Category Archives ⇒ List Building

List Building – Enticement

· Brandon Hann

How exactly do you get people to sign up for your newsletter? Maybe the more important question is: how do you get people to want to sign up for your newsletter? This question will not be completely answered here because there are so many factors that go into your marketing strategy. These factors are then varied based on the industry you’re involved in.

What I can tell you is that you need to find out what makes your visitors/customers “tick”. Researching your site’s demographics can help with this. Here are a few tips you can use to create buzz around your newsletter.

Enticements

  • Content – First and foremost you need to remember that nobody will want your newsletter if it contains useless information. Always provide new, quality content. If you keep rehashing the same material over and over or copy content from other sources on the Internet, you will not be able to maintain a consistant subscriber list.
  • Free stuff – If your newsletter is primarily used to promote products and services that you’re selling, you might want to think about giving away something for free to get people to sign up. This will show your visitors that you are interested in keeping them around. Free stuff can include a special edition newsletter or a free eBook on a subject of interest for your visitors.
  • Speak the truth – Don’t fill your newsletter with bogus information, half-truths or outright lies. This will ruin your reputation and make you lose subscribers faster than you can send out your next message. This is especially true if your newsletter revolves around the latest news in your industry.
  • Be consistant – If you tout that your newsletter will be delivered weekly, send it weekly. In fact, send on the same day and time. Think of your publication as you would the daily newspaper. If you read it, you probably expect it at a particular time everyday. Your visitors will expect the same from you.
  • No spam – Never spam your visitors! Don’t send them offers that you know they won’t be interested in. Never sell your email list (unless you explicitly say you will before someone signs up) to any third party companies. Most of all, don’t overdo it!! If your visitors are expecting a monthly newsletter, don’t send one daily.

If your visitors know that your newsletter will contain the qualities mentioned above, they are more likely to sign up. The best advice I can give you is to put yourself if their shoes. If you were on someone’s website, what would make you want to submit your email address? On the other side, what would make you not want to submit your email address?

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List Building – Post OptIn/White List

· Brandon Hann

Post opt in is a process in which you have an existing email list and you import it into your email marketing campaign. In other words, these visitors did not visit your site and sign up the “usual” way. This is a common practice among webmasters who have changed websites or opened a new one and would like to begin marketing to his/her existing visitors.

White listing, in relation to email lists, is a business practice when a business has obtained email addresses of interested users from all over the Internet–usually thousands of varying websites with numerous topics. They collect all of these emails and separate them into applicable categories and lists and then sell them to other websites to use in their marketing plans.

Post opt in

Some people are skeptical of performing such a task because it’s very likely that you’re going to end up putting people on your mailing list that may not want to be there. Companies like Aweber allow the importing of email lists, but its main purpose is to provide people a means of adding large amounts of email addresses with relative ease when moving service providers.

However, it is possible to take a duplicated list that you may own and import it into another one. This is where things become questionable. For example, if you run two websites with one about cars and the other about motorcycles, you may want to integrate your two mailing lists so you can promote both of your websites at the same time. The problem is that you don’t know for sure that the visitors interested in your car content will also be interested in your motorcycle content and vice versa.

White lists

There’s a lot of debate about email whitelists. On a personal level, you may have created your own whitelist which is basically a listing of all your good emails after pruning out dead accounts or known spammers. From a business standpoint, you may be considering purchasing a white list.

Marketing firms that have harvested thousands of emails based on various topics are in the business of selling these lists to business and website owners like yourself so you can import them into your email marketing campaigns. The debate about the practice comes from the question of how these firms put these email lists together.

Some companies can be spammers themselves who have done nothing but run automated bot searches of the Internet looking for usable email addresses. Others may have legitimately obtained the email addresses, but did not disclose the fact that the addresses may have be sold to another company somewhere down the line.

With that said, you want to be careful whenever you think about adding email addresses to your email list ‘after the fact’ because you never know how those people will receive you and the worst thing that can come of this is getting marked as a spammer.

