Archive for October, 2008
Quick wins for brand loyalty
By Henrie Media Inc. | October 28, 2008
Getting consumers to your website is one thing, and requires a special set of tools - SEO, SEM, networking and many other marketing strategies. Keeping them on your site and coming back is entirely different. One powerful method is to get your customers and site visitors interacting with you website and your brand. Not only does interaction help connect users to your company, but it also increases the time they spend on your site - good for branding and attracting potential advertisers.
Consumers want to interact with your brand. They want to feel a part of the process, that their voice and opinion matters to your company. While blog comments, forums and social networking tools are proven ways for consumers to interact, often times they are wary to participate due to forced registration, disclosure of personal information or simply the time needed to participate. But there are other ways to entice your visitors to interact that don’t require much of an effort from them, or you.
Polls: Polls are powerful. They provide a glimpse behind the curtain of the popular sentiment of a population and consumers use them. A quick click and they’re satisfied. It satisfies their curiosity and reinforces their views and opinions with the larger community. For the website owner, polls can provide a look into everything from the quality of your customer service to ideas for new products or upgrades to existing ones.
There are many free polling services out there and some paid that offer greater detail. Check out Vizu.com, JS-Kit and PollDaddy, recently aquired by Automattic who is behind the WordPress blogging platform and hosting service.
Video and Audio: Nothing is quite as engaging as a well-placed, well timed video. Embedded video is easy for consumers to view - a simple click and they are interacting with your website and your brand, either through your own video or from another source. YouTube is by far the largest library of embedded video options but there are others, including DailyMotion and MetaCafe. Podcasts and embedded audio files provide the same basic function and can be featured unobtrusively in a blog post or in a sidebar.
Photos: Simply adding a photo gallery or photos in your blog posts will get your visitors more involved with your site. Photos can be linked to other, related pages within your site or even to galleries on other sites, including social networking profiles. FlickrIn is a Web app that lets you display tiled photos from your chosen flickr gallery as a small badge that you can embed in your site’s sidebar.
Games: Who doesn’t like playing a good game every now and then? It’s especially interesting to the user if you can find a game that follows the theme of your brand. Sell sporting goods? There are plenty of sport-related games to choose from. Auto parts? Driving games abound. There are even political games, animal-themed games and puzzle games for your thinking audience. Sites like AddictingGames.com, MiniClip and FreeOnlineGames.com all have a vast collection of games that you can embed.
Tickers: This is especially useful in today’s economic environment. You can embed stock tickers, or even a widget with tickers and charts, like this one from Yahoo. But there’s more. Search online and you’ll find sports tickers, entertainment news and tickers that you can customize to include your personal message.
Topics: Brand Development, Marketing Strategies | No Comments »
Warm up your new IP Address
By Henrie Media Inc. | October 19, 2008
It’s inevitable: at some point, you’ll switch to a new e-mail service provider (ESP) or add a new IP address. These changes often have a major impact on your deliverability. Once upon a time, switching was easy and painless, but in today’s delivery environment it can be quite challenging to get off to a good start.
Today, you must bring your new IP address up to speed slowly, rather than sending full throttle right away. If you switch providers, your new ESP likely will warn you about this, but it applies even if you are adding a new IP to your mail stream, such as for sending transactional messages, new Web sites, or e-mail programs.
Spammers usually leap to a new IP address when they get blocked from an old one, then blast out e-mail right away. ISPs get suspicious when they see e-mail volumes spike from unknown IP addresses, so they block first based on sudden volume spikes and ask questions later. This procedure is called throttling.
If you add an IP address to your mail stream, say, for increasing segmentation or volume, your good reputation on your existing IP address won’t automatically transfer to your new one. On the other hand, if you start over after polluting a previous IP address, your bad rep can follow you. That’s why you need to take care with your new one.
Today’s approach is to begin slowly, sending a limited number of messages to small subsets of the best addresses on your mailing list. As you begin to build your reputation, you can start building your volume, but always while keeping an eye on your deliverability reports and spam-complaint rates.
You should be able to warm up your good reputation in about seven days. Depending on your total message volume, it could take a little longer to reach full capacity.
Organizing Your IP Warm-Up Plan
- Get feedback loops established and whitelist requests approved before you start e-mailing, even on a reduced schedule. Also make sure you have updated your authentication records.
- Create a sublist of active e-mail addresses from your mailing list with your most important domains represented. These are addresses with no negatives associated with them. Generally, they’re established but not old addresses, usually 60 days to nine months old and with at least three clicks on campaigns. These usually are your most active and engaged subscribers, who generate the positive metrics ISPs like, such as opens and clicks, adding your sending address to their address books and generating few spam complaints.Avoid both brand-new and older addresses because they can generate more spam complaints. You need addresses that are clearly neither inactive nor a potential spam trap.Use this transition to prune your list of inactive names, too. Simply don’t move the old names into your clean new system. Also, IP warm-up campaigns aren’t the time to reactivate old lists or import poor legacy data. This is your chance to start over, so do it with clean data.
