Rand’s article raises some valid points about the SEO industry. Now that other forms of advertising and sales channels have slipped up a bit due to their high costs or lower ROI, online marketing – including SEO, is taking more of the marketing budget pie in a lot of corporate environments. Internal marketing departments and external marketing agencies are having to prove their worth more, now that budgets are getting stretched and squeezed to their fullest. If a channel isn’t accountable for spending vs. sales then the likelihood that it will survive this downturn is unlikely.

Also, SEO is coming out of the shadows. As myths get debunked and education is expanded to business owners and marketers, true SEO is gaining ground as a viable marketing initiative. Of course there are still gamers, hacks and snake oil salesmen out there and until our industry grows up a lot more and sets some standards the fight will rage on between white hat and black hat SEO.

On the other side of the fence Ms. Callow discusses the benefits of search marketing or PPC advertising. Which is one arena where we have seen tremendous growth in the last several months. Of course a majority of this growth can be attributed to the holiday season, as we handle pay per click advertising for several online retailers. However it is not just retailers looking to leverage this channel over traditional advertising – many of our b2b customers have been asking about it as well. I believe Ms. Callow nails the reasoning for this perfectly in her article.

Often marketers are attracted to PPC advertising due to its inherent benefits such as advanced targeting, accountability and cost effectiveness. With PPC advertising you can start or stop ads at any time, run them only when you know people will be looking for your product or service, target by geographic region (down to the city level) and attract customers using their nomenclature at the exact instance of their interest and query. With advanced web analytics you can track click to conversion metrics to further account for each dollar spent vs. each dollar generated.

There is also a “safe” factor to PPC advertising. Marketers know that they can invest a minimal amount upfront and give it a test run. If they feel it is not working for them they can stop all ads and outgoing costs instantly or they can retool ads and spend more time doing keyword research to find better converting terms. Right now these are especially attractive features.

Don’t Stop at SEO and PPC Advertising

The only thing both of these articles are missing is any mention of other online marketing initiatives, like permission based email marketing. Email marketing is still a tremendous way to market on a very cost effective platform. It literally costs pennies, and in most cases fractions of pennies, to leverage an internal customer or lead list that may be gathering dust and turn it into a powerful customer relationship management channel and sales tool.

So if you are not already involved in online marketing, you better get your move on! You are already losing ground, market share and revenue to your competitors if you are not actively working the online channel. In all market conditions it is a powerful marketing tool, but especially during an economic downturn.

Pick an email vendor to send the campaigns.

One of the worst ways try to send mass emails is through your desktop email client. Many businesses simply copy and paste contacts from their address book into a BCC email and send it out. With this method you run the risk of many people marking the email as spam. This reflects badly on your domain with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and they could blacklist your domain for these practices.

Use a reputable email vendor such as Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact or Newsberry to handle ISP relations and help ensure delivery. These companies also offer very good reporting after your campaign has been sent to let you know how many people opened your offer or clicked on a link inside the email – something you can not do with a BCC email.

Choose your content and subject line carefully.

Even if you use an email vendor your message could still be flagged as spam by the ISP or recipient, so you want to choose your content wisely and write a compelling subject line that will clear spam filters and get recipients to open your message. It is not a bad idea to work with a copywriter that has experience in this area. Be sure to avoid the top 100 words you shouldn’t use in email subject lines if you plan to do this yourself. Couple specials or promotions with messaging on your website or in your store. Get creative with your messaging and use this special time of the year to push more sales (people love sales!) for things like After Christmas Specials and New Year Blowouts.

Choose a compelling design.

While all of the email vendors listed above have pre-built templates you can use, they remain pretty generic. Just slapping your logo into one of them can reflect badly on your brand identity. If possible work with someone who has experience with email marketing design and building templates that will work in all email desktop clients.

Choose your delivery time and day.

Different industries have different best practices for delivery times and days of the week. Many retailers have their best success by delivering in the afternoon and some do very well with Friday or weekend email blasts. Corporations with a b2b focus usually fare better with a morning delivery Tuesday through Thursday.

Scrub, rinse and repeat.

After your email campaign goes out you can review the report you get from the email vendor to see your open rate, bounce rate, and click through rate. Remove the bounced email addresses from your list, review your content and subject line, make needed adjustments to the message and prepare a new campaign.

Send out email marketing campaigns on a schedule that makes sense for your business. If you are just sending an email newsletter, once a month is probably good. If your store offers weekly specials then send once a week. Any more than once a week you run a serious risk of turning customers off to your message and business. This also increases the risk that you will get marked as spam or have people unsubscribe from your offerings.

