5 Easy Methods To Increase Your Business Email Security
Email security can be tricky. Occasionally clients will come to us with questions about how best to use their email system, and how to prevent security breaches. We’ve gathered some of our best email security tips below, and we hope it helps you keep your business running smoothly.
Once you have your email system ironed out and you’re ready to start building your business with email, let us know.
1. Stop Spam & Phishing Emails In Their Tracks
The best way to stop spam and phishing emails is to educate yourself and your employees on what to look for.
Phishing and spam techniques relies on getting you to trust the sender. Usually they do this by using an email domain – the @examplecompany.com portion of the email address – which looks like a reputable company. Common examples might be: @amazon-z.com, @amazon.net, @ama-zon.com, amazononline@online.com, amazon@hotmail.com etc.
They’ll usually ask you to click on a link because they need to verify information on your account. The link usually takes you to a website which is a good copy of the company you’re expecting; similar color schemes, fonts, buttons and logos. Once you’re there, they expect you to put in your user name, password and/or account or social security number.
Your best bet is to notice these email address discrepancies and don’t click on anything in the email. Once you’ve arrived at their site, they may have already downloaded malware which can further compromise your system without you having to take a single action.
Instead, train your email filter to notice these things. Select the checkbox next to the message and choose whatever option your email provider gives you to identify the message as spam. In Gmail, this would be the “Report Spam” button. This helps your email provider realize the domain is a spam sender, and it will attempt to stop those in the future.
2. Check for Confidential Content
You might be the most careful person in the world, but are your employees? Make sure you have clear expectations in place about what can be transferred via email and what can’t.
Social security numbers, account information, banking information, usernames and passwords should never be sent via email. Also make sure your employees know that you and the companies or financial institutions you work with will never ask for this information via email, or via a phone number given to them via email. Always call an institution directly to a trusted number you’ve used in the past.
3. Create An Email Security Policy
Your employees might not know how best to handle a spam email, or not to send out certain confidential emails. That’s why you want to make sure you have a detailed email security policy in place. There are many sample policies out there you can go through and customize to your own needs, like this one from Tech Donut.
4. Block Certain Senders
Sometimes, your employee might try to send an email to a bunch of recipients at once with the To:, Cc: or Bcc: field. These types of emails can expose your clients to each other, which is something they may not want.
It can also accidentally expose confidential information, such as names, email addresses and other information to a wider audience, and can be constituted as spam in certain cases. Since you don’t want to cause spam yourself, you can request that your the company which controls your email server block anyone at your company from sending emails with more than 15 recipients or something similar.
As well, you can block senders coming into your system. Emails with attachments larger than 10MB can slow down your entire network, or not be delivered at all. Set a policy at your server level to block incoming and outgoing emails with attachments larger than 10MB, and to notify the sender and provide an alternate method of sending the file, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
5. Archive Emails
Make sure that you keep a backup of your emails so if a disaster should occur you can still revert to your backup. Check if your server provides a backup, and if so how often. You can also create a backup yourself using an external hard drive and a backup schedule if you feel it’s necessary.
Hopefully these tips have helped you secure your business emails. When you’re confident enough to start advertising your business through email, contact us!
Photo by Diana Akhmetianova on Unsplash6 Best Practices For Your Email Marketing Efforts
Email marketing can seem like an extremely tricky business, even though email has been around for decades now. And how do you even begin to approach building a list to start emailing to? We’re sure you have a lot of questions, and hopefully this list helps you get started with your email marketing efforts. When […]
Photo by Muukii on Unsplash4 Awesome Stats To Help Small Businesses Win At Email Marketing
Email marketing can be difficult. One of the best ways to make sure that you’re successful at it is to be consistent. You may need help with that, and we’re always available to talk about how we can help you increase your revenue. But besides consistency, what other tips can help make your email marketing more effective?
HubSpot, one of the largest email marketing solutions out there, supplied the below statistics for this post.
1. People Are More Likely To Click Certain Words
When you’re writing the ‘call-to-action’ for your email, stick with something which includes “Click Here” rather than “Go” or “Submit”. “Click Here” has a much higher click rate than the other words, meaning more people will head to wherever you’ve linked the button to which is hopefully a landing page on your website!
