Here at Nouri.sh we understand the importance of a well executed eMarketing campaign; we work tirelessly to perfect our own!

However, we still find that we need to convince people that email marketing is beneficial. Here are some crystal clear reasons why you should be utilising this form of marketing.

1. Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%.

That is mind blowing; the ROI is significantly higher than all other types of marketing. There are low/zero start up fees and it requires a minimal investment of your time after setup. Imagine you were subscribed to the Nouri.sh starter package costing $29 a month. This equates to a potential ROI of $1,247 per month!

2. Companies view email marketing as a better return on investment than PPC, content marketing, social media, offline direct marketing, affiliate marketing, online display advertising, and mobile marketing.

By investing a small amount of money and time, you can create an extremely lucrative email marketing campaign. If you are not already actively using email marketing speak to one of our specialists today. They will help set-up a campaign and guide you to a tip-top sustainable newsletter.

3. 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. 

Email marketing works. It puts your brand at the front of the readers mind, even more so when you choose a clever title and deliver people with relevant content.

4. 7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week.

If you receive a discount code or offer, it is always extremely tempting to use it! It may be that the reader had there eye on a product and that this just nudges them in to making a purchase; it could be payday and the reader is feeling particularly flush. Whatever the reason, rewarding loyal clients with a coupon or discount is a sure fire way to drum up business.

5.  56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2014.

Somethings get pushed to the bottom of our to-do list; email marketing should NOT be one of them. It is clear from this stat that people do want to do more. Understandably we just don’t get round to some things. But, with the potential ROI on offer here, it is certainly worth putting time aside for.

(Sources, ExpressPigeon, 2012 Blue Kangaroo Study, Convinceandconvert, Direct Marketing Associaation)

So it’s that time of year again, just over a week to go until Christmas Day. As consumers step up their spending we in the office are unsurprisingly winding down for a small (well deserved) break.

It is common for businesses to avoid change as the festive season approaches. This can be because it is the busiest time of year and not the appropriate moment to be changing strategies, for others they feel it is just not the time of year to get things done. People will inevitably have holiday, partners will be closed for various amounts of time, and others are simply excited for one too many glasses of bucks fizz!

Whilst we have a few more working days available, let us prepare a few treats we can give our business. After all, the Christmas indulgences may very well inhibit your judgement, so it best to outline some plans before the holidays.

A Blog

If you don’t have one, get one. It can be used in so many different ways, depending on your requirements. It allows you to have a voice, whether this is for selling, informing, helping or simply connecting with people it is a great way to compliment any social media work you do. The only thing you may need to pay for is content creation, so blogs bring a whole host of benefits for very little outlay.

An eNewsletter Campaign

Again it is essential that you have a voice and that you communicate. This could be a newsletter for your staff members, a newsletter for clients or why not just implement both! You can use content from both social media campaigns and from your blog. In fact, any source that has an RSS feed. You can tag certain posts so they only go to certain groups and the whole thing really can be tailored to your individual needs. Have a think what would benefit or add value to your company and if you have any questions please post a comment and we will get back to you.

Appraisals/Reviews

These are great opportunities to rebuild relationships with staff. If you have been focussed on a project and haven’t given them much time over the past few months, suggest a catch up. This is a great opportunity for an employee to share thoughts about their own progress and it really doesn’t need to be your analysis of them. Have a chat, make some notes and then get back to them with a plan of action. Another benefit about engaging your staff in this way is that they feel they can share ideas and solutions to their everyday problems. With your help these can be implemented, so you end up with a happier employee who has a little more spare time to make you some lovely money!

A Christmas Party

The highlight of the social calendar, new dresses, new shirts and everyone is filled with festive cheer. It is great to end a year on a high and recognising hard work with a nice meal or a few beverages is always appreciated. It is nice to remind ourselves that we work with great people and this is something we often overlook in the office. Especially in the run up to Christmas, tensions in the office can run high. A lot of people under a lot of pressure cannot end well. The great thing about socialising outside of work is you get to know and appreciate the person, not the job title.

Merry Christmas!

From the Nouri.sh team

Yes it is hard to build up momentum on social media sites, but just because it is difficult to get going it is still imperative that you give it a go.

There really is no excuse for not getting involved

It is quick and easy to create a page that can be viewed by millions of people. And you control your own destiny, the more time and effort you put in the more fans you will acquire.

