All posts in ‘Misc’

Thursday, 11 November 2010

To Be Lost, Or Not to Be Lost in Translation?

So, I have to tell you about our new translation team. I’ve worked with quite a few translators before, but found it pretty hard to get it translated with the right tone and feel that I wanted. Now we’ve solved it!

My lovely mom, Kersti Wittbom, has worked as a translator translating English to Swedish for a long time, and she never misses a grammatical beat…ever (yes, Kersti had to translate this…a little awkward). Now she’s met her perfect American co-captain living in Sweden, Ari Ahokas, who was raised in North Carolina but has been living in Sweden for 2 years now. Ari is the one who basically adds the color of our personalities in all the posts, and try’s to keep things up to date while making grammatical errors that Kersti has to fix (and yes, Ari had to translate this too…).

Here they are in the heat of the moment:

Yes, the photos are bad…It’s my fault. No, we’re not sponsored by Espresso House. (The other guy is the one and only, Christopher.  The man behind everything beautiful on all of our websites.)

You can’t find easier and more positive people to work with than these two. Thanks so much for all of your help!

Sarah@@@@@

Wednesday, 10 November 2010

Newsletter #1

So, last week we sent out our first newsletter, it’s all in Swedish, but I still want to tell you how it went. This is it by the way…

We used MailChimp, but I manually coded the nine snippets from our website in HTML. Our list still has less than 1,000 subscribers, so this means that it’s still free for us to send out our newsletters with MailChimp. This is a huge plus for MailChimp!

So the question is, how did it go with our newsletter, and with MailChimp?

Well, MailChimp is a tad on the slow side when getting started. Everything marched along flawlessly, but it did take about 15 minutes before the first email was on its way out the door.  This is something to think about if you have something important that needs to be out by a certain time. Leave a little room for yourself.

The stats look good. We have zero bounces, zero spam complaints and no one is unsubscribing.   Almost 70 % opened the letter and the click frequency is about 35 %. Why thank you.

Some people signed up the same day we sent the letter, but it was after the actual letter went out. For a situation like this, MailChimp prevails. You go to your email list and click on “segment”.  And there you’ll find a pre-made filter that says “send to recipients that joined after your last campaign”. A few more clicks and all your new subscribers get the latest. Done!

And a fun bonus: If you log in to MailChimp during holidays, you get a special tailor made welcome.

Tuesday, 9 November 2010

Why Was Email Invented?

Well, watch this and you’ll see. Who knew it was the postman who invented email?

Monday, 8 November 2010

When Email Gets Too Much Attention…

…things can take a turn for the worse.

I was out on a walk with some friends and wanted to check my email.

There were a few emails I had been eagerly awaiting.  And the moment that I’m most focused,  furiously reading the emails, I hear a BANG!…and then a scream.  It was me who screamed, and it was my poor unfortunate iPhone that tumbled to the pavement.

Looks bad, huh?  A grotesque graveyard of pixels.

Email is a brilliant channel when it’s used properly – even for the recipient : ).

Sarah@@@@@

Friday, 15 October 2010

Who’s Ignoring Your Emails?

EmailOracle is an interesting add-on to Gmail. It allows you to see what happened to the emails you’ve sent out. It oh so courteously reveals, who didn’t open your email, and who didn’t reply.