I recently picked up the January 2010 issue of FeedFront Magazine and read a very well written article on SEO, by a girl and company I had never heard of. I was so impressed with the way the article was written and the context, I sent a LinkedIN message to her complimenting her on the article and asking to connect. In my invitation, I asked her to let me know when she had time to discuss doing some new business together. I also went to her website but could not find her email address there. Being the self proclaimed social marketing junky, she claimed to be in her article, I assumed I would have a response within minutes. Well 2 months later and no response, it would appear that she has lost a perspective new client. The title proclaims the losing of a million dollar sale, albeit not solely from my new business,  but  really speaks to the theory of not responding to all emails, it could be a million dollars worth of new business and opportunities.

After 10 years of being in the email and Internet marketing industry I have found that poor follow up is a plague that this industry cannot overcome. This isn't an isolated incident, but I have found that a large percentage of people in this industry either do not respond to emails or fail to follow up on leads or even to close a deal.

I make it a point to respond to all requests, either via email, social network, or by telephone as quickly as possible and never let a lead die until it's dead and the corps is starting to smell up my office. The Internet Marketing Industry as a whole is about communicating with new perspective clients, so why don't the people who run it communicate well?

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This article was originally written for and published in FeedFront Magazine.

Email marketing is NOT a science. There is no such thing as 100% deliverability or some magic “Pixie Dust” that can be sprinkled on your servers to help you deliver your email creative into the recipient’s inbox.
There are only “best practices”, which you can follow to help you get the best possible results.

So, the question is, what makes some email get delivered, some go into the spam/junk folder and other email get lost in space? The answer is pretty simple, reputation.

The reputation of your IP addresses will determine, with 95% surety, if, when and how the email you are sending will be handled by an ISP. You may ask, how do I manage the reputation of my IP addresses and where do I start? My answer would be, “Find the right Email Service Provider (ESP)”.

Choosing an ESP with an intelligent, knowledgeable and educated staff is the first place to start. An ESP that works on a flat rate or monthly fee, versus on the amount of email you send is the way to go.

Working with a company that will provide free technical support, monitor and manage your IP reputation, help clean and validate your email data, give you advice on setting up and sending out your campaigns is very important.

There are many companies who will sell you a service and get you setup, but you will find that you are on your own after your check has cleared.

Once you have made it through the process of choosing the right ESP, here is where most will drop the ball. Many do not realize how important it is to put a competent person in the role of the email marketing system administrator.

This role is the key to the success of any email marketing system and whether you make money or not. Many times I have seen this job left to an intern or a receptionist, who hasn’t had experience, training or grasps the type of performance required and thus the program fails.

This is tantamount to letting a monkey with a wiffle bat rebuild the transmission in your car or manage your 401k. You can have the best email marketing system, with white listed IP’s, great deliverable data and the best converting offers on the planet, but if you don’t have the right person running the program, there is no chance to make money.

Think of your email marketing strategy as if you were baking a cake. Each ingredient in the recipe is important to the success of the cake as a whole. If you omit one ingredient like sugar or flour, your cake will not be the success you thought it would be.

Likewise if you skip one of the important steps in your email marketing strategy, you will not get the deliverability, results or ROI you expected. If you do your homework, you’ll be mailing into the world’s inboxes while munching on the best chocolate cake you have ever had and getting paid for it.

With Black Friday, the official start of the holiday shopping season, the day after Thanksgiving, only 37 days away, it’s time to get your message out to the masses. This time of year can make or break your e-mail marketing program and your fourth quarter profits. If you don’t have a plan in place for this holiday season, your way behind. Most marketers have had a plan for the holiday shopping season in place for some time and are getting ready to implement it. Below are some tips to not make any mistakes that could cost you by implementing your plan incorrectly.

Think Quality over Quantity with your email campaigns.

Filling up users inboxes with a higher frequency of your email promotions is not a good idea. Most marketers turn up the volume when it comes to the holiday season. Adding more email to an already junk filled inbox will not benefit you in any way. Think quality over quantity.