Every day you avoid getting involved is a day wasted…

“How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” – Seth Godin

So let’s hit the ground running and ensure you dedicate some of your time to social media pages each week. You can use this time to tweak the look and feel of the page, interact with clients and potential clients, and if you have the time (or a sudden burst of inspiration!) collate a few ideas for future posts and comments.

Connecting with your audience

Enhance your posts with images, not just any old image but a relevant one preferably! Don’t be afraid to add text, if it is not clear what the image is trying to convey then add a few words. Even if you are repeating what you have said in your post, it is better to make it obvious from the get-go as people are naturally drawn to the images first rather than the text.

Don't let readers invent their own meaning - Annotate any ambiguous images

Another benefit is that your social media page can act as a forum where you interact with your clients. It is clear that just having a page gives you some degree of credibility, if your company name doesn’t appear in a search people are obviously going to wonder why.

Free publicity

Some people argue that social media is the cheapest form of marketing; however it can only be used as marketing tool if someone is putting the effort in to create and maintain a great page!

Team this with the services Nouri.sh offer to really exploit these great tools. Your pages can easily be turned in to RSS feeds and in turn these feeds can be used to produce a newsletter. You will be surprised how many people would love to receive a newsletter summarising all your posts rather than logging on to the social media sites every day.

Communicate! Why internal email is essential.

Avoid gossiping, address issues, eliminate hand written scribble that ends up in the trash and keep your employees in the loop. These are just some arguments for why an internal newsletter is indispensable.

Recognise that you need to communicate with staff members.

Just because we are in the digital age doesn’t mean we should stop communicating. When people have an issue and they keep it bottled up inside it will eventually, inevitably explode. Avoid your business being caught up in the mess by creating an easy-to-manage internal newsletter.

If employees don’t know the goals of the company or what is expected of them then they don’t really have a cat in hells change of achieving it. There is no need to bombard your staff with an in-depth breakdown of figures or reveal the ins and outs of your strategy, but if an employee can see where they fit in to said “big picture” then this brings a whole host of benefits.

Set the record straight.

Along with sharing positive information with your workforce, there may also be the need for damage limitation. If you can foresee an issue then it’s best to inform employees in advance. First of all they may be able to help or make provisions so they can handle the situation better themselves and secondly it gives you time to present a calming and reassuring turn of events. Someone that knows there will be a 48h technical hitch with their pay will undoubtedly be less enraged than a person who is still clicking refresh on their online banking at 5pm.

Furthermore, gossip spreads like wild fire and just like the relationship between celebrities and the press, you may wish to make an ‘official statement’.

Tailor your message

Whatever information you would like to share, blogs, social media posts, events etc… You can tailor your newsletter campaign to the audience. All you need to do is have the relevant person subscribed to the relevant campaign. You could differentiate between simple things like department or seniority, right through to people of different ages, shift patterns and even personal interests.
So come on, what are you waiting for? Connect and engage with your employees and let them know communication isn’t dead.
If you are looking for a newsletter solution with the possibility to manage multiple campaigns then I would recommend Nouri.sh. It is easy to use, can be tailored to your needs and has a dedicated customer care team.

The new year is a time for new starts, but why fix what’s getting results?

Continue nouri.shing your online marketing campaigns into 2013 and we’ll give you some special discounts to help kick-start your newsletter:

• 2 months free when you prepay for 10 months, giving you newsletter campaigns throughout 2013.
• A free, tailor-made newsletter template (worth $99) AND 2 months free when you prepay for 22 months. Your template will be designed to match your existing branding or your new vision, and structured to your liking.

And in case that wasn’t enough, we’re also offering comprehensive bespoke packages tailored to your unique business requirements.

To take advantage of any of these offers, email us at my[at]nouri.sh and we’ll get in touch as soon as we can.

Don’t miss out. The Nouri.sh team look forward to helping you make 2013 your best year yet!

The last few months have been very busy for us at Nourish. We have put a lot of work to ensure Nourish runs smoothly with minimum effort from your side.

We have put together some simple steps to help in case you need quick troubleshooting advice. If you have scheduled your campaign, however it did not deliver occasionally, please check the following:

1. If you configured a minimum number of posts, you should ensure that you RSS feed has enough new items to send. For example if you configured a minimum of 3 but only 2 posts were written since last newsletter, then it will not send until you have enough posts. You will have to log into your Nourish account and select “cancel” or “send anyway”.