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List Building – Spam Prevention

· Brandon Hann

Contrary to the title, there is no foreseeable way to completely prevent all spam. It’s just something we’ll have to live with as long as we use the Internet to do business. In fact, even brick and motar businesses suffer from it by getting junk faxes alongside their junk mail.

In the case of list building, there are two kinds of spam. On one hand, you have your own emails to worry about–you have to make sure that the content of your messages are not being classified as spam in your user’s inbox. On the other hand, you have spammers that sign up to your site or newsletter in order to access your free downloads or to write bogus comments on your site to promote their useless junk.

Sending spam

I wrote a full article on email delivery rates discussing the importance of creating messages and newsletters that do not end up in your user’s spam boxes.

This is a vital step in preventing spam for your users and ultimately protecting your site’s reputation. If you’re sending messages being classified as spam, you’re also putting your ISP on the line because it’s their resources that y
you use when sending your email marketing campaign.

Receiving spam

To prevent getting spammers from your squeeze pages, you’ll want to implement anti-spam techniques such as the double opt-in procedure. This is when you have an email marketing signup box such as a newsletter where the user inputs their name email address. Shortly thereafter, the user will receive an email asking to confirm their subscription request.

Automated spam bots aren’t able to get through this procedure because they only know how to “sign up” much like spam bots that scour the Internet looking for email address to harvest are only able to send messages.

Another way to prevent automated signups is to require a CAPTCHA code on your signup box.

Proper email practices

Here’s a list of articles from the website BestPrac.org; a site that offers tips on how to help prevent spam worldwide.

  • Squeeze page scammers
  • Avoiding spam bots
  • Email netiquette
<< Back to Cookie Tracking Forward to Post OptIn/White List >>

List Building – Cookie Tracking

· Brandon Hann

Despite all the negative you hear about tracking cookies, they’re actually not that bad. In fact, the majority of websites out there use cookies in one way or another to save information about your visit to their site. When you log into a site like eBay for example, a cookie is placed on your computer that allows eBay to recognize you the next time you come back.

In the case of your website, you can utilize tracking cookies to tell you a little more about your visitors such as what web browsers they use, what countries they come from and how they got to your site. This information will help dramatically with learning your site’s demographics.

Advertising cookies

Tracking cookies are most commonly used in advertisements to help keep everything organized and most importantly, relavent. Ad networks use these cookies as you travel from site to site where the same ad network(s) are used. This allows that company to follow your movement (tracking) and show you ads that are based on your previous activities.

From an advertising perspective, this makes perfect sense. If you were on eBay searching for car parts, eBay might show you ads related to cars and then if you go over to Amazon, the first ads you see are likely to be car parts. Amazon could also use previous cookies to show some car-related products on their homepage in hopes of selling something to you.

Tracking cookies

Essentially all cookies have some sort of tracking element to them and their sole purpose is to carry Internet usage data with them as you travel from site to site. Some people are fearful of tracking cookies simply because of their name. The words tracking and Internet don’t play well in a lot of people’s minds and they immediately have visions of companies hoarding personal information.

This is simply not the case. Sure, cookies do store information that is specific to you, but it’s nothing that could identify you. However, due to privacy concerns, you have the option of turning cookies off in your favorite browser. I don’t recommend it because I actually like going to a website that remembers who I am and is able to show me products and ads that are related to my preferences.

Spyware

These days, software called spyware can be installed on your system and you may not even know it. But, as mentioned above, not all spyware is bad. One example would be your printer software. Most printer manufacturers install spyware on your system as part of the driver installation and it’s used to “phone home” to make sure that your device is always up to date.

However, every positive has its negative and spyware is no exception. There are many malicious programs out there that can harvest much more than driver versions. Things such as keyloggers can be used to gain unauthorized access to machines, but this is a separate topic!

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List Building – Demographic Info

· Brandon Hann

Have you ever watched tv at certain times during a day and wondered why the commercials you see are so different than what you see at night? Or how about a magazine about cars–why are all the ads related to car parts? Of course the second example is more obvious, but the point is that every media outlet has demographic requirements that it must follow.