What is junk email?

Consumers have broadened their definition of spam to the point where it's essentially "any e-mail I don't want." It’s very easy for a user to click the “spam” button on their email client which will hinder your ability to send email to any other customers or perspective clients within that same domain.

Come up with a fresh, new idea for the holiday season.

Don’t send your customers the same old emails that you have been sending to them all year long. Take the time to come up with something new and fresh for the holiday season. Create a holiday focused offer. Maybe an offer that focuses on a specific demographic and then target those individuals within your existing database or pick from the various categories that Boca Networks can offer, http://www.bocanetworks.com/b2bmaster.aspx, to try and find new customers through promotional emails to non-customers. When it gets later into the season, you can produce some last minute holiday shopping ideas for people you want to promote your products or services to.

Get a jump on the holiday season. Email marketing is the most cost effective solution to be able to reach the masses, especially during the holiday season.

What is a Marketing Moron?

Let’s dumb it down and look at the word “moron” first. I assume after we do that, most can determine what a marketing moron is.

Here is the definition from Wikipedia;

Moron is a controversial term once used in psychology to denote a category of mental retardation.  The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement.  Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community.

Origin and uses:

"Moron" was coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry H. Goddard from the Greek word moros, which meant "dull" (as opposed to "sharp"), and used to describe a person with a mental age located between 8 and 12 on the Binet scale.  It was once applied to people with an IQ of 51-70, being superior in one degree to "imbecile" (IQ of 26-50) and superior in two degrees to "idiot" (IQ of 0-25). The word moron, along with others including "retarded", "idiotic", "imbecilic", "stupid", and "feeble-minded", was formerly considered a valid descriptor in the psychological community, but it is now deprecated by psychologists.

I have been in the Internet Marketing industry for about 10 years. I have worked with some great people who know their stuff BUT the bulk of the people I see in this industry are morons.  Now you might say to yourself, “how can he call such a large group of people morons”? Well, it’s easy. At our morning sales meetings, I usually discuss where we are with open IO’s from affiliate networks and a large portion of the time the answer is always the same, we are waiting to hear back. Communications is a huge part of any business and communicating with your clients and vendors is probably the most important factor in keeping good working relationships intact. Below is a list of common sense items in working with clients and vendors that most people in the affiliate world, at least 75%-80%, don’t do on a constant or continual basis. Are you one of those morons, I mean people?

Do you:

1. Return phone calls the same day
2. Respond to emails in a timely manner
3. Follow up
4. Deal with issues and concerns timely
5. Know your business and what you are selling

These are just a few items in a long list of common sense items when dealing with customers or vendors in any line of business. I guess my biggest concern about marketing morons is mainly pointed at affiliate networks. I am curious if most affiliate networks hire morons to fill seats versus hiring qualified people to deal with their customers and vendors. The biggest bitch from salespeople in my office is; “I sent an IO last week, sent 3 emails to follow up and left 2 voicemail messages and have heard nothing back”. My question is then, “Why did you send them an IO?” and the response is, “Because they asked me to during the numerous phone calls we had after going through all of the details and working out the terms of the deal.”

You may think my article is a little harsh or over the top by including such a large group of people in my definition of marketing morons. You should think to yourself, does this happen to me? Does it take me 3 emails and 2 voicemails to not get a response from an affiliate manager OR am I the affiliate manager who is not responding, am I the marketing moron?

There are many complex issues to be aware of and to understand when contemplating running your own email marketing campaigns, email system and choosing the right ESP.

See my article on “What to know about Email Marketing and choosing the right ESP”, here: http://blog.bocanetworks.com/pt/blog/default.aspx?id=48&t=What-to-know-about-Email-Marketing-and-c .

Once you have chosen your ESP, it is imperative that you discuss how the system works, what not to do and what to do. Make sure that you fully understand the usage of the system and how to successfully launch campaigns and manage the system, before get ramped up to run with it full speed ahead. Most ESP’s have a Tips & Tricks White Paper or another document that will walk you through all of the “Do’s and Don'ts.”

