It’s everywhere, inescapable. In every news outlet, in every country of the world (sometimes as a front page story), Facebook privacy settings are changing once again. That fact in itself is practically a landmark in the importance of social networking sites, but that’s a different blog post.

So you may be thinking, as I’m sure quite a lot of Facebook’s almost 500 million registered users are, what exactly is going on?

Not so long ago Facebook changed their privacy settings to allow users granular access to their privacy settings, to control exactly who can see what, when, where and in what context. Personally I thought this was a marvelous idea, and the first thing I did was set everything to private. Job done, straightforward and spelled out for you there in black and white.

Unfortunately this spelled trouble for people who found the level of control to be overwhelming and confusing, and after a few privacy gaffes (including a few choice comments from Mark Zuckerberg himself) and millions of users threatening to delete or abandon their accounts, Facebook have caved to the pressure and are rolling out a simpler, one click approach to privacy controls. But what exactly does this mean?

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Imagine your new website goes live. You’re ecstatic about the feel, the look, new functionalities and – even better – the increase in visits which might (and should!)  ultimately lead to more business. And then, one year on – what do you do? Do you look at your stats? Do you know what’s going on on your website?  How many people have visited, where they came from, how many referrers you have? How long they stayed and what pages they looked at?

Or you’re engaging in email marketing. How many split tests have you done recently? Do you know what your database likes? Does one part of your recipients always receive a different version of your emails or does everybody always get the same design, same message, same “from”,  same everything? And how many times do you change your Google AdWords to see if you can get in those extra % clicks…

Do you know which digital mix gives you the best conversions…?

Do you constantly test and improve…?

If the answer is yes – great! You’re doing the right thing to monitor and (potentially) improve your communication with the customer then this is what marketing is all about. If not, it might be worth considering – simply because in the fast changing digital world something that worked a year ago can be the spanner in the works 12 months down the line.

The magic formula is testing, testing and again testing. Everything that can be changed in your digital mix is worth testing to ensure that your marketing works. Test your website (layout, images, design, the options are endless), test your email marketing, try different ads in  your Pay-per-click, play around with your banners, test different approaches in Social Media and see what works and what doesn’t.And then go out and do something about it.

“I’m going to strip out 1,000 records from of your 3,000 database which we won’t email-market to anymore”. And? How does that sentence feel to you, as the owner of a precious and loved database? Resistance? Panic? “No, no, no”? And you are absolutely right, after all, it is your data, you have spent years acquiring these email addresses and you feel that you should communicate with them; and what better means than email marketing?

The question here is not “Do I want to communicate with them?” but “Do they want to communicate with me?”

Who are the people who respond to my email marketing – and who are those that don’t? Reducing a database hurts but is absolutely the right thing to do when you realise that part of it is dead weight. They are the people who never open any of your emails and who are quite clearly telling you “I don’t want to talk to you”. It is their right to refuse any contact with you but at the same time you should make sure that you are focussing your effort on the people who are actually engaged. The ones who open your emails, who download, click on links, phone you and ultimately, buy from you. They are your evangelists and they are the ones you should nurture.

So, when you’re doing email marketing, keep an eye on your database. Monitor who opens your emails and who doesn’t – and don’t hesitate – after let’s say 9 or 10 months – to delete the persistent “non-readers”. You’ll save money, it will do your figures good and you’ll end up with a nice and engaged email marketing community. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

E-newsletters are a great place to present your company and to show off what you have achieved. And it is only natural that you want to tell your readers all about the amazing things going on like new products, new clients, new technologies, new contracts or just a great service.

On the one hand, a regular newsletter is the ideal place for this type of information; after all, you want to remind people why they should come to you and / or stick with you. On the other hand, like with so many things in life, you should be careful not to overdo it. When gathering ideas for a newsletter you should always put yourself in the position of the reader and ask yourself the famous WIIFM? “What’s in it for me?” In other words, what’s the benefit for people who have agreed to be emailed by you on a regular basis? (yes, they should agree in some way to receive your marketing communications!).

Treat the contacts in your database as people that are special; because they are. They are the people who want to engage with you. So, give them something special from time to time; invite them to an event and offer reduced (free?) tickets; give them access to materials (e.g. white papers) which others can’t get their hands on; let them have something – e.g. a special offer – which others can’t buy or before others can buy it. These are only examples but I’m sure that if you look at your business and your client base you will find a lot more little treats for your faithful newsletter recipients. Exclusive is the word. So – what’s in it for them?

With any new web build comes the challenge of getting the website out onto the web at large. There are a couple of ways to do this, for instance through traditional marketing or online PPC advertising, but the most effective is search engine optimization. This is an important thing to do and do well, and is also something that an awful lot of people forget about.

While failing to optimize your site will not necessarily exclude you from search results on websites like Google, Bing etc it goes along way to making the process smoother and more efficient. The search engine bots that crawl the net can see the website metadata as well as the page contents, giving your pages and results more context and better relevancy. It also gets your website on there much more quickly so people can start stumbling upon you!

SEO isn’t just for new websites either. Pretty much any website could be improved SEO wise in at least one way. Much like the Aldridge Brownlee website that the team recently worked their magic on. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting the highest percentage of your messages to your subscribers’ Inbox is one of the primary goals from an email marketing perspective. At the same time, it is also the main hurdle to overcome. Innumerable little things can effect whether or not your communications end up in the inbox, or in the junk mail folder of your recipients. The job is made even more difficult as different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email clients have very different rules, filters, procedures and policies on bulk email.

The success of any campaign is influenced by all areas of the process, requiring the close co-operation of everyone from the IT/Server guys to the designers and database handlers.

One of the main contributing factors to the failure of a campaign can be the number of hard bounces and complaint rates. AOL, one of the world’s largest ISPs, recommends maintaining a <0.1% complaint rate. That’s a threshold of 1 in every 1,000 emails that you send out. That may sound harsh, but by adhering to some rules it’s entirely possible.

Even if you beat the spam filter there is no guarantee that your mail will ever be read. Finicky recipients who are unhappy at having received your mail may just click that “Report as spam” button. On local email clients the effect is minimal, but on web-based services like Hotmail or Google Mail, this can have a serious knock on effect for other recipients on the same service as these are tracked, recorded and taken into consideration in future (as if you didn’t have enough to worry about already).

Over the next few weeks I will cover some of the specific problems that the aspiring email marketer would encounter during the course of a campaign, from set up through to the post-send fallout. For this first part we will look at where it all begins: your server and domain.

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