Web Development Blog » Internet Marketing

E-mail marketing software, which is the best for you?

Olaf — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:21:16 +0000

If you search Google for E-mail marketing software you will find a lot of services and I’m sure a lot of them have great features and are worth the money. The pricing for 1000 mail messages is often very similar and most of them offer a back-end which makes it easy to setup a mailing list and marketing campaigns.

If all of them have similar features, how do choose the right one?

Some important features

Creating a mailing list takes a lot of time and might be essential for your e-mail marketing success. While collecting subscribers and sending e-mail messages, it’s important that as many messages as possible have to reach the subscribers mailbox. Bigger companies are more trusted and invest more time an money to prevent that their mail servers are getting black-listed.
If your list is not very big (~1000 subscriber) and you don’t have a lot of campaigns, your partner should offer pre-paid plans. If you take a monthly plan, check that the maximum amount of subscribers is not to big.
If you’re not able to create all the forms and templates, you need a service provider which offer these features out of the box. If you have an international list or campaigns, multiple languages should be supported.
A better service provider let you follow strict usage policies. If you need to create campaigns for your existing list, check if the list is fully accepted (before you start customizing forms and templates). On the other side, if the service provider accept any kind of mailing list and or campaign, it might be possible that their mail servers are black-listed frequently.
All services should offer double opt-in features for your subscriptions. Check if you are able to send an auto-respond message to your subscribers.

In the past year I was able to try three of the bigger services; iContact, MailChimp and CampaignMonitor. AWeber looks pretty good and earns a lot of trust and I’m sure you will not waste your time if you try them as well. They don’t offer a free trial, but at the moment while I’m writing this review they offer the first month for only $1 ($19 for the following months).

iContact – E-mail marketing simplified

I tried iContact first a year ago and actually it works as they offer the service on their website. You can open a trial account to setup your mailing list and templates/forms. If you want to import a bigger list you need to pay first. They offer only monthly plans, “pay as you go” options are not possible. They have all the features like other professional companies, but it looks to me they didn’t update their control panel for the last 3 years (the WYSIWYG editor is very ugly). Every mail message I send, got the iContact branding in the footer, which you can’t remove. I have the idea that they don’t have a strong usage policy because I got NEVER complains for high percentage of un-subscriptions, high bounce rates or complains. They offer a survey function (I never tried) and they support several 3rd party plugins (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, SalesForce…)

MailChimp – Email Marketing and Email List Manager

MailChimp is the best service for a beginning mailing list, because they offer a free plan for lists with less than 500 subscribers. They offering great and easy to use tools for creating lists and campaigns. With a lot of 3rd party plugins (Facebook, SalesForce, Magento, Paypal and many more) they are one of the biggest email marketing partners. Using MailChimp you can go for monthly pricing or “pay as you go”. The last option is for people sending less frequently a newsletter to their members. Another features are: Custom responder messages, complete forms for your website, powerful API system (offering complete example code), Google Analytics integration, advanced reports and much more. They have a very strict policy on abusing their system, will say don’t use them for a mailing list you have bought somewhere on the Internet. Very unique is their affiliate scheme, if someone has joined MailChimp via your affiliate link and the user has upgraded to a paid account, both parties getting a $30 bonus (new user and the affiliate). You can’t turn this bonus into cash, but maybe is an opportunity to run your (bigger) mailing list for free.

CampaignMonitor – Email marketing software for web designers

The first thing you will notice after free trial sign-up is that you login into some kind of reseller area. With CampaignMonitor it’s possible to create mailing lists completely white-label (even for the user of the back-end). Against MailChimp the back-end has less features, but you’re able to create your campaigns with custom templates or using the premium templates offered by CampaignMonitor. They offer monthly and “pay as you go” plans and their usage policy is somewhere between the one from iContact and the policy from MailChimp. While their back-end is very modern and functional, they don’t offer enough features for lists in languages other than English. If you need to setup your list in a different language, you should try the API which is powerful as well.

If you start a new mailing list, most of the products or services should work for you, but if you need a provider for your existing list you need to test them first.
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8 Link building ideas for corporate websites

Olaf — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:07:44 +0000

If you need to promote your corporate website, you will find out that this is not an easy job. Self-promotion via forums or blog comments is often eliminated as SPAM and many website owners doesn’t like to link to your site because you offer a product or service. We all know that inbound links are important to get high-listed in search engines like Google. So what do you need to do to get links to your site? In this article we will suggest things which should work for most of the websites on the Internet. But first we need to change our mind:

To get inbound links you need content which is not just your product information or some sales page. Start creating content which is interesting for your target group AND related to your products.

What do you need?

