Recently Matt McGee of Search Engine Land made a post: Google Offers SEO Starter Guide. Google has released a starter’s guide to search engine optimization that touches on the nuts and bolts to website optimization. This is a great reference for webmasters and business owners who need a basic training on search engine optimization.Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is a 22-page PDF that covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. Topics covered include:

• Page Titles
• Description Meta Tag
• URL Structure
• Site Navigation
• Creating Quality Content
• Anchor Text
• Heading Tags (H1s, H2s, etc.)
• Image Optimization
• Website Promotion
• Webmaster Tools
• Analytics
• More Resources

Take the time now to review search engine optimization best practices for what you are currently doing or learn new areas that can take you to the next step. Download Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide Here.

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BtoBOnline posted some predictions for 2009 Email Marketing Trends from the folks over at email vendor Campaigner.They are forecasting that the following will be hot topics in the next year:

• Automation heats up. Everyone in 2008, it seemed, wanted to personalize and better target their campaigns, which led to better segmentation. However, human beings were still overwhelmingly pulling the trigger on so-called “triggered” campaigns. Next year, as companies start to take advantage of the avalanche of data sitting in CRM programs, triggering will happen automatically.
• Marketers tap integrated marketing programs more often. E-mail marketing used to be relegated to the Web marketing team or to someone hired specifically to do e-mail marketing. This coming year, as head counts shrink and companies realize the value of controlling the entire message, integration will take a bigger role.
• List hygiene becomes a must. “People will become less concerned about how big their lists are or how many people are opening their messages, and more concerned that the people who are opening them are finding that message relevant and are receptive,” said Luc Vezina, head of marketing for Campaigner. To that end, companies will integrate individual e-mail lists into a single, manageable list, he said, which will also make it easier for companies to comply with CAN-SPAM.
• Mobile e-mail marketing becomes a standard option.  By offering a mobile e-mail option, marketers will make sure messages are deliverable and readable.

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When your email service sends out your email, they include a piece of code in each one requesting the display of a tiny, transparent (i.e. invisible to the viewer) tracking image.

When the recipient’s browser or email reading software (an email client like Outlook Express) tries to display the email on a screen, it reads that piece of code and sends out a request to the email service for the tracking image.

The email recipient is unaware of all this, of course. He or she never sees the image, as it’s tiny and transparent: the whole process takes place in the background.

When the service receives the request, it records it and uses it as an indication that the recipient has “opened” the email.

By giving each email its own unique tracking image, the service can even tell which email was opened. So not only does it tell you how many emails were “opened,” but it also tells you exactly which recipient’s emails were opened.

This sounds great. If it wasn’t for a but or three.

First, you now see that “opened” actually just means the recipient’s software or browser displayed the email such that the tracking image was requested.

It says nothing about whether the recipient actually read or engaged with your email in any way.

So it is only a rough proxy for what you might call reader interest. (But better than nothing.)

Second, the tracking image can be activated without the recipient ever actually seeing the email at all.

Many email clients have a preview function, where part of the email is displayed below or to the side of the list of emails in your inbox.

So you can highlight an email on your screen and hit the delete button without ever looking at its content. But the preview function means the email client has tried to display the email and thus registered an “open.”

So some of those recorded opens are from recipients who never even looked at your email.

Third, some recipients will read your email and an open is not recorded. Hah! Now we have the reverse case.

How does that happen?

Your email service can only track the open if that little tracking image is requested.

That piece of code is HTML code. So if your recipient gets text-only emails or has an email client that only displays text versions of emails (like many mobile devices), then the image code is ignored and never requested.

No image request means no record of an open. So your recorded email open rate misses out on those people.

And it doesn’t end there. Many email clients now refuse by default to display images (see below). So they show the email in its entirety, but ignoring images. Again, the recipient could spend all day reading the email but an open is never recorded as the tracking image was never requested.

Many email services also overestimate the number of delivered emails. An email that ends up in the spam folder, for example, is still recorded as delivered by the email service. So some recipients who didn’t open your email actually never got it in the first place.

Did they not open your email because of disinterest or because they just never saw it?

Clearly, we’re in trouble. Not only do recorded open rates not tell us if someone actually read our emails. They can also underestimate or overestimate the true open rate!

Calculation

Even if we had an accurate way of measuring open rates, there’s another problem: there are different ways of calculating them. In our earlier example, open rate is the number of opens expressed as a percentage of the number of emails delivered. That’s the commonest approach.