2. Images Are Preferred To Text
Before you start typing your first draft, consider doing more with less. Use images to help get your message across. It turns out that 65% of people prefer more images than text in their emails, so be sure to capitalize on that with descriptive imagery and fewer words. We generally suggest 200 words or less per email.
3. Don’t Send Plain Text
In line with that, images are only visible in HTML emails. Even if they weren’t, 88% of users prefer to receive HTML emails over plain text emails, plain text meaning that there isn’t any formatting, fonts, colors or anything like that. So while some of your customers may find value in having emails be bare bones and get straight to the point, a vast majority appreciate a little flourish and style.
4. Optimize For Mobile Reading
And, we believe the most important tip here is to optimize your emails for mobile devices. 80.8% of users are reading emails on a mobile device!
Your email marketing software may be able to help you with this, but be sure to send yourself and/or your staff a test email and open it on multiple mobile devices to see how the images show up and how the text wraps, as well as if the links/buttons are able to be clicked easily.
Contact us anytime to chat about how we can help boost your ROI with email marketing!
8 Strategies To Boost Email Marketing For Small Businesses
As a small business, it can be hard to keep up with an ever-changing marketing field. Email marketing and other types can be time intensive. But if you can make the time for them, they can really boost your business.
At Cohlab, we help our clients build and sustain email campaigns across multiple industries. If you need expert help, let us know, but we hope these strategies can help set you on the right course.
8 Strategies To Boost Email Marketing For Small Businesses
1. Make It Obvious
The first key to successful email marketing is getting subscribers. You may already have users heading to your website, landing pages, blog or Facebook; use this to your advantage and give them some way of signing up, whether you find a WordPress plugin, a Facebook feature, or just give them a link to send you a generic email opting in.
The most important part is to make it obvious. Put it at the top of your pages, make it part of your Facebook cover photo, do something to get the idea of being on your mailing list in front of them and easy to do. All they should need to do is give you their name and email, don’t confuse the issue by asking for anything else.
2. Keep Them Informed
Once you’ve begun building a list, let them know what you’re using it for. Send everyone a welcome email as they are added to the list letting them know you’re grateful and that they’ll be receiving Marketing/Coupons/Blog Summaries/Survey/Etc. emails from you.
Email services like MailChimp and HubSpot (which we’ll discuss later) have an option to automatically reply to someone when they sign up for your list.
3. Subject Lines Are Important
Subject lines are key. What are you trying to get them to do, and what information is inside? Readers should be able to know without even opening the email whether anything valuable is inside for them.
Technically speaking, emails with subject lines of less than 50 characters tend to be opened more often than any other length, while subject lines of more than 70 characters tend to have links or coupons inside clicked on more often.
4. Consider Using A Service
In point #2, we mentioned MailChimp and Hubspot. These companies provide email services, allowing you to create lists, email templates, as well as keep you on the right side of the law. These email marketing providers automatically put unsubscribe links at the bottom of every email, which allows readers to opt out at any time and saves you the hassle of breaking the law.
5. Be Brief
About half of all emails are read on mobile devices, which means people are on the move. Keep your emails brief. You should really have only one or at the maximum two focuses in a single email message, to prevent confusion and keep the length in line.
200 words is usually a good maximum. If you need more than 200 words to get your point across, write a blog post instead and link from a short summary on the email to the blog post.
6. Be Committed
Keep it steady. If you feel customers will benefit from one email a month, do that and stick to it, always hitting it on the same day at about the same time. Create a calendar if you have to.
If you are doing more than one email a month, you’ll probably need a calendar. Keep it steady, with one email a week or whatever you choose.
If you decide you absolutely need to change your emailing frequency, inform your email list so they aren’t confused, or create separate lists and encourage people to subscribe to both lists if interested.
7. Stats Are Important
With an email marketing service like MailChimp or HubSpot, it’s easy to watch your statistics roll in from your email campaign. Open rates (what percentage of subscribers have opened a particular email) as well as click rates (what percentage of subscribers have clicked a link within a particular email.)
Not seeing good results? It might be time to change the time/date of your emails (see point #6.)
8. Images Might Not Show Up
Alt tags. These are text descriptions of graphics (images, photos, videos, logos.)
Every graphic you put in your email should have an alt tag, not only for those who use software to read their email to them, but also for those whose email provider has blocked images from appearing. Otherwise your customers might not even know you included a valuable coupon, or what it’s worth!
