Cup and Show week has wound down to a close. And what a week it was, especially for the girls.

It started the week earlier with Michelle Payne on Prince of Penzance becoming the 1st female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup. Along with her brother and strapper, Stevie and their eight siblings, the win became an extraordinary family story.

The following week, women dominated with:

• Kerryn Manning becoming the 1st female driver to win the New Zealand Trotting Cup
• Lisa Allpress on Jimmy Mac winning the 152nd New Zealand Cup
• Sam Spratt on Addictive Habit winning the Couplands Bakery Mile

Social media is now a key promotional tool in many businesses' marketing toolkits. However, it's becoming harder to easily manage your social media, given the wide and ever increasing range of social media channels and platforms.

We reveal eight super social media apps we use to manage our social media channels from our smartphones. Some of these apps are similar, so we suggest you try them to find the ones you like best. 

1. HootSuite - You can monitor and post to several popular networks including both Facebook personal profiles and business pages, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. Hootsuite includes built-in custom analytics system, the ability to monitor selected keywords and the option to conveniently schedule posts.  

2.  TweetDeck - Similar to Hootsuite, TweetDeck is available for iPhone, Android and Chrome browser. With TweetDeck, you can watch your updates stream in real-time when you connect with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. 

So you've decided to start an email newsletter. Good for you as email marketing is one of the most productive ways to stay in touch with your clients and increase sales and repeat business.

But for email to be successful, you must, of course, get your emails read. And like most things, success starts with getting the fundamentals right.

Before you push send, check out the 10 'must haves' for an outstanding newsletter. 

 1.       An attention-grabbing subject line

Your subject line is the first thing people see of your email. Your subject line must compel your readers to open your email; otherwise they won’t read it.  It also must be brief (no longer than 50 characters) otherwise your finely crafted subject line will get cut off if it’s too long.

Try giving your readers just enough information to make them curious. Use action words to inspire readers to click. Subject lines that address your readers concerns such as “How to …” or “Top 5 tips…” show you understand what they care about. Finally, another technique is to personalise the subject line with the reader’s first name.

Ever wonder why your inbox is often jam-packed. The answer is simple. Email marketing works!

While the most popular form of email marketing is the email newsletter, we are all too familiar with email newsletters that waste our time or are full of spam. So it's not surprising that rarely a week goes by without someone asking me if they should even bother having an email newsletter.

However, email marketing should not be ignored if you want to grow your business. It's relatively quick and easy to get started and inexpensive. And, if done right, email marketing can generate new customers, repeat sales and profit for your business.

So to help you get started, here are five ways to harness the power of email marketing for your business. 

Direct Marketing pioneer, Bob Stone, wrote one of the most in-depth direct marketing books ever; Successful Direct Marketing Methods. This book sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide and went to eight reprints. He also built a successful Direct Marketing agency and sold it for a king's ransom. 

Over his long career, Bob Stone identified 30 Direct Marketing principles that proved true better than 90% of the time. Taken from the Direct Creative Blog, we list 20 of those principles here.

1. All customers are not created equal. Give or take a few percentage points, 80 percent of repeat business for goods and services will come from 20 percent of your customer base.

2. The most important order you ever get from a customer is the second order. Why? Because a two-time buyer is at least twice as likely to buy again as a one-time buyer.