Out of the Fog Marketing

I feel the holiday week is always a good time to look at marketing best practices. The phones are not ringing off the hook and it's easier to focus on some of the details that often get overlooked. Here's a look at some best practices for email blasts.

Email marketing has become more complicated as corporate spam filters and even law enforcement in the area has become more stringent. Here is our summary of how to increase the odds your emails get both delivered and read.
1. The money is in the list. Make sure you have a clean, targeted and preferably double (confirmed) opt-in list. Quality is more important than quantity for deliverability.
2. Get an Email Service Provider (ESP). The professional ESP services stay on top of best practices in deliverability. StomperNet research shows the higher quality ESPs have 30% better deliverability than internal servers. They will also automatically purge bounced and bad email addresses. Services we recommend include:
a. Aweber
b. Vertical Response
c. Constant Contact
3. Make your subject lines eye-catching but clear, concise and free from words such as “New” or “Act Now” that are likely to be picked up by spam filters. Carefully screen your entire email for keywords that trigger spam filters. A good list of words to avoid can be found at Wilson Web and Microsoft's website.
4. Include web analytics tracking tags in all emails. The ESPs mentioned above all have easy tracking code insertion.
5. Code using absolute URLs and keep your HTML simple. Use a high text-to-HTML ratio.
6. If you are sending many emails to a particular company or through a particular ISP, consider listing with a Reputation service. Reputation is a way for the internet service providers receiving your emails to easily separate SPAM from bulk email sent legitimately. One provider is ISIPP (www.isipp.com) which runs $100-$300 per month.
7. Test, test, test. Test different design layouts with varying numbers of articles and graphics. Test different days and times of day.

Labels: constant contact, direct email marketing, email blasts, email service providers, email strategies

There is some interesting information in this Forbes article on why you should continue to advertise during a recession. I know, you are thinking these are just advertising and marketing firms that want to keep making a buck.

Well here's some anecdotal proof that increasing ad spend in a weak economy actually works:

1) We increased pay-per-click ad spend for a local IT company this month and their leads have soared. Plus their cost per click is down due to a decrease in the competition's budgets.
2) We increased online advertising for our own firm. In a Google Adwords campaign, we were able to grab the top spot for a competitive term due to competition pulling out. That ad landed us one of our largest clients this month.

So don't spend unwisely, but think about actually INCREASING your budget to outmaneuver your competition this month.

Labels: ad spend, advertising agencies, forbes, google adwords, it, marketing in recession, marketing technology, online advertising, pay per click, recession, weak economy, yahoo search marketing

TechTarget and Google released an excellent report on how IT pros use search during the purchasing process. One data point is IT buyers use the internet to search for comparisons late in the buying cycle. So search phrases such as "product x vs. product y" or "server virtualization comparison" are popular with decision makers late in the purchase process. Our own campaigns backup this data.

However, be aware you'll get very high exit rates off comparison landing pages unless you provide useful objective information, testimonials and hard data. You just can't put up your product collateral and promotional materials.

Labels: ann arbor google, ann arbor marketing, b2bmarketing, it, it marketing, market research, marketing to it buyers, techtarget

Read a great article in Entrepreneur by Robert Kiyosaki on reasons to keep up your marketing campaigns during bad economic times. The six week cycle of promotion is an interesting concept - we have seen this type of result in our business with calls coming in 4-8 weeks after a promotion.

Labels: entrepreneurs, marketing, marketing budgets, recession, robert kiyosaki

Great article by Ian Howie on Wordtracker's site. We find many companies to a decent job of keyword search, a mediocre job of ad copy and a dismal effort at landing pages. However it's one of the more important pieces of the conversion process.

If your landing page does not have anything to do with your keyword or ad copy or does not have a call to action, then it will be a wasted click. You are likely to see bounce rates off this page upwards of 85%.

Also Google assigns a quality rating to your keyword based on the quality of the landing page and its relevance to the particular keyword. The more targeted and relevant your ads and landing pages, the more favorably you are treated by Google.

Labels: google adwords, ian howie, keywords analysis, pay per click, ppc, wordtracker