- Send a message that isn’t time-sensitive. Your goal is delivery more than conversion. So your message could be a customer-service or relationship-building message, in which you thank the subscriber for signing up, list other publications you offer, invite subscribers to fill out a survey or complete their profiles, or remind them to add your sending address to their address books, even if you haven’t changed the actual e-mail address. Remember to spell out subscriber benefits and to include a “valued member” reward to reward them for being prized subscribers.
- Monitor your delivery metrics. Your goal with this mailing is to deliver 95 percent to 100 percent of these messages to the inbox:
- Watch your delivery reports for hard and soft bounces.
- Monitor feedback loops for spam complaints.
- Watch all mailboxes associated with your e-mail program, even those that aren’t official e-mail reply mailboxes for comments or complaints.
Your Post-Warm-Up Game Plan
Don’t let your new IP address go cold again. Once you complete the warm-up campaign, begin transitioning older, less-active recipients and begin mailing from your regular calendar. Continue to move these addresses over slowly and to build your sending volume over time.
How long can this transition take? That depends on your list size and the delivery metrics you generate. Watch bounce logs, looking particularly at the big three domains — AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo — and watch for temporary blocking errors due to throttling.
You should be able to maintain consistent high inbox delivery for all messages as you increase volume. If delivery numbers start to slide, slow down the volume again or hold steady for a campaign or two until the numbers begin to improve, then increase volume again.
The warm-up process requires hard work, careful segmentation, good list quality, and, above all, patience. But the reward is clear: high inbox delivery and a great sender reputation, which will ensure future inbox delivery for a long time.
SOURCE: ClickZ - By Stefan Pollard
Topics: Email Marketing, Marketing Strategies | 1 Comment »
Creating an effective landing page
By Henrie Media Inc. | October 12, 2008
When it comes to converting a click into a lead or sale, the importance of the quality of your landing pages can’t be overestimated. Your landings should tell the people who arrive there you and your offers can be trusted and the quality of the offer is guaranteed, ideally in a single glance.
Be specific
The more specific a landing talks about a certain offer, the more chance there is people will make use of that particular offer. Don’t direct people to a homepage of a website where they have to start looking for the offer themselves. Bring the people as close to an offer as you can.
Make a good first impression
Take a look around at other landing pages and you’ll notice some look better than others. Some look cheap, but on the other hand: something can be too slick as well. Every offer needs a different approach, but your landing should ooze quality, and an attractive graphical presentation is an important part of that. If you’re not capable of creating something yourself you’re not completely satisfied with, find someone who can do it for you.
Make a page scenario
Some landing pages look like they are trying to attract attention on ten different spots at the same time. Try to create a natural and logical flow into your lay-out, so people simply start at the top and end at the bottom of the page. Like this they won’t miss any information you’re trying to get across because something at the bottom made them skip ahead.
Test different designs
One of the ground rules of landing pages is that except for using the word ‘FREE’, nothing is certain when it comes to conversions. So don’t just make one landing. Make several, trying outing different images, texts and lay-outs, and trying all of them out consecutively. Keep track of which ones work best. After a while you’ll learn which type of landings work better for which type of offers.
Add testimonials
Try to find positive feedback on the offer from a legitimate source. Ideally your offer has been featured on TV, or on a well known website. If so, include this in your landing page so people will trust the offer more easily. If you find independent websites recommending your offer, copy their content on your landing page and mention the source, but don’t place links to the recommending sites. A good landing page is a one way street. Don’t give people the chance to get distracted from your offer.
Call To Action
Your landings should make very clear what exactly is expected of your visitors. And don’t try to make something look better than it really is. Honesty about a product or service works better than cheap marketing talk. If you tell people exactly what they’ll get and what they have to do for it, the chance people will recommend your offer to other people will also increase.
Create Trust
The more anonymous an offer is, the less people will be inclined to make use of it. Try to include as much contact information as possible in your landing pages. If you’re marketing for a well-known brand, don’t hesitate to mention this brand. If you add information that will allow people afterwards to comment on the transaction to a real person or company, they will feel more confident to take action.
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing Strategies | No Comments »
Compare to Differentiate
By Henrie Media Inc. | October 8, 2008
Differentiating yourself and your site from competitors is an important step in every online campaign.Use the Page Comparison Tool to make things easier. Enter one URL per line and the Tool will sort them all out according to title, description, keywords, and text.
Compare the results, and find out if you’ve got more tinkering to do or have already made yourself stand out to search engines.
http://tools.seobook.com/general/website-comparison/
Topics: Marketing Strategies, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »
