While you're celebrating this Christmas and New Year we'll be in the background keeping an eye on things as always.

Have a wonderful time and see you on the other side!

If you know of anyone looking for a low-cost, easy-to-use email marketing application, then today could be your lucky day as we've just launched the Suite26 Referral Scheme.

Enjoy cash or email credit rewards

You can earn cash or email credit rewards every time one of your referred customers purchases Suite26 credits.  In essence, the more your referrals spend each month, the bigger the cash or credits reward you receive, and with no limit on the number of referrals you can make, you can potentially earn hundreds of pounds or thousands of credits in rewards every month.

Find out more about the scheme, view the breakdown of what you can earn with very little effort.

What do I do now?

1. Join the Suite26 referral scheme by calling 0845 313 0911 to speak with Ricky or Mark to obtain your unique ID number.
2. Tell your referrals to quote your name or ID number with their first purchase to get the cash or credits rolling into your account.
3. Advise your referrals to quote your unique ID number so they too will earn bonus credits on their first purchase.

Find out how you can start earning your cash or email credits for your business via Suite26 today on 0845 313 0911.

There's an excellent article on the AOL Postmaster blog this morning which discusses the difference between recipients giving permission to receive your mail and actually requesting to receive it.

We all talk about permission based email marketing and how important it is to ensure your mail is delivered reliably to your recipient's inbox, but this article shows that while a recipient may technically have given permission to receive your mail they did not actually request it.

In the example they provide they show that the sender required users to give permission to be on their mailing list before allowing them to carry out a primary function on their website (effectively a forced opt-in) and thus the sender experienced a large number of complaints and delivery problems.

So, here's a few points you should remember:

• Recipients should always request to receive your mailings (for example a sign box on your website or a tickbox shown next to other forms on your site)
• Make sure that potential recipients know what your mailings will be about, how often they should expect to receive them and re-affirm that they can unsubscribe at any time.
• Don't force a recipient to sign up to your mailing list before being able to achieve some task on your site.
• Don't assume that just because somebody has given you their email address that they want to be on your mailing list.   You must always provide a mechanism (ie; tickbox) for them to indicate they want to be on your mailing list.   Adding your entire address book from Outlook is not an option!
• Ensure that recipients can unsubscribe from your mailings with one click and that you honour that unsubscribe from that day forward (Suite26 will do this for you automatically but you must ensure any further back-end databases you may have honours the unsubscribe too)

Finally, the AOL article touches on the topic of engagement.   AOL, among others, keep statistics on how many users click on your mail, how many click to display images, how many click the spam button, how many reply, how many click the not spam button along with other metrics to figure out how engaging your mailings are.   If you regularly get a low engagement score then you could find your mails ending up in the spam folder or maybe not even being delivered at all!   We will be writing more on engagement and the future of deliverability in some upcoming blog posts.

You can read the full article on the AOL blog here: http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/12/03/p/

The Christmas Credits Countdown - Save 15% on email email credits!

The clock's still ticking but time is running out on the Christmas credit discounts.  So come on, think of all the savings and mileage you'll get when you bag your Suite26 bargain today. Remember these credits never expire, so buy them today, save yourself money and hold them until you're ready to do your mailing, which might be a New Year promotion for 2010 or a special message to your customers this Easter.

We hate to see a bargain go to waste, so call 0845 313 0911 and quote CCC today because you now have until 5.30pm Friday 4th December to buy with 15% off, after which time this email credits offer will self destruct! Tick, tock...