EDIT: This Nugget is Defunct because Facebook took away this feature.

In the previous few Daily Golden Nuggets we've analyzed emails and given you some times of the day, days of the week, and months of the year to send your emails. We've also explained the differences between HTML emails that have photos and plain text emails, and when to use each.

There are a variety of companies that you can purchase your email service through like iContact, Constant Contact, and AWeber. But what about Facebook?

Have you ever given a though to using Facebook for email marketing? Let's explore some ideas for doing just that.

First, forget about your personal Facebook account. We've been saying it for more than a year, and many other internet marketing professionals will say the exact same thing: Do not use your per...
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Today we'd like to give you some quick statistics regarding email marketing, and how they relate to your jewelry store.

At the bottom of this email, you will find the links for the web pages we're getting our data from. Feel free to look over it all yourself.

First, let's talk about the time of day to send emails. A few years ago our own research showed that the best time of day to send emails was 1PM local time. That statistic is no longer true. Now that users are able to read emails in a wide variety of ways, we are not constrained to post-lunch time email reading.

Naturally you can send your emails at any time of the day, but what time will have the best chance for someone to read it?

It turns out there are 3 different times, and each has a different audience. You could have as much as a 20% chance of s...
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As you may recall, we send these Daily Nuggets out using a process in our own office. At least 3 people are involved in preparing these every day and the Nuggets are tested on different email readers and cell phones before sending them to you. It's part of our job to do this for you and we spin these out fast enough using our internal process instead of paying an outside service.

On the other hand, you need to spend time selling jewelry and not fiddling with sending email, so it would behoove you to pay for a service.

Let's name check some services. We do not specifically recommend any of these, and each one will work depending on your needs.

1. Mail Chimp - This is built into Gmail and could make your life easy.
2. Constant Contact - This is probably the de facto standard when you want easy to set up newsletter...
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A year ago (Aug 17, 2010) Wired Magazine published an article detailing how "The Web is Dead." It came with a fancy chart that shows how websites are fading away as peer-to-peer (i.e. social networking) and videos are taking over. Take a look: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/

We just want to mention this because it did create quite a bit of hubbub in the internet marketing world and the data does not correspond to other reputable sources like comScore.com. If you look at that chart it actually shows you that email is also dead; even more dead than the web!

It's not true; email is far from dead.

Email is very much a viable form of communication and marketing; in fact, the summer of 2011 marks the 40th birthday of email.

If you haven...
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What's the difference between email you send to your friends and family and the email you send out in bulk to your customers?

Constant Contact is one of the popular, easy to use email newsletter management systems. They provide colorful email templates that you can manipulate and turn into beautiful masterpieces of email creativity.

Perhaps you sit and marvel at the beauty of those email newsletters before sending, only to have your excitement crushed by those built in statistics that show how few people open the email (called open rates).

There are many reasons for low open rates, including spam filters, firewalls, poor subject lines, and customers who don't view images in email. You can only track when an email is opened if the person views images. Have you ever see that "Having trouble viewing this email? Click ...
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Today we're giving you a specific example of how you should use Twitter Share and Facebook Like buttons on your website newsletter pages.

We assume you send your newsletters via email. From within the newsletter, you should allow your readers to share it to their favorite social network. You might only have 300 people on your email newsletter list, but allowing sharing gives you the chance to reach thousands of new customers.

Many email newsletter companies (like Constant Contact, iContact and Aweber) allow short term archival of your newsletters on their website. Mostly, this allows user to read the newsletter through a website instead of their email program.

However, for several years we've tracked the impact of jewelry store email newsletters and how to archive those newsletters directly on your website instead ...
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Back in October, we gave you some guidelines on marketing for this holiday season. Today is the second Monday of the season and we'd like to review your email strategy again.

1. If you have a list already you should send an email before the end of the day today. It doesn't have to be long, just say things like "Still searching for the perfect gift? Here are some gifts that just came in on Saturday..."

2. To build your email list in person, you could ask every customer for their email when they check out. However, customers don't freely give out their email addresses any more. You have to give them a reason to want to give it, and a simple weekly or monthly newsletter is not enough anymore. Here are some good ideas that currently work:

"If you give me your birthday or anniversary we will send you a $50 gift card...
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