Your website is no exception. There’s no sense in promoting your products and services to people who have no interest in using them. Learning your demographics for your niche or market will help you find people in particular age groups, cultural societies and various interests groups that fit your ideal customer. Knowing this information will help you better serve your customers and allow you to market specific segments of your business. The hard (and expensive) part is finding out who your customers really are.

As a small business or even smaller website/blog owner, you will likely not be able to afford a big budget market research campaign, so what options are you left with in discovering who your customers are? I found an interesting blog post on Sean Jordan’s website that discusses just this question. I’ve outlined and summarized a few of the important points here.

Finding your demographic

  • Competitors – A perfect way to start out with any area of your new business is to look at what your competitors are doing. It might sting a little to see other businesses doing what you plan to do, but the best part is that you can learn from their mistakes or take the high road and do things better/differently. In terms of demographics, you can sometimes find this information in media press kits or by searching online.
  • Census Bureau – To find your own demographics, it might help to view the demographics of the country, or your local area. This will tell you who lives around your business and can point you in the right direction to finding out who you’ll be marketing to.
  • The Internet – Searching online can yield tons of information about loca demographics. A lot of real estate websites offer basic information to inform potential home buyers. There’s a website called Claritas that allows you to search your own zip code to discover what kind of demographics there are in your neighborhood.
  • Small Business Administration – This website is not just for locating demographic information, but also for starting a new business or growing an existing one. There is a TON of free resources on this site and it should be explored from top to bottom.
  • Existing reports – Most likely, you’re operating in an industry or field that already has some extensive market research reports already created, so why not use them? This will save you so much time and possibly even money in the long term although these reports can cost quite a bit up front.
  • Hire someone – Undoubtedly this is the most expensive approach to market research. You hire a large firm that specializes in such areas and allow them to do the footwork for you. This option is probably not the best approach for a small business because even once you have the results, you may not have the financial requirements to properly manage your marketing campaigns.

Why is this information important?

As an example, your business sells computer games. If you found out that the majority of people buying computer games are between the ages of 13-26, but your local demographics show you that the majority of people in your area are between the ages of 35-55, would you go door to door offering to sell computer games? No. Had you not known this information, you would have exhausted precious time and resources to gain no additional customers.

Running a business online is a little different because you have the whole world at your fingertips, but it would still be beneficial to know how to market your website to get better response to your products.

This has been an extremely concise article about locating demographics, but my purpose was to emphasize how important it is to know your customers. If you’re faced with this issue right now in your business, I’d strongly suggest you begin a search online to explore these topics in depth.

<< Back to Opt In Capture Forward to Cookie Tracking >>

List Building – Opt In Capture

· Brandon Hann

Oh, the infamous opt in! This is the gateway to your profitable mailing list. Don’t abuse it or underestimate it; otherwise you might be in for a rude awakening. If done right, you’ll get a nice group of loyal and dedicated readers of your material and offerings. If done wrong, you can say goodbye to all the extra income you were hoping for.

The key to the opt in form is to make it accessible, but not to make it obnoxious. Feel free to promote it wherever you get the chance, but don’t force it in your visitors’ faces. You may have seen websites that throw out popup or popunder windows and you already know how annoying these are.

Proper opt in techniques

  • Static page – Create a static page that talks about your newsletter or marketing materials and clearly outline what it is someone will be getting if they sign up at your site. Link to this page from your home page as well as anywhere else you talk about your newsletter.
  • WordPress widget – There are many plugins and themes that offer you the option of placing custom HTML code in your sidebar, header or footer. Create an instant webform that asks for their name and email address so they only have to click submit to sign up.
  • Email signature – Start promoting your newsletter to everyone you email! This the best anti-spam way of letting people know what you have going on. I don’t know about you, but I always look at people’s signatures.

No matter how you promote your opt in form, the most important thing to remember is that you don’t want to spam it, force it or oversell it, which brings me to my next list!

