What are the Delivery Challenges for e-Newsletters?

Grow prospects into customers with e-newsletters.
Grow prospects into customers with e-newsletters.

Clients are sometimes shocked when they review their first delivery report for their new e-newsletter. Their 1,000 subscriber list ends up showing that only 10% to 30% of their subscribers actually opened their campaign. From what I have seen with a variety of accounts, the open rate may never top 50% for e-newsletter campaigns.

What Can a Business Do to Improve Opens?

1. Make sure you are dealing with a reputable subscriber/e-newsletter service. I like iContact, Topica, and Constant Contact. If you are dealing with a small no-name service you may have delivery issues. The larger services will all police their own clients to be Can Spam compliant and typically work directly with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to try to assure delivery of their own clients’ newsletters. That being said, it is not uncommon for double opted in subscribers to be sent via a specific IP block that has ISP service provider approval and those that are not double opted in to be sent through a different server block that may be filtered out at the ISP level and so never delivered.

2. Try to double opt in your subscribers. This is a hard one, and most lists we work with although typically “clean” will not be double opted in. Double opted in means that the reader has verified their email address and their desire to receive your message. This is a two step process – sign up for your e-newsletter and then respond to an automated email that asks them to click to verify their email address and desire.

3. Craft an e-newsletter title that is transparent and identifies who you are. Putting your name and a reminder of who you are in the title can help to increase open rates. This is especially important if you do not send your newsletter out every month. For those clients that send infrequently to their e-newsletter list, their open rates will typically be lower, as readers in many cases have simply forgotten that they have signed up or who you are.

4. Make your newsletter sharable and memorable. ISP are watching reader behavior. If more subscribers never read, open, or click things in your newsletter, over time the ISP may lower your newsletter rating pushing it into a filtered out status. Here’s a great article that speaks to this topic and shares with you some of the new technology and filters that Internet Service Providers are using to filter out spam.

E-newsletters are showing a resurgent interest and many clients are reporting that their newsletter is a great lead generator. If you haven’t tried doing one, now may be the time to give a monthly e-newsletter a new look.

Doing an e-Newsletter? Make Sure to Create An Online Archive

Create a newsletter archive.
Create a newsletter archive.

E-newsletters are far from dead at this point, in fact they are getting a new look by many businesses. We have many clients for whom we provide writing and HTML services for their monthly or quarterly e-newsletters. I still find it surprising that when a new client comes to us that they have not been archiving their previous HTML newsletters on their website.

If you are going to create an e-newsletter in HTML format make sure to archive a copy in a newly created online e-newsletter archive section of your website. This way not only are you sending out a e-newsletter to prospects and clients, but you are also creating new website content for search engines.

If you are blogging, you can even use your best blog posts as e-newsletter content; saving time and money, as the people who will typically read your e-newsletter are usually a different demographic than the ones who will regularly read your blog.

The only time you would not want to archive e-newsletters on your website would be if you had a special price offering or coupon code for use for a certain list segment.

To get an idea of how you can create your own archive here is our own  e-newsletter archive to review for ideas.

AdWords Conversion Setting Guide

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

In February AdWords will be making some sweeping changes in how it records conversions in your Google AdWords account. The changes will be an improvement and allow you or your account manager to have greater control over that data that Google records for your account.

Here are a few tips to help you get started with the new conversion program.

Conversion one per click. This conversion type is being renamed to Converted Clicks. This type of conversion is best used by those interested in tracking leads like professional consultants or business services firms. Here what is important to track is not the number of times a potential prospect fills out a lead or information request form but rather the number of prospects generated by AdWords.

Conversion many per click. This conversion type is being renamed to Conversions with additional descriptors of All or Unique. This type of conversion is best used by those selling products. Here it is best to record the number of actual sales generated by a click rather than the number of customers and then not recording the value of a click to the amount of sales generated by one customer.

With these new pending changes, Google will allow account managers more control over what is recorded statistically in regards to conversions further showing the real value of AdWords to clients. You can read Google’s full notice in their help section.

The Changing Landscape of Social Media

Are Twitter heads reading your Twitter feed?
Are Twitter heads reading your Twitter feed?

