Search Marketing Answers

So you want to start a mailing list - or you have one already but you’ve just been guessing as to what works best.  Here’s eight key points to successful  use of email mailing lists and lead generation through email campaigns

1.  Opt In by Default

Everyone on the list needs to have chosen to join - the sign-up form can be stand-alone (just the sign-up info by itself) or as part of a contact form - if it’s part of a contact form, provide a check-box - Yes I want to receive your newsletter / be on the mailing list / etc. -  have the check-box checked as the default setting (studies show people are more likely to approve being on a list if they don’t have to physically click an extra box).

2.  Frequency and timing matters

Send out mailings on average once a week maximum, once a month minimum.  If your mailing focus is business, Monday mornings or Tuesday mornings are usually the best times to send the mailing.

 3.  Grab their attention right away

Make the subject line interesting - communicating a unique opportunity instead of the cliche’ - and don’t use all capital letters or lots of exclamation points

4. Provide extra value to keep them wanting more

Provide some extra value information in each mailing - some interesting fact or resource knowledge that will help empower your recipients - give them value for it’s own sake in each mailing that is not your direct pitch.  This will get more people to read more of the time and remember your list.

5. The first few seconds matters

Have the key points to your mailing listed in bullet points at the top of the email if you’re communicating several things in a mostly or all text based list so people can get a quick view of what the complete mailing contains - make sure at least one or more of those list items refers to that extra value content.

6. Visual Design Vs. Content Rich

If you are selling products, a really high quality design with click to buy action buttons is the most successful - (sign up for Borders Books mailing list to see a truly world class design).  If you’re not up to the task of maintaining a high end custom designed visual mailing each time, it’s best to keep graphics to a reasonable minimum but in that case your content needs to be high quality with headings in bold and a paragraph or maybe two at most for each heading.  If you have more to say or communicate, this is a perfect opportunity to provide links from each section to a related news article or information page on your web site, or blog article…

7. Track email campaign statistics for fine tuning

Absolutely use a service such as ConstantContact.com or VerticalResponse.com - their systems allow you to embed links in your mailings, and you can see statistics on how many people received the mailing, how many bounced, how many people opted out, how many opened it, how many clicked on each link.  Invaluable for refining future mailings! (and they’re the most cost effective solutions for maintaining a mailing list that will also ensure you’re not going to get your mailings blanket flagged as spam by the major email service providers!)

8. Set yourself apart

If your mailings are more content than visual - make it creative and fun, in a professional way.  The more recipients enjoy the content the more they’ll be looking forward to each subsequent mailing.   It will be one more thing to help set your mailings apart from the rest.

Alan

Speaking of LinkedIn, (see my last Online Marketing post), I was a guest expert for Nance Rosen on her Entrepreneur Hour Business radio show this past Friday. And yes, the topic was SEO.

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It also comes on the heals of my having been interviewed a few weeks ago by Tracey Dowe, a business success coach in Great Britain, but that was recorded, and made available to her clients. It’s actually the first time I was interviewed during a live broadcast related to my line of work, though I had been a radio guest a few years back for a radio show related to how people of different personalities relate to each other in situations such as business.

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So this wasn’t the first time around for me, yet I never go into these situations with arrogance. The fact is, no matter how fortunate I have been that so far I’ve never failed to get any of my clients web sites onto the first page of Google in the organic listings for several keywords, not even I can guarantee such results every time for every phrase. And just as importantly to me, exactly how much can any one person, expert or otherwise, communicate about our complex and challenging world of optimization when give a total of 20 minutes of air time?

Fortunately Nance is a seasoned radio host, (and author and motivational speaker and… and…) prepped me by asking me what the top eight questions were where the answers would sum up the demystification of search engine optimization.

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Of course, I came up with more than a dozen questions the Nance might choose from, in addition to any she might have already had, and that was just scratching the surface. hahaha. Oh well - we focused on enough of them to not only fill that initial 20 minutes, but the segment of the show I was on actually went into an additional session. So with commercials, the entire piece ran just under 45 minutes.

My phone hasn’t been ringing off the hook since Friday, but then again, I didn’t provide my phone number - just links to my blog and my new showcase web site for affordable SEO and Online marketing services - www.HeyDudeWheresMySite.com (to help small business owners who couldn’t otherwise afford professional SEO but who deserve world class solutions nonetheless).

