Email. The very word itself represents communication coupled with speed. One of the most transforming manifestations in our lifetime. The push of a button transmits our words to a personal target of one, or a larger audience of many. If you’re email marketing to your customers, prospects, members or subscribers, rising postal rates are irrelevant, and there’s no concern for postal permits, bar codes, indicias, or printing and mail house costs.

Therein Lies the Challenge

As you inch across that relationship tightrope in a make or break alliance with your customers – those people you already have a relationship with – email marketing can be a cost-effective and powerful way to building and maintaining the edge you need. It’s not only about cost, however, as it’s also, simply, the most effective channel to remaining in front of this vital audience. That’s what email marketing is all about.

There are caveats, of course, included alongside any innovation and email marketing is no exception. It’s a blessing, certainly, because of its low cost and ease of use to your customers and the rest. But because of its low cost, there’s no limit to what you and every other entity can send. Your customers’ inbox, as a result, is a toxic overload of messages and all are competing with yours. A challenge indeed.

So What to Do?

As you deal with the dilemma of spam filters, there is no doubt that your customers aren’t pleased with an overload of messages for products and services they don’t need. So how do you get your message through to them?

Well, the good news is that your customers want to hear from you. They want value from you so your messages need to be important, well-targeted, and provide a content-rich experience. Plus, there’s the challenge of unequivocal compliance with anti-spam mechanisms. It’s an important integrated mix of elements that need addressing, or else your message to your own customer will be intercepted and spam filter-bound.

Deliverability

By any means, this is not an exclusive rendering, but a few deliverability elements you should initially ponder. There’s nothing here that you haven’t heard before, but as a legitimate eMarketer, give serious consideration to these best practices to improve your overall email marketing effectiveness. Or else!

Permission – I know you know this, but remember to confirm with the people on your list that they’ve actually requested to be on it. When your customers or prospects say they want future email from you, allow them to confirm (or verify) their request. It’s just good practice.

The list – You should regularly remove undeliverable addresses, as Internet Service Providers (ISP) track the percentage of undeliverable emails to certain addresses within a period. They could block other messages if you continue to do the same.

Trusted sender – Encourage your recipients to put your “From Address” into their address book, trusted sender list, or approved sender list. As a trusted sender or contact, your email will be delivered and remain exempt from anti-spam measures.

Language – Stay away from using language and tactics that look like spam to a content-based spam filter (especially in your Subject line).

You should avoid:

a) Spam-like words/phrases such as – free… guarantee… credit card… income… call now, etc.

b) All caps – This dramatically increases the likelihood of being filtered.

c) Certain punctuation – It’s not grammatically correct to begin with, but stop with the !!! and ??? as this tactic can trip the filter.

d) Symbols – If describing currency in your email marketing campaign, use $ and not $$.

CAN-SPAM Compliance – Do a legal review of the January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law to ensure your email practices are in compliance.

Frequency – One of email recipients’ biggest complaints is receiving too many emails from the same entity/marketer. If different departments (customer service, research, sales) are sending messages simultaneously, that’s not a good thing.

Expectations – To ease value, importance and frequency objections, tell your intended email recipients what you’ll be sending and how often.

Don’t hide – Your recipient might know your company, but they still need to recognize you. This includes a familiar brand and email “From” line and email address.

Email Service Provider (ESP) – to effectively help with your strategy, manage your data, design your email, and track your results, you should consider using an ESP. Almost needless to say, an ESP, among many other things, for your email marketing program will build legal requirements into their platforms so you don’t have to worry about compliance.

Other -

• Always include information in your Subject line.
• Avoid using mostly images in your message.
• Avoid using attachments as it’s better to link to files via a website.
• Deliverability and performance metrics will increase if you simply perform list hygiene. It’ll lead to higher deliverability and fewer complaints, and thus, a better reputation.
• Do not excessively use “Click Here.”

Obviously, no single tip will guarantee your email delivery, but utilizing as a group can certainly help.

Email Best Practices

When your customer/prospect allows you to send them future emails, they do so expecting something of value and that is something you can control. Remember, your subscriber wants email from you but only if it’s interesting and of value to them. They may not react today but soon, as they know good email (that’s in their best interests) from a good company when they see it.

However, even if you succeed and make it to the inbox, if your recipient thinks it’s spam – your address is flagged.

I’ll end with this: Simply, follow email marketing best practices by complying with CAN-SPAM laws… stay cognizant of and put into practice the tips you read here (and elsewhere)… and create overall compelling messages that result in higher inbox deliverability and response.

Fresh technologies will continue to appear, no doubt creating new communication channels to customers. So the rules of customer engagement will continue to change, and you can bet against that at your own risk. But until that next technology arrives, email in all its eclectic glory is ours to command.

Although poorly written, this is a very good article about the relationship between quality content and link popularity in achieving high ranking in the search engines. Most of us know that quality content – defined as valuable, unique and keyword rich content – is one of the most important criteria search engines use for ranking. Even more important, though, is link popularity. And how are they connected?

That’s the gist of the article, and rather than put my spin on it, I’ll let you read the article and see for yourself how the author cleverly explains the relationship between the two, how good content, in fact, leads to improved link popularity.

In this article, Rhonda Abrams, a writer for USA Today, asks the question that many of us involved in social media are asking:  Is social media money-making machine or is it just a bunch of hype?

Abrams cites the example of small company in California, which has built a thriving business as a result of the owner spending “about five around hours a month” working social media sites.

According to Abrams, “The truth is that social media marketing for small businesses can work. Or, it can be a colossal waste of time. Like every other part of your business, it doesn’t just happen, it takes work and strategy.”

How can you make social media work for your small business? To summarize:

• Get beyond Facebook and Twitter

• Develop a niche

• Keep LinkedIn up-to-date

• Make a commitment

• Understand your goals

• Watch review sites

If you’re trying to figure out a social media strategy for your business this is a “must” read.

There is so much talk nowadays about Cloud computing I thought it might be helpful to discuss the topic in a way that I think everyone can understand. So here is a three-part article on Cloud computing broken up in three topics: (1) What is Cloud computing, (2) What are the benefits of Cloud computing and (3) What is the future of Cloud computing?

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is internet computing whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand similar to an electricity grid.

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client-server in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves over-the-Internet-provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.

The term “cloud” is used as a metaphor for the internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagram as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online that are accessed from another Web service or software such as a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.

Most cloud computing infrastructure consists of services delivered through common centers and built on servers. Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers and typically include SLAs. The major cloud-only service providers include Salesforce.com, Amazon and Google.

According to wikiinvest.com, a simple example of cloud computing is Yahoo email or Gmail. You don’t need software or a server to use them. All a consumer needs is an internet connection and you can start sending emails. The server and email management software is all on the cloud (internet) and is totally managed by the cloud service provider Yahoo, Google, etc. The consumer uses the software alone and enjoys the benefits.

Here is a great article for all you “do it yourselfers” who want to perform SEO on your own websites. Of course, we don’t recommend this because, well, because we provide SEO for our clients…and charge for it. But that’s OK, give it a try anyway.

The article is filled with excellent tips – some general, some very technical – that might require the help of your web designer, but there are some that you might be able to do yourself if you have a content management system (CMS) or can edit the content in your site. To name a few: page names, directory structure, Meta tags, flash, navigation, and much more. Even if you don’t want to do your own SEO, you’ll find good information in the article that is useful for any website owner.