If you’re looking for a low-cost and effective way to get your message out to customers and prospects, then email marketing is likely to fit the bill. This series of articles is designed to highlight the key issues - explaining what to do, what not to do, and why. In this piece, the first of the series, we’re looking at some of the most commonly-spotted problems in email marketing, and the ways they can be avoided.

However, if you just need the benefits of great email marketing but perhaps don’t need to know all the ins-and-outs discussed here, then get in touch with us - we’d be more than happy to demonstrate how effective it can be when done properly.

Copy for email

Copywriting for the web has its own distinct set of rules, largely based around hitting your point straight away, avoiding unnecessary words, maintaining clarity and giving the reader a pay-off as soon as possible. You’ll find that these themes come into sharp focus when writing email marketing copy. All too often it is bogged down with a long-winded and dawdling style, and this lack of clarity can effectively kill a whole campaign, regardless of how good your offer is. Just as deadly to email marketing is copy that is too brief, as this can fail to engage readers.

If your marketing email is vying for attention amongst a hundred or so other emails throughout the course of a day then it absolutely must make an impression and stand out - and the copy is a clear opportunity to do this. Your opener is crucial - engage the recipient straight away by making it clear precisely what you’re offering, what the benefit is to them and why it’s worth reading on. If these things aren’t obvious in the first couple of lines then you’ve lost your chance.

Image-heavy mailers

Email marketing that over-employs imagery can look incredibly good, but it can fail to be effective in terms of results for various reasons.

With increased awareness of viruses and security threats it’s quite rare these days for people to have their emails set up to show images immediately. So email marketing that is overly reliant on images is completely dependent on recipients clicking to see them - which they often won’t!

Even if an image-based email does make it through to a viewing, there are several different email clients and systems that display HTML messages in very different ways. Your carefully crafted masterpiece that was designed to perfection might look unrecognisable on certain clients. Be sure to code around this, and don’t leave out any of the popular email clients.

Despite the image minefield, some brands have fantastically effective e-flyers made up purely of images - Schuh is a good example of this, as well as a lot of the high-end fashion retailers. However these mailers work on the strength and recognition of the brand itself, often in the subject line or from field. If a recipient sees a respected and trusted brand name (obvious phishing aside), they’re far more likely to click “show images” or allow the flyer to upload. Once the recipient has seen the email quality, it’s likely to be assigned to a safe senders list from that point onwards. However, if it’s an unknown or unexpected brand sending the email, then no amount of “can’t see this email? Click here” messages will encourage the reader to open it.

It’s best to achieve a balance between text and images, so recipients can see immediately what you’re trying to say and it’ll look the part as well. For more information on this, see our dedicated article.

From fields and subject lines

These two underappreciated factors are the first things that appear in an inbox, so they deserve as much consideration as anything else in email marketing. As mentioned earlier, if used correctly they can instantly win over a recipeint. However, if either of these are fluffed, then you’re risking the failure of the entire campaign, regardless of how brilliant it might be in every other respect.

First off, the from field - it’s not exactly complex stuff, you’re just saying where the email is coming from, but there are definitely some rules you should be following here. Again, if you’re marketing a big brand or respected name then take the opportunity to reference it. Don’t bother with an email address, especially not a clunky “donotreply@” style one. Using names in from fields is an option, but it depends entirely on whether the recipient will be expecting it and will know who the named sender is. A name in a from field can add a neat personal touch in certain cases, and you’ll find that personally written newsletters often carry the name of the author in this field.

Next up, the subject line - this continues to be one of the most poorly executed elements of email marketing, but again is a fairly straight-forward thing to get right. The golden rule here would be, simply, don’t look like spam. Don’t use words like “best” or “cheap”, and avoid full subject lines in capital letters, as these are likely to trigger spam filters and send your marketing directly to junk mail folders. For the same reason avoid using characters such as “£”, “$” or “!” even if there’s an entirely credible reason to do so. Once you’ve got these spam issues out of the way, think about how best to present your message in the most succinct fashion. Don’t make it too long or cryptic. It needs to be quick-fire, contain a selling point or an intriguing line to encourage an opening. It’s a vitally important factor so make the most of it.

Timing

The day and time that you send out your email marketing can play a large role in deciding the end result. Sending out on a Monday morning will all but guarantee failure in most sectors. Think about the start of your own working week… do you have time to peruse and respond to unexpected emails? It’s unlikely.

With newsletter-style email marketing, decide on a regular mailout day and time - and stick to it. Recipients will expect the email to drop into their inboxes at the same time each week, month, or however often you send it, and it’s this regularity that will guarantee and maintain a certain level of interest.

More sales-driven email marketing should be timed around key buying times, depending on the product or service you’re promoting.

Call to action

The last point in any email marketing is the call to action, the element that turns a recipient into a customer. It’s incredible to think that any email marketing could be sent out without a cast-iron call to action, but it does happen.

Don’t leave your reader in any doubt whatsoever as to what they need to do to take you up on your offering. Walk them right through to the phone number, email link or web link that takes them to a conversion. Ideally give them an option of all three, different customers have different preferences so you should cater for them all.

Warmest thanks to all of the clients and partners that we’ve worked with throughout 2008. We hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year, and we’re looking forward to achieving further success for you in 2009.

We’ve got some fantastic new projects in development at the moment, including some major site launches set for the beginning of 2009. Keep an eye on the blog for updates, which will be coming very soon. Our industry articles will be continuing apace in the New Year, with an insider series on email marketing just about ready to get going.

If you’ve been looking at what we do and you’d like your company to be one of our 2009 success stories, then we’d love to hear from you.

Last of all - our studios are closed from 19th December to 5th January - all the best from everyone here at Green Media.

Google’s Matt Cutts had some interesting comments this week on the question “is ranking dead?” in an excellent interview with Mike McDonald from WebProNews, which vindicated our entire approach to SEO here at Green Media.

“I’m not sure I would say ranking is dead but it’s not as important as it used to be,” said Cutts. “The fact is the smart SEOs (search engine optimisation companies) are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversions, they are looking at their server log. It’s great if you’re ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn’t help you very much.”

“The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don’t worry about ‘can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase,’” he added.

These sentiments echo precisely what we’ve been saying here at Green Media for a long time now. We mentioned the problems with purely ranking-orientated SEO in a blog entry back in July 2007, when discussing our own approach to search. As we pointed out way back then, it should always be about conversions and ROI - something that’s only now being acknowledged by the wider SEO industry and those at the very top of Google.

If you’re still using an SEO company that is preoccupied with getting “1st page rankings” over all other considerations, then you’re wasting your time and budget. SEO, like any other type of business marketing, simply needs to be accountable - and there’s no value whatsoever in boasting about a 1st page result on a term that absolutely no-one is searching for, no matter how it’s dressed up or shouted about. When your SEO is delivering massive ROI and genuine business benefits across targeted markets, then you’ve really got something to boast about.

Today’s financial climate demands that you keep on marketing, but it also demands a more pragmatic approach to your advertising in order to continue being effective. Marketing for marketing’s sake simply won’t deliver the results you need now.

Prospective customers are resistant - even immune - to traditional hard sell advertising during an economic downturn, and you could be wasting budget to carry on with the same approach that perhaps worked for you two or three years ago. Think about what you’re offering, and how you can offer it in the most suitable way for today’s buyer.

A recent email marketing campaign for our client at Cloverleaf Honda took a direct conversational copy style, outlining Honda’s response to the credit crunch and showcasing some models with massive savings. This moved away from the typical salesy marketing that a customer might be expecting, and towards a more open tone. We combined the copy with a clearly laid-out branded design and a personalised email subject line, and as a result achieved a click-through rate of almost 30% - smashing the industry average of between 5-10%.

These results show that the customers are still out there - it just takes a different approach to successfully connect with them now.

It’s a rare industry that has remained unscathed throughout 2008, and there’s now a real need to evolve your promotional approach to meet with the changing day-to-day demands of the market. The first thing to consider is the be-all and end-all of your marketing - the customer. Ask yourself - do you know your customer as well as you think?

Avoid guessing what your customers are looking for, as even missing the mark slightly here will cost time and money. It is always worth doing a little research every so often to find out exactly how you should be marketing your product, and it becomes even more important during turbulent times like these. You’re likely to be surprised at how willing people are to give you the information you’re looking for, and a questionnaire on your website or a quick email flyer could be all that’s needed. Everyone’s got an opinion, and most people like the opportunity to express theirs.

It’s hardly in-depth socio-demographic analytics, but you will find out some information that is new to you - something that could help you avoid wasting your marketing budget at a time when it needs to be more effective than ever.

The marketing budget is often the first outgoing to be cut during an economic downturn, but it is almost always the case that any immediate savings will be massively overshadowed by the imminent problems that reduced marketing will cause.

Marketing is absolutely key to your company’s performance, so if anything a financial nosedive like the one that is happening right now should make your marketing budget more important than ever. Your competitors will be cutting their own marketing spend, and when that happens you’ll find voids opening up. It’s up to you to fill these voids and benefit. Cutting your marketing budget leaves the gaps for your competitors to fill, and isolates you even further from your goals.

Your customers and prospects haven’t disappeared - they still exist, they’re perhaps just more discerning than they were earlier. Again, it’s up to you to react to this.

Refocus on what you’re trying to achieve from your marketing. It’s likely that you’ll need to adapt your approach or even your offering, but giving up altogether simply cannot lead to a positive outcome.

Riding out the turbulence can empower your brand in other ways, particularly expanding and consolidating your share of voice (SOV). Eventually once the financial storm has settled, if you’ve stayed the course and been ever-present throughout then this will be abundantly clear to customers and market observers - you’re not meekly emerging from a wreckage like competitors who disappeared by cutting their marketing, you’ve never been away.

Maile Ohye followed up her outbound links article on Google’s Webmaster Blog last week with a succinct explanation on the value of good quality incoming links, and the importance of a well thought-out strategy. It’s another good example of how Google is opening up about its processes, and it also backs up what we’ve said about inbound links for a while now.

Another thing we’ve said over and over on Green Notes is that there’s no secret with this anymore. The whole point of a search engine is to enhance the user’s experience, so if you’re doing something that goes against this then you’re likely to be damaging your SEO potential.

Google Webmaster Blog’s Maile Ohye posted a really useful article this week on the subject of outgoing links on your website. It answers some common questions and worries about adding links, and explains how they can provide a reputation-boosting effect to your site.

The importance of incoming links is well-documented, as are the various processes to follow when developing a link building strategy - but outbound links haven’t been so clear-cut, until now.

Ultimately, like everything else relating to SEO and websites, outbound link strategies revolve around providing the user with the best experience possible - and employing a healthy dose of plain old common sense.

Take a look - here.

There isn’t any single big secret about SEO - it’s largely a combination of clean up-to-date structural coding, good copy, strategised in-depth link building programmes and regularly refreshed content (all things we’re good at here at Greenmedia.) There are so many myths and misconceptions about what makes good SEO, some based on out-dated web practices, lots based on unethical methods and quite a few based on nothing more than bad guesswork and plain ignorance.

In this article we’re covering two topics that regularly crop up in SEO conversations - meta description tags and meta keyword tags. Neither is particularly important these days, but this doesn’t stop them being the invariable reference points for every amateur SEO expert out there. Perhaps it’s just because they sound a little bit technical… who knows?

Meta description tags

This is the copy that can appear on a search engine results page, and is literally just a description of what’s on the page that’s being referenced. The important thing to know regarding meta descriptions is that they don’t have any bearing whatsoever on your search engine ranking. None at all. Despite this, it’s still worth giving them some attention as they may well be the difference between a click-through and being ignored from a search results page. Write at least one definitive meta description for your website, and if your content is diverse enough then write them for individual pages. Just don’t expect that that they’ll boost your search ranking, they won’t.

Meta keyword tags

SEO would be a far easier practice if it was simply a case of filling up your webpages with meta keywords, but the general experience and usefulness of search engines would also go through the floor as everyone would be doing it - which is why it isn’t so simple now. Meta keyword tags are a legacy of what can be called, in web terms at least, the ‘old days’. Things have moved on. They’re essentially irrelevant now, and the major search engines don’t place any ranking priority on them whatsoever. Google and MSN ignore them completely in this regard. Yahoo and Ask do briefly consider what is in the tag, but they don’t prioritise it over the body content of the website and don’t use it at all for ranking.

Always keep in mind that you’re writing for human users and that the goal of the search engine is to maximise the user experience. The whole idea of a meta keyword tag - loading a line of code with words that the user can’t see - goes against this entirely.

We made our annual visit to the Online Marketing & Media Show this week at the Business Design Centre in London, to check out the latest developments in the world of SEO.

Dealing with our level of clientele it’s essential to stay ahead of the game in order to continually deliver the best results. At Greenmedia we invest a lot of development time into refining our SEO - it’s a constantly moving topic that’s always producing new opportunities - so the UK’s biggest industry gathering is naturally the best place to see the latest advancements on a national scale.

We spoke with some of the best people working in the industry today, and a fair few snake oil salesmen along the way. Seeing the latest and greatest SEO techniques in action and hearing explanations from global pioneers, we once again found that here at Greenmedia we’re at the forefront in terms of search potential. In fact, several of the ‘frontier’ search techniques that were discussed at the show were ideas that we’ve been using for some time to great effect. However, hearing fellow experts extolling the virtues of these methods justified where we’ve taken our SEO in the last year, and invigorated us for some exciting developments in the coming weeks and months.

Transparency is a crucial factor of SEO. If a company can’t - or won’t - tell you what they’re doing with your website then it’s entirely possible that they’re winging it or indulging in optimisation of the black hat variety, with neither being acceptable. With this in mind, it was great to hear SEO-guru GarytheScubaGuy openly delivering his top tips for 2008 at the show. Gary’s presentation has become one of the must-see talks at Online Marketing & Media, and it was once again a highlight.

All in all, this week’s show underlined that the world of search really is evolving faster than ever before, which means that if you (or your SEO provider) aren’t looking at the very latest techniques then you’re likely to be left behind.