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As is typical of my life, the Hey Dude site was literally two days before the show, just a vision in my mind. So I had to rip out a site in only a few hours. And since I’ve been coding in HTML since the beginning (1995), I had to rip it together from scratch. crudely as I do given I put in very little time with CSS. So the site itself has lots of old-school table structure.

And I only this week hired a talented graphic designer to create a logo for me.

But at least the very basic info on SEO and Online Marketing information is on the site and was ready for the radio show.

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And even if I never get a single client from that opportunity, it’s one more chance I was given to share with business owners and managers my insight into what they need to be aware of related to our industry - which is enough so that they won’t get ripped off or hoodwinked. And they may just have a little more respect for how much work it takes.

As a person who not only helps my clients become more successful through online marketing initiatives, but who also takes my own advice, I try to allocate time ch week to participate in the online discussions and expert Q&A sections of a number of web sites. One of these is LinkedIn - a site that some people refer to as “The Facebook for business people”…

I really like the LinkedIn site, from it’s intuitive navigation, to the handful of services they provide for business networking online. So out of all the sites, user forums, discussion areas, and expert advise web sites I participate in, LinkedIn is the one I put the most energy into. Mostly in reading, and when appropriate, responding to questions submitted by other members, in a wide swath of topics, including internet marketing, search marketing, web development, and project management.

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I don’t answer questions that I don’t believe I have something to offer value in a response to. This is in comparison to a number of “experts” who provide answers just for the sake of gaining expert status. They’re obvious to spot. Typically a very serious business question is posed. There will be any where from a few to a few dozen replies, most of which are chock full of insight, opinion, recommendations, and guidance.

Then you’ll see among them, an answer like “n/a” or “don’t know”…. Hello? If you don’t know, or the question is “not applicable”, then do you really think that you are contributing positively to the discussion, or to aiding the member who posed the question? So it’s plain to see, especially when the same “expert point seekers” answer question after question the same way…

As a result, I do what I can to give even more valuable responses to some questions.

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In any case, one of the questions posed this past week was Which ISPs place no limits on how many emails you can send at once.

Now, the truth is, there can be many very good, and valid responses to this question. Whether it’s related to actually providing links to ISPs that provide no such limits, or the reason why they do, or even how to “work around the system” when an ISP does place those limits…

My answer was actually more of a response to a previous person’s answer than anything. They recommended setting up your own mail servers and doing it all in house.

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So my answer spoke to why, in my opinion, that solution is probably not the wisest, most cost-efficient choice. Rather than going into the entire response here, if you happen to be interested in why it’s probably not wise to run your own mail server for mass mailing purposes, I invite you to read my blog post on the subject.

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Anyhow, to make what has now become a long blog post just a little longer, when I got home the other night, I found a message in my in-box from Trevor Levine, the LinkedIn member who actually posted the question.

Trevor thanked me for my response, saying:

“I think your response was the most helpful… I am writing an ebook called “Explode Your Sales From Emails”. I wanted to see if I could reprint your post in my ebook, provided that I include your contact information.”

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Well heck! Of course I sent a reply with my permission! Are you kidding? I’m flattered that Trevor, a Marketing professional, found my answer so helpful as to not only be the MOST helpful, but also worthy of inclusion in his upcoming eBook!  (Answer since removed from LinkedIn as it will now be part of an eBook)

It only makes sense that I would want to have my views, which I happen (oddly enough) to consider helpful to small business owners, shared in any way possible. The more people I might help, the more joy I receive. And surely it can’t hurt to have a reference about my business knowledge circulating out in the world - can it? After all, isn’t that part of PR? And doing it through an online path is therefore online marketing also.

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Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve had a request of this nature. Just recently, I was invited to participate in a Skype phone interview that will be turned into a podcast and featured on a business consulting company’s web site, for their clients and site visitors - with the market being small business owners.

I’ve also been interviewed on the radio a few years back, and my perspective has been featured in news articles in the print media a couple times over the years as well.

Yet it’s always beyond a blessing when someone else finds what I have to offer to be credible enough for these opportunities…

Sending out email to thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of recipients can be a very effective way to get new business, keep existing clients thinking about you, and bringing repeat business back. Before you can even consider what your mailing should say or look like, what offer(s) you want to make to recipients, how often to send them out, or any of the other “time of mailing” issues, you need to first find the most cost-efficient way to send the email out. Then you need to know how you’re supposed to determine the effectiveness of the mailing.

