Email Marketing and SEO

The gang over at SEOmoz put a nice video together on using email marketing and SEO together to promote your web site. This video does a great job explaining how each plays a role in attracting visitors to your site and how to keep them coming back.

Could Google Wave change email?

For anyone who hates reading through a long list of email chains, Wave may be the solution. Google Wave combines real time chat features, video and Twitter like conversation streams. If chat, email, and Twitter had a love child, it might look something like Wave. It will be interesting to see how Wave will impact current email marketing, Twitter and other chat technologies.

Deathmatch: Twitter vs. Email Marketing

In the graphic above, I pulled searches for "twitter tools" and "email tools" in the United States. (email tools=red, twitter tools=blue) I could have just pulled a report of twitter and email marketing, but I think this gives us a more clear picture of how people are searching. When using a technology, people tend to look for tools to help them manage that technology or make things more efficient. Obviously there are more people with an email address than a twitter account, but this gives you some insight into how much real activity is taking place in this space.

Does this mean that Twitter is going to replace Email?

Lets take a look:

• Tools and Analytics: Both technologies have tools available to measure impact, emails are more mature. (Let)
  
• Subscribe: This one is pretty easy, just follow someone on Twitter, like me @seanhecking (Advantage Twitter)
• Content: 140 characters? please! Email allows you more space for delivering your message with branded content (Deuce)
• Forward to a Friend: Twitter allows for a retweet (RT), the equivalent of forward to a friend. Email allows for traditional forward to groups (Let)
  
• Unsubscribe: Twitter also allows you to unsubscribe (unfollow) and means it! (Advantage Twitter)
• Tagging: Twitter allows for content tagging to help organize tweets. Email: "what are tags?" (Game, Set, Match?)

What are your thoughts on this match?

Good Email Design Checklist

I wanted to add some additional tips for email marketers looking to optimize their email designs. Below is a helpful checklist of items for email marketing designers and developers. This list will help you avoid the junk box and spam filters for good email design.

Tables - if your email HTML contains a lot of CSS or in-line CSS, try converting as much of the design to HTML tables. Using tables exclusively will help display your design correctly and improve the total delivered emails to the in box.

Image Size - if your email is full of images and slices totaling more than 150k, try to reduce your total by using more HTML formatting. Reducing images will improve your chances of getting past spam filters. Using Photoshop, generating GIFs at 64 colors or JPEGs at 50-60 quality will help reduce your image size.

Copy Check - does your email contain phrases or misspellings that may flag it as spam? Many email marketing platforms will perform a spam check as part of their delivery service. Use these tools to your advantage.

ALT Text - does your email contain descriptive ALT text for things like headers and buttons? These are the main call-to-action on an email. Don't forget to optimize your email for a good user experience.

Creating HTML Email Campaigns

Back in September of 2008, I put together a short presentation on building HTML email campaigns. Based on recent research I've read, more marketers are looking to use email marketing as a way to increase sales in 2009. I plan on updating this guide in the coming weeks to include some additional tips and research.

HTML Email Marketing Tips

Found a good video tutorial below on sending HTML email campaigns through Campaign Monitor. I have personally used Campaign Monitor for small campaigns and it does a fine job of delivering emails. Campaign Monitor's website is also a great resource for email marketers. While this is a good tutorial for starters it implies that emails are simply web pages. Emails use HTML similar to web pages but must be constructed differently to render properly across different email viewers. Hope this video provides a good starting point for your marketing efforts.

Building HTML Email Campaigns

I wanted to share this presentation from a little while ago I did on email marketing. Hope you find it helpful when building or designing HTML email campaigns. Enjoy!

Avoiding HTML Email Design Mistakes

In order to gain the most exposure possible when sending htm email campaigns, keep in mind there are many design factors that can effect your total number of emails opened. Building your html using the tips below can help improve the performance of all your campaigns.

• Build emails in old school HTML - use as much HTML as possible to describe your message and use tables with strict HTML.
  
• Avoid CSS - CSS will not appear correctly on many new platforms such as Gmail, Outlook 2007, etc. Use tags such as the font, b, strong and spacer images to format emails.
• Use ALT tags - use ALT tags to describe areas of your email for calls to action, short descriptions and header copy.
• Avoid too many images - too many images will weight your email as possible spam preventing the email from being delivered by ISPs such as Google, Yahoo and company email server spam filters. Optimize your image size to the lowest size possible without losing too much quality.
  
• Avoid SPAM phrases and characters - key words such as $, !, buy now will have a negative weight on your emails.
• Avoid DIVs, Layers, Javascript, Flash - using rich media and scripting is a big no-no to spam filters. Again, advanced formatting will kill your email formatting and delivery.
• Not testing - by not testing your campaigns on many email browsers, you take the risk that your message will not appear to a large group of subscribers. Know your list and what email browsers to test.
  

Here are some additional resource for building campaigns:

• Email HTML Design Guidelines
• HTML Email Guide
• Email Standards
• Testing Services
  

Blog SEO - New Life to Old Blogs

After a few years of posting on this blog, I've noticed that the same topics begin to resurface over time. This can actually be to a bloggers benefit and help build their Blog SEO strategy.

By referencing past posts within the copy of your blog, a blogger can reflect on old thoughts. By linking to these older posts, you are giving the search engines fresh content, a link to relevant content and a link to content already in their index. For instance, by linking to an post from 2005 on email newsletters and blogs, I have referenced both a relevant post and brought new life to old copy. You can begin to see blogs the same way search engines see sites.

E-mail Design Lacking Some Punch?

A recent article on clickz suggest that most e-mail campaigns miss the mark. Many do not render correctly in mobile devices, even more display virtually nothing when images are not displayed. These new numbers are not good. Are marketing pros focusing too much on the message we send, rather than the method which we send? This suggests, more than ever, the need for a comprehensive strategy for email. Every touch point must be considered in order to maximize your reach.

Helpful Links:

Email Experience Council

Been a while...

Its been a while since my last blog. Hopefully in the next few weeks I can get back to writing about marketing technology. Some of the topics I hope to cover in 2007 include:

• Quantify email marketing using web analytics
• SEO for rich media
  
• Optimizing pages for mobile search
• and many more...