Category: Newsletter Marketing

Recently the folks at Gmail announced via their blog that they have been working closely with PayPal and eBay in an attempt to reduce the number of phishing attacks and the associated collateral damage. By using industry email authentication technologies such as DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Email (DKIM), they now authenticate every message sent PayPal and eBay. The end result is that if a message from either paypal.com or ebay.com arrives at Gmail, if it does not pass Gmail’s authentication verification, Gmail will reject that message completely and not deliver it.

The significance of this is that Gmail has now set a precedent within the realm of email deliverability. In short, the search giant has made the executive decision not to deliver messages from two particular companies unless those companies take steps to authenticate their email. What if Gmail were to decide to use the same policy for all inbound email? At this point, I think that is very unlikely, considering that email authentication unfortunately has not been embraced yet by the majority of email senders. In fact, it was also recently reported that less than half of Fortune 500 companies are using any sort of email authentication. A mere 202 companies—40 percent—are using some sort of authentication, and only 72 of those are using DomainKeys/DKIM. That to me is a little scary.

Folks, the time will come when spam and email abuse is bad enough that Internet and email service providers will make the decision to only deliver email that has been authenticated. Once that happens, any email senders who have not authenticated their email will be rejected. Do you want to be in that predicament? Will you be ready when that time comes? At mobileStorm, we use all authentication methods in our email. We are prepared.

Now is the time to start authenticating your email. There are numerous resources to help you understand these technologies and how to implement them. Authenticate today!

Until next time,
Jaren Angerbauer, Director of Deliverability, mobileStorm
Drink Responsibly, Drive Responsibly, Email Responsibly

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of email in which the sender uses lots of text and pictures to communicate the message. And when I say lots, I mean LOTS. I sometimes find myself having to scroll two and three pages to get to the end of the message. Nightclub and event promoter emails are especially notorious for this type of content.

Case in point: A nightclub owner wants to promote a particular event. His email creative ends up full of photos of DJs and scantily clad women. What is not in the email is a good text-to-image ratio, or an easy-to-understand call to action.

To use the old adage, “less is more” seems more than appropriate to email marketing. Here are a few things to consider:

• Most email clients block images by default. If the message is 90% images, the user is left with 10% of the message.
• Sending unstructured content can have the potential to confuse to the reader.
• Using poor design and little or no navigation can result in a poor or incorrect customer perception of what is being communicated.

The bottom line is that you want to want your readers to be able to grasp the essence of what you are sending to them quickly and effectively. What you don’t want is for your readers lose interest because it takes them too long to get the point of your message. Here are some simple steps that can be followed to create great content.

1. Use a good mix of HTML text and graphics. Don’t just fill up your email with cool photos or images that have the words on them.

2. If using plain text, get to the point or call to action quickly. Don’t write a book and expect the subscriber to read the entire thing.

3. Validate your email content for errors. Use an HTML validator such as http://validator.w3.org/.

4. Check to see who is actually opening and reading/clicking your emails. Remove those who don’t.

Until next time,
Jaren Angerbauer, Director of Deliverability, mobileStorm

Drink Responsibly, Drive Responsibly, Email Responsibly.

There is something in the realm of link building called “link baiting,” a process whereby links appear by themselves. You don’t ask anyone to link to your webpage, you don’t submit your site anywhere, but new inbound links appear every day.

How is that possible? Below are some ways to make this happen for your own site.

One of the best ideas for link baiting is to create an extensive resource list for something specific that your visitors will find most useful. Think about what that could be, do your research, and create that resource list.

Another similar idea is to create a “101” list for your particular topic. These kinds of lists are doing pretty well in social network marketing; they too generate linkbacks easily.

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There are thousands of ways to get your website dropped from Google, and you probably know them very well: Keyword-stuffing, doorways, spamming, selling links, etc. I wrote an earlier article on what not to do in SEO, as well as a sequel, in which I touched on things that might get you in trouble, so read those posts if you haven’t done so already.

More important is how you get your site back on Google—and that’s what this post will be about today.

Let’s say you see that traffic from Google has greatly declined, and that your website is nowhere near the top for your major keywords—though it was ranking pretty well before. What happened? Your website has been placed under a penalty filter from Google and will stay there until you (A) get rid of the reason for the penalty, and (B) let Google know you fixed the problem.