By following these few simple guidelines you can maximize your return on investment with cost effective email marketing campaigns and have a stellar holiday season!

You can shift your marketing dollars away from traditional print and direct marketing to internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and PPC advertising. As we say on our solutions page, your website is the core to all your marketing initiatives. It is the only marketing tool that gives you direct, almost real-time, feedback of marketing campaigns. No more guesstimates as to how that direct mail campaign went or how many people even saw your ad in the yellow pages, let alone called you because of it.

With the tracking and analytics capabilities of the internet you know almost instantaneously how well your marketing collateral, ad buys, or email campaign was received. You get real numbers allowing you to understand where you should invest more or curtail other initiatives. If you are not receiving statistical data from your web development company, internet marketing firm, or email marketing agency you should probably seek additional vendor help in those areas.

Now more than ever it is critical to be strategic with your marketing dollars. It’s time you know exactly where your marketing dollars are going and exactly what you are getting for them. Return on your investment (ROI) can be determined almost immediately and there is no guessing. Can you say the same about your last print ad campaign?

Not only can you be more strategic with internet marketing, but you can also claim you’re going green! By not running print ads your business is not using the paper to print the direct mail pieces or using the toxic and environmentally unfriendly inks used in printing those items like postcard mailers or newspaper ads. Some people in the print industry or more traditional graphic design agencies may want to argue the validity of that statement, but stop and think about every aspect of creating and delivering a single direct mail piece. If you compare the total process from creating the ink, making the paper, printing the item and then delivering the item,with the alternative of using electrical energy to keep the ad servers up and running you can see the environmental impact for online marketing is dramatically lower than many other advertising options.

With online marketing, not only can you feel warm and fuzzy inside about doing your part to save the planet, but your wallet will also feel good. Because online marketing does not use those physical, natural resources it does not carry the same high cost as print advertising. When you hire an internet marketing firm you are paying for their time, energy, and effort to create your digital ad. You do not have to pay for the ink company to create the ink or the paper company to create the paper or the printer to print the creative piece – all those items that get built into the cost of doing direct mail. Instead your budget can be put towards what is most important – creating powerful ads that drive real customers to your door! Isn’t that the point of marketing in the first place?!?

When things look to be getting tougher many businesses immediately start to slash and burn their marketing budgets – one of the worst things to do in these times. You don’t want to bury your head in the sand and wait out the storm while your competitors expand their branding and advertising online. Instead you should contact an internet marketing consultant to help you put your marketing dollars to better use.

• How 3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Rankings
       Our Post from February 20, 2008 – Vanity in Your Address Bar – WWW or no-WWW
• What Does a Title Tag, Title Tag and Title Tag Have In Common?
       Our Post from June 15, 2007 – Search Engine Optimization Tip 2
• Time to Wake Up to Email HTML Standards
       Our Post from November 28, 2007 – Email Standards Project

This email would have made a much larger impact and probably sold more tickets for the show Peter Pan had the subject line been correct. However, I bet their open rate went through the roof to find out who Peter Oan is.

Have a great weekend!

All I can say is, IT’S ABOUT TIME!

Sorry for that outburst, but anyone that has spent a lot of time in the permission-based email marketing game knows how badly this is needed and how long overdue we are for an organization of this type. The Web Standards Project set the blueprint for these guys, all they have to do is carry it forward. Granted they have a few more vendors to worry about than the WSP did, but they already have a major contributor on the inside – Freshview (makers of Campaign Monitor).

So, why do web standards for email matter? Because if marketers want to continue to use this viable marketing tool to communicate with customers we have got to do something about the chasm between modern web design principles and vendor support for our practices.

Lately it seems vendors have started slipping backwards with Outlook 2007 using the html rendering engine from Microsoft Word and Gmail supporting next to nothing in terms Cascading Style Sheets. Even for today’s most savvy standards web developer building an HTML email that functions well and looks good in 12+ different email clients will push you to your limits. We should not have to shackle our creativity or resort to purely image-based designs to please all of the email clients’ abilities or lack thereof to render mark up that otherwise works in all modern web browsers.

For now there are workarounds hacks that will allow the email to function well in a large majority of the clients, but that is similar to the graceful degradation principle in web design – sometimes it works. Honestly the only way to avoid problems at this point is through complex list management and separation of contacts by email client (if you know it), and always, ALWAYS provide a link to view the message online. This takes the email client rendering out of the equation and puts the mark up into a modern web browser.

The next step for the Email Standards Project should be to get other major organizations onboard with their cause, like the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and get every email marketing provider to link to their cause and talk about them.

There are a few that caught us by surprise, including:

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