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Tag Archives: Dude Spellings

Is Email Marketing The ROI King?

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dans Email Marketing

Ran across an interesting article in which a VP at Exact Target says that email marketing has the best ROI of any direct marketing method.

The article does make the point, rather subtly, that email has the best ROI when it’s done right.  I would have made that more clear.  Blasting out email for any address you can get your hands on won’t have a decent ROI, but sending relevant emails to people who want to hear what you have to say is very effective.  That’s the key: be relevant and send to people who want to hear from you.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Bounces

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dans Email Marketing

Earlier today I needed to find out if a bounced email occurred synchronously or asynchronously. During the course of my research, the thought occurred to me that the difference between synchronous and asynchronous bounces is probably fairly unknown among email marketers, but knowing the difference would probably come in handy for them.

In order to explain the difference between a synchronous bounce and an asynchronous bounce, I’ll first need to explain the basics of how email servers communicate with one another while sending and receiving emails. First, the sending server contacts the receiving server and says “hey, I am server XYZ and I have an email to deliver to you.” The receiving server then checks to see if (a) it wants to receive email from the sending server, and (b) if it can deliver the email to the specified recipient.

At this point, the receiving mail server can do a number of things:

  1. Accept the email message and deliver it to the recipient.
  2. Temporarily refuse to accept connections from the sending server.
  3. Permanently refuse to accept connections from the sending server.
  4. Respond that the recipient does not exist and refuse the connection.

If any of the above responses, except number 1, are received by the sending server, the attempt to send that email is aborted and it is considered a Synchronous Bounce.

If the receiving server responds that it will accept the email message, then the sending server attempts to send the message. If the process of sending the email is aborted or interrupted for some reason, this may also result in a Synchronous Bounce, depending on the settings of the sending server (some of them will retry for a certain number of times for various types of interruptions).

If the receiving server indicates that it will accept the incoming email, and the process of sending the email message completes without complications, the receiving server will respond that the entire email was accepted successfully and the sending emails records a successful transaction in its server logs (actually, all of this is recorded in the server logs).

If after a successful transaction, the sender (the actual person sending the email) receives an email message from the receiving server indicating that the email message was not delivered for some reason, this is known as an Asynchronous Bounce. You are probably familiar with this kind of email because most people have received them. These are the emails that say something like “Your message could not be delivered for the following reason:” and then have a bunch of seemingly garbled text that supposedly explains the cause the failure.

Most email marketing systems have a method of capturing the messages from these Asynchronous bounces and then marking the message as “bounced” in their metrics reporting. Because the receiving server initially responds that the email message was delivered, and then sends the non-delivery message at a later time, this lag can cause the email reporting metrics to change and make it seem that “delivered” emails change and mysteriously morph into “bounces.”

It is important for email marketers to have a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous bounces so that they can effectively maintain their lists and interpret the metrics associated with each email campaign. One reason that email systems may return an Asynchronous bounce message after initially accepting the email is because the email system may run the email message through some content filtering software and other tests to try and determine if the email is spam and should be rejected. If this is happening alot in your email campaigns, this may be something you want to check, so that you can ‘despamify‘ the language in your email, and/or otherwise figure out what it is about your email message that the email systems don’t like. Correcting this will help get your message into your recipients’ inboxes.

Hopefully, this information will help you become a better email marketer. If you have other technical questions about email marketing, feel free to post them in the comments, and I will do my best to provide answers. Thanks for reading.

Mass Marketing is Dead. Make Way For Personal Marketing.

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dans Marketing Strategy

The days of mass marketing are coming to an end as we enter a new era of personal marketing.  As technology advances, marketers are able to gather more and more data about prospective customers and reach them in new and innovative ways.  As these changes develop, its important that marketers recognize the changes taking place and change their tactics to match the changes in technology.

Until recently, marketers have pretty much taken a “mass media” approach to their efforts:  Blast out as many marketing messages as possible on every medium available as often as you can afford it.  In an era when it’s not really possible to learn anything about the audience and their tastes, this crude shotgun method of attack is pretty much the only option.  Mass marketing tactics are really just slightly more sophisticated versions of standing on the street corner yelling at people who walk by, hoping that some small percentage of them might be interested in what you have to say.