Others, though, may express it as a percentage of the number of emails sent.

Some count an open every time an email is opened. So if someone “opens” the email, moves on, then goes back to the first email a day later, you have two opens from one recipient.

Some deal only in unique opens, never counting more than one open from each recipient. So the above scenario would produce a single “open.”

As far as interpreting your own email open rates go, you just need to know how your service or software calculates your numbers. As long as you know how you calculate open rates, you can make better judgement calls on the meaning.

Calculation methods become a problem when people start comparing open rates across services or senders. More on that later (I warned you this was long!)

Relevancy

Finally, another apparent nail in the open rate coffin is the issue of relevancy. In the last century, tracking email marketing results was relatively underdeveloped. Open rates and possibly clicks were often the only thing that got measured.

As a result, open rates became established as the success standard of choice…by default. There wasn’t much alternative. This became ingrained into the email marketing mentality. But is it really what you want to measure?

We’ll see how it has its uses in a bit, but are “opens” really what you’re trying to achieve? Even if you could measure opens accurately and meaningfully, aren’t opens merely one step in a process which should end with the recipient taking some kind of action?

That’s why you should emphasize those other metrics in your evaluations (clicks, downloads, purchases, registrations, whatever). Open rate is just one of the numbers you need to look at. Don’t place too much focus on it just because its traditional and appears in all your reports.

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If you’re interested in learning more about email marketing, these resources are available to browse and use.

The purpose of this article is to collect some of the most important practices successful email marketers use and we tend to write and speak about.

Whether you’re having issues with the deliverability of your messages, or are simply looking to compare your well-functioning campaign against some suggestions, this information should offer some guidance.

Email Best Practices

Get Permission

This is, by far, the single most important measure to take in order to help ensure good deliverability — the foundation of an effective email campaign.

In a broad sense, make sure that whether you are adding subscribers or they are adding themselves, it is quite clear to them that they’re giving you permission to receive email messages.

More specifically:

Don’t use purchased leads

Ask people if they want your email and don’t simply assume that they do based on another transaction with you or your business

Use Confirmed Opt-In to protect your sender reputation

Read some examples of methods of obtaining email addresses that can or cannot be used with responsible email marketing services.

Stay Relevant

If you were asked to give a speech on golf tips at a conference, and you spent your time at the podium talking exclusively about your country club, what type of reception would you get from the crowd?

Your subscribers will give you that same type of reception (through complaints and unsubscribes) if you don’t stick to meeting the expectations you’ve set for your email campaign.

Start by focusing on maximizing the value of each message you send to your subscribers, and stick to it.

Promptly Remove Unsubscribes

Responsible email senders automatically remove subscribers who opt-out using the link at the bottom of any of the messages sent from your campaign.

In some cases, however, subscribers will respond to your email messages asking to be removed from your list. To avoid issues:

Use a reply address you check regularly

Manually remove people who ask to be unsubscribed

Send Frequently Enough … But Don’t Overwhelm

Sending too frequently can cause an increase in:

Complaints

Unsubscribes

…while not sending often enough can lead to the same issues, plus more undeliverable email addresses on your list.

Set expectations for how frequently you’re going to send messages to subscribers and stick with it. You probably don’t want to send every day, but you certainly don’t want to wait several months between each message you send.

Review Your Message Content

Once you’re finished at the drawing board and have saved your message, review it and make sure:

It has a plain text version, even if you’ve written one in HTML

You’ve avoided using excessive punctuation within words and phrases

There is a sufficiently high text to HTML ratio — messages should not consist of large images with little text

You haven’t hyperlinked URLs in HTML messages

To check its SpamAssassin score for content filtering issues

Also, by sending a test of your message to a few of your own email accounts, you can help ensure that it appears consistently the same way to each of your subscribers.

Get Whitelisted

Encouraging your subscribers to add your email to their address books has benefits.

Email users add only certain chosen parties — senders who they know, trust, and expect email from.

Because of this, senders who appear there sometimes get better email deliverability often with an added benefit of images appearing automatically.

Use an Effective Reply Address

Though it takes only a few moments to decide on, choosing the reply address that appears in the from line of your messages is important to the success of your campaign.

Along with the subject of your message, the first thing your subscribers see of your messages when they’re browsing their inboxes will be the reply address and/or the “Name” you also set.