Improper opt in techniques

  • Popup windows – Back in the old days, a popup window was used as a useful way to show someone information without having to change pages or open a whole new browser window. Today, they are the most annoying form of advertising and your opt in form should never appear on one. Besides the high probability of being blocked anyway, you’re likely to lose people just because your site looks tacky.
  • Popunder windows – A popunder window carries the same annoyances as its popup counterpart, but this one is designed to show up behind the window you have open. This way, when you’re done surfing and you start closing your browser windows, this mysterious window will be left open. While it does have some potential for catching people off-guard, it too can make your site look tacky.
  • Forced – Forcing someone to signup to your list just makes you look desperate. One way this can be done is when someone emails you to ask a question and you immediately add them to your mailing list just because you now have their email address. Remember that just because they sent you a message does not mean they want more emails from you.
  • Spam – It should go without saying, but obviously you don’t want to spam your visitors to get your newsletter. Not only does this look bad, but it’s illegal and your visitors are likely to get the idea that all of your future communications will be spam-like.

Building a list is not easy and it takes a lot of work to get it right. I’m still amazed at the amount of people that visit my site each day compared to the amount that sign up for my newsletter! However, having patience and doing it right will create a better experience for you and your visitors.

<< Back to Spam Scoring Forward to Demographic Info >>

List Building – Spam Scoring

· Brandon Hann

Nowadays, spam is so prevalent on the Internet–it’s everywhere. And just as soon as you think you’ve escaped it for good, you get more spam. Even after you deleted your old email address and created a new one, you start getting spam within the first week. It’s a wonder that people even still use email anymore.

Anyway, spam scoring is a feature that email servers use to “hopefully” capture spam and either delete it or place it in a separate folder. The scoring rules vary from service to service, but one of the most common spam blocking services out there is SpamAssassin. Depending on where your users get their mail, your messages may or may not have issues getting to them.

The score

All emails that pass through a SpamAssassin filter are scored from 0-10 after being subjected to a laundry list of checks. To see the full (and very confusing) list of rules, go to the SpamAssassin website. Generally, an email with a score of 5 or lower will get passed the filter and hit the user’s inbox.

Your goal is to test your messages before you send them out because even though someone has legitimately signed up to receive your emails, your messages can still be blocked.

Email tips

There’s a huge list of tips on the SpamAssassin website as well, but here’s a brief idea of how you can prevent your emails from being marked as spam:

  • Don’t use strange characters like replacing o’s with 0’s or writing the work LOOK as L@@K
  • Don’t put invisible text inside HTML messages
  • If using HTML emails, don’t included blank tags
  • Keep your emails on topic or at least focused if you have multiple topics

Testing

If you have a third party managing your email list(s), you can run tests within your account for all of the messages you wish to send. If you’re doing all this manually, you may want to send some emails to yourself provided that you have SpamAssassin enabled on your email server.

Imagine the huge waste of time you’ll experience if you have 100 users on your list, but your email becomes blocked from 99 of them!

<< Back to Support Time to Response Forward to Opt In Capture >>

List Building – Support Time to Response

· Brandon Hann

This topic is relatively small, but it essentially involves creating a better response time for customer support issues in regards to any and all questions you may receive for your website. More specifically this pertains to your users asking about or needing support for your email subscription list.

If you’re managing all of your email campaigns manually, meaning you’re not using an third party email service provider, you need to stay on top of you support requests. This is vitally important for users wishing to stop receiving your information via email or those wishing to change what information they are getting. Fortunately for those of using an email service such as Aweber, you don’t have to manage support requests as much because 99% of all mailing list features are automated.

Average response time

Trust me when I say that your visitors will rate your whole business (and your reputation) on your response times for customer support issues or general questions about your services. This fact may be more important to those running full-scale businesses online because this can affect your sales, but all websites can suffer to some degree including the loss of web traffic and backlinks.

Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and ask yourself if you’d like to be “placed on hold” when you need urgent assistance. Make sure you respond to your visitors/customers as soon as possible. My theory is if you’re running a website, you’re more than likely on it at least once a day, so same day response times are not that unlikely.

Communication is key

Just like I mentioned in the article about proper commenting techniques, communication in any form is vital to your site’s success. If visitors think your site is dead, they won’t be coming back and this becomes an issue very fast if you lose communication with your users.

The easiest way for you to provide this support to your users is to provide a very easily found page on your site that includes a basic webform, visible email address, phone number or all three!

