Dhour

By Timmy Vic

 Pelted by monsoon rains, recovery crews ended their search Thursday night for the remains of the 152 people killed in Wednesday’s passenger plane crash in Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad.

The Airbus A321 plane operated by Pakistani airline Airblue, was on a flight from Karachi when it crashed into the Margalla hills north of Islamabad.

The plane disintegrated upon impact, instantly killing 146 passengers and a crew of six.

Among the dead were two Americans, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad has confirmed; however, the embassy is not releasing details until the next of kin is informed.

There is still no word on the cause of the crash. The Airbus crashed a minute after losing communication with airport’s control tower early Wednesday morning amid heavy rains and dense fog. Eyewitnesses said the plane was flying at an extremely low level before crashing.

The black box of the flight has not been found, but many aviation experts previously had voiced concerns about Airblue’s safety standards.

Former pilots and aviation experts have argued that Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) does not always enforce safety standards. The CAA rarely makes its investigations public, so accountability is an issue.

In 2008 interview with the BBC, a CAA employee told reporters that an Airblue plane was grounded in Manchester, England because an inspector found a serious problem with the aircraft months earlier. The plane was grounded because the problem had not been addressed.

Another crash in 2006 was allegedly caused when the CAA approved a plane, whose cargo was over weight, to fly.

Safety standards are not the only issue facing Pakistani aviation. The industry has also been known to force pilots to fly excessive hours, raising the risk of fatigue and pilot error.

Traffic-control protocols are also a problem. Many have wondered why the doomed Airbus was circling at 1,600 feet when the minimum altitude for Islamabad was 3,000 feet.

There is no current evidence that any of these issues were a factor in yesterday’s crash.

PeterGreenberg.com is a constantly updated source for the latest in travel news, analysis and information led by travel guru Peter Greenberg. For more information, visit PeterGreenberg.com.

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Best Features of Email Marketing Programs

By Garrett36 Pierson36

 An email marketing program generally helps businesses to create campaigns, organize contact details, schedule communication and monitor marketing efficiency. It is one of the best solutions that a lot of business managers or owners commonly use because of its low cost maintenance. Plus, this program also provides customers to unsubscribe to the campaign, allowing businesses to comply with the SPAM laws.

Most email marketing programs today have tracking functions that provides marketers statistics that are relevant to the improvement of the campaign and specific data needed to gauge the success of the campaign. It features functions that counts the number of emails sent, the number of emails that bounces back, the number of clients that clicked the links in the email message and even the total number of purchases as referred by the emails sent.

Aside from these, it has lot of other features that makes it a mainstay in the list of tools that most marketers use today . Here are a few of them.

Database Management

Such marketing programs provide easy ways of recording clients’ contact information through a database manager. This feature aids companies with their records by providing ways to filter, categorize and update contact information. Some features even support importing or exporting of databases in different formats like Excel, making records easily managed for reports or for other business purposes.

Segmented Marketing

With its ability to sort and filter contact information, businesses are also able to execute segmented marketing plan. Marketing campaigns can be easily tailored according to locations, ages and even customer preferences by means of using the application’s segmented list features. With this feature, more personalized messages can be sent, making customers feel that their preferences are considered by the companies. It also sets the limitations to product or service offerings either by location, by purchases, by gender, etc.

Legal Reminders

Since there are a lot of online messaging policies that businesses need to follow, some of them are sometimes forgotten by marketers. It is a good thing that this software reminds its users to comply with such policies with a number of features like the automatic unsubscribe feature, reminders or legal disclaimers, spamming notices, state communication laws, e-commerce policies, notifications, etc.

Monitoring

Monitoring is also easy with this marketing application. Email messages that reach customers successfully are easily known with its tracker. It can as well provide specific statistics that are relevant to the improvement and study of campaigns.

Managing multiple accounts with this email marketing program is also convenient. It allows businesses to have different accounts for different issues or concerns of customers, making them a lot easy to direct to the departments that can best answer the messages. Plus, monitoring of complaints and customer feedback also comes handy with this marketing tool. Managers or supervisors are able to distinguish issues and concerns that they need to improve on; thus making it an efficient marketing tool for monitoring customer preferences, marketing trends, product or service performances and even the profitability of the utilized campaign.

Thomas Berns has 10+ years of experience with email marketing. View a detailed list of email marketing reviews online to help make your decision easier. Read Vertical Response reviews, Elite Email reviews, Constant Contact reviews and more by editors an and users.

What to Know about an Email Marketing Program

By Garrett36 Pierson36

 These days, email marketing is considered as one of the most useful methods in promoting either an online or offline business. This type of marketing allows marketers to obtain potential customers and keep existing customers as well as repeat buyers. For the most part, businesses would want to extend their operations to great lengths especially in satisfying existing customers. Thus, marketers make use of an email marketing program that is suitable to their businesses.

Many successful businesses make use of a specific email marketing program to ameliorate the quality and productivity of their marketing mix. Once marketers come up with an appropriate and efficient marketing program for their business, they would be able to encourage current customers to come back as repeat buyers. Marketers have several options to choose from when it comes to implementing email marketing. This is whether marketers keep in touch with customers through sending special discounts or promotions or creating regular newsletters.

Marketers can take advantage of the benefits of email programs as long as they know how to implement it correctly. For instance , before marketers send their emails they should make sure their customers agree to receive such emails. Marketers should have the consent of their customers to send emails so they would not be considered spammers. Spammers are those that send emails illegally to get information from customers.

Some of the benefits of an efficient email marketing program include the following:

- Allows marketers to keep their products, services, and/or brands visible to customers - For instance, when a customer purchases from an online shop and does not hear from such shop again, it is most likely that he/she would not remember the website. Furthermore, it is highly possible that the customer would not recommend the online shop to others. Through making use of an efficient email marketing campaign with an appropriate program, customers are automatically sent with newsletters and emails for continuous promotions and offers by online marketers.

- Keeps online marketers in touch with existing or current customers in a convenient manner An email marketing campaign with an efficient program encourages customers to become repeat buyers; thus, establishing loyalty. Then again , online marketers should ensure that the content of the newsletters and/or emails sent to customers are valuable and satisfies the needs and wants of customers. More so, online marketers can add special offers to their emails and newsletters while still encouraging customers to keep on buying. This is true as long as the contents are valuable and pertinent.

- Allows addition of special discounts to existing customers to encourage repeat purchases An efficient email marketing program helps in encouraging existing and even past customers to buy from online marketers specifically if the program offers discounts, free shipping, and other freebies. Existing and past customers would feel valued and special when they receive such offers. Consequently, an email marketing campaign with an efficient program combined with strategic planning could lead a business to success.

Victor Green is an Account Executive at EliteEmail.com, the award winning email marketing solution used by companies who need the top email marketing software. Try the complete small business email marketing program today for free!

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