Archive for ◊ October, 2009 ◊

42% of e-marketers are leaving money on the table

If you’ve been here before you know how much I dislike lazy, uniformed e-marketers.  Relax, this is not going to be another rant.  I want to help you get better results, and maybe reduce the “junk” that fills my in-box every night.

Forrester Research reported that the average cost per order from an email marketing campaign was only $6.85.  Compare that to $12.27 and $19.32 for affiliate and paid search campaigns and it’s a no-brainer as to why companies are ramping up their plans to do even more email marketing.  Unfortunately, many companies are leaving money on the table.  The same Forrester study showed that of the companies doing email marketing, only 58% segment their lists based on customers’ purchase history or preferences.  This lack of segmentation not only costs them revenues, it is needlessly filling their customers’ mailboxes with unwanted mail.

If Customer’s don’t want it – It’s SPAM

One of the most difficult things for some e-marketers to understand is that just because someone opts in to their mailing list, that does not mean they want to see every offer under the sun.  It does not take many off-target emails before the customers start to view messages as an intrusion – spam, and not as messages from a trusted merchant.  It won’t be long after that when they start ignoring your messages, unsubscribe, or worse yet – click the “spam” button in their email software. more…

Frames used to be cool

If you’ve been surfing the web for more than a few years, you may remember the days when seemingly every Web site was constructed using frames.  I built more than a few of those myself.  On the surface they seemed to be an ideal solution to many of the problems both coders and marketers had with non-framed sites.  For coders it meant you didn’t need to copy your navigation, headers and footers into every single page – saving you lots of time.  For marketers, it meant that your menus. logos and other branding information was always viewable by your site’s visitors, no matter how much scrolling they did.  In the days of Yahoo and other directory pages, it was a perfect way to build pages.

Then came the next generation of search.  Instead of relying on human provided data to build a huge list of web pages, these new search indexes used “robots”, “spiders” and “crawlers” to automagically navigate the internet.  Following links, they located pages and read their content dynamically.  This is when using Frames become a bad way to build pages.

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If you don’t ever look at the web interface, you may have not noticed something new that Twitter is trying out.  Lists – something we have all been doing in various API clients for a while now.  Below are a few screen shots of what I see from within my account as I create a new set of lists.

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Not long ago I provided some advice about how to hire an SEO.  Today, I had to fire one of my customers for not following that advice.  I can’t entirely blame them though.  Well, I could – but that would be rude.

You see, as an SEO consultant I had made a very bad mistake.  I assumed the customer would want to help me, that they would want to take an active role in optimizing their site and improving it’s search rankings.  This is the story of how it happened.  The names have been removed and the keywords have been changed to protect the stupid. more…