A gentle browsing led me to a new website that matches brands and agencies, Digital Agency Expert.

Checking it out… will let you know more after registration information comes back from the organisers.

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There’s a nice wrapper around the B2B marketing magazine this month and I sat down for a quiet lunchtime read today.  Nicely constructed to resemble a normal front page with the magazine logo in corporate green, the headline is “Brand Augmentation – experience it with us” and a Gravity Global apple image.

What a great message.  Seemed like a good new business tool for a creative agency.

The copy invites readers to download the app from the Itunes store and ‘point your iPhone at this cover”.  So I did.

Sad failure

The app instructs you to point your iPhone at the black marker on our business card (or the magazine cover).

What is a ‘marker’?

I think they mean the black frame around their name with the apple picture.  A further description says that a globe is supposed to appear and you can point at any one of the offices and see a video about them and get in touch.

I pointed, I waited, I moved my finger across the screen.  It went pink for a bit and then back to showing the photo it was pointed at.

What a shame.

Why the campaign doesn’t work

There are several reasons why this is a failed campaign.  You need to know where your dollars are being spent and how successfully they are returning enquring prospects to your agency.  And this campaign fails on several levels:

1. The “lowest common denominator” factor was not considered.  I used to call this the “David Baker Test” [ask me why].  What about the prospect who either can’t or won’t take the action you request?  How to deal with her.
2. Consider the customer who doesn’t own Apple products – can she see your message?
3. Alternative browsing methods weren’t offered – iPad, iPod, web page, pdf document.  All possible alternatives.
4. Android and BlackBerry versions not offered – an insult to those businesses who didn’t choose Apple phones for their staff
5. Wait and see….. I downloaded it but is there any follow-up or tracking to see if I also visit their site?

So although it’s a great idea to use the tools of expertise you have to sell to clients in your own creative agency promotion, consider your audience and offer a solution that any person with a web browser can use to get to your company information.

You try it… Apple App Store search for Gravity Global World

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Any B2B marketer and any creative agency who works with business to business clients must be using email as part of the marketing plan.  Business needs to add new customers to mailing lists and drive outbound messages for new products and services on a regular basis.  We listened to a great seminar hosted by the UK’s B2B Marketing magazine and have written up the notes for you to download.

Listen again using this link (you have to register with BrightTalk)

Read the slide notes below and if you like them; share with colleagues:

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We had a little hissy-fit rant about Scribd a while back.  I’d like to formally apologise for shooting my mouth off too early.

Scribd has added new features – and they look pretty useful for content creators.

The main thing that has been added is Analytics.  Scribd has made a dashboard that looks a lot like google analytics.

It includes helpful data on:

• Document views by day graph
• Document “reads”, “Embed reads”, “Readcasts” and an overall engagement score
• Views by region / geography
• Search key words
• Top referrers

Which begins to make the service look more useful as a business development tool.

Business model revised

It seems that Scribd has revised its “free to anyone” business model to one based more on “Give and take”.  When it first launched there was little difference between Scribd and Slideshare – both enabled documents to be uploaded and shared.  And its sign-up self-promotion annoyed me.

Recently I was tempted back by a search that linked to a great document upload.  And I found that Scribd now has refined its business model.  You can read any document free.  But if you want to download one – you have to reciprocate by uploading one of your own.

I wonder if it keeps tabs on the number of uploads / downloads each user does…. maybe I should keep a list of future documents to upload but not until I’ve found one I want to download.

Anyone else tried it out?

New Business Development

If yoiu are using content creation as part of your business development tactics this is pretty handy.

1. First – ensure you have lots of links into your website from any documents you upload
2. Second – add to Scribd any of the e-books, how-to manuals and expert guides that you have on your blog or website
3. Third – use good tags and key words to describe them in the upload
4. Fourth – come back and check for views / downloads and other analytics.

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Welcome to Blog number 14  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows.

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• Boosting relevance: why you should learn more about your subscribers.
• Risks and downsides: why you should think twice about custom fields.
• Alternatives to custom fields.
• Custom field usage.
  • Planning.
  • Collection.
  • Reporting.
  • Personalization.
  • Segmentation.
• Thinking outside the demographic box.
• A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Why learn more about your subscribers

The ability to customize your mailings to subscribers (and, via segmentation, which subscribers you mail in the first place), is a more advanced part of email marketing than most casual bloggers will typically reach.

That said, the more you know about your subscribers, the more you can tune your interactions with them, and so the better your results will be. Think for a moment how you might be able to improve your interactions with your readership if you knew more than their email address:

• If you knew buying history you can offer you best / newest customers early bird discounts or special packages;
• If you knew location you could invite people to your next training course, tweet up or conference in that city;
• If you knew their names you could make your mailings more personal;
• If you knew their gender or age range you could write more articles that appealed to that group;
• If you knew their Twitter account you can follow them in social media.

It’s possible to do all of this without having this extra data – typically known as custom fields – but when you can’t target content to the right people at the right time then you’re losing relevance. Relevance is the core benefit to using custom fields: it allows you to really get very focused with your content (especially non-automated delivery), which means greater relevance to your target audience. That in turn leads to better response rates.

Risks and downsides

Before diving into custom fields, however, my advice to bloggers is to think twice about it. As bloggers we’re typically content marketers, and our focus is that content and our audience. One of the benefits of using email marketing (and, specifically, fully automated email marketing like FeedBlitz delivers) is that it’s easy. You can do a really good job with some up-front work and let the automation take care of getting your word out.

