It's Arrived! More Email Addresses For New Sites

One of the most popular requests we've had in the past from people signing up for Business Catalyst sites was that they wanted more email accounts than we provided. Due to this demand, we're happy to announce that we've removed this restriction now so more businesses can operate on BC without having to worry about email hosting.

Effective immediately, all new full-solution sites created will have the following email limits:

• 1-User Mini - Now has 10 email addresses
• 5-User Regular - Now has 20 email addresses
• 10-User Super - Now has 50 email addresses

Please note that the limit for lead-in plans and any existing sites remain unchanged. Existing sites that change plans will also be required to adhere to the original limits. The new email limit will be made available to existing sites from 1 April 2009.

Use BC Like BC Uses BC #4

4 Points To Improve Your Email Marketing

On the subject of email, one of the most powerful features within the BC system is Email Marketing. Used properly, it's a cost-effective push marketing channel that small businesses like yours can use to reach past customers and prospects who've opted-in to receive communications from you. You can read and learn all about email marketing at our Online Business Wiki buthere's 4 points I want to highlight to help you become a better email marketer -

1) Keep Your Mailing Lists Clean

As an unfortunate part of life on the internet, you will get people and automated spambots signing up for your email newsletters with fake or temporary email addresses. It's important to remove these from your email recipient lists on a regular basis. Repeatedly sending emails to invalid or expired addresses will result in ISPs flagging your legitimate email marketing efforts as spam.

Thankfully, it's now easier than ever to keep your mailing lists clean with BC:

• Once you've sent out an email campaign you can automatically remove all bounced emails from your mailing list with one click just by going to the 'Email Addresses That Bounced' option in 'Reports and Performance' for your campaign and clicking Unsubscribe Allunder the Actions tab.
• Email Newsletter sign-in boxes now come standard with a CAPTCHA field when you use the Module Manager to place them on webpages or templates to stop automated spambots from signing up with fake email addresses.

2) Let Your Recipients Use Their Browser Instead

When you send out your email campaigns, you're reaching a vast ecosystem of email clients out there; various versions of Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird floating around and webmail clients like Gmail and Yahoo Mail too! Although it's good practice to test on all the major clients to see how the images and layout of your HTML email are rendered there's what I call the 'just-in-case hyperlink' that you should put in the header of your emails.

It's the 'View-in-browser' link and all you have to do is insert { tag_viewinbrowser } in your email header or footer. When your recipients click on it, the email will be opened in a browser where you can be sure the images will download and the layout will be rendered as you intended therefore increasing your readability.

3) Let Your Recipients Tell Their Friends About You

Want a quick-win for expanding your email newsletter readership especially if you're sending some exclusive high-value content on a regular basis? Put the{ tag_tellafriend } tag in your header or footer and the recipients who love your newsletter can click and sign-up their friends to read your newsletter as well.

4) Let Your Recipients Unsubscribe

Inevitably, people will want to unsubscribe from your email lists for whatever reason and it's important to provide them with this option otherwise they might just click on the 'Report Spam' button instead which will red-flag you with their ISP. Did you know you have 2 different kinds of unsubscribe options you can give them by inserting these respective tags:

1. { tag_unsubscribe } - the standard unsubscribe link which opts the recipient out of all communcations from you.
2. { tag_unsubscribelist } - sometimes people might want to unsubscribe from an monthly or fortnightly email series rather than all communications from you in which case you would useUnsubscribe. When they click on this they are only removed from the email list that was used to send them the email campaign but are still opted-in to receive other communications from you.

You Can Become a Email Marketing Power User

With those 4 tips, I hope you've gained some knowledge to fine-tune your email campaigns. Not quite at the power user level yet? That's ok - try these email campaign tutorials on our Online Business Wiki and give Email Marketing a test-drive on your BC Free Trial!

• Tutorial 4 - Sending Your First Email Newsletter
• Tutorial 4.4 - Using Email Campaign Tags
• Email Campaign Reference Guide (the extended version)

Editor's Choice - The Best Articles on Web Design and Online Businesses

If you're busy like me, chances are you don't have the time to keep updated in latest web design news, tips and tricks piling up inside your RSS feeder. Let me make life easier by recommending 3 must read articles in every issue:

How To Stop Scrambling For Clients And Get A Steady Stream Of Paying Gigs from Freelance Folders
"Freelancing can be your ticket to freedom — but it can also be a terrifying ride if you have a hard time getting a steady stream of clients.

There’s good news, though — it doesn’t have to be that way. By taking a look at the 'big picture''for your freelancing venture, you can position yourself to have more business than you can handle even in today’s tough economy."

Designing User-Centric Web Sites from ThinkVitamin
"In the third of our series of articles in the lead-up to The Future of Web Apps in London, Chris Messina looks at how we should make sites more user-centric, using forward-facing technologies that are available now."

17 Most Desirable Designers Collection from Smashing Apps
"We are always looking to come up with the post that is attractive and useful for everyone. We most of the time focus on the designers' stuff and where anything is going to launch free of cost. There are countless designers' free stuff available which everyone should review at least once. In this post, I have present the 17 Most Desirable Designers Collection."