3 Keys To Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing is becoming a popular tool for many small and home based businesses around the world.

Email marketing allows businesses to eliminate expenses for things like paper, ink/toner, envelopes, postage, etc., and these savings make it a very attractive method of promotion.

Done properly, email marketing can be very effective. Unfortunately, too many businesses let the excitement of a low-cost marketing campaign overshadow their business sense.

Done improperly, your email marketing campaign becomes nothing more than a mess of sending the wrong message to the wrong market.

There are just a few key elements to launching and managing a successful email marketing campaign.

They are . . .
The list (your database).
The offer.
The follow-up.
Start With the Right Email Marketing List

The temptation is to rush out and purchase a list from brokers or leads suppliers. The harsh reality is that most of these lists are simply harvested email addresses from search engines. The so-called "savings" of purchasing a list of email addresses can be effectively wiped out when email addresses begin bouncing and recipients begin complaining to your Email Service Provider for sending Unsolicited Commercial Email (or "spam").

The best (and only truly safe) way to build your database is to market effectively. This can be done both online and offline. Traditional methods such as collecting business cards in a drawing and offering free information in exchange for contact information still work very well.

Additionally, Search Engine Optimization strategies can be very effective. The key is to get prospects to visit a "capture page" that is designed to entice them to give their contact information in exchange for something you are offering, such as a free report or free download.

As your list begins to grow, if you have targeted your market effectively, you will find yourself with a considerable database of motivated and targeted prospects.

The Offer

Email marketing is about getting your offer out in front of your database. Yes, they have joined your list voluntarily but keep in mind that you are competing with hundreds of other email messages they may be receiving that day.

Your job is to make sure your email marketing message is opened and read by your prospects.

The key is to create a compelling subject line. Where possible, use the prospect's name in the subject line. Most recipients are much more likely to open an email addressed to them by name.

Once your message is opened, the copy must create a compelling interest so that the reader will want to learn more.

The key here is to think like your prospects. They all have the same question on their mind when they open their email:

What's in it for me?"

Answer that question in your copy and your email marketing campaign could be a huge success. Focus on telling prospects about the benefits of your offer. What will it do for them? What can they expect if they order from you? How will it help them save time, increase revenues, lose weight, feel more attractive, etc.?

The Follow-up

The next step is to follow up with your prospects. Studies have proven that prospects need to see your message over and over again before they make a decision to purchase. Using an AutoResponder to follow up with prospects can dramatically increase the response rate of any email marketing campaign.

The ability to follow up with prospects over time is critical to your success.

Your follow-up letters should essentially repeat your original message. Maybe each follow-up message can stress a particular feature and continue to reinforce the benefits to your prospects.

The idea behind an effective email marketing campaign is to ...

... Tell them.
... Tell them again.
... Tell them what you just told them.

Attention spans are short. Competition is high.

Keep your messages to the point and focus on benefits, benefits, benefits.

Make your prospects WANT to buy from you by consistently keeping your email marketing message in front of them.

The reward for a job well done will be increased revenues and customer loyalty.

Source : http://www.trafficwave.net/articles/email_marketing.html

Tags : email marketing, singapore email marketing, email marketing singapore

Email Marketing Campaigns: 4 Great All-Around Tips

Email marketing how-to lists and tip sheets often focus on one topic. How to improve delivery. How to craft a good subject line. How to boost your open rates. But we're doing something different. We're taking the top four general email marketing tips that we've seen work time and again, and we're passing them on to you. Here they are:

Use Google Analytics to get the big picture

If you've been on the Internet for some time, you've heard about Google Analytics. Even though it seems a bit intimidating to add something like this to your campaigns, you need to do it so you can see what happens after customers click through on a link in your email. With Google Analytics, you can track your subscribers well beyond your email. You can see which pages they visited, what they bought, whether they abandoned their shopping carts or even which pages are causing dead ends on your site. While email click-through rates are good data to see who's doing what, don't forget that many of your clients are probably viewing their emails through a preview pane, which automatically counts as an open rate. With Google Analytics, you can take things a step further by analyzing your actual click throughs to see who's doing what.