With recent changes Facebook has made, renegotiation of the Google-Twitter contract, and Google’s announcement that it does not include social signals in its ranking algorithm, business owners and SEO’s are struggling to find where social media fits into a strategy for web visibility.

Although I still feel that social media still has a place in a mature business’ overall marketing plan, how to go about using social media for visibility is now drastically changing.

It used to be that having social updates posted to Twitter and Facebook was a strategy that all businesses on the web needed to embrace, now our recommendations are different based on this changed landscape.

For new businesses the validity of starting a Facebook or Twitter account with no followers and paying a writer to post updates has lost value. It is by far better for this new business to invest in AdWords and blogging for a long range content and visibility plan than to be on social media platforms.

For established mature businesses whether to post to Facebook or Twitter really now depend on the business’ community. Some firms have a vital Facebook presence and to continue to post there makes perfect sense. Additionally for these businesses to use Facebook’s options to promote posts to a wider demographic is now becoming an attractive option. For right now Twitter continues to be a smart place to be, but this may change rapidly as Google and Twitter redefine their relationship in the months ahead.

What is becoming more and more attractive than a Twitter and Facebook as a marketing strategy is activity on a personal Google+ profile tied to a rel=”author” tag with high quality content pieces and Google+ Community creation and moderation.

This next year will be strategic for how businesses use social media. I am predicting that more activity will be in Facebook  promoted updates than in regular content creation and that Twitter will need to continue to reinvent itself to stay relative in this new landscape.

Building Links Using Article Directories is a Dead Strategy

Creating articles that were informational in nature with links back to your website in a bio and placing these on news sites, article directories, and ezine sites for use by other webmasters on their blogs and in their websites in a way to build incoming links is just another previously good tactic that Google has disavowed.

Unfortunately, there are many business owners who are still using this tactic and are encouraged to embrace this tactic by SEO firms mainly based in India. It is very important to know that using this type of tactic today may actually work against you.

Make sure to watch this video on this topic from Matt Cutts the lead web spam engineer from Google and the voice to my industry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo75Og4M34Q

It is important to understand that this approach was highly useful and beneficial to websites one and definitely two years ago. But now using this tactic may actually drop your organic placement. Guest blogging is also another high profile tactic that has also fallen under Google’s eyes and has also been disavowed as a usable tactic to improve organic search placement.

With Google focusing on high quality unique content, that is not overly keyword dense, and has high user relevancy as tested through click through rate, time on page, and personal search history it is nearly impossible to scam your way to the top of the organic results.

A much better approach for placement today is to focus on improving the user experience on your website, refining the message, and promoting your site to generate traffic on social media and Google AdWords.

There will always be sites that are placed in the top ten slots on Google but getting there now is no longer an art form but rather creating the very best user experience that is the most relevant to a unique search query.

Can Older Websites Retain Their Organic Placement?

Matt Cutts from Google helps to demystify the issue that many older and previously well placed websites ask frequently, “how can I maintain my organic placement against new website startups in my industry?”

You can watch the full video here.


Here are my tips to assist you even further on this important topic.

1. Just because you’ve had great organic placement for years does not assure that your site will continue to be well placed now and in the future. It is important to know that your placement can be pushed down as new more relevant websites appear. Even those that are brand new.

2. If your website is over five years old, it is absolutely time to budget for a complete redo. Not only a design change but a full review of your content and how you are using technology on your website. If you don’t have YouTube videos on your website, you are really missing a strong channel that will drive traffic and keep visitors coming back to visit.

3. Have you really read your own content? Have you looked at your Google Analytics data in the last month on your website traffic? If things are falling off for you, you will want to look at your message, look at your bounce rate, and time spent on your website. If the numbers are low, it is time to really think of the things you can add or remove from your site to improve value to your readers.

It is very important to understand that just because your business and website have been around for a while does not guarantee organic placement. Google is evaluating click through rates, time spent on your site, and a user’s search history to rack and stack websites. If your numbers are low or your site is stale your placement will drop when compared to other hungrier, more relevant websites.

If you need professional eyes on your site to help understand where you are and where you should be, we offer a SEO placement review that may be of value to you as you evaluate what you should do to move up or retain your site placement. I invite you to read more and check pricing.