Ok here goes:

1. Open a spreadsheet or plain text file.
2. Fill in the first row or line with data labels that describe each type of information you have to upload.   The column heading for email addresses should be “Email”. The heading for your contacts names should be “Name”.  Then enter each contact’s email address and name on a separate row or line.
3. Now save youf file as Text-only files as .TXT and select “ANSI” encoding.  Do not save as “UNICODE”.  Excel spreadsheets as .CSV or .XLS files.

Here are examples of how your file will look in both excel and Notepad:

Gmail:

1. Log into your Google Gmail account.
2. Click Contacts along the left side of any Gmail page.
3. Click Export in the upper-right corner of your Contacts list.
4. Select either of the CSV (Comma Separated Values) formats.
5. Click Export Contacts.
6. In the File Download dialog box, click Save.
7. Choose a location and click OK to save the file.
8. You may now import this file into your Email&Go account.  

Yahoo Mail:

1. Within Yahoo, click Options in the upper-right corner.
2. From the drop-down box, select Mail Options.
3. Select Contact Options from the menu on the left side.
4. Click Import/Export in the upper right corner.
5. Scroll to the Export section at the bottom of the page. There are multiple  choices to export to in the drop-down box. 
6. Choose to export to Yahoo CSV and save the file to your desktop.
7. You may now import this file into your Email&Go account.

Many clients wonder what benefits our dedicated email service can offer them, and whether they could just do it in-house themselves.   Here are a few reasons to choose our service.

Track and measure your success.

If you know who opened your emails, what they clicked on, who bounced and who unsubscribed, you can start to understand who your audience really is, and what they are interested in.

Saves you time!

Sending the email might not take too long (although it may crush your mail systems internally!). It’s dealing with the results of your campaign that can eat up your time.

Subscribe and unsubscribe requests – every time you send a campaign, some people are likely to want to get off the list. It may only take you a minute or two to deal with, but if you need to stop what you are doing and switch tasks, it adds up quickly. And what happens if you miss one and send to that person again?

Our dedicated email system lets people unsubscribe instantly from any email they receive, and your list is updated automatically.

Dealing with bounced emails

For any given campaign, you might expect up to 10% of the emails to be bounced back to you. That could be hundreds or thousands of emails you need to handle somehow.

Are they permanent bounces? Then should you remove them from your list? Or do you need to resend the email to them?

Our dedicated email system instantly removes hard bounces, and re-sends your campaigns automatically to addresses which soft bounce.

Dealing with spam complaints

Sometimes people forget that they signed up for your emails, and hit the spam button. Email&Go instantly removes people from your list when they make a spam complaint, ensuring they do not receive any more email.

Avoid hold ups on your own mail servers

We’ve heard of more than one marketing manager staying up till all hours trying to send email campaigns out without shutting down the company email network.

Your email campaign can only succeed if your recipients are actually able to read it. Using Definition’s dedicated email system to send your campaigns can have a big impact on the number of people receiving the emails.

Whitelisting and feedback loops

We have relationships with major ISPs like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and many more that mean our mail servers are recognized as legitimate senders of bulk email, so your campaigns have a much greater chance of being delivered.

Monitoring of blacklists

We continually check blacklisting services to make sure our servers are not being listed, something which is time consuming and complex to do for your own servers.

Specialized network of mail servers

Our mail servers optimize email delivery for particular recipient mail systems, throttling the speed of delivery to match acceptable levels for each system.

Use advanced options and smarter features
• Personalization – Use custom fields to adapt your emails for individual subscribers
• API – A programming interface to let you integrate our dedicated email system with your own systems
• Segmentation – Send focused emails to subsets of your full lists
• Powerful import and export – Easily get your subscriber lists into and out of the system at any time
• Archive your campaigns – Easily display your previous campaigns on your website

Constant improvement!

A web based service like ours can be updated with better performance, new features and smarter tools very quickly, and at no extra cost. You don’t have to worry about having the wrong version, or getting out of date.

Every month we are adding features and making updates to make our dedicated email system do more for you in less time.

Secure, reliable and supported!

Your valuable subscriber information and campaign details are kept safe in our data centers. With biometric security, uninterruptible power supplies and environmental control units, our physical security and reliability is state of the art.

We keep your data backed up and duplicated across our network at all times. Our hardware is completely redundant, meaning that even if one disk or server fails, nothing will be lost and the system will stay up.

Focus on your customers, not on your technology!

Sure, you can use your own email client, or some other in-house tool to add your subscribers and deal with unsubscribe requests and bounces from bad emails all day.

But wouldn’t you rather spend that time working on the email itself, crafting the message to better meet your customer’s requirements and tweaking subject lines and headlines to get better results?

Using our email service lets you avoid the mundane administrative work and concentrate on serving your customers better.

This is the 2nd part of an earlier article.  What is a typical open rate?

Based on everything we have seen here at Email&Go, and on the other research out there, the bottom line is this:

If you are getting an open rate between 20% and 40%, you are probably somewhere around average.

Very few lists of reasonable size are getting much above 50% open rates from normal campaigns. Your list may have some specific factors that give you higher rates; if so, well done.

However, don’t expect to be getting 80% open rates. People are too busy, inboxes are too full and the measurements are technically limited. If, after all that, you are still interested in seeing specific figures, see the footer for some references you can browse through.

How can I increase my open rate?

There are a ton of elements you can vary to try to entice more of your subscribers to open up your emails. Here are just a few things you could try:

• Experiment with your subject lines: Try including details about the content of the email right in the subject line, instead of using your standard subject.
• Send on a different day: Are your subscribers too busy on a Wednesday morning to read your email, leaving it languishing down the inbox? Maybe a Friday afternoon email would be welcomed.
• Get the important content up the top: Remember that many people will see a preview of your email before deciding to open it or ignore it. Make sure your email is recognizable, and that your key points are in the top third.