Here we are, well into the last quarter of 2009, and holiday-related marketing campaigns are well underway. Many of Gold Lasso’s clients have begun promoting sale dates, coupon codes, clear outs, special event dates such as VIP access to online sales and other year-end online campaigns. Meanwhile, some still have not begun their end of year planning. Start now, it’s not too late. Here are some tips to help organize your e-marketing strategies:

• Coordinate online and offline promotions together to reinforce customer messages.
• Prepare special “backup plan” promotions that might be triggered by an event – snow in Florida promotions and inventory blowouts are just a few examples.
• Make it your New Year’s Resolution to be more engaging with your customers. Clearly and directly ask your customers to use social media by sharing info on Twitter or Facebook, forwarding to a friend or responding to a survey. Follow up with a thank you email or give financial incentives to those who share messages. (This feature can be tracked in eLoop standard campaign reporting.)
• Incorporate Auto Responders so people receive messages immediately after signups or customer purchases. This not only puts your name in front of the customer right away, but prompt emails encourage higher open rates and build better sender IP reputation.
• Keep pushing your messages all the way until last minute. It’s OK to send messages the day before Cyber Monday as well as on Cyber Monday. (The Monday following Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is associated with a significant increase in online sales. Cyber Monday is November 30. Mark your calendars!).
• Don’t only promote holiday shopping. Why not assemble messages for New Year’s – encourage customers to stock up on services or products for 2010 now.
• Busy staff? Why not incorporate RSS-to-Email functionality in campaign creation. One of our clients saved his office 20 hours of staff time by utilizing this feature in eLoop!

These are just a few of the many ways email marketing can be used to enhance your business this time of year. Remember to start sending emails now, send often, and send all the way until the end of the promotion for maximum results. For more information on how these features can be used, contact your eLoop Account Manager.

Gold Lasso is very excited to announce our partnership with AddThis, the #1 bookmarking and sharing button on the Internet. This partnership enables us to offer Social Media Integration for your email campaigns. This integration is seamless, fully customizable and can be accessed through the new and improved toolbar within the HTML message editor.

RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”) is a Web feed format used to publish or announce frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio and video.

The only information that you need to get started is the link to your RSS file. In Twitter you can simply click the orange RSS icon under your list of people that you are following, in WordPress it's listed with your "Site Meta" and in most other sites you simply click the RSS icon and it will take you to the necessary page.  Copy and paste that link into the RSS wizard in eLoop and you are well on your way.

What does this mean for you? It means that if you have a website, blog or a WordPress site, Twitter account, or anything else that can generate an RSS file, you can automatically get that information to your recipients in a few easy steps. There are two options within eLoop to help you accomplish this goal and you only need a few pieces of information to get started.

The first option is to setup an ongoing campaign based on time intervals and updates of your RSS stories. This feature would be used if you wanted to send out updates of your RSS stories to your recipients daily, weekly, monthly, etc.. We have built in the ability to check to see if your stories have been updated before the campaign is executed to ensure you aren't sending the same information multiple times to your followers.

The second option is to simply include your stories from your RSS directly within a message (using a datapoint based on an RSS profile) i.e. have your last five tweets in your monthly newsletter. I have included an example of that technique at the bottom of this message from my own Twitter account.

This is another awesome addition to our system because it's just one more "Really Simple" way of getting new information out to your recipients quickly. You setup a campaign and do what you normally do, update your stories, tweets, content etc. and watch your click rates climb. This new feature will be available to all users by Friday August 7th. Please keep your requests and feedback coming, we welcome and encourage your input!
To start adding RSS to your communications, simply click the icon within the editor and follow the simple steps.

Real-Time Autoresponder Campaigns
This feature allows you to send real-time autoresponders based on your eLoop landing pages, as well as any existing form that you already have implemented on your website(s). You can accomplish this through an "auto" campaign triggered by either a submission of a Landing Page or by using a query string. This process differs from Time Released Campaigns because you can send multiple emails to the same recipient unlike the Time Release Campaigns which will only allow you to send to the same recipient once per campaign. Recipients can fill out the form multiple times and receive a message for each submission. In addition, the message is sent immediately upon submission of the form/query string instead of waiting for a time release campaign to kick off every few minutes. This process is faster to accomplish real-time sending instead of batching, queuing, and then sending when the campaign criteria is met.

Image Map Tracking
Even though image maps are not as widely used as they once were, they are still popular enough to warrant tracking capabilities. Now designers can map out coordinates in an image pointing to multiple URLs without having to slice the image in to multiple pieces. It's a simple way to save time when creating messages. Please keep the comments and suggestions coming, we value your feedback! If you have any questions on these new features, please contact Client Services at service@goldlasso.com

Last week Gold Lasso featured a webinar discussing the benefits of RSS-to-Email. Thank you to everyone who participated and joined in the discussion afterwards. A complete recording of the Webinar is now available online, click here to review.

RSS-to-Email is a hot topic these days. Highlighted by Website Magazine in the article, E-Mail Marketing’s Future… Right Now, eLoop’s new feature is included in an overview of ESPs changing the email landscape. “This is useful for people using Twitter, publishers who update their sites regularly and have newsletters based on updates, press releases, or any other type of timely content that gets posted to a website regularly." View the article here.