Check your send address frequently

It's easy to create your campaign, set it up to send, and get caught up in analyzing the data from your returns. But what about responses to your email or HTML newsletter? Keep in mind that while the campaign is over for you, it's not for your recipients. Quite often recipients will use your send email address to bounce back an email asking for more product info. They might even use that email address to bury an unsubscribe request in some other text. Are you checking your send email frequently? Make sure you do to field any and all requests that come back from your campaigns. And don't forget that if even one unsubscribe slips under the radar, you might get a spam complaint.

Segment your emails and up-sell based on customer activity

When you use Google Analytics (see above) with your campaigns, it not only helps you figure out who bought something on your site or checked out a certain product, it gives you an entire new segment to your list. Once you know who your most active recipients are, you can create a list segment and an email that caters to them. For instance, if a customers go to your site and either purchase a certain product or spend time frequenting the pages featuring that product, you can use this list segment to create a new campaign that up-sells an entirely new but related product in your next campaign. Remember – recent data shows that most people unsubscribe to email campaigns because they don't feel they're relevant to them. By segmenting your list this way, you're making absolutely certain that each email is relevant to your active openers.

Archive your emails after you've sent them

An email archive is more than just a place where your customers can go to view past emails, it's a static page that anyone can find in a search engine. The key to taking advantage of this is using a one-two punch. The first step is to put your sent emails – even if they're old -- online. Even old emails give a good picture of what your company does, how things are done, and what type of products you tend to sell. The second step is to place a newsletter sign-up box, also known as an email Signup Form, on your main archive page. This gives you the great chance to sign up new email subscribers on the chance that they parachute into your archive via a keyword search.

Source : http://www.benchmarkemail.com/resources/email-marketing-articles/4-great-email-campaign-tips

Tags : email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing service, email marketing malaysia

SEO Basics: 8 Essentials When Optimizing Your Site

Basic search engine optimization (SEO) is fundamental. And essential. SEO will help you position your website properly to be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when people need your site.

What are search engines looking for? How can you build your website in a way that will please both your visitors/customers, as well as Google, Bing, and other search engines? Most importantly, how can SEO help your web presence become more profitable?

During the Introduction to SEO session at SES New York, Carolyn Shelby (@CShel), Director of SEO, Chicago Tribune/435 Digital, fully explained the extreme value SEO can deliver to a site, and stressed the importance of basic SEO using the following analogy:

"Skipping the basics and spending all your time and money on social and 'fancy stuff' is the same as skipping brushing your teeth and showering, but buying white strips and wearing expensive cologne," Shelby said.

Although the Introduction to SEO session was intended for industry newcomers, Shelby's tips offer important reminders for even experienced SEO professionals who have been optimizing sites for years.

What is SEO, Exactly?

The goal of foundational SEO isn't to cheat or "game" the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to:

• Create a great, seamless user experience.
  
• Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches.

1. Your Website is Like a Cake

Your links, paid search, and social media acts as the icing, but your content, information architecture, content management system, and infrastructure act as the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash.

2. What Search Engines Are Looking For

Search engines want to do their jobs as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is the most relevant to what the user is looking for. So how is relevancy determined?

• Content: Is determined by the theme that is being given, the text on the page, and the titles and descriptions that are given.
  
• Performance: How fast is your site and does it work properly?

• Authority: Does your site have good enough content to link to or do other authoritative sites use your website as a reference or cite the information that's available?
  
• User Experience: How does the site look? Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it have a high bounce rate?

3. What Search Engines Are NOT Looking For

Search engine spiders only have a certain amount of data storage, so if you're performing shady tactics or trying to trick them, chances are you're going to hurt yourself in the long run. Items the search engines don't want are:

• Keyword Stuffing: Overuse of keywords on your pages.
  
• Purchased Links: Buying links will get you nowhere when it comes to SEO, so be warned.
  
• Poor User Experience: Make it easy for the user to get around. Too many ads and making it too difficult for people to find content they're looking for will only increase your bounce rate. If you know your bounce rate it will help determine other information about your site. For example, if it's 80 percent or higher and you have content on your website, chances are something is wrong.

4. Know Your Business Model

While this is pretty obvious, so many people tend to not sit down and just focus on what their main goals are. Some questions you need to ask yourself are:

• What defines a conversion for you?
  
• Are you selling eyeballs (impressions) or what people click on?
  
• What are your goals?
  
• Do you know your assets and liabilities?

