About Jodi Kaplan

How to Safely Send Bulk Emails Without Spamming

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Image via Wikipedia

Have you got an ESP? I don’t mean Men Who Stare at Goats or Uri Geller.

An ESP, in this case, is an email service provider. There are quite a few of them, but how do you determine which is the best for your needs? And why do you need one in order to send emails?

Why you need an ESP

When you first start building your email list, it’s tempting to either try to send from Outlook (or Mail) or to use a free email address like Gmail or Yahoo! The trouble with this is that if you send too many emails from your home (or office), your internet provider is likely to think you’re a spammer.

Yahoo! limits you to sending 100 emails per hour. For Hotmail, it’s 100 per day. Google allows 500 if you send directly from Gmail, only 100 if you send from your desktop.

If you’re going to be sending lots of emails, and don’t want to be branded a spammer, you’ll need to get yourself a dedicated email service provider to do it.

Better delivery

ESPs work hard to make sure that emails sent from their systems get delivered (no matter how many you send at once). And, they’ve got built-in content filters and spam checkers that look at your email (before you send it) and alert you if there’s anything that might cause it to get stuck.

There’s also technical backup in the form of DomainKeys (basically an authentication system that makes sure your message isn’t being sent from a spammer).

Save time and effort on list maintenance

An ESP will:

automagically add/remove people as they signup or unsubscribe
offer you well-designed templates for your signup forms and newsletters (or, often, allow you to upload your own)
help you if you get stuck (videos, tutorials, and even real, live humans
track and graph everything for you – the number of signups, your click rate, bounce rate, and who opened your email

Try it out for yourself. I use (and strongly recommend) AWeber (affiliate link) It’s one of the top email service providers (used by Copyblogger, Darren Rowse, and yours truly). And, it’s only $1 for the first month. Pretty low risk (practically free). And a much better deal than the other kind of ESP.

Tuesday Travels: Get Free, Legal Icons for Your Web Site

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Webtreats 36 Fully Layered Black and Orange Gl...

Image by webtreats via Flickr

Today’s Tuesday Travel is a list of places where you can get royalty free icons. Use them on your website (usually free, sometimes with attribution required). Check each one to make sure before you use them.

Icon Archive (thanks to Michael Martine for pointing this one out). Icons of all shapes and sizes, plus a really cool sliding search feature.

Royalty-free stock icons

Free icons, from shiny to origami, and holidays

Chocolate obsession icon set (I think the name pretty much covers it!).

15 Marketing Terms You Need to Know

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Ever start reading a web page or a tutorial and wonder what the heck the writer was talking about? Wish you had a marketing terms glossary?

Words and phrases such as lightweight code (what, is it made out of feathers?), or nixie (related to pixies maybe?) can be awfully confusing. Here’s a guide to busting some of that jargon.

A/B split: dividing your list (or your web page views) in two pieces. You change one variable at a time (like button color) and test to see which performs better.

AIDA: The four steps to successful marketing: Attention, interest, desire, action

B to B: business to business (companies selling to other companies)

B to C: companies selling to individual consumers

B to G: companies that sell to the government

Call to action: A request to do something (such as “click here”).

Click through rate: The percentage of readers who click on an ad or email link

Copywriting 4 Ps: promise, picture, proof, and push (essentially, the same principle as AIDA) – this means making a big promise about your product, painting a picture of who and how it will help, showing proof it works, and then asking for the sale. Don’t confuse this with sales 4 Ps (which are price, product, placement, and promotion).

ESP: email service provider. A company, such as AWeber, that will manage your email marketing lists and subscriptions for you.

Landing page: a dedicated web page designed to solicit a specific action (such as buying something or subscribing)

Niche market: a specific slice of the entire business pie – focusing one small segment of a market, rather than trying to market to everyone.

Nixie: nothing to do with pixies; a nixie is a postcard or mailing that’s returned because the address is no good.