Here is what to do:

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As we all know, links play a vital role in SEO: Links are important for both ranking and traffic. Getting links requires a lot of work; however some people don’t even know where to start and how to get those desired links. So today I’ve continued to write about where you can obtain links from and how to do so:

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SEO is an extensive daily activity that needs a good organization system. Different SEO professionals use different systems, programs, or other methods to make their SEO work more effectively and produce better results for themselves and their clients. However, there is no need to invent the wheel again when a guy named David Allen has already created the best time-management system out there: Getting Things Done. If you haven’t read this book yet, do. It will most likely make your life better. In the interim, let’s talk about how GTD can be used in SEO.

The beauty of SEO is that it is done merely with one’s Internet-accessible computer. You don’t need anything else to do your job. And you can arrange the work in the most productive way possible.

There is no need to change your current task-management system right away. If you are a successful SEO professional, then you are already doing most things suggested by GTD. Think about this: While you are reading this article, is there anything you’re thinking about that’s bothering you because it must be done? If the answer is “yes,” then here is the first thing you are doing wrong: Keeping tasks in your head.

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I took a little break from blogging, and am now back in the saddle again. However, rather than getting to hear me preach about deliverability every week, I am going to share my slot with my esteemed colleagues Jared Reitzin and Shaneli Ramratan. So enjoy the new schedule!

The FTC recently approved some slight modifications to the CAN-SPAM act. While these changes will not dramatically impact the way we send email, they are worth noting, as they do affect the way some mailers manage their unsubscribe process, among other things.

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I’ve noticed in my SEO experience that while we constantly think of the more ways to create more quality content and gain more quality links, we still come back to keywords. Keywords are just that important for an SEO strategy, no matter which level you are on and at what stage. Keywords help in answering your online marketing questions and developing your Internet promotions.

So what do you do with keywords, say, in the middle of your online marketing initiatives? How do you conduct your keyword research? Is it different in comparison to what you were doing at an earlier stage? Let’s answer these questions.

First of all, keyword research brings different results depending on the time and circumstances when you do it. The trends are always changing: New ones appear, and others become too old to deal with. Take a closer look at what’s happening in your niche/field and see if those keywords are in your strategy, and whether or not you want to add them. I wrote earlier on how to choose keywords and how to optimize pages for them; if you didn’t read those articles please do so before proceeding.

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Effectiveness and Open-Rates:

While email marketing is considered one of the most effective ways to communicate with leads and customers, social media can sometimes be just as if not more effective. I’ve heard different stories from small-sized websites how their open rates with messages via sites like MySpace or Facebook were higher than email open rates of the same size databases. Moreover, their social network responders are more active than email ones, which can lead to better ROI and more sales. Social websites are perfect for viral marketing, which can yield quicker results than an email campaign. They are also, relatively, a new phenomenon so marketing on them can give you an advantage against your competitors, assuming you start today.

Downsides and Dangers:

Social networks are as effective as they are dangerous for your online activities. The nature of these sites is that they are people-driven, opinionated. This is especially true of the most active members, who will constantly leave comments and feedback, for better or worse. This can lead to trouble if you do something “wrong” by the subjective opinion of these social leaders, who collectively can damage your reputation within the community. This is particularly true if you are a corporation like Ford or Red Bull, which have established major presences on these sites.

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In the past we’ve talked about some more traditional ways on how to get traffic to your site. Today, let’s discuss some of the new ways to do this that have started to crop up over the past couple of years:

Non-Text Traffic:

This means traffic from videos, images, and photos. Video-sharing sites are highly popular as are image- and photo-sharing websites. If you optimize your content (videos, images, photos) you might rank high within such sites, which will drive more viewers to your content.

In addition, this can also drive more traffic to your site from the dedicated and major search engines. The more popular your videos or photos the greater the chance your content will turn up when doing natural searches. That’s your additional traffic. You need to take video and image/photo optimization seriously as search engines are paying much more attention to it and will continue to do so in the future.

Wiki Traffic:

This is traffic from knowledge and encyclopedia sites. We all know Wikipedia’s links do not matter for SEO anymore. Yet, they still bring lots of traffic, which still surprisingly comes from search engines. This happens because lots of Wikipedia articles are still coming up on the first positions in both Google and Yahoo! for many highly searched terms and thus the most clicked as well. Inside the article page, people who are interested in the subject are exploring it further by clicking the external links. That’s how they come to your site through the searches.

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