You reply address and name should be:

Recognizable

Hosted at the same or similar domain as the website subscribers signed up at

Avoid using free addresses (e.g. hosted at yahoo.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc.) you use for personal communications.

Free addresses tend to stand out less to subscribers and when deciding whether to deliver your messages, some ISPs consider messages from free addresses to be slightly more risky since anyone (including spammers) can get their hands on them.

Keep Complaint Rates Low

More of something to understand than it is strictly a practice, keeping the rate at which subscribers report your messages as SPAM at an acceptable rate is crucial to email deliverability.

Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good

Starting off on the right foot is a virtue worth noting; however, obsessing to get it right the first time or trying to do it all can prevent you from starting to see the positive returns you’re assured with an effective email marketing campaign.

Instead, get started with by:

Publishing a form to your website

Setting up your How to Get Started live seminars that will give you the instructions and confidence you need to get set up with something that will benefit your business.

Once you have a basic set up, you can move onto optimizing your campaign including:

Considering HTML versions of your messages

Split Testing Web Forms and Broadcast Messages

Customizing the branding of your campaign

Targeting specific segments of your lists

But take a step-by-step approach and don’t try to do it all at once. Start somewhere, then use the results you see to motivate your improvements!

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It’s been a while since we’ve picked apart an email campaign.

I’m not really a fan of being negative, but a great example of what not to do came across my desk the other day, and I can’t help but share it with you.

Please don’t make the same mistakes with your email footer that these guys did.

The Offending Email

Ethan, one of our web developers here at AWeber, was puzzled at an email he recently received from a ticket sales website. He had absolutely no idea who this company was. He couldn’t remember ever doing business with them.

He eventually figured out (after going to their site and trying a login/password combination he rarely used) that he had purchased tickets to an event through them — over a year ago.

As we often remind people looking to collect subscribers offline, permission isn’t indefinite - it expires, and if you email subscribers out of the blue after a long time, they lodge spam complaints because they don’t remember you.

That’s not what caught my attention about this email, though. What I found especially appalling was their email footer:

(Click image above to magnify)

Three things about it made my slap my forehead:

1. Vague Opt-In Reminder

Remember: this company hasn’t emailed Ethan at all since he made his purchase a year ago. So they should have known he wouldn’t expect an email from them.

While they did at least attempt to put a permission reminder in this footer, they failed to actually remind him of anything.

Their reminder text:

Our mailing list records indicate that your email address is opted-in to receive this email.

Great. Very helpful. “Oh, they say I’m opted-in. Well, I must be.” Right?

When you create a permission reminder, especially if you don’t email often, make sure you tell people:

Where and/or how they signed up

When they signed up

You could also put the subscriber’s email address in the footer (as this company did), although I would say that’s less important than where, how and when they signed up (after all, they already know what email address you’re emailing them at, right?).

A much better permission reminder:

This email was sent to (email address) because on (date), (first name) signed up for ticket alerts at (website URL).

Now, at least the subscriber can check out the web page where s/he signed up and hopefully recall signing up there a few months (a year?) ago.

Want to create a permission reminder like that in AWeber?See what you can personalize your emails with.

2. No Replies Allowed

Nothing says “you’re just a number to us, buddy” than an email campaign that tells you not to bother replying.

Yes, there’s a link to their Help Desk in the footer. But what about people who don’t read down to the footer?

Is it really so hard to send from an address whose inbox forwards directly to the Help Desk?

One of the advantages of email marketing over other mediums is that it lends itself to having a two-way conversation with your customers and prospects — why would you shut out subscriber interaction and feedback like that?

3. Difficult To Unsubscribe

To top it all off, in this example unsubscribing is a real challenge.

The company forces you to login to your account with them to unsubscribe:

People who want to stop receiving email from you are going to do it, one way or another. If you make it hard on them, if you put hurdles in the way of them opting out, they’ll simply mark your messages as spam.

Not only does the company in this example lose a chance to learn why people unsubscribe from their list, they put themselves at risk of blocking and filtering due to complaints.

Lessons Learned

Remind people why they’re getting your email. Be specific.

Be available. Avoid using “noreply” or unmonitored addresses in your “from” line.

Make it easy to unsubscribe.

What Do You Think Should Go In An Email Footer?

Do you do these things in your email footer? Can you think of other items that should go there?

Share your ideas below!

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