Here is where the problem comes into play.  Many do not realize how important it is to put a competent person in the role of the email system administrator. This role is the key to the success of any email marketing system and If you make money or not.

I have seen too often, this job left to an intern or a receptionist, who hasn’t had experience, training or grasp of the type of performance required and thus the program fails. This is tantamount to letting a monkey with a wiffle bat rebuild the transmission in your car or manage your 401k. You can have the best email marketing system, with white listed IP’s, great deliverable data and the best converting offers on the planet, but if you don’t have the right person running the program, there is no chance to make money. Realizing that the system administrator is a big key to success, here are some other important steps that one needs to do and guidelines to be followed.

1. An IQ of more than 12 is required for an email marketing system administrator.

2. Read the article from the link above.

3. Relevant offers need to be sent to your optin email database. Send people something they can use. Provide them with a reason that they should do business with you; buy your product or service.

4. Don’t use too many graphics. This will cause slow downloads, graphics that overshadow your message, and attachments will turn off readers because they will think that there might be a virus infected payload. Keep it concise and simple.

5. Keep your HTML code clean and make sure you have a good balance of text to HTML within your creative.

6.  Make sure your content is well written, spell checked and has proper grammar.

7. Check your links to make sure they work. There is nothing worse than sending an email campaign that goes to a dead link.

8. Make sure all of your images are showing up and load quickly.

9. Pay particular attention to the "from” line, because often people will determine that they do not know the e-mail sender and delete it immediately.

10. Do not use SPAMMY subject lines. This is an “instant death” when it comes to having your email deleted prior to even being opened or viewed. Use clear, enticing subject lines to get your optins to open and read your offering. You can't get results without a clear call to action.

11. TEST, TEST, TEST and then TEST some more. Set up an AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and a few other free email accounts and add it to your system to be used to TEST each Ad/creative you are planning to deploy. See if and how the email get’s delivered, whether it is into the inbox or junk folder and how it is displayed in each email clients system. Make changes to your creative so your email creative looks the best it can, in all email clients systems.

Boca Networks has been in the email marketing business, a publisher and ESP (Email Service Provider) for 10 years.

I have been in the internet marketing industry for 10+ years. I have seen it grow to an immense industry in a very short amount of time and implode. I have seen hundreds of companies come and go. I was here when the bubble burst and am still here helping companies generate traffic with the best possible ROI. Quality email marketing campaigns are hands down, the best way to drive targeted traffic to your website or offering, that exists on the Internet today. You may argue that Google or search engine PPC traffic is a better way to drive traffic, but I would disagree based on the cost and volumes. Let’s do a little math together and see what the results look like.

For this example I am going to use a program we have called the “Guaranteed Opens Program”. It’s pretty simple to understand. You only pay for email that is delivered to a user’s inbox, opened and read. This program is a great value when compared to a CPM campaign, where if the ESP’s delivery is not good, it could cost you .25 - .50 cents per inbox delivered, opened and read email. The cost of our Guaranteed Opens Program is about .02 -.03 per open, based on volume. Our smallest program is 45,000 guaranteed opens and it costs $1350.00.

Now the math:

45,000 opens (emails delivered to the user’s inbox, open and read) cost $1350.00. Please keep in mind that we have to send a much larger amount of email just to get the 45,000 emails delivered to the user’s inbox, open and read.

If your average open to click rate is 7%, which in this case would be 3,150 clicks to your website, this means that a new visitor to your website would cost you roughly .43 cents. Obviously, you can do the math based on your click to conversion ratio and come up with the actual cost of the new lead, sale or inquiry you would get from this to complete the analysis. Spending .43 cents per click to drive a new customer to your website is pretty cheap when compared to what PPC costs are on Google, Yahoo and many of the other PPC search engines.

