SPAM - How do you get your email through?

What is spam you ask? Isn't that a canned cooking product? Well, it is, but it is also a huge part of modern day emailing, and even more so in terms of marketing. 

Spam is a message which is sent out electronically to a massive audience, in which the recipient would not usually want to receive. It consists of advertising, for products and services. Spam can also come in get-rich-quick schemes or pretend legal services. It is very inexpensive to send out to a mass audience, it costs the sender very little, and is paid mostly by the recipient or the carriers.  

The most popular type of spam used today is done by email. The main use of spam is commercial content and advertising. Spam has also been called unsolicited bulk email (UBE), unsolicited commercial Email (UCE) or junk mail. Spam has a pretty high stake in all everyday emails, up to 80-85%. 

Now that we know what spam is, how do we avoid it? How do we get our message through to our customers? Email providers, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and even our Mocomotion have built in spam filters. These filters target key words and phrases. They also target certain ways an email is typed. For example, if you type "SAVE NOW ON WINDOW INSTALLATION" In all caps and green writing, these are  warning signs for the filters and they may block your email. A blocked email means that your message will go to the junk/spam folder. That is the last place you want your message to go, because let's be honest, how often do you go sifting through your junk emails?

As well as using a spam filter, Gmail uses something rather neat. They have a community based spam filter. This means, if an email I received should be spam, but got through to my inbox. I am able to mark it as spam. This will go through the network, and it will remove it from others peoples inbox as well. 

Gmail on Spam

Take a look at this video; it was created by the Gmail team. Although lacking in professionalism, the video is very informative and shows the way Gmail is fighting spam. 

Before you send out your email, you'll want to look it over to make sure you have as little properties of spam as possible. You can go to this website here, http://www.americaint.com/spam-filter-messagetest/spam-checker.html. This website will check your email and make sure it will pass through spam filters. It will check your email and give it a score of anything from 0.1 to anything over 13.1 (which is major spam content). Now that we know how to build our marketing emails free of spam and how to check them to make sure they will get through to our target. We are ready to start emailing! Have fun!

Thank you for reading my blog!

Austin Lerke

Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Basically, Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO” is the process of bringing a website higher in the ranks of a search engine.  When trying to optimize a webpage for search engines, what one is essentially doing is trying to make the site more visible and easy to find for people looking for content related to your subject matter.

How do you improve your rank on Google, Bing, and other search engines?

There are many ways in which you can improve your ranks, but it can be very complex.  So complex, in fact, companies now hire people to work full time on improving their business’ rank.

Two great ways that one can improve their search engine ranks are using the right keywords and having relevant, quality content which will lead to having backlinks.  These are basically what SEO is all about, when looked at in the simplest sense.

Keywords involve choosing relevant words and phrases to base your optimization around.  These will be the basis for your URL, tags, and other words which will be places in the coding of the website, but also in the content.  The more specific and niche the keywords are the better chance someone who is looking for your specific content will be able to find it.  If one uses keywords which are too general or generic your content could be lost among the millions of sites on the internet.

There are sites such as http://www.seotipsy.com/ that serve as tools to give companies ideas and advice for improving their SEO rankings.

Some people believe that the most important thing to ranking high on search engines is to generate relevant content.  I agree with this idea, because it leads to the direct traffic, plus it can lead to people linking others to your website.  When others place a link to your website on another website it is called a backlink, and it is a useful way to get your website ranked higher.

Though SEO is a great way to get your website noticed, it is an ever changing game, and you always have to be working on keeping your rank up.  Your website can drop from the first hit on a search engine to several pages deep in a matter of minutes.  Staying number one is not easy, but it is definitely necessary if you wish to have a successful business with a strong internet presence.

Here is a short video about the basics of SEO: 

I hope you enjoyed my blog, thanks for reading.

Victoria Le Page
October 3, 2012

Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an essential part of any company’s presence on the internet and for the company’s growth.

HostPapa is a web hosting company that uses email marketing to relate and contact clients directly; to inform them of prices, improvements, new technology, and information. I was and still am directly involved in the replies from the monthly newsletter queue for HostPapa.

The amounts of replies I receive that are spam filter notices are unreal. The email says something along the lines of:

“I am protecting myself from spam. If you would like to contact me further please go to this website... You will only have to do this once.”

Not something a company wants to see when it comes to their emails not reaching the consumer. Spam is definitely a huge problem on the internet. Consumers do not want to receive daily updates from brands, company’s, or anyone for that matter on an ongoing daily basis. I honestly do not ever look at 99.9% of the emails I receive from retailers or wagJag deals. I either felt obligated to give my email while shopping at a store or gave it out to win something… WHICH I DID NOT WIN OF COURSE, and in turn now receive annoying emails daily.

Companies that do any emailing or send anything online must abide by CAN-SPAM. CAN-SPAM is a set of laws that govern the email marketing world while giving the consumers privacy. The penalties of not abiding by these laws could cost a company up to $16,000.

THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH TO SCARE ME INTO NEVER BREAKING THE LAWS!

These laws include:

1.     Don’t use false or misleading header information.

2.     Don’t use deceptive subject lines.

3.     Identify the message as an ad. 

4.     Tell recipients where you’re located.

5.     Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.

6.     Honor opt-out requests promptly.

7.     Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. 

This information was gathered directly from the CAN-SPAM website. For further information on CAN-SPAM please visit their website. 

Here is a short video that explains each one of these regulations into small detail. 

Number 5 refers to an option they must give you within every email they send that allows you to opt out of their emails going forward.