5. Don't Forget to Optimize for Multi-Channels

Keyword strategy is not only important to implement on-site, but should extend to other off-site platforms, which is why you should also be thinking about multi-channel optimization. These multi-channel platforms include:

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• LinkedIn
  
• Email
  
• Offline, such as radio and TV ads

Being consistent with keyword phrases within these platforms will not only help your branding efforts, but also train users to use specific phrases you're optimizing for.

6. Be Consistent With Domain Names

Domain naming is so important to your overall foundation, so as a best practice you're better off using sub-directory root domains (example.com/awesome) versus sub-domains (awesome.example.com). Some other best practices with domain names are:

Consistent Domains: If you type in www.example.com, but then your type in just example.com and the "www" does not redirect to www.example.com, that means the search engines are seeing two different sites. This isn't effective for your overall SEO efforts as it will dilute your inbound links, as external sites will be linking to www.example.com and example.com.

Keep it Old School: Old domains are better than new ones, but if you're buying an old domain, make sure that the previous owner didn't do anything shady to cause the domain to get penalized.
Keywords in URL: Having keywords you're trying to rank for in your domain will only help your overall efforts.

7. Optimizing for Different Types of Results

In addition to optimizing for the desktop experience, make sure to focus on mobile and tablet optimization as well as other media.

Create rich media content like video, as it's easier to get a video to rank on the first page than it is to get a plain text page to rank.

Optimize your non-text content so search engines can see it. If your site uses Flash or PDFs, make sure you read up on the latest best practices so search engines can crawl that content and give your site credit for it.

8. Focus on Your Meta Data Too

Your content on your site should have title tags and meta descriptions.

Meta keywords are pretty much ignored by search engines nowadays, but if you still use them, make sure it talks specifically to that page and that it is also formatted correctly.
Your meta description should be unique and also speak to that specific page. Duplicate meta descriptions from page to page will not get you anywhere.
Title tags should also be unique! Think your title as a 4-8 word ad, so do your best to entice the reader so they want to click and read more.

Summary

You should always keep SEO in the forefront of your mind, and always follow best practices. Skipping the basics of SEO will only leave your site's foundation a mess and prevent you from fully maximizing revenue opportunities.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2259693/SEO-Basics-8-Essentials-When-Optimizing-Your-Site

Tags : seo malaysia, search engine optimization, malaysia seo company

2 Industry Organizations Every Email Marketer Should Join

A look at two organizations that will help email marketers stay connected and involved in the email marketing community.

One thing I love about the email marketing industry is the comradery. I was reminded of this again last week while I was in New York on business. I was lucky enough to connect with fellow ClickZ columnist Stephanie Miller and a few other industry friends for dinner. I've had similar dinners in Atlanta, Kansas City, London, Washington, D.C., and many other places.

If you're an email marketer and you aren't linked into this community, you're missing out. So I thought I would write today about two organizations that are near and dear to my heart - and which I highly encourage you to join if you're looking to build a career in email marketing. They are the Email Experience Council (EEC) and Only Influencers (OI).

The Email Experience Council was founded by industry friend and fellow ClickZ columnist Jeanniey Mullen in 2005; in 2008 it was acquired by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

Their annual conference, usually held in Miami in January or February, is always a highlight of my year. The sessions are great - industry thought-leaders and brand-side marketers providing practical advice on what's working now in email and online marketing. So is the networking - if you're looking to make connections with key people in the space, this is the conference for you.
The EEC has also begun hosting local off-line meet-ups - this is a relatively new initiative but it seems very promising. They also sponsor annual awards for email marketing professionals; you don't have to be a member to win but you do need to be a member to nominate someone. I was on the award committee last year and am currently serving on the nominations committee, which matches interested members with committee assignments and leadership roles within the organization.
In addition, the EEC provides webinars, resources, and information to help marketers improve their email programs - one thing that stands out about EEC members is their willingness to share their expertise and help elevate the industry as a whole. Check out their blog for free advice from industry thought-leaders and then consider joining. Individual memberships are less than $400 per year. And well worth the price.

Only Influencers was founded by industry friend Bill McCloskey. Bill is a natural born connector - after years of managing a free discussion list for email marketing professionals, he expanded the offerings and turned it into a paid membership organization.

Recent topics on the discussion list included a request for samples of B2B and B2C email welcome series creative, a discussion about the new CASL regulations (see my friend Matt Vernhout's take here), and the value of an email marketing professional pursuing an MBA.

