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Best Practices - Email Etiquette

Found at Voddie.com  http://bit.ly/eDDhJg 

What is so powerful that it could spoil your customer relationships, blemish your reputation, entangle you in a legal battle, or even put you out of work?

Email is that powerful tool. To maintain control over it, you must know the rules of email etiquette.

Email, although a form of written communication, behaves much like verbal communication. Email can be expressed quickly, and a response returned within seconds.

Kathryn Towner has written a very good article at Marketing Profs, showing you how using the correct etiquette when sending emails will always provide a greater response.

 

Best Practices - Blogging vs Email Marketing

When it comes to measuring time spent, analyzing dollars budgeted, and calculating successful marketing strategies, it seems that their impact, value and effectiveness are often up for debate, regardless of the method or medium.

For example, email marketing came along a decade ago or so with a whirlwind of activity and applause, and the percieved value depended on numbers sent, numbers clicked and easy-to-measure statistics newly available. As email marketing matured, the lines were drawn regarding privacy, overload and qualified senders. And measure of success these days is often put in terms of how it compares.

Email marketing is beyond comparison, however, as the most targeted, widely used one-to-one "push" marketing strategy with results that are measurable. Professionals agree, email marketing is the backbone of most cross-marketing and social media strategies.

Recently the web site Mashable.com posted an article comparing blogging with email marketing. Read their article here:
http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/generations-internet-infographic/# and read the whole thing, it's great stuff.

Blogs are useful, but more in the same way web sites are, as storage areas for resources and information – they are the libraries, service centers and storefronts.

Blogs are NOT push medium, and they don't pull very well either, but they are handy if you have advice to give and don't want to repeat yourself each time a question is asked. That's how I use my blog, anyway. Every time I answer a question via email, I save post the explanation to my blog. That way next time I can just send a link!

Great email marketers send the right message to the right people at the right time. That is an art form, and it is appreciated by those who have asked to be sent those permission-based emails. No other marketing medium is based on being asked, what a fantasticly welcome idea!

Great bloggers write when they have something worthwhile to say. They integrate the blog information into their next Tweet or Facebook post and point fans to their blog for details. They understand how all these content areas are used for search marketing. For tips on optimizing your blog post for web search, visit Typepad's reference area and read:
http://www.typepad.com/tips/blog-seo-tips.html.

For best practices in email marketing, visit WinBlogger.com.

Best Practices - Blogging vs Email Marketing

When it comes to measuring time spent, analyzing dollars budgeted, and calculating successful marketing strategies, it seems that their impact, value and effectiveness are often up for debate, regardless of the method or medium.

For example, email marketing came along a decade ago or so with a whirlwind of activity and applause, and the percieved value depended on numbers sent, numbers clicked and easy-to-measure statistics newly available. As email marketing matured, the lines were drawn regarding privacy, overload and qualified senders. And measure of success these days is often put in terms of how it compares.

Email marketing is beyond comparison, however, as the most targeted, widely used one-to-one "push" marketing strategy with results that are measurable. Professionals agree, email marketing is the backbone of most cross-marketing and social media strategies.

Recently the web site Mashable.com posted an article comparing blogging with email marketing. Read their article here:
http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/generations-internet-infographic/# and read the whole thing, it's great stuff.

Blogs are useful, but more in the same way web sites are, as storage areas for resources and information – they are the libraries, service centers and storefronts.

Blogs are NOT push medium, and they don't pull very well either, but they are handy if you have advice to give and don't want to repeat yourself each time a question is asked. That's how I use my blog, anyway. Every time I answer a question via email, I save post the explanation to my blog. That way next time I can just send a link!

Great email marketers send the right message to the right people at the right time. That is an art form, and it is appreciated by those who have asked to be sent those permission-based emails. No other marketing medium is based on being asked, what a fantasticly welcome idea!

Great bloggers write when they have something worthwhile to say. They integrate the blog information into their next Tweet or Facebook post and point fans to their blog for details. They understand how all these content areas are used for search marketing. For tips on optimizing your blog post for web search, visit Typepad's reference area and read:
http://www.typepad.com/tips/blog-seo-tips.html.

For best practices in email marketing, visit WinBlogger.com.

Best Practices - Preparing Your New Email Marketing Campaign

More and more small businesses seem to be signing up to use various email marketing software applications. There are two questions to ask yourself if you are in the process of building your own email marketing campaign:

1. Do I have the skills and knowledge that I need to succeed?
2. What tool is the best to help me successfully reach and affect my target audience?