This is less true with custom fields. Custom fields take work; it’s going to take more time from you to set up, use and manage them. You need to determine whether that time’s worth it.

Secondly, collecting that data from subscribers when they sign up will reduce your list growth rate, simply because any extra friction in the process reduces your growth rate. Even asking for basics such as a first name or the recipient’s gender will increase the bounce rate from the form. The more you ask for, the greater the hit. Again, up to you if that hit is worthwhile (you can test it, of course!).

Also bear in mind that, unless the extra data is coming from you (e.g. purchase history), user entered data can be unreliable. People lie. They type badly. There may be several ways to enter the same information e.g. in the US, they might report their state as “MA”, “Mass” or “Massachusetts”! That makes extra work (yet again) for you in terms of trying to prevent that or bearing it in mind when you come to use your custom fields.

Finally, various jurisdictions have laws about user data and privacy. If you collect custom data and the user demands you change it, you pretty much have to change it. More work there as well.

So it’s perfectly OK to say, like the idea, I have better things to do and my results are great as is. That said, the larger your list becomes, the harder it is to back fill custom field data if you have a change of heart or hire someone (e.g. a VA) to help you with your blog or list.

Custom field alternatives: Multiple Lists

If you want to segment your audience, bear in mind that there are simpler alternatives to using custom fields on a single list. Use multiple lists! Have one list for group A, another for group B etc., and power both from the same blog using tag filters. Easy to set up, the subscribers self-select into the right list at subscription time, much less work all around for you. For basic segmentation I would recommend this approach for bloggers instead of custom fields.

Basic custom field usage

A primer on jargon

• Custom fields – Data you associate with a subscriber, such as their name, location or birthday.
• Personalization – Using that data to modify the content of your mailing.
• Segmentation – Using the data to select individuals from a list for a mailing instead of mailing the whole list.

Planning

So you’re ready to take the plunge? OK, first you need to do a little planning. Think about:

• What do you want to do with the extra data?
• Where is the data coming from?
• What about existing list members where you didn’t collect the data?
• Is all the data going to be required or optional?
• What data will the user add, and what will you add yourself?

Say you’re running a mommy blog. Most of your readers are going to be, by definition, women. It makes little sense to use gender as a custom field. So don’t ask for it. Make a “Just For Dads” list instead.
You may also have data that you want to associate with a subscriber instead of having them add it themselves. Say you’re a gym and you want to give everyone a special offer on the anniversary of their membership – you can add their “Member since” or “Month Joined” data yourself. You don’t want to ask subscribers when they joined on the subscription form, since they might not be members (yet!) or they might not remember. If subscribers have to start thinking as they subscribe then they’ll lose momentum, and list growth will suffer.

This is also an example of data you might want to hide from a user. Others might include whether the user is a prospect, customer or partner – data you might use to tune a mailing later.

Decide, too, which data is essential to your plans. Name? Gender? Location? Job title? Experience level? Make essential data required, and the rest optional. But be really brutal on prioritization; remember that the more friction you add (required fields) the lower your growth rate will be. On the other hand, the more friction you add, the more committed the subscribers are who join your list. If you’re getting a lot of “tire-kickers” adding themselves, extra friction might very well be a Good Thing. Extra friction (in the form of extensive required fields) is also very useful if your list is being used as a lead generation tool for your business. You want the leads to be as pre-qualified as possible.

Some of the biggest challenges with custom fields, though, come from back filling data from existing subscribers, and what to do when that data (or optional fields) isn’t there. There’s nothing worse than a mailing that starts “Dear Valued Customer” since that actually shows the very opposite. What are you going to do if you don’t have the subscriber’s first name? Can you find a decent default? Can you conditionally exclude personalization elements if there’s no data? Is there a form or link you can mail out to have the older subscribers add their data? Think, too, about segmentation. If you’re going to segment by state, say, what do you do with users for whom you have no state data? Always mail them, just in case? Or never mail them?

Planning is essential. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step.

Collection

For new subscribers, this is pretty easy: ask for the data they can supply at subscription time. If you want to restrict choices to a few, make the field a choice field (such as a list box or radio buttons) to avoid the MA / Mass / Massachusetts issue.

For data, you provide, e.g. a link to your contact management or CRM system, you’re going to have to sync the email database with your CRM’s data. That requires manual or automated import / export – more work.

For the old list, you’re going to have to ask them to add the data. You’ll need a link to your form from your provider and you’re going to have to send them to your readers. Since there’s no real incentive to having existing subscribers tell you more about themselves (they’re already on the list; they’ve done the hard part), don’t expect great results from this. You can offer incentives and prizes to help, but be prepared to live with data gaps. Since you’ve done your planning up front, this won’t be an issue, right? Right! But you can add a link to the form in your template, so you can give readers a chance to provide or update their data with every email.

Reporting

One use of custom fields is not to use them in your outbound mailing at all. You can think of them as simply a one-time survey. Looking at the data can be interesting, though, so don’t neglect reporting once you’ve set up your custom fields. You may well be surprised at what you learn, and that in turn can lead you to produce better, more relevant content, or enable you to reach out to your subscribers in other ways.

Personalization

Not just “Dear Jane” instead of “Dear jane@example.com” (although that’s good too). You can personalize based content based on customer status (regular / preferred), gender and more. So with FeedBlitz, for example, you could conditionally include (or exclude) content from a different feed in your mailings based on the subscriber’s status.

Also understand that “content” isn’t just what’s in your post. It can also mean the HTML you format the post with. So you can change, for example, an image or color scheme based on custom demographic data.
There are dangers here, though. Beware customizing the subject line, as that looks really spammy. Test for cases where the data is missing or defaulted, so that the email still looks good. If you use conditional substitution, test again. If you want to test design changes “safely”, clone your list, place test addresses in there with the test cases you want to use, and test using that list before moving your design into production.

Did I mention this was work?

Segmentation

A great example for segmentation is going local. Say your blog is really focused on events in your area. You can collect the ZIP code from subscribers, and then mail only people in the relevant zip code for info on that area. From a monetization perspective, you can start to sell sponsorships and advertising into your segments once your list gets big enough (but keep the messages relevant else you’ll lose people). Once you get good with targeting and customization you can really make every email work much harder for you.

Again, however, there are traps for the unwary. Segmented mailings are typically slower than “all readers” mailings simply because your email service has to figure out whether each subscriber qualifies; personalization (if you’re using it) adds to the load too. It may not be significant but you should test using a non-time critical mailing to understand the difference.

Secondly, a botched segment mailing can be downright embarrassing. Make sure you have tested / evaluated the segment before you use it with the tools your email service provides; you don’t want to send a blast about an upgrade discount to people who’ve already paid full freight. And it doesn’t take much imagination to envisage even worse scenarios.

If you have a segment you like, save it if you can to make it easy to reuse in the future; it’s both a real time-saver and SNAFU risk reducer.

Thinking outside the demographic box

Demographics – broadly speaking: name, gender, location – are the typical use for custom fields, especially for personalization and segmentation. But you can do more than this. I’ve talked about using internal data (customer class or purchase history, for example) as one type of data. You can use activity stream information (did they click or open an email recently) as another. If you collect twitter, facebook or web site links, you can use that too. In fact, simply knowing a subscriber has a website or twitter account may be enough to work with - you may not need to know the details to get a good segment going.

You can also get completely obsessive about this stuff too, so beware the law of diminishing returns. For example, you can make smaller and smaller segments to get more precise, but if you get to the point where it would be faster to use your personal email app to do the mailing, you’ve gone too far. As with most things in marketing, your mileage may vary. Test, measure and update.

Ultimately, remember that custom fields and the benefits they bring are only really good at optimizing your existing list. If you’re not getting the basics right – subscription form positioning; compelling and relevant content; gripping subject lines; effective calls to action – then you’re missing a bigger opportunity. Plan for custom fields up front if you have the luxury to do so, but I’d recommend that you make sure you’re well past square one with your blog and basic email marketing before you start digging into custom fields and the work they add. Your time is limited and precious; be sure you’re spending it wisely.

A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users

Custom fields are a lot of work, but they can be excellent tools for making better use of your list. The features are complex and can be found under the Newsletters tab at FeedBlitz; click the “Custom Fields” button in the left side bar. Since there’s a lot of ground to cover, there is also a sequence of FeedBlitz-specific tutorial posts on using custom fields and entries in the FeedBlitz knowledge base – click here to start.

Next week we will have  Blog 15 – HTML Email Design Tips

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 13  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 12 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

How to Increase Engagement with a Multi-List Strategy for Your Blog

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• How multiple lists can help you attract and retain subscribers;
• The benefits of multiple delivery schedules;
• Content focus;
• A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the twelfth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Multiple lists from a single blog? You bet! It’s a great idea, and if you’re using automation to send your mailings it won’t cost you any more time and effort to manage once you’re set up.

There are two core ways you can use multiple lists to increase engagement in your readership. These ways are:

• Different mailing schedules;
• Focused content.

Both will help you grow your and retain your audience, but they address different needs.

Multiple Mailing Schedules

When and how often to mail your readership can be the source of much angst in the email marketing community. Many people spend (and maybe waste) a lot of time and energy trying to find the right date and time to send out a blast to get the best results.

For content marketers (i.e. us, bloggers), I say that the best approach is not to get down to this level of detail. There are much more important and valuable things that you can do with your blog and your time. You will be more productive creating great content on your blog, building your community, doing some SEO, guest posting etc. rather than spending hours in reports worrying whether it’s better to mail out Tuesdays at 10am or Friday evenings after work. Focus instead on getting better results from your mailings by writing better headlines, compelling calls to actions, or adding an autoresponder.

That said, though, what you can do (and should definitely consider) is have your subscribers tell you how often they want to be emailed. That way your mailing schedule best matches their expectations and you’re more likely to keep them for longer. Corollary: you’re also much less likely to lose them because they feel swamped by too many emails from your blog or updates that are too slow.

This is where having multiple lists, each with a different delivery schedule, comes in really handy. You can offer a “Fast” subscription, which sends out a mail every time you post. For some people that will be great. For others, though, this will be way too much information and aggravating. Enter the next list, powered by the same blog: A daily digest. Same content, just delivered once a day. You might even offer a weekly wrap as well for those who want to stay in touch but for whom even a daily missive would be burdensome. You could perhaps adjust the slower lists to use abridged content if you typically have a lot of posts each week, just to keep the email down to a reasonable size.