OI also offers local "meet-ups" - a chance for email marketers to gather offline and chat, usually over drinks and some food. Recent meet-ups have occurred in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Kansas City, London, and New York.

There's also an OI blog where members (including myself) have the chance to share our experience, offer practical tips on improving email marketing programs, and sound-off on industry issues.
The connections I've made through OI have invaluable. It really is a community and there's an instant comradery when you meet someone whose posts you've been reading for years. No matter what your email marketing issue, you'll find others willing to provide their thoughts on the OI list. Some of the most valuable discussions are those where members are on opposite sides of an issue - while we don't all always agree, Bill keeps the discussion cordial and constructive.

OI membership is $200 a year; a small price to pay for the connections you make and the guidance you'll receive from the community. There's also a monthly subscription, for $20, if you want to test drive before you commit for the longer term.

Source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2351380/2-industry-organizations-every-email-marketer-should-join

Tags: email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing malaysia, email database

21 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability

Most of us have had at least one experience of losing something in the postal mail. Hopefully yours was something small, like a postcard, not something like a mortgage payment or a rent check.

But despite how much we all complain about the post office, its delivery rates positively sparkle compared to email messages. Just last week, Return Path, the email certification service, reported that one in six emails never makes it to the inbox.

One in six is a lot. What if one in six of your customer-service emails went missing, or one in six order confirmations? Even with all the other demands on your time, to track sales, to create more content, to manage your social media accounts, when one in six of your email messages is getting lost, it’s time to do something about it. Just cutting that rate in half, from one in six to one in twelve, will give your entire email marketing program a 10 percent lift.

One in six is a lot. What if one in six of your customer-service emails went missing, or one in six order confirmations?

The good news is it’s not all that hard to improve deliverability rates. And, if your deliverability rates are already good, it’s not too hard to preserve them. Here are 21 simple techniques for increasing your list’s deliverability rates, or for keeping the healthy deliverability rates you’ve got. And there’s enough time before the holiday rush to see results if you make these changes now.

1. Use Double Opt-in, Not Single Opt-in

The difference between double and single opt-in is that with double opt-in (also called “confirmed opt-in”), people get a confirmation email after they’ve entered their email address into your form and clicked submit. They’re not subscribed until they click a link in the confirmation email.

Deliverability rates for lists that use double opt-in are significantly higher than for single opt-in lists. Their unsubscribe rates are also lower, and their open and click through rates are higher. Double opt-in crushes single opt-in on just about every metric, with one exception — you’ll get about 20 percent fewer subscribers on the front end with double opt-in. However, that small loss up front will translate into big rewards long term. Use double opt-in.

2. Purge Hard Bounces after One Bounce

A hard bounce is when an email message is sent to an email account that is closed or no longer exists. The major ISPs (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) keep track of these bounces, and will start to suppress delivery of all your emails if you trigger too many hard bounces. So keep your list up to date and remove hard bounces fast. Most email service providers make this easy.

3. Purge Soft Bounces after Multiple Attempts

Soft bounces occur when an email message is sent to an email account that is full, or temporarily unavailable for some reason — the server is down, for example. Soft bounces are less of a problem than hard bounces, but it’s still a good idea to clean them up. After 3 to 4 soft bounces to an email address, it’s time to take it off your list.

4. Avoid Over-mailing

One marketer’s definition of over-mailing can be another’s everyday practice. But generally, if you’re mailing more than once a day, you may be over-mailing. Over-mailing is also a little trickier to blame for poor deliverability rates, because when you send more emails, people tend to respond less — i.e., you can’t just send twice as many emails and get twice as many responses. Those suppressed response rates can also contribute to reduced overall deliverability, which brings us to the next point.

5. Purge Subscribers Who Haven’t Opened or Clicked in Awhile

“Awhile” can be a year, or six months. Whatever time frame you pick is up to you, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If people aren’t opening or clicking on your emails, culling them from your list might hurt, but it will help the deliverability rates for the people you’ll keep.

6. Avoid Spam Traps

A spam trap is an email address that has not been used by a real person for a long time, like 18 months, and has since been taken over by an ISP or by an anti-spam organization. That email address is now called a spam trap because if any emails get sent to it, the sender will be flagged as a spammer. There are reports of a mailer sending just one email to a spam trap and having its Sender Score drop by 20 points. That’s a severe example, but it drives the point home: Mailing to even one spam trap can hurt you.