In the age of spam, there are definitely right and wrong ways, as well as very efficient and also very costly ways as well.

Bulk Email - A Brief History

When the concept of sending out large amounts of email to lists of recipients first emerged in the early days of the Internet, the earliest solutions came from software that allowed you to set up and send your mailings from the comfort of your own computer. There were no limits on the size of the lists, what should or should not have been included, or any rules about what qualified as spam.

That was because spam didn’t exist as a concept until those first solutions really gained in popularity. Combine software that lets you send out tens or hundreds of thousands of email messages at one time with mailing lists provided to you where you personally had no prior contact with the recipient, let alone knew whether they had any desire to receive your mailing, and spam was born.

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Government Regulation

As the problem grew severe, the U.S. Government stepped in and in 2003 issued the CAN SPAM act. This regulation stipulates several requirements that email must follow in order to not be deemed as spam.

The problem with this of course, is one of enforcement and compliance oversight. There are just too many originators of email, and too little willingness on the part of mailers or too little knowledge of the rules.

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Industry Self Regulation

So in recent years, the major service providers including Microsoft, Google, AOL, Yahoo and others, stepped it up and began writing software to specifically look for email that would potentially be considered spam according to their own corporate view. Smaller mail server owners also got into it as well. And if any of them deem that an email coming from your mail server is spam, you can now see your mail server “black listed”. Meaning that from that point forward, either temporarily, or permanently, any email from that same source would be blocked. Regardless of whether it is spam or not.

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Why Not Manage The Service Yourself?

Why not just get your own mail servers? Or pay your current Web Hosting or Web Site Developer to let you use their servers? Or use one of the top ten Free Email Providers services?

Setup, Maintenance and Compliance Costs

Setting up your own mail servers is proably not the most cost efficient means of sending out regular mailings to large volumes of recipients any more. Between the costs of the hardware, software and IT infrastructure both in initial costs as well as ongoing, plus having to set your system up so that every mailing complies with the CAN-SPAM act as well as the ever changing rules of the major ISPs, it’s too cost-inefficient.

Outgoing Email Limits To GMail, MSN, Yahoo Mai, AOL Mail, Comcast, RoadRunner…

Every major service provider allows you to set up mailing lists, but they all now “meter” or “throttle” your alloted mailing capacity. This means that if you try to send one email to more than 10 or 15 or 25 recipients at one time, their systems will often obliterate the email after the first X recipients.

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The Answer - Compliance Based Mass Mailing Solution Providers

In order to help resolve the problem of legitimate business owners having their mailings trigger blacklisting flags, service providers have cropped up recently where their sole or primary function is to give you the ability to set up mailings, maintain mailing lists, and send out mass email, while ensuring your mailings comply with the CAN SPAM act regulations as well as the anti-spam policies of the major service providers.

Two of these that I routinely recommend to my clients are Constant Contact and Vertical Response.

I manage many of these accounts on behalf of my clients, and have trained several others in a very short time-frame how to manage it themselves.

Constant Contact, among other similar service providers, does one thing as their primary business. Mass Email Campaigns. Some of my clients have upwards of 50,000 to 60,000 subscribers. With Constant contact and Vertical Response, these top clients send out as many as one or two mailings every week, without problems.

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They Do All The Heavy Lifting For very low fees

Constant Contact does all the work - and when you send out a mailing, their system sends it out in batches. Every mailing implements every single requirement to comply with the CAN SPAM act and meets all the top providers guidelines. When those guidelines change, it’s seamless to you, and you don’t have to do anything different.

So for one small monthly fee, you can send out as many mailings as you’d like. (Although it is not wise to ever send out more than perhaps two mailings a week - one a week being ideal from both safe-best practices as well as ideal brand building)

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Effortless List and Campaign Management

You can split your list into multiple groups, and every time a mailing goes out you can not only see how many people got the email, but how many opened it, how many clicked on each link in the email itself, anyone that unsubscribes does so from within the email and the lists are updated automatically. You can see how many formerly good email addresses are now bad, and so much more…

It’s infinitely more cost effective and prudent to use such services.

Constant Contact and Vertical Response have different pricing models, but otherwise both are highly effective and offer both pre-designed mailing wizards as well as the ability to create completely custom email.