<< Back to Delivery Rates Forward to Spam Scoring >>

List Building – Delivery Rates

· Brandon Hann

Here’s a little underestimated topic–the deliverability of your email campaign. It’s a wonder that some people pay little attention or no attention to this at all. Maybe it’s one of those “out of sight, out of mind” things, but it really shouldn’t be. Imagine if you sent out a message or newsletter to 100 email address and it only reached 75% of them? You now have 25 people not getting your message.

So what keeps 25 valid email addresses from receiving your message? SPAM filters are the number one reason. Another would be IP address blacklisting. It could even be whether you’re sending attachments with your email. Of course, if you have a list with some invalid email addresses, that’s a whole other issue! Let’s breakdown some of these email issues:

Invalid email addresses

List pruning is an important task and should be done periodically to ensure that you’re not sending emails to people who don’t want it, making sure that you’re not using excessive system resources and also to keep an updated count of your active list.

Better yet, let the users prune themselves! If you’re users signed up one month, but lost interest the next, they would be happy to know that you don’t have them jumping through hoops to try and get their email address off your list. This is one less thing to worry about if you’re using an email provider such as Aweber because they follow anti-spam laws to a “T”, therefore all of your messages will provide instructions on how users can unsubscribe.

SPAM filters

A lot of people have spam filters, but some may not even know they’re there and some might not have control over what comes in. The point here is not to force your users to try and find out ways to sneak your emails past the guards, but to ensure your emails are designed properly so they can get to the inbox without trouble. Have you ever been to a website that tells you how to subscribe to their newsletter and then somewhere on the same page, they tell you that before you can get anything, you need to make sure such-and-such email address in on your whitelist?

How often do you continue with that subscription and do you even remember to add the right email address? Don’t put this type of stuff in your user’s hands. They want access to your information and they want it fast and easy. The moment you let this fact out of your head is the moment you lose readers.

IP address blacklisting

If you’re not using an email service provider, you’re likely sending emails from your own system(s). Be careful as some ISPs and webhosts don’t allow the sending of mass emails over their networks. This can cause your IP address to be banned on certain ports or worse, you can be placed on worldwide spam lists. To check your IP address, you can visit some (or all) of these blacklists:

More information on how to remove an IP from these lists can be found on each page.

Attachments

Don’t send people attachments if you can help it! Even if they’ve purchased or requested something downloadable, don’t attach it. Make it accessible to download from your server and then link to it in your email. Attachments don’t always make it on the other site. Some users have automatic attachment removals, some send all emails with attachments to the trash and sometimes attachments can get corrupted.

So, unless you’re communicating with someone one-on-one, try not to attach any files.

Frequency

One sure way to increase delivery rates is to let your readers know when to expect your email(s). This way they can look for it and if it did happen to end up in the spam folder, they can make adjustments on their own to ensure that won’t happen again.

Also, by telling a user when they should expect your mailings, they can get a better idea of the “value” in signing up for your mailing list.

Following the tips above will guarantee that your messages are delivered on-time and to the right people.

<< Back to Bounce Handling Forward to Support Time to Response >>

List Building – Bounce Handling

· Brandon Hann

If you send an email to someone based on an email address they gave you some time ago, but this time you receive a bounce-back message, it’s usually because that person has changed their email address or their inbox is full. When you’re running a business and a successful mailing list, you don’t want to have bounced emails.

Some mail servers are configured to delete all bounced mail automatically, but you don’t want to do that. In fact, you want to know about every bounced email your system gets because this gives you an opportunity to rectify the situation. In most cases, there’s nothing much you can do. If someone changed their email address and didn’t provide you with the new one, all you can do is prune your list accordingly.

However, this is exactly what you want to do. You don’t want to maintain a working email list with hundreds of dead emails in there because all you end up doing is wasting valuable system resources.

Bounce handling

If you’re using a proper email provider, bounce handling will usually be handled automatically, but if it’s not, it’s important to check your email lists for email address that are no longer valid or accepting your email. If you don’t, you can be marked as a spammer and this is not good.

Being labeled a spammer will not only tarnish your professional and/or personal image, but you can affect your webhost, ISP and email service provider!

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