2. Check if the URL of your RSS feed has not changed. This can happen for example if you change the permalinks setting on a WordPress blog.

3. The RSS feed you’ve set up for a blog or webpage may have some errors that need to be corrected. Please note the following:
* Please run your URL through an RSS validation service like the one at http://validator.w3.org/feed to identify compliance errors. RSS feeds should be RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom compliant to be used by Nourish successfully.
* Even if your RSS is valid, but there are some errors identified please try to correct them by contacting your IT team or your feed producer.

4. If everything above worked just fine, there still may be issues with the RSS feed accessibility. You may want to contact your feed producer. They may be updating or eventually having site issues, or they may limit third parties, like Nourish, from accessing their site.

If you have configured everything correctly but still there are issues please contact Nourish Customer Support via a Help Desk ticket from within your Nourish account. Alternatively you can use this url directly: http://www.nouri.sh/helpdesk

Of course you are welcome to drop us a line if you are not sure how to perform some of the steps above.

To help you quickly and efficiently we ask you to include as much details in your message to us.

Thank you for using Nourish!
Your Friendly Nourish Customer Support

In recent weeks we’ve received many requests for Featured Nourish newsletters. This month we were delighted to learn the exciting story of Underground Book Reviews and could not wait to share it with you.

Amy, one of the writers answered a few questions to show how they are using Nourish for their email newsletter. Here is how it has been adding value by engaging their readers:

Why did you want a newsletter in the first place? Why did you choose Nourish?
I started Underground Book Reviews last August with three other writers, hoping to help new authors gain exposure and get credit for their hard work. We offer a review and interview every week, and highlight undiscovered and up-and-coming authors. The website has gained a lot of interest in the writing community, and also appeals to adventurous readers and anyone looking for a good read that isn’t mainstream. As we grew, we began to worry that we would lose subscribers due to too many posts.

I use Feedburner, however it sends our subscribers an email every time we do a blog post. With an average of three posts a week, I worried about cluttering subscribers’ inboxes. I started looking at different possibilities, and found that most of the websites that offered a weekly newsletter required payment.

How easy was it to get going with Nourish?
I didn’t have a problem at all! The layout is user-friendly for my purposes. It worked seamlessly with my Feedburner feed. When I addressed Nourish with questions, they immediately responded and were very helpful. It’s rare to find a free online service with such great customer support.

Would you recommend us to friends/ colleagues?
Absolutely! If I had known about Nourish I would have put it on the blog as soon as I started it.

How much has your web traffic increased thanks to Nourish? Do you see any change in figures already?
Traffic has stayed steady, but our subscribers have increased. We usually gain one or two subscribers a week: in the first week we started with Nourish, we gained ten! Many more switched from our daily email option, to the weekly newsletter through Nourish.

How do you intend to promote your newsletter to increase subscribers?
The blog tends to do a pretty good job of self-promotion. With every new book we review, or author we interview, we gain subscribers. If we continue to produce quality work, we expect the blog to grow on its own. However, we’re greedy for more exposure, so we occasionally do promotions with other websites and offer book-related deals to our subscribers. We recently started a series which we call the “Emerging Author Series” in which we bring an aspiring author to the blog as a guest. After the interview or guest post, we ask our subscribers to vote to read a sample of their work. This gives the writer much-needed exposure, and encourages subscription to our blog.

Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
I’m completely satisfied with the quality here, and the customer service is outstanding. You won’t be losing me any time soon!

Visit Underground Book Reviews to read more.

Offering nice prizes or inviting subscribers to vote is a fantastic way to engage your audience and identify which topics generate more interest.

With any paid level plan, Nourish allows you to create as many different campaigns as you need and segment your subscribers in a way to deliver the most meaningful content to each group. Nourish campaign statistics and integration with Google Analytics provide you with insights into what works well for your newsletter and which aspects you can improve.

I hope you enjoyed today’s story. Let me know how you use Nourish by emailing me at my[at]Nourish. Sharing examples with others is beneficial for your newsletter.

– Remember, I am here to help you get the best out of your Nourish newsletter. Reach out to me if you have questions or suggestions.