Other questions to ask as you begin designing your email marketing program:

1. Who is(are) my target audience(s)?
2. Do I have permission to email them, how do I get permission?
3. What are the goals of this marketing strategy?
4. How often should I email in order to achieve my goal?
5. When should I email in order to achieve my goal?
6. What action is my email asking the subscriber to take?
7. Is my message written as concisely and effectively as possible?
8. Is the design of my email going to work in their inboxes?

Like any fully functional web site design or effective and attractive ad design, email marketing requires a trained professional and a well developed strategy in order to succeed.

My favorite tool is ExactTarget.  As an alternative, iContact has a nice platform.

Read more about email marketing tools:

http://www.email-marketing-options.com/providers

http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2008/05/hosted-email-service-price-comparison.html

Best Practices - College Students Use facebook, Not myspace

Of the 100-or-so college students attending our session on "Internet Etiquette," only one was using myspace. Almost all use facebook. The question on the minds of these future employees was this: What do employers look for when they include facebook in their background checks?

See the Iowa State Daily's summary of our session HERE >>

Best Practices - Call to Action

Read through your email that you are about to send out to your target audience.

How clear is your call to action?  What are you asking your reader to do?

I am amazed at how often this obvious feature of a good email campaign is missing.   Even if you are sending a news item or a transactional email, a clear and well placed call to action will elevate the response of your email. 

Examples include:

• Order by Monday to receive the 10% discount.
• Download the report for more information
• Try our new recipe using Mesquite Marinade.

I enjoy the emails sent by Blue Moon Dueling Piano Bar & Restaurant.  The call to action is obvious in the right top corner, where it says, "$1 Margarita Click Here" and that takes me to a printable coupon.  (However, the same email requires me  to scroll down to find information about the promotional event, which I may never see because I have clicked to print the coupon.) 

Preview emails for the call to action and see what you find. 

Best Practices - Apply the "BEEPD" Strategy...

Struggling to figure out how to manage your social media marketing? 

Struggling to find the right route through the web of social media?

Stop straying in all different directions, quit wasting time in the wrong traffic.

Get BEEPD!

Here's a simple process that will work.  Keep it handy, the world of social media can be very enticing.   And so far, there are a few spots that have proven to be worthwhile for business marketing:

1. Brainstorm at your blog.
2. Elaborate at your web site.
3. Email to announce.
4. Promote at Twitter.
5. Discuss on LinkedIn.

© Kathryn Towner, WinCommunications

Best Practices - Managing Email Bounces

Small or big business, non-profit or otherwise, it is important to understand the nature of email bounce management.  The success of your targeted permission-based email program may hinge on how well you maintain your list, and here's why:

1. Bounced emails are unreceived, and if ignored, these subscribers will forget they ever subscribed.  It is up to you, the sender, to investigate best strategies for insuring delviery to this segment of your audience.

2. A high and continuous rate of bounced emails will tarnish your email reputation with the receiving internet service providers, and that bad reputation can cause further disruptions in your email deliveries.

For more on this topic today, read J. Jennings's article at Clickz:
http://www.clickz.com/3632719/print

Best Practices - Writing for Email

Emails are unique.  A well-structured business email will:

• Contain more content than a social media message like those posted at Twitter or LinkedIn
• Use correct grammer and spelling
• Present less information than a business document, often sent instead as attachments
• Present the most important idea at the top (See this nice demonstration from Yale >> )
• Use bullets

Make your emails more effective - write effectively, efficiently and correctly.

Best Practices - Understanding SPF Records

Email servers, whether they are owned and operated by your corporate office or if they are Yahoo or MSN, are bound by rules and algorithms that determine the validity of the emails they receive.  Obviously a great focus in recent years has been on creating rules by which to sort out the unwanted emails.  By checking the actual behind-the-scenes "envelope" information of an incoming email, the receiving server decides if the sender if valid, forged, or possible SPAM - and all of this is automated.

Improving the success of your email deliveries requires an understanding of email authentication, and the main factor in this equation is your own email domain's SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record.  Read about SPF at www.openspf.org and follow the wizard under the heading Deploying SPF.

To check your record, go to to a helpful page at the Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/
and enter your domain name in the field on the right side of the screen.  This will bring up your SPF record if it exists.