Founded almost 10 years ago, as the new millennium dawned, CoolerEmail is entering its second decade in 2010.

Reaching that milestone is an opportune time to look back at CoolerEmail from its beginnings to now. Examining the email marketing industry as a whole, we see how it and CoolerEmail have grown and developed together in dramatic fashion over the decade. So put your nostalgia hat on and get that faraway look in your eyes as we return to 2000 and compare then and now.

Early in the development of Internet marketing, permission-based email was identified as an economical and powerful tool for direct communication. Founders Leif Youngberg and Lars Helgeson wanted to make it easy for anyone to capitalize on this new opportunity in direct marketing by offering a reliable tool to send professional-looking, permission-based communications and track responses. CoolerEmail was one of the first companies to integrate robust customer relationship management software with HTML e-mail campaign tools.

From its inception, CoolerEmail promoted best practices by emphasizing the importance of sending solicited communication only. The term spam is traced back to 1993 and actually predates the legitimate use of email marketing. By the time CoolerEmail was founded, spam was already an annoyance, but Congress was still three years away from passing the CAN-SPAM Act (new regulations later went into effect in July 2008). Thus CoolerEmail’s founders made it their mission to work diligently with ISPs to develop the industry’s highest deliverability rates while helping their clients send legitimate, opt-in email.

From those humble beginnings with just a handful of clients utilizing CoolerEmail’s robust functionality, CoolerEmail now sends millions of permission-based, trackable emails on behalf of thousands of clients each and every day. Working directly with all the major ISPs, CoolerEmail is proud to offer its clients the highest deliverability rates in the industry.

In 2000, Gallup found that only 54 percent of Americans used the Internet, and 89 percent of them used it for e-mail. Today, most Americans use the Internet, with a vast majority of them using it to send and receive email regularly.

CoolerEmail has always led the industry with innovative features and unmatched reliability. CoolerEmail’s founders believed then, as they do now, that customer service is paramount. Our Cooler Support Team is “fanatical” about support, providing live help during business hours by phone (866.4.COOLER), email or through social networking sites.

Speaking of social networking, the sites Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn didn’t even exist in 2000, but now they do, and CoolerEmail was, of course, an early adopter of all three. Social networking continues to grow in importance, as an adjunct tool for Internet and email marketers. In 2010, you’ll see more robust CoolerEmail functionality and integration for social media sites.

The team at CoolerEmail is looking forward to our second decade as the email marketing service that stands out from the rest in technology, usability and customer service. As we like to say, It’s Just Cooler!

Understanding how your recipients view your emails to effectively organize your content:

Let’s say you have a phone message to relay to your roommate.  You decide to leave a note for them- and you’re hoping they’ll get this note before they leave for work the next morning.  Where do you leave it?  It seems a simple answer: on the bathroom mirror; the refrigerator door; atop the coffee pot… etc.  If you know your roommate’s morning routine, you can leave the note anywhere their eyes will be during that routine.

If you’re especially clever, you may consider not leaving the note in the first place your roommate visits in the morning – as they may be too groggy to pay any attention.  You also might consider not leaving it in the last place, as they will be in a hurry to get out the door.  Either way, you’re not going to leave the note someplace you know your roommate will not be visiting, say, under the bed.  Why?  Because you want them to see it, of course!

This all seems common sense, right?  Well what may not be so “common sense” is applying this same concept to your email newsletters that go out to your client.  If you knew your client’s email reading routine, wouldn’t you use that knowledge to organize the information you wish them to receive?

There are countless elements that play into how your contacts receive your messages. The time of day it is sent off or received, the day of the week, the time of month, attention span of the reader, how busy their business is at the time, whether or not they had a bad day… etc.  But let’s talk about one of the most basic – the layout of the content itself.

So your contact OPENS the email – success! But are they getting all the information they want and you want them to have? They may not receive the message as you intended it to be received because you are making crucial placement mistakes.

Many studies cite an “F-Shaped” reading pattern of web content when studying eye tracking in those who read their language from left to right, top to bottom.  This shape suggests that readers usually begin at the top left corner of the page and move across the top to the right.  They then go back to the left side and read across again, but before long their movement across from left to right gets shorter, like the second limb of a capital F.  Once they lose interest in the main body of the article, they’ll move on to content placed in sidebars.

Of course there are variations on this F shape, sometimes users will read across the entire article creating more of an E shape.  I also found studies that show more of a U shape (down the left and up the right side).  However, the F-shape is by far the most popular when studying web content eye-tracking and some things are pretty much agreed upon:

Headlines get read. Make sure you’re putting the most important information, in the simplest way possible in your headlines. Though it doesn’t need to be as short and sweet as your subject line, you should continue to think about creating interest.

Keep it fairly short – remember, this is an email, not a novel.  Your contacts have other emails to read and business to do.  In most situations, your contact does not have the attention span for your email that they do for other reading material – say, the Sunday paper.

Not everything will be read. What is it they say, on average a person only retains 25% of what they are told?  So think along those lines when creating your newsletter.  Put the most important info at the top, at least in the first part of your article, and think of the rest as “extra”.

Define paragraphs or sections with “mini-headlines”.  Make the first sentence in a paragraph an introduction to the following information – engage readers and create interest.

Smaller type encourages focus. The same way that speaking softly will cause listeners to lean in and tune up their ears, smaller type forces readers to pay more attention.  Just make sure you keep it legible! (Note that some studies found that smaller text will sometimes be ignored when it is placed alongside larger text, as with sub-headlines)

Remember, just like your roommate receiving their phone message from you, your readers want the information you have for them, otherwise they wouldn’t have opted-in to your correspondence.  You just have to give it to them in a place they can easily find it.

Conduct your own research and let us know your findings!  Did you get better click-through rates when links were on the left or the right side of your newsletter?  Are your articles getting more attention that the advertisements on your site?  Are you noticing a difference when you send out more text-heavy newsletter versus the short and sweet?

Articles I used to write this entry:
“The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes” http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
“F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content” http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
“11 Striking Findings From an Eye Tracking Study” http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/05/20/11-striking-findings-from-an-eye-tracking-study/
“3 Hot Marketing Tips from Heat Map Analysis” http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1499/3-Hot-Marketing-Tips-from-Heat-Map-Analysis-images.aspx

You can now look back at your grammar school days and think, “Wow – the nerds really do end up inheriting the world…”

Right?  Right.  Why? Because the nerds paid attention in class.

Were you one of those A-earners getting stuffed in lockers?  If so, you probably already know about the weekly Cooler E-Classes.  If not, I’ll fill you in:

Cooler E-Classes are live, interactive, webinar courses hosted by Betty Cooler (aka Lettie Taylor of the CoolerEmail support team).  These Cooler E-Classes are a tour through the 2.0 interface.  Lasting usually between 45 and 75 minutes – they cover:

• Importing and organizing contacts- Learn about importable file types and how to create them, where to import your contact list, how to create and manage lists and groups and all about custom user fields.

• Building an edition- With the all-new Build module, creating an edition is so easy you’ll be able to send out your newsletters more often – or in a hurry!  Betty shows you, from start to finish, how to create a newsletter edition using a system template.  You’ll learn how to insert images, links and text as well as how to customize each email sent out to it’s recipient.

• Sending a broadcast- Choose your contacts, select the edition and Send!  It’s really that easy – and Betty proves it with a look at the Send module of the 2.0 interface.  She also covers questions like, “what if one contact is on the list twice?” and “how quickly does it actually get sent out?”

• Tracking results- Dive into the Track module with a look at all of the different charts and graphs available for your tracking pleasure.  You’ll learn where to find all the information you need to have.  And how to keep track of it on a regular basis.

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Questions are welcome throughout the session – and the end of the class is completely dedicated to Q & A – so if you need a live demo on a certain feature or want to see your question answered live – ask away!

Cooler E-Classes are every Wednesday afternoon at 1:00pm Pacific Standard Time, and unlike a lot of higher education – they’re completely free!  To request an invitation, email EClasses@CoolerEmail.com

Already attended once but just can’t get enough? – You, and everyone from your team is more than welcome to join any time.

To get more proof that school is cool – email EClasses@CoolerEmail.com and ask for more info on the Cooler E-Classes.

You may already know how fast the digital convergence is  happening.  Here is a outstanding video clip which puts it all in perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2jDOkzrVew&feature=player_embedded.  The CoolerEmail social media integration continues!

Looking for the hot topics, most relevant and up to date information, and you don’t want to open 10 tabs on your web browser to do it? Well let’s point you in a couple of directions to help you out. In a previous post we discussed using Google tools as a source for relevant content in this post we are going to look at 5 aggregator sites that can be used individually or together to get you in the know!

