known as UCE – unsolicited commercial email or UBE – unsolicited bulk email) is NOT the messages you have no interest in! If you have opted into a subscriber list or joined a program then you have agreed to receive emails from them. If a message arrives in your spam folder and it’s email you have agreed to receive, please do take a second to click the ‘not spam’ button.
If someone contacts you out of the blue trying to flog you something then don’t hesitate to ‘report spam’. If you aren’t sure whether you agreed to receive emails from that person or not then take a quick look at the end of the message – if it says something along the lines of ‘you are receiving this message because you contacted us’ then it probably is spam (some people seem to think that if they sign up to your auto responder they can send you junk) or ‘if you have received this message in error please click here to unsubscribe/ send an email with the subject line ‘unsubscribe me’ then this is probably a spam message.
Some spammers even have the bare-faced cheek to tell you that reporting messages as spam when they are not is illegal (which it is in some parts of the world) yet seem to have forgotten that it is just as illegal to send spam!
Legitimate email senders will tell you when you signed up, from where and offer a ‘one click’ unsubscribe link.
Important! For your own protection read the CAN-SPAM Act – each email in violation of the CAN-SPAM act is subject to penalties up to $16,000!
Set Up Filters and Labels
Understand how to use the in-built filters and your emails will be much easier to manage. You can choose to set up filters and labels by program, program type or any way you want to.
1. From the ‘More actions’ button, select ‘Filter messages like these’ from the drop down list
2. You will see the email address of the sender already filled in – you can leave this as it is and/or add other key words to sort out your incoming mail. Once you are happy, click ‘next step’.
3. All that’s left to do now is select the actions you want to take. I suggest you click the ’skip the in box’ and ‘apply the label’ buttons (click the ‘choose label’ drop down, ‘New label’ and call it whatever makes sense to you and select ‘never send it to spam’.
4. You will see a list of emails from your in box that your new filter would select – click the ‘also apply label to xx conversations below’ and then click the ‘Create Filter’ button.
You will now see the filters you have created listed on the right hand menu. Google will display the ones you use most often with ‘more’ underneath – drag and drop your choices to edit the list. When you get an email into one of your filters you will see the filter title in bold and the number of new emails in brackets.
Googletalk
Googletalk is a chat program you can quickly install – not only does it give you an instant messenger, you will get little snippets of incoming emails appear at the bottom of your screen while you are working. This means that you can keep an eye on your incoming messages and react quickly if it’s a request for help or notification of a time-sensitive offer without having to log into Googlemail umpteen times a day.
I tend to use Googlemail alongside Skype – these two messengers make you easily reachable to most of the people you would want contacting you, without the security issues surrounding some other instant messenger systems.
Other Gmail features
Set up indicators of whether the email was only sent to you, change the background, set it to UK, rather than US English, set it up a vacation mode…. there are many features you can play around with. If you run into a problem then Gmail Help is a good place to start.
If you really want to get organised then read use Google to clean up your life!
Unsubscribe
If you are drowning in email you never have time to read then it may be time to start weeding. I hate unsubscribing from anything because I get upset when someone ‘un-subs’ me but it is very easy to end up subscribed to far too many email newsletters.
It is an acceptable and effective practice to offer a report or ebook in return for an email address but if you have no interest in the follow-up emails then unsubscribe. You can always change your mind and sign up again later on. The more subscribers a marketer has on their email list, the more expensive their auto responder bill so you could argue you’re doing them a favour!
Email in-boxes can be one of the biggest time-traps for Internet marketers – get your email under control today!
Categories: Email Marketing Tags:
Choose the right email!
Emailing for profits just got a whole lot easier. Find out how: Try Viral Mail Profits Now
Internet marketers are certainly a chatty bunch and one of our preferred tools for communication is email. Your choice of email address is therefore crucial. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making a bad choice of email provider – read on!
Email filters
How many emails do you get each day? 10? 100? 1000? 10,000? (yes, really!) The answer is probably more than you will ever know as the first enemy of the email marketer can be the email service providers themselves.
Every email provider has a series of filters in place that sort through all the emails you are sent and decides which messages you will actually ever know about. This may sound like a good idea but it can really cause problems for you. There will be messages you have asked for that they will block and yet the bogus and spam emails still seem to get through.
Perhaps you may well think that anything that thins down the number of emails arriving each day sounds like a good idea but don’t forget that the same applies to the emails you send: Someone contacts you asking for more information about whatever you are offering but is left assuming that you couldn’t be bothered to reply as your carefully worded reply never reaches them.
Top of the ‘oh-no’ list of email providers is Yahoo and AOL (which is why most programs won’t even let you use email addresses from these companies to join) but there are filters you have no control over on every email account, even the ones on your own domain. You can improve the odds of emails you want reaching you by ‘white-listing’ the sender (adding the sender as a ‘contact’ usually works) but even this won’t guarantee you get the messages you want.
Email capacity
The other factor to be aware of is the volume of emails you are allowed to receive – once your mailbox is full then emails will be ‘bounced’. Not only will you miss out on information that could have been useful, this will also result in your affiliate memberships being canceled.
The reason for this is simple – if someone sends an email to an email address that refuses to accept it they will be flagged as a potential spammer, even if it’s a ’soft bounce’ from an overfull inbox. Think how many affiliates a popular program has and you can see why this could cause a problem.
Best email for marketers
The best solution for Internet marketers is GMail/Googlemail – they let more of your email through than most, have a huge capacity and a number of built-in tools to make your life easier. Best of all, it’s free!
For Internet marketing you will need (at least two) email accounts – one will be your ‘contact’ address, the other your ‘list’ address. For your contact email address see if your name is available and perhaps use your user name for your list address. Your contact email address is your primary email address and the one you will use to join affiliate and network marketing programs. The list address will be invaluable when you start using marketing resources such as safe lists.
The free tools available to you through a Google Webmaster account are something we will be using regularly so open a Google account today!
Tomorrow, I’ll walk you through some of the tools to make managing your email easier.
Categories: Email Marketing Tags: