Just a side-note to say that Janine and Co. look to be doing really well - I used to compete with them when I worked at Campaigner and it seems they’ve fully embraced blogging culture, proven by their consistent 1st place prize for ‘best business/marketing blog’ in ClickZ’s yearly awards. If only I could say the same for my previous employer!…

11 Places You Need To Include Your Opt-In Form

Your Homepage - If you don’t have one on your home page, get one there now.

Your Sub-pages - All of them! If you don’t have the space to put an actual form on all of your sub-pages, at least have a “Newsletter Sign Up” link on them.

Your Blog - Not everyone subscribes to RSS to get information from your blog, so you’ll need to include an actual form for your readers to sign up, or a “Sign Up For Our Newsletter” link to it. You don’t want to lose the opportunity to get email addresses from people who might be interested in knowing about your regular updates. If you use TypePad, you can get the free VR Opt-in Form Widget with just a few clicks.

Your Purchase Confirmation Page - Someone has just hopefully had a great experience purchasing from you, why not ask them to join your list right then and there?

A Pop-up Window - Include a pop-up window when someone leaves your website. You won’t be able to use this with visitors who have their browsers set to block them, but you’ll surely get some people seeing them. We’ve had thousands of people signing up through this form.

A Landing Page - If you have a separate landing page you send people to from your search engine pay-per-click campaigns, include a newsletter sign up form on it. If they don’t purchase from you, they might at least sign up to your list, then you’ll be able to attempt to get them to purchase later on.

The Footer of all Outbound Email Correspondence - Any email you personally send or any email your employees or customer service people send one on one, should have the link to your opt-in form.

Your Email Marketing Campaigns - We have many customers that include an opt-in form image or link inside their actual email marketing campaigns. If the email is forwarded to someone who isn’t on your list you might get a new subscriber. You can also use Forward to a Friend links as well.

Offline

Your Counter - Don’t forget to put a sign up book at your counter or somewhere prominent in your place of business. Then enter those email addresses quickly and send them a welcome email.

Taking Appointments - If your service business is centered around making appointments with your clients, ask them for their email addresses so you can confirm the times. Also ask if they would want offers from you and make a note of their answer.

Your Tradeshow Table - You’ve spent a lot of money to be at a tradeshow. If someone doesn’t have a business card you don’t want to lose the opportunity to add them to your list. So make sure you have some kind of sign up form or book at your booth.

Corporate Recruitment
Why bother to use an agency when your next star employee could be on the next site over? Although best used for freelancer-type roles, if you’re looking for white-hot web designer for your next project, try bidding on a term like ‘web design’ to display your 96 character job description to anyone viewing a site related to web design. Your Google content network-targeted campaign might deliver hundreds of applications, but isn’t that a good thing? You get to choose the perfect candidate after they’ve come to you – for a fraction of the cost of agencies and/or recruitment ads.

Personal Service Offering - with a twist
Although firmly in Facebook’s shadow, Linkedin offers a great social networking service for professionals. The site is constantly adding killer functionalities and expanding the service, and thousands of employees (including myself) and employers are active in the network.

So if you’ve blocked off some time for freelancing as a side income, why not use PPC to advertise the services you offer? Don’t worry if you don’t have a PPC-friendly website or landing page; using your Linkedin’s public profile is probably better – it comes complete with testimonials/endorsements, work experience, education and a contact channel, so you can easily promote yourself as an expert in the field matching your keyword. Your clients are as qualified as they can be, and depending on what services you offer, you’ve likely paid for your campaign several times over.

Check out an example for the Google search query ‘multivariate testing’ resulting in Niki Hignett’s profile page where he offers services for A/B and multivariate website testing: (Having trouble? Click here to see the ad on Google’s preview page)

Newsletter subscription growth
We all know email marketing is super cheap and effective, and that having a healthy opt-in subscriber base is a great way to launch new products, build brand loyalty, and up sell your product. Although organic is usually the preferred method of building your list, why not throw some money at it, and calculate the long-term revenue generated by your newsletter program? PPC can drive qualified, interested clicks to your newsletter program, although it’s likely you’ll need an incentive to entice them to click-thru. The argument is you’ll get some non-qualified clicks, but what better justification of a newsletter program for turning those subscribers into advocates and buyers?

Affiliate program promotion
If you’ve launched a new affiliate program, you want registrants ASAP. Use PPC to target potential affiliates by bidding on the same keywords your perfect affiliate might search for. Be up-front with the commission structure and tiers, and you can offset the costs of your PPC campaign with the sheer volume of sales generated by your super affiliate.

Synergize with your SEO efforts
SEO is free traffic, and PPC is paid… so it’s obvious which is better for your budget, right? If you’re on a tight budget don’t write off PPC just yet. When used in tandem (along with a good web analytics program) you can max out the effectiveness of both PPC and SEO with a little research and some sweat. By identifying your ‘head’ vs. ‘long-tail’ search terms, you can use PPC to target the search terms that are very specific to your product - low volume & high yield (and therefore low cost per click). Leave SEO to target the broad, brand-related keywords that are often high in volume and low yield, and you’re already saving a bundle and doing some semi-advanced marketing tactics!

Can you think of any more PPC ideas that aren’t your ‘run-of-the-mill’ variety? If so, I’d love to hear them!

Check out ‘The Age of Snark’ here, for your own good.

SpamMeltdown.com offer sources of inspiration to designers of HTML email.  Instead of just talking about email design, they’re going one better and showing real-life examples of emails from monster retailers and brands.  What’s more, they’re then analyzing and dissecting those campaigns and providing very insightful feedback.  Check them out at www.spammeltdown.com, or check out their highly useful post on Welcome Messages at http://spammeltdown.com/post/Welcome-Messages.aspx

A while back I had a great experience with Dell Canada’s customer service, so much so I wrote a post about it and as a result I happily recommend Dell to any peers who’re in the market for a new computer. It’s also a fact that referral marketing is one of the strongest and oldest forms of marketing, with the rule that ‘a happy customer tells 5; an unhappy customer tells 10’.  It’s one thing to see that statistic, but it’s entirely different - and more rewarding - when it actually happens to you. In this case I’m happy to become a statistic.

About 2 weeks ago my wife and I got back from a fantastic destination wedding in Antigua (West Indies), where we got married. It was fantastic, and was made all the better because we chose Blue Waters hotel (www.bluewaters.net). We couldn’t be happier with our entire experience; the weather, the hospitality, the friendly staff, the food, and the ceremony were all like a fairy tale, and for that reason we’ll be going back. And that’s the key – our experience was made so great by the team at Blue Waters that we’d be happy to go back. That’s great branding and marketing and they’re doing it right.

What did they do?
In addition to our wedding package, we had pre-booked a superior room that was already not too shabby. However, upon arriving at the hotel, we were delighted to find we’d been upgraded to one of the elite Cove Villa suites – complete with private infinity pool, 2 flat screen TV’s, King-size bed, turn-down service, and more. Fantastic.

It works
What Blue Waters did was very simple. Knowing it was off-season during our stay, they upgraded us. It would be no extra cost to them, but the instant affinity created with that one sentence: ‘we’ve taken the liberty to upgrade you to our Cove Villas’ will ultimately pay off. Over the average lifespan of a marriage, with 1 anniversary per year, it’s a sure bet we’ll find ourselves back in Antigua in the future, and paying for the same villa we were upgraded to for our wedding. The crucial thing is… we’ll be happy to do pay, simply because our first experience was so good. Blue Waters gained customers for life by simply identifying their market, calculating a one-time loss, and factoring in the average spend made by a couple on an anniversary. Sure it may not be next year, but it will happen.

What companies can do
So what’s the point of all this? If you as a company can identify the needs of your customers and calculate what you can offer them at low cost to you but high value to them, you can dramatically increase the weight and affinity of your brand. It’s all about perception, and like I said, happy customers referring friends can pay over the odds for small risks taken at the onset. Of course it’s relative – hotels can offer free rooms, whereas online stores can offer free shipping, but what counts is that you recognize what puts a smile on your customers’ faces, address it, do it, and you can have customers for life.

This represents a fundamental change in the way Flash-based sites are perceived in the industry. For years, Flash sites have been increasingly marginalized into sites specific to ultra-creative type portfolios, online games, digital agencies and multinational brands like Coca-cola for use in their uber-engaging ad campaigns. The everyday SMB or corporate organization were always steered away from Flash considering it was never accessible by the Search Engines, meaning that a site built in Flash was effectively invisible to the outside world.

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

This move by Adobe is 1) clearly a way to bring Flash back into the main stream for websites, and 2) a competitive move to align Flash with Microsoft’s Silverlight, who clearly did their homework and built SilverLight on XML, meaning it’s instantly indexable.

It looks like Google are already on it - phasing in the SWF-indexing technology, whereas Yahoo are rumoured to ‘have some work to do’. Microsoft, obviously, were not included for the competitive reasons mentioned above.

It does seem that although this is a massive step in the right direction for Flash-based sites, some issues will take a while to be resolved, for instance the production of a Flash site will have to change in an SEO standards compliance-type way and be built in such a way to allow deep indexing of separate SWF files. Having fiddled with Flash before, it’s easy to build a site as one complete movie/FLA, and in this case a user might be left at your homepage after arriving from a deep search, and be expected to navigate themselves to the correct level/page.

Except for the learning curve needed for webmasters and web designers in Flash, this advancement by Adobe might be monumental. Flash exists on 98% of all computers today, and there are 73 million Flash files on the web.

Read the official Adobe Press Release here.

Unfortunately I’m still waiting for my granted invitation from Google, but basically Ad Planner is a free online tool that allows online advertisers to find and target sites that match certain demographic criteria. The sites listed are (thankfully) not restricted to the content network, meaning that Google are clearly using some form of data collection method apart from AdSense subscriptions to generate lists of viable, revenue-generating sites for online advertisers.

So where’s the data coming from? SearchEnglineLand & TechCrunch are pretty sure it’s the ubiquitous Google toolbar, whereas Google themselves reveal that the data comes from a mixture of sources including aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data (I recall about 2 months ago opting-in to this from within my GA account) and other third-party market research.

Where ever the data is from, it looks like Google are going after the ad planning and selling business, with this new tool set to become a free and easy-to-use media planner at your disposal.

By selecting from a filter of sites, you can see the age, sex, education and household income of that site’s visitors, allowing an advertiser to make an educated decision on whether or not to advertise on that site. What’s more, the tool does offer a dedicated media planning facility, allowing the user to export a list of the sites researched for use with another 3rd-party ad server. It’s worth nothing at this point that Google’s Ad Planner in no way acts as the ad broker – at this time it looks to be a research tool only, but I don’t think anyone will be surprised when Google announce you can now buy ad space directly from Ad Planner.

Further to that, it seems pretty obvious that Google are looking to really nail the ‘one-stop-shop’ title down; this tool will eventually allow an online marketer/advertiser to publish PPC and image/video/mobile/text ads to sites on and off the content network after researching the viability of doing so, then report and gauge reaction using Google Analytics. Who knows, a landing page could be optimized with Google’s Website optimizer, and that entire site could be built using Google’s App Engine, fulfil orders with Google Checkout, and monetize further page views using Google AdSense.

Further reading here:
Wall Street Journal @ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121425232721997689.html
SearchEngineLand @ http://searchengineland.com/080624-104519.php
TechCrunch @ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/24/is-google-ad-planner-getting-its-data-from-the-google-toolbar/

Jeanniey Mullen, who you might recognize from her countless ClickZ articles on email marketing (and who’s also the founder and exec chairwoman of the EEC) states that:

Email marketing currently generates an estimated return on investment of $48.29 for every dollar spent on it, according to the Direct Marketing Association

We conservatively estimate that if all marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, email’s ROI would jump to $52.69. Not paying attention to rendering impacts revenue directly.

Although it might not seem like much on paper, that $4.40 uplift per sale can add up to a tidy profit, and truly begs the question why huge multinational retailers like Apple are continuing to use image-only email campaigns for their promotional campaigns.

Here are some more noteworthy stats on image-only email campaigns - if anything these should sway you from ever even experimenting with image-only campaigns - just don’t!

• Only 47% of respondents say their companies have taken action to design emails with image suppression in mind.

• Of the 38% that had tested to see whether the changes they made produced results, 32% have seen more opens, 32% have seen more clickthroughs, and 17% have seen more conversions - with 47% seeing at least a 10% improvement.

• 23% of retailers send emails that are completely unintelligible when images are disabled.

• Of the 77% that sent intelligible emails, there are significant variations in clarity based on use of HTML text and alt tags, two techniques that can boost effectiveness in image-disabled environments.

• Only 42% of retailers designed emails that contained a reasonable mix of HTML text and images, and 63% of retailers used alt tags on their images adequately or extensively.

As a result, the report advises marketers to include more HTML in their emails by including the following:

• Headlines
• Section heads
• Product names, prices and other text companying product images
• Text in banners
• Lists (upcoming releases, etc.)
• Menu and navigation bar text
• Call-to-action buttons
• Promotion codes and instructions on how to apply them

Additional findings:

• 14% of retailers compose their navigation bars with HTML text rather than images.
• 3% of retailers used HTML call-to-action buttons rather than images.
• 88% of retailers include a “click to view” link in their preheader text.
• 63% of retailers include whitelisting instructions in their preheader text.
• The emails from only 21% of retailers displayed meaningful snippet text.

http://feedcompare.com/
http://www.text-link-ads.com/blog_juice/
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
http://www.keywordspy.com/
http://www.webconfs.com/domain-stats.php
http://www.backtags.com/
http://www.websitegrader.com/ - Recommended
http://www.seomoz.org/rank-checker
http://www.iwebtool.com/multirank
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/
http://www.touchgraph.com/
http://www.soloseo.com/tools/indexRank.html
http://www.xinureturns.com/ - Recommended
http://seodigger.com/