Mass marketing is already evolving toward a more personalized touch, and as this happens more and more, prospective customers will start to demand it.  Consumers are already extremely savvy about filtering out messages that are irrelevant to them.  Think about your own behavior; while reading articles online, most of us have learned to simply filter out anything on the screen that is flashing or blinking, or flying across the page because we know that these are irrelevant ads that must use these kinds of tactics to get out attention.

In contrast, contextually relevant, unobtrusive, text-only ads, such as Google Adsense, are a new targeted approach that are a step in the right direction toward more personal marketing. Critics of these kinds of ads say that the cost per conversion can be higher — the higher cost is not justified if the conversion rate is low.  This criticism hits on the key difference between mass marketing and personal marketing:  personal marketing does require a more intelligent game plan and ongoing analysis. The days of cranking out some one-size-fits-all generic artwork and some snappy copy that appeals to everyone are coming to an end.

Personal marketing will require more work, more preparation, and smarter implementation, but the rewards will be vastly better than the mass marketing approach.  For example, consider this post about how a difference of one letter in choosing key words can mean the difference between a 30% conversion rate and a 1% conversion rate.  This is the kind of detailed analysis and hard work that will be required to be successful in the new era of personal marketing.

Changes in technology will require even more due diligence on the part of marketers.  For example, the inevitable start of Bluetooth Marketing & Proximity Marketing will present new challenges to both marketers and audiences.  The challenges will be similar to those of email marketing.  Audiences will want to filter out unwanted messages, and it will be important that the marketing industry step up and employ the lessons learned in email marketing to Bluetooth and Proximity marketing, so that the industry doesn’t go through a decade of turmoil dealing with new forms of spam while simultaneously crippling the whole medium with a bad reputation.

Changes in technology will present an opportunity to vastly increase the ROI, conversions, and effectiveness of marketing efforts, but the rewards will only be recognized by those marketers who meet the new technology with equal innovation in tactics and lots of hard work.  It is more difficult to analyze web traffic, SEO metrics, conversion rates, and sift through databases, than it is to simply blanket the world with your message until your budget runs out, but in the end the extra effort will pay off.

The changes in technology will be coupled with huge advances in data collection and data mining.  It will be critical that marketers use this data wisely and ethically.  The data can serve to pinpoint audiences with amazing accuracy, which will ultimately make it better for everyone, but the temptation of misusing the data must be mitigated at all costs in order to preserve both the confidence of the public and the autonomy of the marketing industry to operate without strict government controls to protect the public.

The future that I hope the marketing industry creates is a world where audiences receive only the messages that interest them only at the time that they are receptive to the message, and they never receive unwanted messages and will not have to expend much effort to keep from being bombarded by messages in every medium to which they have access.  Its a tall order, but the marketing industry has to do it.  Otherwise, audiences will take matters into their own hands and refuse to participate.

Selecting a Firm to Help With SEO

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dans Marketing Strategy

I get a lot of requests from friends to help them with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  SEO is not my main area of expertise, but I do have to know a fair amount about it for my job.

One of the main questions that I get from people about SEO is “how can I get my site ranked in the top 10 on Google?”  If you know anything about SEO and/or Google, you know the futility of such a question for anyone without significant resources.  Small companies that compete in non-niche markets are forced to compete with giant corporations that have the resources to dedicate an entire staff to SEO.  The typical large corporation has anywhere from one to ten full-time employees focusing on SEO; working every day to figure out how to get their company ranked number one for a dozen search terms, so competing with them can be very difficult to say the least… but not impossible, which is the beauty of the Internet, but I digress.