Delicious

As many of you may know, this is a social book marking site that is driven by users bookmarking interesting websites, articles, and posting throughout the web. There are many ways to find the hot topics on Delicious but two of our favorites are the Delicious Hot List and by topic or keyword, this is known as the Delicious Tag.

Netvibes

Netvibes is a personalized homepage, news and multiprotocol aggregator, and social network in one. Netvibes lets individuals assemble their favorite widgets, websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and everything else they enjoy on the web – all in one place.This is a great place to assemble the blogs and websites you consistently go to for news and information.

Alltop

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.

On Alltop you can search by category, topic, or keyword and you can create your own feed page.

OneRiot

OneRiot, a realtime search engine, helps users find the news, blogs and videos that people are buzzing about. OneRiot ranks its search results using PulseRank, a realtime ranking algorithm that sorts web content according to its current social significance. By indexing pages shared by millions of Digg, Twitter, and wider social web users – including the contributions of OneRiot’s own three million-strong panel – OneRiot delivers fresh, hyper-relevant search results that answer the question: what is happening right now?

RiotFeeds

As reported by TechCrunch OneRiot rolled out RiotFeeds today, a Twitter tool “which basically hand curates tweets from the top sites in various categories on the web. The end result are feeds that just contain tweets with links from sites of the same ilk.”

Starting a newsletter is one thing, but getting new subscribers is a whole different ballgame.  Anyone can write a basic newsletter.  A few can write really good ones.  Most, however, are not able to grow a subscriber base beyond their immediate friends and family.

The bread-and-butter of a newsletter is its readers.  The absolute must-have for getting those subscribers is the opt-in list.  Especially with today’s anti-spam laws and other protections.  Getting someone on your list without getting accused of spamming is where the opt-in comes into play.

The core of the opt-in is that form that the prospective subscriber must fill out in order to start the subscription process.  Similar to the card in the magazine on the rack, the opt-in form gets your subscriber’s information so you can ad them to your list and start sending them newsletters.

That opt-in form should be in or linked from every single newsletter you send out.  Preferably, your newsletter should have a line that says something like “If this was forwarded to you and you’d like to keep receiving great information from us, please opt-in here.”  That should be set in stone like the copyright information and your website link.  In every newsletter, every time.

Your website, obviously, should prominently display that newsletter form too.  Wherever the eyes go when they load your site is where that should prominently be placed.  So if your site loads and most people immediately look to the logo at the top-left, your opt-in form should be directly underneath or next to that.  If they go to the top-right, that’s where your form should be.  That’s your premium advertising location and so that’s where you should be advertising YOU.

If your site has a blog that people might be subscribed through with RSS or other feeds, you should definitely have a link to your newsletter opt-in there too.  Preferably one that goes out automatically with every post, through RSS.

Social media is another great place you should be taking full advantage of.  Your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other pages should have a link to your opt-in form or the form itself (if possible).  Those should also be prominently linked whenever you mention your newsletter.  You should periodically send out tweets or make FriendFeed posts mentioning your newsletter and how to subscribe too.

On Facebook, in fact, you can now insert your opt-in box directly to your profile page through the HTML insertion allowances they have there.  This means every time someone looks at your profile, theyll see how to subscribe to your newsletter.

If you’re doing anything to pimp your newsletter, it should involve that opt-in box, in fact.  It doesn’t matter what you’re doing to promote it, getting subscribers is goal numero uno.  Do that all the time, every time.  You don’t have to be pushy or repetitive about it, but you should be consistent.

Just doing these things will greatly enhance your subscriber base quickly.  Doing them consistently will ad new subscribers on an ongoing, regular basis too.  Both are things you can definitely be happy with.

If you’re producing a great newsletter with a lot of good information and have been building a large reader base, but not getting activity out of your readers, it can be extremely frustrating.  One of the most disheartening things for a publisher to go through is a lack of reader response or activity.

It doesn’t take long, after consistently publishing a newsletter, to become disheartened with it when you get no response from your readers.  When no clicks, no comments, and few apparently active readers are happening, you’ll feel you want to give up.

After all, if they aren’t clicking and they aren’t sending you responses, are they really reading?  Are they interested at all?