Let’s compare a few PPC costs for Google on some pretty high traffic keywords for US only traffic. The costs listed below are for positions 1-3 on Google:

Debt $10.10 - $13.77
Online Education $4.72 - $6.86
Payday Loan $5.56 - $6.95
Cash Advance $5.32 - $6.65
Buy Gold $2.26 - $2.90
Dating $1.91 - $2.39

According to the above stats, to get the same 3,150 clicks from Google, it would cost you approximately $37,800 for ”debt” traffic and for the keyword “cash advance”, it would cost you approximately $18,900. There are many variables that can come into play with any marketing campaign but the numbers above should give you a little insight and speak for themselves.

I have a need to write about email marketing because I read so many posts and articles online that are so far off base and provide bad and erroneous information. I think the biggest factor most people need to understand about email marketing is that it is NOT a science. There is no such thing as 100% deliverability or some magic “Pixie Dust” that can be sprinkled on your servers to help you deliver your email creative into the recipient’s inbox. There are only “best practices” which I am going to lay out in this post. It is important to remember that all email is basically the same. So, the question is, what makes some email get delivered, some go into the spam/junk folder and other email get lost in space? The answer is pretty simple, reputation. Below are the most important factors in helping you determine how to choose the right ESP and understand the fundamentals of email marketing and how it should be handled.

This list is in order of importance:

1. IP Addresses: IP address reputation is the most important factor with any email marketing software or system. If, during your email campaigns, recipients click on the spam button or complain about the email they receive from you, this will hurt your “IP Reputation”. If enough people complain about your email or click on the spam button, this will cause your emails to either go to the junk folder or be rejected all together.

2. Email Data: Your email data or records have to be good quality. If you have co-registration or crappy data, don’t even waste your time. Sending emails to people who want to receive them is the only way to ensure that your IP Reputation stay’s in the good graces of the ISP’s. List cleaning is also a very important aspect of email marketing. If you send 100 emails and 10 of them are to email addresses that do not exist, most major ISP will block your email based solely on trying to deliver to invalid email addresses.

3. The ESP: The company that handles the backend of your system and maintains it on a daily basis is probably more important than the system itself, if it is a decent piece of software. Managing feedback loops, white listing requests, bounce processing, list hygiene, and system maintenance are only a few of the many items that need to be monitored and maintained in order to keep everything running smoothly. Finding a reputable and knowledgeable company is more difficult than it sounds.

4. Email Software: Since Boca Networks, the company that I work for, is an ESP, you would think that I would make our software, eList Manager, the number 1 item on this list. I didn’t because even though I think our software is superior to many other programs offered in the marketplace, it isn’t as important as you think. Obviously you need a quality software system to bring this all together, so I am going to list what I feel are the important factors in choosing an ESP software package, other than what I have listed above that relates to the company behind the software. Here is a list of features that are a must; IP rotation, subject line rotation, bounce processing, open/click/unsub tracking, 1-click unsubscribe processing, fully integrated reporting on a campaign and list level, global do not send lists for the entire system (ie. Do not send emails to abuse@ or @spam.com), easy suppression file uploading, master global unsubscribe importation, time/date scheduling of campaign deployments, multiple users and privileges, spam scoring for creative’s and having a single web based interface to handle a single mailer solution to a system with 50 front end mailers.

I understand that there is a lot more information than I have listed above in garnering absolute insight into email marketing, but I thought I would touch on, what I feel, are the best places to start. Boca Networks has been an ESP and large email publisher since 1999.

The Federal Trade Commission has approved four new rule provisions under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM or the Act). The provisions are intended to clarify the Act’s requirements. The provisions and the Commission’s Statement of Basis and Purpose (SBP) will be published in the Federal Register shortly.