All you have to do is offer the subscriber the choice at sign up time. They self-select into the appropriate list and they’re done. They get what they want when they want it; you get happy subscribers who don’t become frustrated by too many updates, or news that isn’t timely enough for them.

Focused Content

The other core use of multiple lists is to focus the content so that every mailing is relevant to the subscribers. Most blogging systems these days will offer category pages, where all the posts sharing the same category or tag can be viewed at once; it’s great for search and its great for visitors to see all the related posts in a single place.

You can do the same with your mailing lists too. For example, Elise at Simply Recipes has a “recipes only” email list accessible here, as opposed to her main list which is all the posts – not just recipes – on her food blog. Like Elise, you can offer focused content based on what your readers want. There may be fewer updates going out to a more focused list, but you’ll get better engagement with its subscribers with each mailing.

On the other end of the spectrum, Money Saving Mom has over a hundred lists. The site uses both content and scheduling differences. They’re all powered by the same blog, but she gives her visitors a lot of choice in terms of choosing when they want an update and what they want to get. Result? Stellar list growth. See her subscription form page here; it’s really quite the marvel.

Best Practice in Action

Since I’m drawing attention to Money Saving Mom, her site uses a combination of techniques to grow her mailing lists. It’s a fantastic example of how to quickly fire up subscriber acquisition. Use it as inspiration for your list growth, no matter what field you’re working in or how large (or small) your lists are now.

Let’s take a look:

• There’s a financial incentive (sweepstakes) above the main banner for the main mailing list;
• “Subscribe for free updates” call to action in the right side bar for a menu of all lists;
• Autoresponders and custom landing pages driving traffic back to the site.

Dynamic and User Generated Lists

The challenge with offering different content lists have one disadvantage: They require you, the blogger, to know (or to make intelligent decisions about) the different content you should be offering. Sometimes that’s hard to do, and as your site grows you may forget to update the mailing lists to include your new posts. What to do?

Well, with luck, your email service has an API that you can use to let the users create their own lists on the fly. You can then, with a little back end or client side scripting, have the subscription form on any one page offer an automatic subscription to that page’s tags. You can do the same for search functions too. That way you can ensure that the content is always relevant – the subscriber picked it themselves!

For FeedBlitz Users

FeedBlitz makes creating additional mailing lists from a single source easy, so if you’re also a FeedBlitz user read on to see how to set up multiple lists for your blog in just a few steps.

The easiest way to create multiple mailing lists is to start with your main list that you’re happy with. Then go to Newsletters – Settings – Advanced Template Editor and make that template your Master Template. That means that all other lists you then make will use the same design as your main list by default, which gives you great brand consistency and saves a whole boat-load of time.

Then clone the list via Newsletters – Settings – Clone. It creates a copy of the list and its settings, but does not copy subscribers. If you’re creating a new delivery schedule, pick the new schedule you want as part of the cloning process. It’s that easy.

If you want to create focused content specific lists, again clone the mailing. Then go to Newsletters – Settings – Content Settings for your new clone, and either:

a) Add tag filters to include / exclude categories from the mailing; or

b) Change the article source URL to be the category RSS feed for the content.

Don’t forget to change the title of the mailing to match the content, and you’re done.

If you want to get all techie and use the API, head over here to the Knowledge Base for the documentation – you need to use the publisher ID parameter to link the subscription to your account.

Finally, freshly minted mailing lists in hand, you need to update your forms to offer your new alternatives. Since most sites are not offering hundreds of different choices, FeedBlitz can create a form for you that automatically updates itself as you add new lists. Go to Newsletters – Forms – Subscription Forms and, from the right hand side of options, choose “all public” as the lists to include. Update your site with the code and that’s that. (If you want to exclude a list from the automatic form, mark it as private at Newsletters – Settings – Content Settings – The Basics).

Next week we will have  Blog 14 – The Prizes and Pitfalls of Personalization

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 12  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 11 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn the content triggers that can lead to your mail being junked, even when you’re using a high-reputation mailing service like FeedBlitz, and what to do about it.

[This is the eleventh article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Blogs are Email Marketing Accidents Waiting to Happen

When you blog and send your words of wisdom out to your subscribers, you are not only a blogger but also a marketer. You may not like to think of yourself that way, but it’s basically true.

The thing is, of course, is that most bloggers are untrained as marketers. Specifically, we’re largely not trained as email marketers. We put up our subscription forms and hope for the best. Usually, that’s fine.

But sometimes that lack of expertise can hurt, because it can lead us to create content that ends up setting off content filters. It’s actually all too easy to do, in fact, because in social media we can easily add widgets and plugins that are designed for the web, but which can completely foul up your feed and eviscerate your mailings. Blogging and social media enable us to make the kind of “rookie” error that a professional, corporate email marketer would never let see the light of day.

There are also problems that can creep in because of design decisions that may render your email unreadable and therefore useless; although I’ve touched on these before I’ll go over this ground again in a little more detail.

Hold On – Isn’t Reputation King?

Ah yes, indeed it is (You have been paying attention! Thanks!). You’re not going to get your blog’s mailings anywhere without using an email provider like FeedBlitz with excellent sender reputation and low complaint rates. Having a good sender, especially one that’s on white lists and feedback loops (again, you-know-who), does a lot to eliminate the risk of content rules routing the email to junk.