Stay creative!
Mariana

Thanks to the growth throughout 2011 we are preparing to migrate Nouri.sh to new, more powerful servers. We wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you to all our customers who submitted new features/ functionality ideas. We appreciate your feedback!

As always we remain open to new ideas. Our Q1 2012 development plan is now being reviewed. We welcome any suggestions from all customers until December 11th 2011.

So step up and help us shape Nourish and make it even better! We promise to review all ideas and take the best into development. Please post your comments here or email: my [at] nouri.sh

You are welcome to join us and share with us:
Nourish on Facebook | Nourish on LinkedIn | Nourish on Twitter

Thank you for using Nourish. Please invite all your friends and connections. Nourish is Free and Fun for them as well!

Nourish is great for your Social Media strategy

Our customers know it, but we thought you may also want to know just how powerful Nourish really is when it comes to engaging an audience.

You know your business best, however one thing we wanted to make sure you have is a great eNewsletter. We have been developing Nourish as the eNewsletter solution that will empower you to differentiate in your Social Media strategy. Your ‘unfair advantage’.

Here is how…

Nearly all news sources on the web use RSS. How many of your readers familiar with RSS? Who knows?… But the good thing is that almost all of them are familiar with email. So this is where comes Nourish helping you to share your content in the format familiar to your readers.

Unlike other tools Nourish only lets you generate emails from an RSS feed. You can use a single or a combination of RSS feeds to streamline valuable and engaging content to your readers. Different feeds can be used for different campaigns, and even different template can be used for each of your newsletters. For example you can communicate with your clients using a different tone to how you communicate with your suppliers.

Nourish is easy to set up and intuitive. It makes managing a large list of subscribers effortless. The opt-out process, as well as subscribing/unsubscribing to individual campaigns is completely automated. Nourish can take the hassle of you managing any number of subscribers, starting from a personal blog to a large company newsletter.

Only those who have run multiple campaigns know how overwhelming that can be. If you aim to target multiple audiences or promote different products, Nourish has a great deal to offer you. It allows you to run multiple campaigns for segmenting your subscribers. Delivering the most relevant content to each group of your readers can boost your open and click through rates and reduce unsubscribers. Plus you have subscribers’ statistics at hand any time to validate the relevancy in the course of your campaigns to their audience.

Nourish allows you to manage multiple campaigns in one single account. Each campaign you create represents a different newsletter. Nice and simple! Unlike any other service Nourish does not limit the number of campaigns you can have.

We know how important it is for B2B organizations for example to segment their subscribers by industry sector. Your campaigns, and the content you deliver with each may vary on (for example) customer demographics, or by set products or services. Or perhaps you may need to have a more ‘independent’ newsletter featuring content from multiple sources.

It’s also easy to create a form for your website to add subscribers to one or more of your campaigns. We have developed a WordPress plugin called Nouri.sh Newsletter that makes this a simple 2 step process.

With the automated scheduling you are sure that your email campaigns go out at regular intervals, without logging in or any manual intervention from your side. Just set and forget!

And my favourite one: your readers like cool custom templates. Your Nourish emails can have your unique branding for a professional look of your campaigns. We can help with that too, just send your brand ideas to: my [at] nouri.sh

Unlike other similar services, Nourish will not force you to upgrade after a trial. Come join us for free today and keep it free as long as you wish!

Plus one: make sure you invite all your friends and contacts too. We’ll make sure they will also get it for free!

In 2011 we will continue to nourish your business communications by distributing your successful newsletters. So we decided to continue offering promotional discounts to all new and existing customers:

• Our standard discount to new customers is giving you 1 month free if you pay for 11 months.
• If you have signed up in 2010 we give you the option to prepay for 10 months and use Nourish for free for 2 more months.
• Either if you are new or existing customers you can receive a free newsletter template (worth $99) completely customized to your business’ unique look by prepaying for 22 months. On top of the free template you will get 2 more months for free.

To give you even more means for awesome year start we decided to extent our offering by introducing our personalized discounts. What do we mean by that? We will be happy to discuss your unique business requirements and prepare a custom proposal especially for you! Did I say at no obligation, just as a special gift from us!?

Just use the comments form below or email me directly at my @ nouri.sh to express your interest and I will be in touch promptly.

Don’t miss this out. We at Nourish look forward to helping you make 2011 your best year yet!