The new rule provisions address four topics: (1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender; (2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements; (3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and (4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

In addition, the SBP accompanying the final rule also addresses a number of topics that are not the subject of any new rule provisions. These include: CAN-SPAM’s definition of “transactional or relationship message”; the Commission’s decision not to alter the length of time a “sender” of commercial e-mail has to honor an opt-out request; the Commission’s determination not to designate additional “aggravated violations” under the Act; and the Commission’s views on how CAN-SPAM applies to forward-to-a-“friend” e-mail marketing campaigns, in which someone either receives a commercial e-mail message and forwards the e-mail to another person, or uses a Web-based mechanism to forward a link to or copy of a Web page to another person. The SBP explains that, as a general matter, if the seller offers something of value in exchange for forwarding a commercial message, the seller must comply with the Act’s requirements, such as honoring opt-out requests.

The new rule provisions and SBP are a follow-up to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on these and other CAN-SPAM topics that the Commission published on May 12, 2005 and March 11, 2004, respectively. The Commission received 152 comments and suggestions on the NPRM and 13,517 comments and suggestions on the ANPR from representatives of a broad spectrum of the online commerce industry, trade associations, individual consumers, and consumer and privacy advocates. The new rule provisions and SBP are based on these comments and suggestions as well as the Commission’s law enforcement experience.

The Commission vote to approve the Federal Register Notice was 4-0.

1. Make your sign-up form easy to find. Remember that nearly every page on your site has the potential to be a landing page, particularly in the case of visitors arriving from search engines.

2. Provide a convincing incentive for subscribers to sign up. Provide good quality content for email subscribers.

3. Don't ask for too much information. It's tempting to ask for more information that might teach you slightly more about your subscribers, but the more information you ask for, the more hesitant many people will be to give up private information and to invest time into filling out your form. Keep it simple. Ask for what you need to email your subscribers with your goals for personalization and segmentation in mind.

4. Use a thank-you page that does its job. The job of a good thank-you page, usually, is to transition subscribers from a Website experience to an inbox experience. Set expectations with subscribers about what they should expect to receive, including what your emails will look like in their inbox, and what they should do with it. This is especially important when using a confirmed opt-in process.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

I’m disappointed that the man named Crusader of the Year by Time Magazine has fallen prey to that affliction of the ego that has body slammed countless numbers of politicians, corporate leaders, preachers and celebrities over the years.

The lust of power makes the man invincible in his own mind and allows him to rationalize lines that the rest of us do not cross. So it’s time for Client 9 to resign and let the NY State legislature get back to being the least productive and most dysfunctional state legislature in the country.

Now that HD-DVD has gone the way of BetaMax, the American public no longer has to be the guinea pig for the Electronics and Media companies that can’t find a way to collaborate. If only the ginormous retailer, WalMart, took a stand on day 1 of these two non-compatible formats and stocked only one of them, how many people would not be stuck with an HD-DVDsaurus waiting to add to our landfills?

If you haven’t yet put your HD-DVD player up for sale on Ebay, don’t bother. Their value just plunged into the bitter pit of obsolete technology on which one million early adopters gambled wrongly.

How will email marketing survive a recession? I think it’s fair to say that no industry is immune to a recession, but email certainly remains a lower cost alternative to other online marketing avenues.

Will advertisers shift more of their compressed budgets to email? It’s proven, reliable and has a predictable ROI. My crystal ball is a little cloudy, but I predict that the few winners to emerge on the other side will be the ones who can anticipate and adapt as the market evolves.

The affiliate Summit is right around the corner and I am trying to set up like 50 appointments.  Any other
city and its easy, in Vegas I keep hearing; 'well I'll be at the $5 black jack table at the Wynn,' 'meet me
at the club at Bellagio,'or the best yet 'I'm not working when I'm in Vegas, my boss will be drunk and
gambling, I'm playing.'

I LOVE Las Vegas like the next person but we still need to get business done so for all of you slackers
out there - PUT ME IN YOUR SCHEDULE!  This is a business trip so business needs to get done.  I have
10 appointments set already and need about 15 more to feel productive.  Please understand I am traveling for
BUSINESS.....Don't forget to add my name to your party list though after all it is Vegas Baby Vegas