Here is just one example where there is an opt out option at the end of a MAC Cosmetics email blast:

You are receiving this email because you opted in to receive emails from M·A·C Cosmetics Online regarding products and promotions. Unsubscribe. Please add macnews@e.maccosmetics.com to your address book to ensure you continue to receive emails from M·A·C Cosmetics Online. © M·A·C Make-Up Art Cosmetics, INC. All worldwide rights reserved. Privacy Policy Legal Terms/Conditions M·A·C Cosmetics Online, 130 Prince Street, New York, New York 10012

Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you enjoyed it.

Janelle Brown

September 2, 2012

Email Marketing Best Practices

Email Marketing Best Practices

When running an email marketing campaign, whether the aim is to increase sales, website traffic, brand awareness, or any other marketing related goals, the main obstacle to overcome is getting your target audience to actually open the email.  If an email does not get opened, or worse gets sent to the spam filter, that is one potential lead/sale/customer which you have just lost.

            

            Typically email marketing programs have spam checkers, which will look for patterns which are typically found in spam mail, and let you know if your email will be sent to a spam filter, or delivered to the inbox.  The main concern once the spam filter has been avoided is to actually get the email opened by the viewer.

 Jamie Turner, at Dreamforce believes the best way to increase open rates is by offering an incentive in the subject line, which can increase read rates by up to 50%.  Also, the subject line must be compelling, and between 30 to 50 characters, and create a sense of urgency. 

Once the email is opened you should ensure the call-to-action is above the fold (in the first section of the email, so the reader does not have to scroll down to take action on your offer) and easy to find.  The email should not be too cluttered, and should get the message across to the reader quickly and easily, with as little confusion as possible.

The emails should also be closely linked to your landing pages, in order to provide the reader with a seemingly seamless transition from the email to the landing page, which will make the reader feel comfortable with the landing page as soon as they arrive on it, rather than having to figure out how the page works again.

Marketing campaigns must do all they can to avoid “spamming” customers with too many emails, or else they will quickly lose leads.  Nobody likes spam.

Finally, you definitely want to analyze how your campaigns did, or else you will never know what stage of the process your campaign is succeeding in, or failing.  These analytics come from the email marketing programs which are used to send your email.  You can get lots of valuable information, such as read rates, click through, how much time someone spent reading the email, and much more.

In sum, email marketing campaigns should be quick and easy for the reader to navigate, and they should be able to understand the information you are giving them within moments of viewing the email.

Here is a quick video by a company which has an email marketing program. It explains two quick “gotcha’s,” which are things which should be avoided when on a marketing campaign:

Brand Evaluation - Task Assignment #3

Today we discussed online customer acquisition techniques.  How does your brand use the Internet to acquire customers?  Does their competition use display advertising?  How do they compare?

Try to find out if your brand is using display advertising.  If so, what do you think the objective of the campaign is?  Do they have a clear call to action?  Are they using landing pages effectively?  Who do you think they are targeting?  How could they improve?

Look for other signs of acquisition campaigns.  Are they using event marketing?  Public relations?  Viral marketing campaigns?  If so, how do you think they are doing?  Can they improve?  If not, what should/could they be doing?

You will score 10 points for this one.  Happy ad hunting!

Quiz #1 - Wed. September 26

Quiz #1 has been saved to eLearn and is ready to go.

You must complete this quiz on Wednesday September 26 between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm.

You will have 30 minutes to complete the quiz and you get one attempt at each question.  Questions are multiple choice and T/F (there is one exception).

Includes questions on chapters 1 - 5.  It will give you a good taste of what to expect for the mid-term exam.  If you have been keeping up with your reading and assignments you should be in good shape.

Good luck!

Targeting Your Online Advertising

What is Online Advertising?

It refers to a form of promotion that helps in marketing goods and services through internet to deliver advertising messages to the consumers. 

Targeting Audience through Online Advertising

As we all know Online Advertising now a days has a fast pace of promoting and marketing products and service to the targeted user in a tremendous degree of accuracy and in a really fast way by placing ads on different websites and tracking them through different tracking methods. It helps advertisers reach niche audience with customized message. 

Targeting your online advertising includes targeted audience that an advertiser wants to reach, these can be reached through:

Demographic: - It helps the advertiser target the audience on the basis of their age, sex and nationality. For example, some advertisers want to target consumers on the basis of their age, so they come out with ads that attract and target that particular age group so that they can reach the market they want. Websites like Yahoo and Facebook use it.

Geographic: - Geo-Targeting helps in determining Geo location of the website visitor and delivers different content to the consumer based on the location as set by website. It reaches targeted audience of a particular place, state, city, country.  It helps website owners and advertiser to restrict content in places where they don't want it to be viewed and displays content customized for that particular area or location.

Behavioral Targeting: - Advertisers target users from their behavior online, such as from search, visiting different websites and behavior segments For example, targeting companies establish an agreement with the publisher, who puts a code on his website(that collects information from the consumer). Then when the user is using that website, the site will put up a cookie on the users browser which keeps on updating as the user surfs online, this helps the advertiser to reach the targeted market through their behavior online.

Language:-Language targeting serves ads only to users who have selected to access the website in a certain language of their choice. This type of language targeting ads can be seen on regional local websites, it helps reach only those users who use the website in a particular language that the advertisers are targeting. For examples: - User using English, French, Spanish, Hindi or Punjabi etc. to access a website.

Interest:-Interest based targeting refers to delivering ads to people on what they care about, either for a long term or at a given moment. Google Ads and other keyword related search ads fit into this category because they only delivered those ads to people that they desire at that time. Ads on blogs or focus issued websites are also a really good example of interest based targeting. Campaigns can use interest based targeting to reach a particular person or group who cares about that subject at that time.