This is a question that all newsletter publishers have to face.  It’s also what prompts most seasoned publishers to agree that building a newsletter and gaining subscribers for it is the easy part.  It’s getting subscribers active that’s difficult.

The best way to counter these feelings of despair with your newsletter and to find out for sure what your readers are thinking is to just ask.

Don’t keep guessing, wondering, and getting more frustrated.  Instead, insert a survey into your next newsletter.  Ask something simple that requires little effort to respond to.  Give a list of prospective subjects for your upcoming issues or ask for the readers’ thoughts on a subject and see what they’ll say.  Or just ask directly what they think of your newsletter so far.

These impromptu surveys could become a regular part of your newsletter’s content, giving you valuable feedback about what your readers want to see and are interested in reading.

Most of the time, you’ll receive a decent response, especially if the survey is located prominently in the newsletter itself.

These simple and easy additions to your newsletter can boost your reader’s activity and even subscribership by leaps and bounds.

There are more tools on Google than you could possibly ever need for getting ideas, getting information, and producing your newsletter.  In fact, those first two items (ideas and information) are what Google does best and Google has several tools you can use to make it easy and quick.

Anyone who writes a newsletter, blog, or other publication knows that keeping your ideas fresh is not easy.  When you first begin publishing a newsletter, for instance, you’re chuck full of energy and have tons of ideas for content.  Eventually, though, you’ll start to run low.

There are a lot of ways to keep your ideas fresh and your newsletter full of great information, though.  In fact, using nothing more than your Google account, you can have all that you’ll ever need to keep your content fresh.

Google Reader

This is your first tool of choice.  In fact, for many, this is the only tool they need.  If you follow a lot of blogs, news feeds, etc. related to your newsletter’s content, Google Reader can make it very easy to keep track of them without visiting individual websites every day.  Just ad the RSS feeds to Google and check them all in one place, whenever you’d like.

Your Google Reader can be fed directly into your Gmail account, read through your browser, etc.  All of the articles syndicated in your Reader can be clicked to link to their source and read on the website that published them.

Google News

For many of us, this is an all-in-one news source for everything going on in the local, regiona, national, and world wide news.  You can even have news subjects (like weather for your area, specific subjects, etc.) fed into your Google Reader.

Google Trends

Wondering what’s the hottest, right now?  If your newsletter is all about the latest trends, memes, or something similar, then Google Trends might become your best friend.  There is a ton of great information here, all up-to-the-minute and from all over the Web.  This is also an awesome way to find things to stuff your Google Reader box with.

Google Alerts

Similar to Trends, Alerts ties in the latest, right now, up-to-the-second information and shows it to you immediately.  Not just when you look for it, but as soon as it appears.

Basically, Alerts are search terms whose results, when the update, are sent as a list to your email.  So when a new piece of content or series of stories on a specific search subject is put online, Google will find it and immediately send you an Alert through email.

All of these great tools can boost your idea stream and give you a lot of great flow for your newsletter’s content.  Take advantage of the easy tools available and automate your content triggering process.

There are two types of added value for a newsletter: value that adds to your subscribers’ engagement and interest and value that adds to your bottom line.

Both of these are important additions to any publication and should be part of your newsletter’s focus from the get-go.  Adding value to your readers’ experience boosts their confidence in your publication and engages them in the newsletter in many ways.  Adding value to your side of the newsletter (i.e. it’s profit potential) definitely keeps your interest level and engagement up as well.

Adding Value For Your Readers

Giving extra value in each issue shows your readers that the newsletter is all about them, not you.  It gives them incentive to not only participate in the publication itself (by clicking ads, reading content, etc.), but to get their friends and colleagues interested too.  Word-of-mouth to advertise subscriptions is, like any other marketing, the best kind you can get.

There are a lot of ways to ad value for your subscribers.  The simplest is to find discounts, freebies, or other offers you can pass on to your readers.  Coupons they can print out, offers they can get by mentioning your newsletter, or even just plain “generic” values that you point them towards that they might not have found on their own are all great ways to boost value.

Other values for readers include exclusive information they can’t get somewhere else (articles), featured writers or gurus whose information is aimed directly at your readers, and more are another way to give value to your newsletter.

Finally, engaging your readers and interacting with them (via the newsletter) further enhances its value in their eyes.  Answering questions is a great way to do this, or publishing “letters to the editor” in each issue is great too.  Anything that makes your newsletter personal to the reader ads value.