To make it even more difficult for small businesses, there are a whole lot of charlatans in the SEO business.  These guys promise the world and deliver very little.  There are tons of businesses taking people’s money for essentially doing nothing productive.  Among the handful of these companies I’ve seen, they all seems to have a few things in common, so before you hire someone to help with SEO, please look at my checklist:

  1. Google is still the big kid on the block.  If any SEO firm tells you that Google no longer owns the largest share of the market and is therefore not important to target for high rankings, that is a sure sign that the company just wants your money.  There are a lot of different ways to measure market share, but any way you slice it, Google still has a more-than-significant share of the market.  In fact, over the last 10 months (March 2008 to Jan 2009), Google’s market share has grown from 77% to 81%, so they show no signs of losing market share any time soon.  Astonishingly, I have seen several SEO firms try to persuade prospective clients that Google is falling out of favor and that focusing on Yahoo! and MSN is the preferred tactic.  I suspect the reason that they do this is because it is notoriously difficult to game Google’s system, and these guys know it.  As a matter of fact, Google is known to completely de-list (ban) sites that try to game their system, and they are used to dealing with it and good at catching people who try it.  As far as I am concerned, Google is really the only game in town when it comes to search, so if an SEO firm you are paying won’t guarantee getting your sites ranked with Google, then what are you paying for?  The other 19% of the market that Google doesn’t have?  How much is that really worth?
  2. Submitting Your Site to Search Engines.  Another thing that bogus SEO firms will tout is how many search engines they will submit your site to.  Many of them will tell you that they will submit your site to “over 100″ search engines.  As I pointed out above, Google is really the only game in town, so who cares if your site is submitted to 100 search engines that no one uses?  In fact, of the 19% market share that Google doesn’t have, Yahoo!/MSN/AOL account for almost all of that, which means that the 96 other search engines that your site will be submitted to, all have less than 1% of the market combined.  So, no matter what the SEO firm tells you, submitting your site to 100 search engines is pretty much worthless.
  3. Editing Your Meta Tags. Many suspect SEO firms will also tell you that they will “optimize your site” by editing the invisible meta tags on your website (or adding meta tags if you don’t have them).  This is also virtually worthless because Google pretty much ignores meta tags and focuses on the actual content of your web pages.  Long ago, in the early days of the Internet, pages had unseen tags in the HTML called “Meta Tags” that were used to hold geeky information that was used only by programmers and search engines.  A few of the meta tags held information, like the search terms that you wanted people to be able to find your pages under, and a short description of the page that was indexed and stored by primitive search engines, which they would then use as the basis of their searches.  This is why Google revolutionized search: They do not use these meta tags at all because they realized that this system was far too easy to rig, which people did all the time.  That’s why, about a decade ago, when you searched for a popular term like “CSI Miami”, many search engines would return hundreds and hundreds of results for pornography.  The pornographers quickly realized that all they needed to do in order to get their pages ranked highly was to fill their meta tags with popular search terms and bogus page descriptions.  Google circumvented this problem by actually looking on the content of the page to create their index and determine search terms that apply.  This is why editing the meta tags on your site doesn’t really do anything.
  4. It’s all About Quality Links To Your Site.  In addition to improving search as I described above, Google also created a system of ranking that rewards sites for having more links that point to the site.  Google’s theory is that a link to a site is essentially like a “vote” in favor of that site, so the more “votes” for that site, the better ranking it gets from Google.  Google rationalizes that the site for any topic that has the most links pointing to it, must be the accepted definitive authority on that topic, so it is ranked at the top.  Google further refined this tactic by giving weight to each of the inbound links, so that one link from Wikipedia is far more valuable for ranking than 100 links from small unknown sites.  This refinement prevents people from gaming the system by simply cranking out 10,000 dummy websites that serve no purpose other than creating links to a single site in an effort to improve the ranking.  This is why I say that it is about “quality” links to your site.  Some SEO firms I’ve seen will create a small network of sites that they call a “business directory” or something similar.  These sites are really nothing more than a database of all their clients (and perhaps others) that is used to create a small network of web pages that link to one another in an effort to trick Google’s system into thinking that your site is really popular because so many sites link to it.  Sometimes these SEO firms will even create several copies of these little networks to try and boost the number of links pointing to their customer’s sites.  This is especially a bad tactic because Google actually lowers your ranking (or possibly bans your site altogether) for such behavior.  Google cross-references its database to find sites with near-duplicate data.  If it finds near-duplicates, then it lowers the weight of those links, or maybe even disregards them or assigns negative value to them (no one really knows because it’s a trade secret closely guarded by Google, but observers have seen the end results and have reported how they think it works). Anyway, the bottom line is that your chances of tricking Google with some scheme to manufacture links to your site will very likely either not work, or even worse, backfire.  You are much better off starting a blog and joining some forums on the topic that relates to your site, then post as often as you can with relevant and meaningful content that links back to your site.  Like anything worthwhile, its takes time and effort to build up a portfolio of quality links to your site.  There are no shortcuts.

In summary, be very careful before hiring a firm to help you with SEO.  Many of them are only hoping to take advantage of uninformed people and are not actually providing much value.  Many of them may indeed get your site ranked high on Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL, which may be of value to you.  But their services should be discounted accordingly if they are not going to help you get ranked with the search engine that 80% of people are using.  As is always a good practice, caveat emptor.

Content Is King for Email Delivery

6
dans Email Marketing

A colleague sent me this link discussing the use of the word “free” in email subject lines. The gist of the article was that using “Free” in the subject line is frowned upon by savvy email marketers because of its potential of triggering spam filters, but that their A/B split testing showed dramatically better response rates when they used “free” in the subject line, which caused them to conclude that “a free offer far outweighed the negative effective on clicks caused by triggering spam filters, resulting in a net click-through-rate gain.

Since the article was written by a copy writer, I’d like to offer the perspective of someone with perhaps a more technical angle. As the eMarketing program manager, one of my job responsibilities is to ensure email deliverability of our email marketing application, which requires intimate knowledge of how spam filtering works on a technical level and how to avoid the spam filter for legitimate emails.

Our system sends over 30,000 emails per day, many of which contain blatant marketing terms that would surely trigger spam filters, yet we have an average delivery rate over 95%. Of course, like all email marketers, we cannot easily determine if the email was being delivered to the spam folder or the inbox, but we know from our server logs that the emails were accepted by the receiving mail server, and much of our own testing shows that we are getting emails into the inbox most of the time.

Based on my experience and testing, content-based solutions are losing prominence as the de facto standard for spam filtering. Anti-spam technology is advancing very rapidly and is moving away from content filtering because it doesn’t address the real problem and can never be as accurate as is required in today’s business environment where conducting business is done almost entirely by email.

Reputation-based solutions are supplanting content filters as the best way to suppress spam because it does address the root problem: bad senders. These newer solutions are extremely effective at blocking the real spam and allowing legitimate emails EVEN IF the emails content may seem suspect. Case in point: Lyris has a case study showing that even senders with risqué content, like Frederick’s of Hollywood, can achieve very favorable response rates if they adhere to email marketing practices that focus on ensuring that your recipients want to receive your emails.

You can be pretty sure that Frederick’s emails will be loaded with all kinds of words that would throw up red flags for any content-based anti-spam solution, but they still get high response because they adhere to email marketing best practices like making sure their list contains only opt-in recipients, writing great content, providing great offers, and purging their lists of complainers and non-responders.

You may be familiar with the “report spam” button that appears in the web interface for email providers like gmail, yahoo, and aol. This button is part of these newer reputation-based anti-spam solutions. When recipients click those “report spam” buttons, the email providers make note of the sender and keep track of how many people are complaining about that sender. Eventually, if enough people complain, the ISP or email provider simply stops accepting email from senders that receive a lot of complaints.

If your recipients are not complaining, the chances of your emails being tagged as spam are lower. Senders that consistently have a low complaint rate earn a degree of trust and are usually subject to less content filtering. This is a very efficient system because senders who use best practices, like only sending to opt-in recipients, purging their lists regularly, and writing great content, get rewarded with being subject to less filtering.

So, in the end, the use of “free” (or any other term) in the subject line, does not operate in a vacuum and is dependent on other factors as to its effectiveness. If you send any email to a list of recipients who have not agreed to receive emails from you and are not interested in what you have to say, then the chances are high that anything you put in the subject line will be ineffective. Conversely, if you build a relationship of trust with your recipients and they value what you have to say, then when you put “free” in the subject line, they will know it is legit, and they will open the email and respond to your offer.