A lot, but not necessarily everything. Basically, when your email is run through the inbound ISP’s content filters, a score of some sort is applied to it. Let’s say that having a high score is a bad thing, and the higher your score the more likely your email is going to be flagged as junk. Worse, if your subscriber uses a separate email app (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird etc.) to read her email, that app knows absolutely nothing about sender reputation. Your email is downloaded to your email app, and the only tool it can basically apply to that inbound mail to stop spam is content filtering. So it refilters your messages again, but this time you don’t benefit from the trusted sender advantage.

How Content Filters Work

When your email arrives at the ISP from a sender with a great reputation, it benefits by having its score reduced somewhat from the get go. It might benefit a little; it might benefit a lot. Unsurprisingly, ISPs don’t share their rules, but open source projects like Spam Assassin work this way. Anyway, using a service like FeedBlitz enables you to start with a reduced baseline spamminess score before the content filters go to work. They raise your score and finally, based on that score, your email is sent to the inbox – or to The Other Place.

Usually, reputation trumps content (i.e. your baseline benefit of using a reputable sender massively outweighs content analysis) unless you are, in fact, writing something spammy. Our experience is that, even for our frugal deal bloggers, who are always talking about free this, 20% off that and sample the other (generally spammy content phrases), their email usually gets straight to the inbox, no problem.

So why fret about content then? Well, some kinds of content will greatly raise your spamminess score. Another is that the ISP’s content filters aren’t the only ones your email has to pass before it gets to the inbox; you need your email to be able to get past the desktop software filters I mentioned above too. Since trusted sender doesn’t apply here, it’s possible to lose the battle for the inbox at this very last stage.

To avoid that you need to steer clear of the Three Danger Zones of Spamminess. Grab your online GPS and read on! We have a map…

Danger Zone 1: The Subject Line

The first thing to realize is that your subject line will be scanned by content filters as well as the body of the email itself. A truly spammy subject line will get your mail junked just as much as talking about dodgy pills or offshore banking accounts where you can net bajillions o’ bucks in the body of your email.

So as well as following the tips in an earlier LBB about keeping subject lines short, imperative and attention-grabbing, avoid these errors:

• DON’T SHOUT.
• Especially don’t shout FREE, SAMPLE and % OFF.
• Don’t over use exclamation points!!!!
• Don’t over-use other symbols $$ #!% in your subject line either.
• Phil, don’t personalize the subject line with the recipient’s name.

The last one may seem counter-intuitive; after all personalization typically increases open and response rates. But mail whose subject line starts with “Yourname, blah blah blah” is almost always spam and will be treated as such by the filters. By all means personalize the subject if you can, e.g. “We recommend this zoom lens for your Nikon D40 camera” if your recipient bought a D40 from your store recently. Just don’t use their name in the subject line.

Danger Zone 2: Accidentally Spammy Content

Here it gets more complicated. Not only are content filters (and I’m including your computer’s anti-virus software in this category) looking for keywords, they’re also looking to see whether your message might be malware (a virus). Sometimes the most innocent things can trigger alarms, leading to the junk folder or scary security alerts. (I’m not intending to cover all the ins and outs of content filters here – life’s too short! Just the pertinent parts a blogger can easily foul up on).

A quick technical detour is in order for a moment. The vast majority of email today is HTML email; mini web pages, in effect. HTML is made up of tags that produce your text, break it into paragraphs etc. All handled by your blog automatically and then converted to email by services like FeedBlitz.

But some tags have been abused by viruses and other villainy to the point that email apps won’t display them (see this knowledge base article on why video typically won’t work in email, for example, and how FeedBlitz saves the day for video posts). This especially applies to tags for JavaScript, forms and what are called IFrames.

The reason why you need to care about this is that the vast majority of blogging widgets use – guess what! JavaScript, forms and IFrames. If those widgets live on your blog’s sidebar and not in the post then you’re fine. But if you do have these tags in your post (or they’re added to the feed by a “helpful” plugin or widget on your blog) then they won’t work in your email and they probably won’t work for your RSS readers either. This is why blogs and bloggers are so much more likely to fall afoul of content rules than professional email marketers: it’s simply too easy to break them with all the cool toys social media let’s us add to our sites!

But script doesn’t work in email, so ad networks and other active content won’t work. A preponderance of script will damage your spamminess score badly. If you do insert a script-based object into your post (e.g. a survey), make sure that it has a noscript tag that will offer email and feed readers a useful alternative. FeedBlitz will help here – it strips script from your content before it mails it out in an effort to increase deliverability and reduce risk for the reader.

IFrames can show up with some affiliate programs and other add ins. While they’ll probably pass muster with a content filter, your reader’s security software will probably be very unhappy seeing an iframe in your email if that iframe references a page that isn’t on your web site. Some Amazon affiliate links for specific books are iframes and can fall into this category, leading to scary, scary security alerts (almost always false alarms, but that’s life) when your email is scanned by the subscriber’s anti-virus app. Use images or static inline code instead; just say “no” to iframes in your posts.

Then there’s forms. Don’t put whole forms in your email. They’re unlikely to work in many email systems (but will probably display just fine, creating much subscriber frustration when they fail to work). If you want a subscriber to fill out a form, use the mail with a compelling call to action to drive them back to your site instead.

Remember: You’re fine if your gidgets, gadgets and doohickeys are in side bars etc. It’s when they get into the actual post content itself that you have to be careful.

Finally, there are bad neighborhoods. If you link to a bad neighborhood (or what the content filter thinks looks like it’s going to be a bad place to send a reader), your email is going to be junked. This did, in fact, happen to one of our clients; Yahoo was sending their email to junk consistently whereas none of our other clients was having the same problem. The issue boiled down to exactly one link in their email. Sent without the link, the email landed in the inbox perfectly, every time. With the link, away to junk it went, every time. There was nothing wrong with the link (or the site it linked to) per se; it just happened to push Yahoo’s content filter over the edge.

So sometimes you can simply be unlucky; it happens. But if you’re using an ESP their support function or professional services group may be able to help.

Danger Zone 3: Graphic Design SNAFUs

Speaking too Softly and Shouting Too Loudly

Content filters look to see if they think you’re trying to hide content from the user, because doing so is inherently suspect. So very small fonts, colors that are the same as – or very similar to – background colors are all flags on the play. Don’t do it.

Ditto for very, very large fonts and over use of bright, attention grabbing colors are also flags. Anything SCREAMING FOR ATTENTION is going to bump your spamminess score heavily in the wrong direction, so nix the 72 point bold red font with the yellow background, OK? Keep the graphic design tone in a normal voice and everything in plain sight and you’ll be fine.

Unfortunately, there are other ways graphic design can mess things up just by accidentally crippling readability, especially for older email clients and many webmail readers.

Dark Backgrounds

Some email apps won’t display backgrounds, especially if the background is an image and not a solid background color. Since you have a dark background and therefore light text on it, without a dark background your light text is now displayed on a white background. It’s illegible now! We recommend using a light background and dark fonts for your copy all the time; you can surround them with images and backgrounds that won’t affect readability if they’re not displayed, but will still look right when thy are.

Using Styles that Aren’t There

Styles and stylesheets, a.k.a. CSS, allow graphic designers great control over how web pages display online. In email, though, not every email app supports all the CSS your designer puts in. Worse, if your post uses styles that are only mentioned in the web site but not defined in the post itself, your feed and emails are not going to render the way you intended at all. This is why, for example, may WordPress blogs specify floating images online, but in feeds and emails they don’t wrap properly; the stylesheets aren’t there to tell the subscriber’s app how to display the image, so it uses the default. (That’s why FeedBlitz has a set of template tags to force images to wrap the way you want, even if they don’t start out that way.)

And that’s the best that can happen. If your post inadvertently uses a style that’s used by your subscriber’s webmail or feed reader, your post is going to use that style. Results: who the heck knows! Probably something that will make your subscriber very unhappy. Ask your graphic designer not to use obvious CSS class names like “header”, “footer” or “style1″, “style2″ etc. – they’re much more likely to conflict with a webmail reader’s CSS namespace if you do. Make class names more specific to your site and you’ll avoid this kind of naming collision.

Too Complex HTML and CSS

Finally, don’t use overly complex HTML and CSS positioning within the post to manage your content. Keep post HTML really, really simple. The more complex it is, the less likely it will be faithfully rendered on subscriber email apps. Gmail, for example, is simply awful IMHO at rendering anything beyond trivial HTML content even with styles.

KISS, though, and you’ll be fine!

The Good News on Graphic Design

Once you have a graphic design in place, test it. If problems occur, fix them before you go live with the design. When you have the design working and rendering acceptably across the board, the good news is that you’ll have avoided the majority of graphic design risks mentioned above, permanently.

Whitelists Solve (Almost) Everything

If you are white listed in your subscriber’s email systems (ISP and desktop app, if applicable) then you are going to pretty much avoid all of content filtering problems. Always ask to be whitelisted when your subscribers join your list or interact with a landing page.

Next week we will have  Blog 13 – One Blog, Many Lists, Much Success

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 11  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 10 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In lieu of this week’s scheduled List Building for Bloggers post, I want to instead focus – yet again – on permission and why, in particular, simple CAN-SPAM compliance is not a defence against being labeled a spammer.

The background is this. FeedBlitz‘s quality monitors suspended a new account yesterday for complaint rate issues. We engaged with the list owner who complained that this was unfair, how could we, in all the years they’d been emailing they’d never had more than a few complaints a week etc. etc. And, besides which their mailings were legal so we should not suspend the list.

They then quoted an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on CAN-SPAM, thus:

There are no restrictions against a company emailing its existing customers or anyone who has inquired about its products or services, even if these individuals have not given permission, as these messages are classified as “relationship” messages under CAN-SPAM

And I agree – their mailings were legal. The complaint rates showed, however, that too many of their “subscribers” felt their mailing was spam. Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right.

As it turns out, some members of the list were acquired from people who’d bought products from this publisher, as well as online subscribers. Much as being in a social network doesn’t give you permission to mail someone, nor does their buying a product and parting with an email address as part of the process give you permission either.

Permission must be explicitly given to you by your subscriber for your marketing mailings to be successful and minimize complaints. Now, you can use the purchaser’s email address without that permission for what are called transactional mailings (e.g. “Your order just shipped” or “How well did we take care of you?”), because they are relevant to that specific business transaction between you and the purchaser. You just shouldn’t add them to your email marketing database and start hitting them up without permission, and you shouldn’t use that email address outside the context of that transaction.