Adding Value for You

Value in a publication is a two-way street, of course.  If you aren’t interested (or profiting somehow), even if your newsletter is a hobby publication, you’re going to lose interest or compromise your newsletter.  If your readers aren’t interested, they won’t click, buy, or engage in your newsletter either.

So adding value for you, as the publisher, is just as important as adding value for your readers.  Often, the two coincide and can cooperate to make both you and your subscribers happy.

If, for instance, you get a business to offer a coupon as an advertisement in your newsletter, perhaps you can have a stated goal with them as well.  Something like if 100 visitors come to them thanks to your newsletter, you get the service for free?

Or maybe just finding the deal is good enough to give you value and passing it on to your readers is just a bonus itself.  That also adds value to your experience.

Offering discounts or extras with your own products or services is, of course, an extremely obvious value adding to both sides of the equation as well. You can take this further by creating contests amongst your readership encouraging them to illustrate the highest and best use of your product/or service with a reward at the end. An excellent way to tie your blog into a contest is to have clients submit stories, pictures, or videos which you pick the best, display them on your site or blog, and then have an open contest. People want to win, so they will invite others to vote which will open you up to a wider audience.

Finding Discounts

One of the best ways to get discounts to offer your readership is to work within your business sphere, these are people you network with already so you will be doing them a service as well as yourself.

Another source for discounts and coupons is of course online, you can create a Google Alert to get discounts in a specific industry, niche, location, and/or product delivered to your email in-box. Major online retailers tend to have seasonal sales often, you can either bookmark their sites or sign up for their email alerts to keep up to date on the latest sales. There are also online sources that specialize in finding the best coupons and discounts on the net – we have listed some of them for you.

http://coupons.com

http://www.couponcabin.com/

http://www.couponmom.com/

http://www.couponchief.com/

http://www.retailmenot.com/

http://coupons.smartsource.com/

http://www.bestcouponbook.com/

http://twtqpon.com/

http://cheaptweet.com/

http://www.coupontweet.com/

https://www.mobiqpons.com/

There are literally thousands of ways you can ad value to your newsletter without breaking the bank or compromising anyone.  All of them will boost your newsletter’s success!

A newsletter is just a newsletter without subscribers to read it.  Building subscribers is, often, the only goal most publishers have for their newsletter.  While this is fine in the beginning, it’s definitely not the ultimate goal for your publication.

The ultimate goal of your publication should be to keep your current subscribers interested and active.  Without that, you’re just sending stuff to a list of people and will ultimately get very little back from them except unsubscribe requests or spam complaints.

So while rewarding new subscribers with freebies and incentives is a great way to get those initial signups, it’s also important to reward your loyal subscribers as well.  There are a lot of ways to do this and even accomplish both goals at the same time.

Obviously, if you offer a freebie or incentive to all new signups, you should give the same freebie and incentive to your current subscribers just for being there.  This is the simplest and easiest way to reward your current readers.

If you can get more complicated, you can also set up a quasi-affiliate system where subscribers can be attributed to a current person on your list as their referral.  If a current subscriber gets X number of new signups that stay for Y number of weeks, they get a bonus/payoff.

Other incentives you can use are simple “thanks for being there” mentions.  Do a short spotlight, feature, or just commentary on one of your longest-term and one of your latest subscribers.  So spotlight Joe, who’s been there since Issue 1 and Mary, who just signed up this week.  People love to see their name in “print.”

The spotlight approach is also good for strategic business partners, best clients, and your local community. If you are trying to generate exposure opportunities for your brand, enlarge your network, and increase your newsletter subscribers why not do it all together? By shining the spotlight on another business, individual, and/or cause you are not only helping others but helping yourself as well.  When you show support for others they will reciprocate by either doing the same for you or by sharing your newsletter with their sphere, both options of course are welcome.

Don’t forget to incorporate your spotlight and client appreciation into your blog, this will bring readers from your newsletter to your site and vice versa. You also want to keep this newsletter feature consistent, if you are going to do it monthly, quarterly, or bi-annually then let your readership know and stay on schedule.

Finally, the best way to show appreciation for your readers is to publish a quality newsletter with useful information on a consistent basis.  Delivering quality while engaging your readers through feedback and interaction will be the best way you can show appreciation and build a strong subscriber list.

Check out CoolerEmail we are doing some cool things with 2.0….