http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-russell-brown-show/samurai-poster-part-2/

We had a nice afternoon out at a local park when something caught my little one’s attention. We took a quick photo (as you do when you have kids) and when we returned and looked through the photos I realised that this was the perfect pic to try out the technique.

I wont go into all the details here unless some really wants me to break it down. Suffice to say that I sourced an image of something that looked like butterflies and composited it into the the original photo. I then made some color adjustments, added some noise and integrated the awesome relighting technique from the tutorial above. Click the image below for a comparison and be sure to click through to Russell Browns great tutorial.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who agree that email marketing should be really beneficial to their business. Many of them have given it a go by trying to use Outlook to handle their email marketing. While you can technically send a stack load of email to people with Outlook let me tell you why it’s a very bad idea and complete waste of time and money.

1. Its a huge hassle and takes much much longer than using a dedicated email marketing service like Mailcall. I don’t know how many of you enjoy sitting down and swearing at your computer but attempting email marketing via outlook will give you some practice at it.
2. You have the problem of managing a list of subscribers, remembering who has unsubscribed (that’s a legal requirement these days), what email addresses bounced and more. Outlook doesn’t do those things. You have to do them manually. Got a pen & paper handy?
3. You don’t really have any idea at all how successful your email marketing campaign has been.
   If you use Mailcall it will tell you who opened your email, who clicked on a link, who unsubscribed, who forwarded it onto a friend and much more. It will track all of this in real time so you know exactly how things are going.

Now I know people that fully understand these 3 points yet still insist that they can do it themselves. This leads me to one of two conclusions.

1. Either these people are dead scared about using a new system .. or
2. They’re cheap. Really properly stupidly cheap.

So … what can we do?

Problem 1. I’m scared.

Being scared about a new system is fair enough. Let’s face it, most of you probably use Outlook everyday so are somewhat familiar with it. I also guess that you probably think Outlook IS email .. so therefore all email related activity goes through Outlook. Again, that’s a fair enough assumption even if it’s wrong.

Good news though; we can fix the being scared issue with some training, some practice and by having someone that can help. Someone like me. Very simple stuff really and Mailcall is very simple email marketing tool to use.

Problem 2. I’m really cheap.

The issue that we can’t fix easily is the one of you being too cheap to realise when you’re onto a good thing but let me try anyway with a simple example.

Lets say you want to send a message to your customers and lets say you have an active customer list of just 500 people.

It will cost you just $40 NZD to use Mailcall to send that email.

Now I can hear whats going through your head.  “Bloody hell, $40, that’s a half a tank of gas in my Holden .. I’ll send it with Outlook’

Here’s the thing though .. It’s going to take outlook a good hour or two at least to actually send the email. It’s going to take you much longer to format a nice email. Then you have to figure out who you are sending it to. You have to darn well make sure you’re not sending it to anyone that doesn’t want to receive email from you because if that happens you are actually breaking the law.  Then, if it actually sends your email and your ISP doesn’t close your account for thinking that you’re a spammer, you still have no idea of what has happened with your email. Who got it? Who opened it? Who visited your website as a result. You just have no idea.

If you can see the logic in this and how much more you could potentially make by being able to easily and effectively market to your customers, give them relevant content, keep on the right side of the law and track the success of your campaign then why aren’t you doing it?

Stop being so darn cheap.

Want to know how much it would cost to use Mailcall to email all your subscribers?

Follow this link to the Mailcall pricing page.