Legality is necessary, but not sufficient

But why?

That’s a fair question.

The answer is because the receiving ISPs don’t care about legality as a deliverability criteria. What they ultimately care about is customer retention, and one of the things that turns into in practice is trying to stop spam from reaching their users’ inboxes. Less spam = happy subscriber = recurring revenue for the ISP.

And how do they stop spam? By applying filters based on sender reputation and, after that, content and subscriber preferences. What determines reputation is a while laundry list of factors such as complaint rates (which are driven by permission, relevance and timeliness), bounce rates, how often a sender mails an address that they’ve been told is dead, sending volume, spam trap hit rates, email header and content structure, authentication and more. We at FeedBlitz take care of all this so you don’t have to. It’s what we do.

Critically, note that not one, not one of these factors is affected by CAN-SPAM compliance and legality. See? Having your email be legal is pretty much irrelevant to the receiving ISP. Legality is simply not a criteria they apply to determine whether your email is accepted, routed to junk, or (ideally) sent to the inbox.

In other words, your deliverability is not affected by what CAN-SPAM says you can legally do. CAN-SPAM compliance means that you aren’t violating the law; that’s all.

Compliance does not mean your email will be delivered. It does not mean that your email isn’t spam. It does not mean that an ESP has an obligation to send it. It does not mean that an ISP has an obligation to deliver it.

What matters is whether you are following email marketing best practice so that the metrics the ISPs care about are good enough to get your message to your subscriber’s inbox.

Which is why FeedBlitz – and other high quality email senders – coerce you as far as we can into following best practice because of the way we do business, and why we at FeedBlitz monitor metrics and enforce them for everyone daily. As a blogger, you want that from your email service, because (a) you want your own emails to have the best chance of getting through, and (b) you don’t want a rogue mailer on the service wrecking deliverability for everyone else (specifically, of course, you). Quality counts.

Seeing the invisible complaints

So, then, what about the publisher’s assertion that they didn’t get many complaints before? Well, that’s because what an ESP (email service provider, like FeedBlitz) and ISPs call a complaint is someone hitting the “spam” button in their email app. When this happens, messages are passed from the ISP to the ESP via what’s called a feedback loop, telling the ESP to drop the subscriber from the list. When we get a complaint like this, we remove the subscriber from the list and send you this message.

The crucial part to understand is that the feedback loop mechanism does not extend to individual bloggers and publishers. You, as an individual, will not be notified by a receiving ISP that the subscriber has hit the “spam” button (gmail is an exception to this rule if you structure your emails correctly, which you’re almost certainly not doing since it’s a function of the SMTP header).

A feedback loop is a service to service communication only. Moreover, accessing a feedback loop as an email service is a privilege, not a right. ESPs have to earn their way onto feedback loops by having a track record of good sending behavior (we’re on them of course!). So what we call “complaints” are feedback loop notifications, which are very real and are, yes, complaints. But they are invisible to you, the blogger, until you use an ESP like FeedBlitz to run your mailings. Unfair? Maybe. The way it is? Yes.

So, to be clear, what we report to you as a complaint is NOT a subscriber hitting “reply” and saying “that mail stank, remove me from your list” – you’ll get very few of those, I expect, just like the publisher of the list we suspended. Remember that what we’re reporting are feedback loop metrics (“spam” button hits). You’ll never know about these “spam” complaints until you use a reputable email service like FeedBlitz which will track those metrics for you. When you do switch to a quality, supported email service like FeedBlitz – and you will eventually because you want high quality automated email production and sending with great deliverability – you may be in for a rude awakening if you don’t have a properly permissioned list, which is what happened here. The publisher simply had no idea of the true complaint rate because they didn’t have access to the same level of data that we do.

Should you get that rude awakening, for crying out loud don’t shoot the messenger! Don’t blame the ESP for revealing the ugly truth about your mailings because they actually care about quality and have taken steps to inform you of the fact. Bear in mind the reason you selected that ESP in the first place (it’s a little like the old joke: Don’t complain about your wife’s judgement, look who she married). If you want great deliverability (and who doesn’t?), you have to play by the rules.

So if you end up with a quality notification, change how you acquire subscribers, ask for help and take your ESP’s advice. Your ESP will probably help you because they want to keep your business if your mailings can be brought quickly into line. But they can only help you if you’re prepared to listen to the metrics, the advice and lose your sense of entitlement simply because your mailing is merely legal.

Remember, flagging an email as spam is the subscriber’s call alone; your opinion doesn’t count. The ISPs are their gatekeepers. Use email marketing best practices and you’ll be successful with your campaigns, the ISPs and your ESP.

And if you don’t? Well, just don’t complain that it’s legal so that’s OK.

It isn’t.

Next week we will have  Blog 12 – Are you in the Three Danger Zones of Spamminess?

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 10  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 9 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

The Right Way and the Wrong Way to Integrate Social Media Messaging and Email Marketing

Or, to paraphrase the mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “just because you could doesn’t mean you should.”

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• The Wrong Way to integrate social media contacts
• The Right Way to integrate social media data with your blog’s email marketing

Yup: This one is that black and white.

[This is the tenth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

Integrating Social Media Messaging and Email: The Wrong Way

Permission and relevance are the keys to successful list building, with timeliness following closely behind.