RFM: recency, frequency, money. A way to rank your clients (or subscribers) based on how new they are (recency), how often they buy (frequency), and how much they spend (money).

SEM: search engine marketing; the equally arcane art of using Google to drive traffic – while this includes SEO, it can also be paid ads (those sponsored ads you see on the right side of Google searches)

SEO: search engine optimization, or the arcane and mysterious art of getting more people to come to your website. The idea is to find keywords with lots of searches (and not a lot of competition)

Got any to add? Or one you found and don’t understand? Add it in the comments.

Do You Know the Email Metrics That Matter?

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Image thanks to Maialisa on Pixabay

Are you overwhelmed by your email marketing? Trying to figure out which email metrics matter? What should you be measuring? Opens? Clicks? Are bounces a problem?

The great thing about email marketing compared to print is that you can get all sorts of data about your messages.

With email you can see how many people received your message, how many people opened it, whether they clicked on any of the content, and if they bought anything from you. With snail mail, we had to wait weeks and weeks to see results. Email lets you do that in minutes.

But which are the email metrics that matter?

Delivery rate

The first thing you want to check is your delivery rate. This is the number of people who actually get your message delivered. If you send a message to 5,000 people and only 3,500 get it, it’s time to change email providers.

A good provider will use various authentication tools to verify that you’re not a spammer, and check your messages for spam before you send them. Also, make sure that you take these steps to stay out of the spam filter.

Bounce rate

The next thing to look at is your bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of emails that didn’t reach an inbox. This can happen for several reasons. Sometimes, the server at the other end is broken. Or, the person could have moved/left their job and not given a new address. And, sometimes, people provide fake addresses just to get your fabulous ebook. If your bounce rate is high, check to see why. A high bounce rate can hurt the delivery of your other messages. It can also cost you money, since many email providers charge by the size of your list.

Open rate

This one is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the percentage of people who open your email. Higher numbers are good. It tells you how interested people are in your messages. Track this to see which messages (and topics) are the most popular with your readers.

It’s also a good idea to monitor when your emails are opened. Do you get better results emailing in the morning? Or the afternoon? Check to see what day or time of day gets the best response and adjust your marketing schedule accordingly.

Click through rate

Click through is the number of people who click on one of the links in your email. This will vary depending on how many links you have, the number of times each person clicks on a single link, and the type of content in your newsletter. Full articles will get fewer clicks than an excerpt which requires readers to click through to a web site to read the entire piece.

The click through rate can also be affected by the quality of your email opt-in procedure, and how interested your readers are in your content. The numbers won’t be perfect, as the email software can only track HTML emails, but they’re a good general guide. Each business and each email is different, but you can get a general idea on how your click through compares to your competition.

Unsubscribe rates

If these are high, you may need to rethink your strategy, or your content. Something isn’t connecting. Have you delivered what you promised in your sign up page? Or have you wandered off to other topics that your subscribers weren’t expecting?AWeber, by the way, has an automatic box that pops up asking readers to explain why they unsubscribed (which is very useful).

Sales

This is the best part. If you were selling something, how many people bought it?

Set up a form to track your sales confirmation page (the last page they see when they buy your product). Add a description (sale!), and the amount. Now you can count up what you earned.

Tuesday Travels: Marketing Ethical Issues

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Image by Jack Spades via Flickr

First, a story, then your regularly scheduled links. When I saw the first post on this list, it reminded me of something that happened several years ago.

I got a call from an agency to work on a long-term project for a big company. So far, so good. They wanted to meet with me first (fine).

They also wanted a drug test. For a freelance project.

I thought and thought and decided no, I couldn’t do it. It’s not right (in my opinion). Some of my friends thought I was crazy. Maybe, but I had to live with myself. And now, your links.

Ethics and Freelancing

Marketing Ethics: Persuasion vs. Manipulation

Blogging Ethics

Ethics Imperative in Social Media

By the way, what do you think? Was I right? Or nuts? And, has anything like this happened to you? What did you do?