The top way to get a spam trap on your list is to buy an email list. But if you want to know some of the other, less common ways that even good email marketers can end up with spam traps on their lists, see “Email Spam Traps and How to Avoid Them,” my article on that topic.

7. Use a Consistent, Recognizable Sender Name and Email Address

In other words, don’t have your email messages be from a free email account (like Hotmail or Gmail). Use the name of your company or brand as the “from” name.

The image below shows why this is important. Your sender name is actually more prominent in some email clients that the email subject line is.

The sender name on your email messages is often just as visible as the email subject line.
The sender name on your email messages is often just as visible as the email subject line.
8. Send from a Consistent IP Address with a Good Sender Score

Not sure if you’re doing this? Ask your email service provider.

9. Use Clear Email Subject Lines

“Deceptive” is the term the ISPs use, when subject lines are intentionally misleading. It can sound a little harsh, but here are some examples of what they mean: Don’t mention a sale or a coupon in the email subject line and then not offer it in the email. Basically, don’t promise anything in the subject line that your email doesn’t back up.

10. Do Not Include Attachments

Never, ever include an attachment for the emails you send to subscribers. Got a PDF or some other file you want them to have? Include a link to download it in the email.

11. Do Not Use Fancy Coding Languages

Avoid Dynamic HTML, frames, PHP, JavaScript, Java, ActiveX, ASP, and “cache busters.” Just keep it simple, okay?

12. Avoid Known Spam Words

This is actually far more complicated than it sounds. Search on Google for “spam word lists” and look around. If you removed every word that appears on every spam word list from your emails, you’d have to communicate by images — there wouldn’t be any words left. That said, if you have to use a few spam words (and you will) try to use them as little as possible. For example, don’t open your email with “FREE FREE FREE FREE.”

13. Avoid Embedded Videos

This is too bad, because videos increase email engagement by a lot. But unfortunately, they can also suppress deliverability. If you still want to send something like a video, send an image that looks like a video, and link it to a page that automatically plays the video. Most of your subscribers won’t notice the difference.

14. Keep Message Size to 40KB or Less

That doesn’t mean you can’t ever send an email over 40KB, but try to keep most of your emails under that size. This may mean you have to take an extra step and reduce the size of any images in your email. It is extra work, but it’s worth it.

15. Use a Spam Screening Tool

Almost every email service provider will have one of these tools built into the interface where you create your emails, but if they don’t, head over to SpamScoreChecker.com or any one of the free spam tools, and run your email through their process. It takes less than 5 minutes. To ensure a good deliverability rate, your email should have a SpamAssassin spam score of less than 5.0. If your email rates higher than that, the tool will definitely let you know.

Source : http://webmarketingtoday.com/articles/113607-21-Ways-to-Improve-Email-Deliverability/

Tags : email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing service, email marketing malaysia

8 Email Marketing Tips

The day of the pitch has passed. Best practices in email marketing demand communications that go beyond advertising, respect the customer, and speak in a familiar one-on-one style. Email is "the most personal advertising medium in history," says Seth Godin, whose book Permission Marketing set the rules that transformed email marketing into what it is today. "If your email isn't personal, it's broken."
In response to the impersonal abuses of spam, email marketing became personal by necessity following the 2003 adoption of the CAN-SPAM Act. The act essentially defined spam as marketing messages sent without permission and set penalties not only for spammers, but also for companies whose products were advertised in the spam. Smart marketers, recognizing that people's aversion to spam destroyed the customer loyalty they worked so hard to build, had already begun to address the problem with best practices that focused on permission. Today, what's best is often defined by the size of your company and the industry you're in. But a few core practices hold for everyone.

 1. Get Permission "Email is one of the most powerful and yet one of the most dangerous mediums of communications we have," says Jim Cecil, president of Nurture Marketing, a customer loyalty consultancy in Seattle. "Virtually everyone uses it and in business-to-business marketing everyone you want to reach has access to email. It's also very inexpensive and it can easily be built into existing marketing systems. But of all media, it is the one where it's most critical that you have explicit permission." Without permission you not only risk losing customer goodwill and inviting CAN-SPAM penalties, you could end up blacklisted by ISPs that refuse all mail coming from your domain if spamming complaints have been lodged against you. Permission is not difficult to get. Offer something of value--a coupon or promise of special discounts, a whitepaper or informational newsletter--in exchange for the customer agreeing to receive your messages and, often, to provide valuable personal information and preferences. Sign-up can be done on a Web site or on paper forms distributed at trade shows and conventions or by traditional mail, resellers, and affiliated organizations in a business network.

 2. Build a Targeted Mailing List "The very best way to get permission is to have your best customers and your biggest fans ask their friends to sign up," Godin says. It results in a self-screened database of prospects who are probably interested in your offering. That is how Tom Sant built a mailing list that now numbers 35,000 for his newsletter, "Messages That Matter." According to Sant, author of Persuasive Business Proposals and Giants of Sales, "We simply began by following up with people we met at trade shows or on sales calls and asked them, 'Would you like to get a tip from us every few weeks about how to do your proposals better?' We made it clear that people shouldn't be getting this if they didn't want to." Sant includes a Subscribe link in his mailing so new readers have a means of signing up when their friends forward it to them. His mailing list "just grew organically," he says, "because people would pass it around. We created an entire network of people who were getting these messages. It's very effective and it's enabled us to strengthen our position as thought leaders or recognized experts in the field." 
3. Work with a Clean, Targeted Database Jack Burke, author of Creating Customer Connections, advises that you should work with the cleanest permission-based list you can find that is targeted to your industry and your offering. Many companies have this information in CRM, SFA, and contact management databases. But there are places to prospect if you don't. "A good place to look is with traditional, established data merchants for your industry," Burke says. In the insurance industry, for instance, Programbusiness.com allows its members to send broadcast emails to its database of some 50,000 targeted subscribers and members have the opportunity of selecting subsets of addresses categorized by insurance type such as commercial, health, life, and auto. Coregistration services Web sites, such as www.listopt.com or www.optionsmedia.com, can help. Coregistration simply means you offer your e-zine and email promotions through a registration form that appears on multiple sites. You should, however, do some research to ensure they will reach your targeted demographic and the lists are maintained. "Too many companies, large and small, are under the illusion that they have the email addresses of their clients," Burke says. "If you actually go in and audit their client databases, you'll find they're lucky to have 20 to 25 percent--and what they do have is often out of date." 

4. Adopt a Strategy of Persistence It takes time to build customer relationships. "They used to say it takes something like 7.3 impacts to make an impression with an ad, and that was long before the Internet. I believe today it's approaching 20 imprints before it makes an impression," Burke says. "So if you aren't touching your clients in some way at least once a month, chances are they're going to find somebody else to do business with." Successful email marketing, Godin says, "starts with a foundation and uses the email to drip the story, to have it gradually unfold." That foundation requires an entrance strategy to greet new prospects and set up expectations for the relationship. "After the customer has registered for future emails, downloaded your whitepaper, or entered your sweepstakes, there often is nothing to enhance that relationship. Companies need to think about what should happen next," says Jeanniey Mullen, partner and director of email marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide. Ogilvy's research shows the first three emails are the most critical. Mullen advises there should be an introductory message in which customers accept an invitation and give permission for future communications, followed by a second that sets up customers' expectations by explaining future benefits (discounts, coupons, or high-value informational newsletters). The third should begin to deliver on their expectations by sending the promised newsletter, whitepaper, or discount offering. 
5. Tell a Story In All Marketers Are Liars, Godin emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a successful marketing strategy. Email offers the opportunity to tell the story in continuous installments. "Email marketers don't have a prayer to tell a story," Godin says, "unless they tell it in advance, in another medium, before they get permission. Otherwise, it quickly becomes spam. The best email marketing starts with a foundation, like Amazon, and uses the email to drip the story, to have it gradually unfold." Too much email marketing, Burke opines, is one-off offers written as if recipients "like to run home at the end of the day and turn on Home Shopping Network so they can be targeted 24x7 by commercials." A well-crafted newsletter should be more than just a summary of your resume or company history. For instance, each issue of Sant's Messages That Matter offers a free tip or strategy on how to make business proposals sing. "We focus on providing specific content, messages of a page or so about the kinds of things we're good at," Sant says. 
6. Let Readers Drive Design As there's no such thing as guaranteed delivery in the email business, design is especially important. Because filters often block logos, graphics, and Flash animation, they can determine whether or not a customer or prospect even sees your message. "Filters are getting extremely thorough in what they're filtering out," Burke says. "If you're not careful, those filters can filter out legitimate email." He recommends using flat text with hyperlinks to your Web site. "It's text so it'll go through," Burke says. "You can put all of the graphics in the world on your Web site and once they click through to your Web site you're better able to capture their identity and their information for future follow up." Many companies offer both plain and rich text email editions, giving customers the option of registering for the html edition on their Web sites. In those editions, design becomes especially important. But Ogilvy has found that email requires something different than traditional creative marketing design: Its studies have shown that users are most likely to respond to images and copy to the left of an image. "We have seen increases up to 75 percent in response rates by moving the call to action button up next to an image instead of below the image, or by literally changing a link to a button so it stands out more prominently in the text," Mullen says. She has also found that the use of industry-, company-, and brand-specific words and phrases enhances the response. For instance, the word advice generates a high response for companies considered to be the thought leaders of their industry, but companies with consumer products, such as Apple with its iPod, will generate a better response using words like new or sleek. 
7. Have an Exit Strategy People who gave you their email address did so because they wanted to hear from you. But that can change and often does. "If they stop responding," Mullen says, "chances are it's for one of two reasons: either they're not interested in your content anymore or they're no longer getting your emails. "In either case we recommend that you define a set number of non-response messages [after which you] stop sending them emails. It sends a negative brand message and it doesn't do anything to help reestablish your relationship with them," Mullen says. That number differs by industry. Travel companies, for instance, cannot predict when their customers will be traveling and looking for discounts on rooms and airfares, so their horizon is much longer--as long as several years. On the other hand, a high-tech B2B company is probably only going to want specific information on wireless security when it's addressing the problem internally. After the problem is solved, continued mailings about wireless security are likely to irritate. Devising a successful exit strategy is much like determining a successful formula for content: Know your industry.