Permission though, needs to be explicitly granted. I’ve covered this before in previous List Building for Bloggers posts. I emphasize it frequently because it is essential to your success as a blogger in building your list and getting your message delivered.

Social networks, increasingly used for commercial purposes, rely on email and other messaging to inform you of updates. They also can enable you to email your contacts / friends / fans / followers – and with that functionality comes the very strong temptation to cross the permission line. The social networks, after all, want you to connect with your contacts, and they have features that exist for expressly this purpose.

So let’s take your friends on Facebook. One of the things you’re probably able to see is your friend’s email addresses, unless they’ve been very restrictive in their privacy settings. So you can, in theory, harvest these addresses and add them to your mailing list. Because they’re your friends, it’s OK, right?

Wrong.

Just because someone has made you a friend doesn’t mean you have permission to add them to your list. A social media site isn’t a personal CRM (custom relationship management) database. Sure, mail them relevant social stuff -and encourage them to join your list – but use the social network itself to do the messaging. Anything that even smells of mass mailing outside of the network itself is spam, plain and simple.

Similarly with your fans – some may allow you (either by design or sloppy privacy settings) to see their email addresses. Again, don’t add these addresses to your mailing list. Even if they’ve become a fan of your business Page on Facebook, it is not permission to import them into your list. Pressing “like” for a page is nothing more than an electronic congratulatory pat on the back; don’t misinterpret it as a carte blanche to deluge them with email. You should do that with status updates and wall posts instead, which is the right way to keep them informed.

Another path to abuse with Facebook is the event. As others have noticed, messages from Facebook itself have excellent deliverability. If you can “hijack” that then you’re pretty sure your message is going to be read. The unethical have started to do this and I’ve seen training videos online on how to do it. Ugh.

By all means create legitimate events that are relevant to your Fans and promote them. Don’t fake it, and don’t (ab)use Fans from Page A to promote the unrelated business from Page B. Keep your messaging to what’s relevant.

Facebook also allows you to import addresses into events, up to 5,000 at a time. If you’re not already a fan, Facebook invites you to become one. I personally find this distasteful. Yes, I agreed to be on your list. But I don’t want to be a Fan of your Page. If I did, I’d have become a fan already, see? Trying to force me into it? Not cool.

If you want to promote your event to your mailing list, use your mailing list! And by all means have a call to action in your mailing to “Visit us on Facebook” to make it easy for subscribers to like the page. Link to the event on Facebook. But trying to coerce me into becoming a fan via import? From my perspective, it will have the opposite effect. I’ll be off your list ASAP, nor will I attend your event or like you page. It boils down to respect for your audience – if you don’t respect me and the permission I gave you, I’m out of here.

Same with LinkedIn. Agreeing to share professional contact information is not permission to add the contact to your mailing list. Don’t mass mail your LinkedIn contacts via your list – don’t add them to your list at all! But you can (and should) list your subscription page on your LinkedIn profile, and occasionally set your network update to invite your contacts to join the list. Just don’t overdo it.

Integrating Social Media and Email: The Right Way

Is all lost? Not at all. There are plenty of ways you can do this right.

You can use social network features to communicate properly, respectfully, with your network (and with those outside it) using those networks. We all know the rules of the road on each platform. Follow them and market / sell / promote away! Good luck! It’s worth it! You can (and should) use social media to encourage new subscriptions (read the earlier posts in this series!).

You can also use social networks to find out more about email addresses that you have properly acquired.

Let’s say I add myself – phil@feedblitz.com – to your mailing list. You don’t know too much about me. But if you can find my email address in your contacts at LinkedIn, or as a Facebook friend, you would know that I am male, my full name and other personal information. It is OK to grab that data – I have voluntarily made it available to you or to the world – and you can append it to your mailing list. Now you can personalize your mailings to me using my name. I’d probably like that. I’d much rather be greeted as “Dear Phil” than “Dear Customer.”

Why is this OK? Because the email address (and my permission to use it) came first. You’re backfilling with other data you also have permission to access. In other words, you’re not adding me to your mailing list; you’re just finding out more about me. No permissions about my mailing preferences have changed or been assumed or implied.

So you can use social networks and other public data to find out more about your list if you want to put the effort in. That’s OK, as long as you get explicit permission to mail first.

You should not start with demographic data (e.g. a name) and then find an email address and add it to your list. That’s spamming.

Or, let’s say Joe@MegaCorp.com was on your list, properly permissioned. You find out from Facebook that Joe has left MegaCorp and is now at AcmeWidgets. Should you update your email list to Joe@AcmeWidgets.com? No. You don’t have his permission unless you’ve heard from him that it’s OK to update your list.

What you should do instead is send him a message via Facebook and say “congrats on the new gig, may we update our mailing list with your new address?” It’s perfectly OK for you to solicit permission within the context of the social network as long as you’re being respectful and following the rules of the road.

Let’s say Joe says “Don’t add me to your list, I’m in a different area now, but feel free to contact my replacement, Mary@MegaCorp.com” you cannot add Mary to your mailing list. She needs to give you her permission to do that; a third party (Joe) cannot. So fire up the phones or a personal email to Mary, introduce yourself and start from there. You can’t assume implied permission simply because Mary replaced Joe functionally.

Next week we will have  Blog 11 – CAN-SPAM: Being Legal is Not Enough – A Rant

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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