We hope these strategies have helped you on your journey, and if you need anything else, we’re just an email away!
How To Get The Most Out Of Email Marketing Services
Email marketing services like HubSpot and MailChimp help you organize your mailing lists and send templated messages to many users at once. But not many people are using email marketing services to their fullest.
At Cohlab, we have some best practices we utilize for our clients’ email marketing services which we’re happy to share with you. For additional help, contact us anytime and we’ll be happy to assist you.
Get The Most Out Of Your Email Marketing Services
Get Permission
No matter how you are getting these email addresses (a sign-up at your brick-and-mortar, a form on your website, a giveaway or contest) people need to know what they are signing up for. Before you ever use email marketing services or gather a single address, be sure people are aware that:
- They will receive X number of emails per month
- They will get (discounts, coupons, product information, first chance at new products, e-books, etc.)
- You will not spam them or sell their email address to another company
Set Expectations
After a user agrees to be on your email list, send a follow-up email immediately to thank them, introduce yourself or your company, and remind them again what type of emails you will be sending to them. Most email marketing services like MailChimp and HubSpot have an option to set up an autoresponder when someone signs up for your email list.
Segment
Segmenting your email list is an extremely important aspect of email marketing services.
Someone who is on your list because they are a customer is going to be interested in different things than someone who signed up for an e-book. Similarly, your particular industry will have different segments, whether this is based on gender, age, job title, company, etc.
Each segment will likely be interested in a different aspect of your business. If you’re a restaurant, you probably won’t want to send info about your Senior Specials to the under 50 crowd, while information about Kids Meals should probably go to the 25-45 age group.
Most email marketing services will allow you to manually place email addresses into various segmented groups which you design. It isn’t rocket science, but it does take time to setup at the start.
Optimize
When preparing for email marketing services, be sure to optimize the actual content of them. For instance, subject lines of emails have been shown to be extremely effective at <50 characters and >70 characters. Between 50-70 characters, emails tend to be opened less often.
More specifically, emails with subject lines of <50 characters tend to be opened more often than any other length, while emails with subject lines of >70 characters see the best click through rates (on a link or deal within the email).
Overall, emails should be short on content. If you have a lot of content to deliver, put short summaries and link out to a blog post on the topic. In general, emails shouldn’t have more than about 200 words in the body.
Remember, for additional email marketing services help, contact us anytime!
6 Email Blast Basics From Your Friends At Cohlab
Whether you have a newsletter or a big sale to announce, an email blast is usually a marketer’s first choice to get the word out.
An email blast let’s you contact a ton of people at the right time, but there are many ways this can go wrong for a company or individual marketer, even if you’re using a system like MailChimp. For advanced tips, definitely let us help you out, but for now let’s take a look at 6 quick email blast tips to help you get off on the right foot.
Email Blast Basics
1. Bigger is not always Better
Let’s pretend that, through your sales force’s prospects and friendly contacts as well as a list of customers who have already purchased from you, you have about 2,000 email addresses.
Having a bunch of email addresses which aren’t properly vetted isn’t ideal. We would much rather see you email blast a new product release to 200 customers who have agreed to receive information from you than 2,000 who aren’t expecting product information.
Your click-through and engagement rate with the 200 will be much higher, and you will see better returns from being able to more directly target this group.
2. Commit. Commit. Commit.
An email blast is not a one-time affair. You’re not going to get a great return off of just sending one blast; people need reminders. The ‘why’ behind your blast will remain the same, but the specific wording and images should adjust to keep it fresh on your second and third blast.
This allows you to test as well, which we will talk about a bit later.
Consistency is also important, you can build momentum for your email blast by staying on a schedule to keep your brand at the top of mind for your customers.
3. Stay Above The Fold
Most people won’t read much of your email blast at all, or might only preview it, so you want your “call-to-action” to be above the fold. This means you want to put whatever you want them to do near the very top of the email blast, whether it’s a link to a product page, a survey, or a coupon.
You don’t want them to have to scroll to get to your call-to-action, or the vast majority will never see it.
4. Keep It Short
Brevity is your friend. Do you read lengthy emails? You might skim them if they truly interest you, but most you read the subject line and maybe the first paragraph before deciding to trash it or invest your time.