 8. Best Practices--Know what you want The key to maintaining a set of successful best practices is to know what you want from them and be prepared to rewrite them as your business needs change. Mullen suggests starting with a good awareness of what you want your best practices to achieve. "Identify what you will use them for, the goal of your communications, and how you'll define the success of your campaign," she says. "The most important element in any kind of successful email marketing is understanding and defining what your realistic strategy should be." Carol Ellison is a freelance writer in Secaucus, NJ. Build Your Email Reputation "Understanding developments in the enterprise/corporate environment can be enormously helpful in pursuit of best-in-class email delivery rates," says Al DiGuido, president and CEO of Epsilon Interactive, a provider of strategic email communications and marketing automation solutions. The latest trend in corporate filtering is reputation-based technologies that authenticate the sender using a variety of techniques that whitelist the IP addresses sending the mail. This suggests a set of best practices, in addition to honored standards such as getting permission, to help assure deliverability. Some of these include the following:

Test your campaigns to ensure they'll pass traditional antispam techniques such as content filtering.

Send a consistent volume of mail from stable IP addresses. Sudden increases in message volume from a single address, particularly if it's new or unfamiliar, can trigger a block.

Contact the companies at the domains you email most often and ask that they whitelist your IP address. It could open doors elsewhere. According to DiGuido, "being on multiple corporate whitelists is sometimes used as a factor in enterprise/corporate solution reputation algorithms."

Test your campaigns with content filters and monitor emerging corporate solutions to better understand how they determine reputation scores.

Authenticate your email and implement sender verification technologies to enhance your reputation and help assure deliverability. --C.E.


Source : http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Editorial/Magazine-Features/8-Email-Marketing-Tips-47641.aspx
Tags : email marketing, email marketing service, email marketing singapore, mass email, email list, bulk email, email database

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
   
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
   
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for a site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
   
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.\
   
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.
   
6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
   
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
   
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
   
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
   
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
    
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
    
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
    
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
    
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
    
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
    
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
    
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
    
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
    
19. Text around your links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
    
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
    
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
    
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
    
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
    
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
    
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
    
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
    
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
    
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
    
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
    
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
    
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
    
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
    
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
    
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
    
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
    
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
    
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
    
38. Use keyword rich captions with your images.
    
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
    
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
    
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
    
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
    
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
    
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
    
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
    
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
    
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
    
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
    
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
    
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
    
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
    
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
    
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
    
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
    
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Source : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/

Tags : seo malaysia, search engine optimization, malaysia seo company