Archive for the ‘Email’ Category

As most online business owners, I produce my newsletters through email.  I specifically use Constant Contact to produce my newsletters and manage my contacts, open and bounce rates and now for all my events.

As a business partner with Constant Contact, I am privy to early information and I just learned that Constant Contact has an iPhone app called QuickView.

It’s the iPhone app built specifically for Constant Contact® Email Marketing. QuickView lets you:

• Check the status of your email campaigns
• See who clicked, opened, forwarded, bounced, and unsubscribed
• Create a new email list on the go — you’ll see it when you’re back at your computer
• Add a new contact while you’re out networking — your account updates automatically
• Search your contact database
• Update any contact’s individual record — your changes will save to your account

All you need is an iPhone or iPod Touch and your Constant Contact username and password. It couldn’t be easier or more convenient.  I just downloaded the app to my iPhone and have added some new contacts and checked the status of my most recent email open-rate.  I love it!

Email Marketing by Constant Contact® is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your customers, clients, or members—and build strong, successful, and lasting relationships with them. You’ll create high-impact email newsletters and promotions in minutes, no technical expertise necessary. With more than 300 easily-customized templates, a simple point-and-click tool, and award-winning free customer support, you can create professional, compelling messages your audience will act on. And it’s easy for you to manage your contact lists, sign up website visitors, track your clicks and open rates, and send automated communications to new subscribers.  You can even try it Free for 60 days!  Click this link Free 60 Day Trial to get started.

My Outlook email stopped sending and receiving last night about 11 pm.  I didn’t think much about it because I have an old version of Microsoft Office, so I shut down the computer and went to bed.

This morning when I started my computer for the day, I was still unable to get email and I went out to WebMail and found more than 50 emails were sitting out there unable to come into my Outlook.  Also, one of my clients told me she had received an email from me 7 times!   My first thought of course was that crazy worm has gotten into my computer.

So after downloading a spyware software and running that.  Restoring my computer to a previous day.  I still had the same issue.  So I tried to delete an email and I got a message that I had reach a maximum capacity.  Oops!  I looked down and had almost 4,000 emails in my InBox and that’s not counting the emails I have in separate folders for clients, training, affiliates, etc.

So I went to work permanently deleting emails.  I sorted my InBox by name and just grabbed the entire group (after making sure I didn’t need them) and did a Shift Delete to get rid of them.  When I got below about 1700, my new emails started pouring in.

So the lesson here is to read it, act on it and do something with it.  Don’t leave it laying around.  I knew this, but wasn’t practicing it very well.

Hope this keep you from getting Email Overload!

As a virtual assistant and small business owner, I have many different clients throughout the year and keep up with them by setting up folders for each client in my Outlook.  I have some clients that I only work for once a year for special projects, but I like to keep past correspondence to refer back to.

Well, that is a good system and a bad one.  Because I keep everything, my Inbox gets rather large.   I don’t know if it was because I have a large amount of incoming emails in my Inbox or if I got a nasty virus, but I was attempting to delete a spam email and all of a sudden it was like a large hand grabbed all of the 1200 emails in my Inbox and deleted them all.  To say I was devastated, is a huge understatement.

Luckily, my client emails were safely tucked away in their personal folders, but there were several emails that I hadn’t had an opportunity to respond to and now they are gone and I don’t have any idea who they were from.

I tried to do a Search and Recover, but to no avail.  I guess a good lesson, for me at least, is to make sure I do a back-up of my .pst files everyday and to clean out my Inbox more frequently.

How do you keep your Inbox tidy?  If you have suggestions or ideas, I would appreciate hearing from you.

I work for several clients that produce an email newsletter, or better known as an Ezine.  I have helped them to set up the layout and design, and input content and images for publication.  But…I had never done one for myself and my business.

Oh my gosh, can I just tell you how much fun I had?  Of course I gave myself a deadline, which was yesterday, to have the first one out and that became a little stressful at 11 pm last night when I still hadn’t hit the Send button.  But I met my goal and it was out of my inbox and into the outbox of more than 300 contacts in just a matter of minutes! 

I searched for the best techology to use for my Ezine and I selected Constant Contact.  They have more than 300 templates to choose from, great reporting features to see who opens your email, how many bounced because of bad addresses and who just didn’t want to hear from you.  (That was a little tough, but I’m trying not to take it personally)

In addition to the excitment of fulfiling a goal and utilizing a great tool, I have received many compliments, one much appreciated critique and several inquiries for my services.  BINGO!  Feedback, just what I was hoping for.

I know the next one will be much easier and I won’t put so much pressure on myself to make it perfect (which it wasn’t).  But it was easy, fun and fast, three things we need more of.  If you need to boost your business, consider Constant Contact it’s a great tool to market your business and services and if you don’t want to do it yourself or don’t have the time to do it, check with a Virtual Assistant to take care of it for you. 

Don’t you love those long weekends?  Just looking forward to some time off, relaxation with the family or friends, going to the beach, lake or mountains? 

Don’t you just hate coming back to the office to find a foot of mail in your mailbox; 500 emails, 450 of them spam and of course the weekly meeting that takes longer than usual because of the long weekend stories?

I’m with you, except it’s my business to go through the mountains of mail, the never-ending emails and I have several meetings throughout the day with various clients.   I have one client that has re-routed her informational email account to me to monitor and moderate.  This alone had 150 spam emails in it when I came back into the office today.  And I Love it! 

The good thing is that I’m caught-up.  Not only with my personal emails, but with my client’s emails as well.  This is just one more way a Virtual Assistant can help busy people stay caught up.  By giving the task of email and calendar management to an off-site, virtual professional you don’t get bogged down with email messages that really don’t contribute to your bottom line.  Although email is very important in our society now (and I couldn’t personally live without it) it is a time consumer and before you realize it, you have spent 2-3 hours working on responding and sending emails.

Before the next holiday (July 4th, is just around the corner), think about outsourcing this task to a Virtual Professional.  We can help you stay caught-up and make coming back from those long weekends or vacations as pleasurable as the time-off.