Keep your email blast short and sweet. If you have a lot of information to get across, write a blog post and link them from the email to the blog, using the link as your call-to-action.
5. Test. Test. Test.
Multiple email blasts work best, as you can test how different subject lines, body text, images and calls-to-action work on different individuals.
You should also test your email blast on yourself or your coworkers multiple times, and to different email providers (Google, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) to see if your email is presented in the right way; do images come through, is your subject line too long, does your call-to-action show up above the fold, etc.
6. Watch And Learn
If you want to learn from your emails, you’ll need to send them from a client like MailChimp, HubSpot, or setup a tracked link or contact form on your website. It’s important to know how your email blast performs, so you can improve in the future.
For more help with your email marketing, contact us today!
5 Tips to Use MailChimp Effectively for Your Email Marketing Platform
The web is filled with different tools and services that are designed to help small businesses successfully implement an email marketing campaign, and for good reason. Email marketing continues to provide a phenomenal return on investment. One of the best known of these products is MailChimp. The service is fairly straightforward and easy to learn quickly. However, knowing how to send an email marketing campaign with MailChimp, and knowing how to maximize the use of it for the best possible result are two different things. In this article, we look at 5 ways your small business can maximize your success and use MailChimp more effectively.
Your Audience
Without a good list and a number of quality subscribers, nobody is even seeing your email campaign. A good subscriber list is the foundation on which any great email campaign is built. Generating a list of people who wish to receive and read what you are sending takes time to build, but it is worth the investment. More importantly, once you have a list, take the time to segment it into targeted groups. Separate them by demographic, their activities, purchase history, or other specialized groups. Once your list is segmented, you have the ability to specifically target certain groups with specialized content that will have the greatest effect on that particular segment.
Your Statistics
One of the great things about MailChimp, is that it provides a great deal of information that can help determine if your content is hitting the mark. Those stats aren’t just there for MailChimp to look professional. They are there to be used. Pay attention to your statistics like open rates, unsubscribes, and click-through rates. If you sent an email last week that had a 60% open rate, and your email this week is only at 20%, what made the difference? Taking the time to review and evaluate your statistics can greatly increase the impact your campaigns will have.
Your Opening Line
It has been shown that 33% of your audience opens an email strictly based on the subject line only. If your subject line isn’t something that entices recipients to open the email, you are eliminating a third of your list immediately. Use creativity, clarity, personalization, capitalization, powerful words, conciseness, and make it compelling. Sounds easy right? Don’t panic, if you are taking advantage of tip 2, knowing your exact target will make crafting a great subject line much easier.
Your Timing
Knowing when to hit the big red launch button that MailChimp ceremoniously provides takes a little research. Fortunately, the research has mostly been done; all you need to do is follow what it tells you. MailChimp did their own study and found that emails sent Tuesday through Thursday around 4 PM have the best open rates. You may find that your own segments have their own open rate sweet spot. And, MailChimp even provides a send optimization tool to help hit the moving target that is your audience.
Your Content and Layout
Even if you have a masterful subject line that is simply impossible for people to skip, the stuff inside that email is critical to achieving any action taken by the recipient. Various studies give an average email reading time of 7 to 15 seconds for over half of the population. That’s not much time, and chances are that whatever is at the top of your email will be the content that is viewed. Whatever your mission for the campaign, whether it’s information about an event or a call to action, make sure it is at the top of your layout. Structure your email so the most important information comes first. Use color, use images, use infographics, and use different design elements that capture their eyes like you want the written content to capture their mind. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to do this successfully. MailChimp has pre-made templates that guide you through the process and help find that balance between catching and overbearing.
Don’t Waste Your Time
As the old saying goes, time is money. Any activity you do, any investment you make regarding your company’s marketing strategy should be successful and provide a great return on the investment. MailChimp, and other email marketing products can be a tool that slingshots your marketing efforts into the stratosphere. But they can also be an utter waste of time. Before you decide to start your own email marketing campaign, take the time to familiarize yourself with how it works, and then follow these tips to maximize the result of your efforts.
Use our complimentary Digital Marketing Scorecard to gain valuable insight on how your website rank compares to others. We’re also glad to answer any questions you may have and provide Cohlaborative digital marketing solutions to meet your company’s needs.
