I was reading through the web news today and I came across an article on new advances in email marketing.  Wow, thought I, this is definitely something to dig into and I should probably share it with you.

Apparently, Constant Contact and GoldMail Inc. are doing a dance which will result in more effective email offspring for everyone.  Through this union of interests, “GoldMail and Constant Contact small business customers [will be able to] add interactive slideshows easily to their Constant Contact emails and deliver richer email messages”.  And the best part folks, it’s free!!  Yeah buddy, ’cause you can’t beat that.  The rest of the article is located at http://bit.ly/djNc0b and I encourage you to read it if you want to know more.

The questions I have to ask is “Will it really improve the mass email offering or would we still just delete them?”  Sure interactive content is cool but do I really want it taking up more room in my inbox or spambox?  Imagine the possibilities, not only can you be spammed but now it can be interactive spam (lol).  Hopefully this is not what it would be used for but I could see it going south and just causing more issues if misused.

I have a couple clients that use Constant Contact currently and they love it.  The service is pretty awesome and they use it with regard for the people receiving the mass emails, so I see light at the end of the tunnel.  I just hope the users of this new service still follow the not-official-but-good-to-follow rules of email marketing:

1. Keep it short.
2. Keep it sweet.
3. Keep it relevant.

If so, we should all be safe and the experience of opening up a newsletter email might actually be more enjoyable.  :)

Let me know your opinions folks.  Yay or Nay on the multi-media mass emails topic and your thoughts about the implications.

Thanks for reading and have a blessed day.

Big Cloud Media

Has anyone else had issues logging into gmail today?  It was working fine earlier today and business was going as usual but for some reason I keep getting “Server Error” when I try to access my account now.  Although it does not bring my business to a complete halt, this outage doesn’t do many good things, except remind me that although Google is an awesome online service provider and extremely powerful and large, they still have their misshaps too.  Thus, create backups of important stuff…something all of us get comfy and forget about, but in the long run, it’s a good idea.

Resolution:  well there isn’t one at the moment.  According to Gmail’s support blog:  “Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly.” (you can read more here).

All of us gmailers will have to just deal, I guess, until Google gets their services back online.  I guess it is pretty important to them because they use it too, lol.  I know it’s free, but when a service has as many users as gmail and is no longer a beta, things should be anticipated.  Cheers to waiting it out folks.

Koji Flowers

Big Cloud Media

Update 4:21pm:  We are back…yay!  Gmailers, get back to it.