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E-Newsletter Best Practices

So you’ve been thinking that maybe you should do an d-newsletter, here are some tips to get you on your way.

1. Make sure that before you start e-mailing and for that matter before you even create your first e-newsletter, that you have updated or created a privacy policy on your website. Your privacy policy should clarify what you will do with e-mail addresses and how you will harvest them. If you will be selling your list or renting it to others, you need to spell that out and allow an opt out before you do that in order to be Can Spam Act compliant.

2. Use a professional subscription service for your list. This will allow for easy subscribe and unsubscribes and allow for users to self manage their subscription. The key to keeping and adding subscribers is to make it easy to enroll and to unsubscribe. Do not use MailMan as your subscription list. If you have ever tried to manage your own subscription through this open source application you will experience a high level of frustration . Once you have used it you will know that you should not use this for your own list. Stay user friendly!

3. Make sure to install an auto subscription box throughout your website. Let your website work for you in getting new subscribers. Personally I have found the best way to build a list is to do a white paper and then require an email address to download the white paper. I have added nearly 600 subscribers to my list this way alone.

4. When you have prospects contact you by email, make sure to collect their email addresses and manually add them to your list. Make sure that you have this covered in your privacy policy before you routinely start to do this to prevent complications.

5. Make sure you understand e-newsletters in today’s world. It is important to understand that e-newsletters can still be great marketing tools in today’s business environment, but the typical open rate will be between 10% to 30%. Don’t expect that everyone will open your mail and be prepared for that. Make sure that this is not your only marketing endeavor. Internet service providers are making the delivery of e-newsletters more and more difficult so make sure that you are using alternatives as well. Some of those alternatives would be RSS feeds of your e-newsletter content, online e-newsletter archives accessed from your own website, and a blog that points to your e-newsletter articles or announces when one is posted. It is very important to note that if you are emailing to a large corporation or any state or federal government entity that the reality is that your subscribers will simply not get your email. It will be filtered at the IT staff level.

E-newsletters can still be great marketing tools for your business but should not be your only marketing vehicle.

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Invitation to Microsoft Analytics Program

Click this link to be invited to Microsoft Web Analytics – Gatineau Beta http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau

Microsoft is testing a new analytics package similar to Google Analytics and you’ll want to try it out. The link adds you to the waiting list to check it out. You will need a MSN adCenter account in order to try the program out. You will also pay $5 for the account.

I for one have signed up to see if the product is better than Google Analytics and what the differences may be. You may want to sign up as well.

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Ding, Dong, The Wicked Witch is Dead- Google Kills the Supplemental Index

Yahoo! Well really Googlehoo!, The Wicked Witch is dead. Google has just announced that it has killed the Supplemental Index.

Google’s Supplemental Index has previously been affectionately known as “Google Hell” and if your site arrived there, there was simply no getting out. There were many tips on the Web that had been widely circulated on how to get out, but the reality was that short of changing the content on every page and even changing your page name and starting all over, you were stuck.

Now, Google has announced in their Search Blog that they have killed the Supplemental Index. In about July this past year Google had dropped the additional descriptor “Supplemental Index” next to search queries which had been the bain of all professional webmasters. After that change, we could only guess by poor website performance if a site had landed in “Google Hell”.

Google has now stated:

“…From a user perspective, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.”

Google has stated that this change has been due to new technology and their unabashed “amazing technical feats” allowing a full search of the entire index for every search query.

So… ding, dong, the Wicked Witch is finally dead! Good Riddance!