Beside your corporate website you need a blog. This blog might be a part of your website or if possible hosted on a second domain and IP address.
You need to create unique and fresh content, related to your product and services. Hire a content writer if you can’t write the articles by yourself.
You need time and maybe some money (more about the costs later)

Okay here are the natural link building ideas:

Write your blogs frequently
If you have already a blog, I guess most of your articles are about your news, products and services. Keep writing them, but write also information which is “not about you”. For example if your product is Web Hosting, provide valuable information about how-to secure websites or give some other advice related to hosting or websites. If your articles are interesting even for non-customers, those people might write about on their own blog and will link to the source.
Write content for 3rd party websites
Write articles on blogs, websites or networks like HubPages.com, EzineArticles.com or blogs which allow other authors to write for them. In these articles it’s possible to add also links to your site.
Promote all articles via social networks
This one important, if you post your article-links to your twitter or facebook profile, more people will know about your blog and the chance is bigger that other people will blog about your article. Try also sites like Digg.com or delicious.
Get links from customers or partners
Ask your customers and partners for a link from their website. Start with the partners where you buy products and services, they might give some link back because you’re a customer. For your own customers it’s more effective to offer something for free.
Offer freebies
Provide in some of your own blog posts a free gadget, e-book or service. Freebies are always a welcome subject to write about. Be creative and you will get many free links!
Submit your press releases
Write press releases about your most important news and submit them to press release submission services. There are many of them (check Google), try also paid services like PRWeb.com, this way you’re able to reach many people which might pick up your news and will write about (incl. link). If you can’t write a press release article by yourself, hire a copy-writer.
Ask for a product review
Search related websites or blogs and ask the owner to review your product or service in exchange for a free product. Get this way a link and also some publicity (works great if your product is a service).
Create a second blog
If you’re able to produce enough unique content or articles, start a second website or blog. Host this website on by different web-host and don’t link this site from your other sites. If you keep this site “product neutral” you can even write about your competitors products and services. Build links from different sections to your site.

We didn’t mention here the reciprocal link exchange and paid links because those are against the Google webmaster guidelines. Exchanging links is not forbidden, but don’t have too much of them.

Do you know some nice link building techniques? Please share them below as a comment, thanks!Similar Posts:

Blended search and the importance of varying your website’s marketing methods

Olaf — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:11:54 +0000

Effectively marketing your website for better exposure to search engines, or search engine marketing (SEM), has certainly changed over the years. From the days when keyword focused Meta tags were the de-facto method to grab top rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) to the recent days, and today still, when most major engines weigh the value of incoming links more heavily than any on page factors in their ranking algorithms; there’s been big changes in the methods used by website owners to take hold of their fair share of visitors from the major search engines. Today, there’s a new twist being thrown into the search engine marketing game, and that’s come about with the new concept of blended search results.

Blended search – mixing multiple media types with natural listings

It doesn’t really matter which major search engine you’ve decided to use as your portal to the World Wide Web; Google, Yahoo, Ask or MSN, they all have something in common. Something besides the obvious, that is. These major search engines, who grab nearly 100% of the daily search engine user base worldwide, are all starting to offer their own forms of blended search results. Instead of the plain-old text based website listings that used to be displayed when performing a search, users are seeing related images, blog posts, links to news stories, related videos and a whole slew of other topically related media attached to these searches.

What this means to website owners and the marketing tactics they use

Really, this should be seen as an exciting advancement for internet business owners; instead of merely relying on their website’s pages to obtain traffic from search engines, they can start to utilize images, video, and the “buzz factor” to grab even more traffic from these major engines offering blended search results. In today’s WWW, media is where it’s at anyway; with the widespread availability of affordable broadband internet, more and more internet users today are enjoying the fact that they can watch streaming video and listen to audio broadcasts online. As search engines continue to deepen their blended search results into other areas, website owners are getting new venues to attract more people to their websites; something that smart website owners are already capitalizing on.

How can a website owner start taking advantage of the new blended search format?

It’s simple; vary your marketing methods. Instead of relying on tweaking your website’s page titles, keyword density and building inbound links as your sole optimization and marketing approach, start using video, audio and images with keyword focused names. Youtube and Revver are excellent resources for website owners, not only do they allow you to upload videos so that you can display them on your own website with little technical know-how, they both have a large user base where you can receive nearly instant-exposure to your videos; plus, the search engine exposure doesn’t hurt, either. Recordpad is a free audio recording tool for Mac’s and PC’s that allows you to create Mp3 files, which would be more than suitable for an audio podcast on your website. A simple digital camera or royalty free image websites can give you the types of images that you need to take advantage of blended search results; the tools are out there, you just need to take the initiative to start varying your website marketing methods so that you, too, can capitalize on these new features that the major search engines are offering.

The search engine marketing game is changing. If you want your website to thrive in this new digital world with this generation of media minded internet users, you’ve got to stay atop the trends and utilize the new tools of the trade. But hey, if you want to take your chances by relying on the old ways of marketing, optimizing and promoting your website, that just leaves more room at the top for the rest of us.Similar Posts: