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| eMarketing Tips and Tricks - July 22, 2003 |  |
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Check out our eMarketing Tools
Informative eBooks
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Today's Article: How Best to Manage and Distribute your Messages Today's Ask Dr. Ebiz: Hard Bounces and Soft Bounces Today's Software Review:
Live Person's -
Live Keyword How Best to Manage and Distribute your Messages
Almost 70% of USA email users have made online purchases as a result of receiving permission email marketing. Click-thru rates for email marketing campaigns can range from 1.3 to as high as 25%. Whichever way you look at it - doing business over the Internet is growing at incredible rates and email marketing is becoming a given element of many marketing campaigns. It should come as no surprise that the tools that help us manage our email lists and distribution are becoming increasingly important. The challenge in incorporating email marketing into a campaign is determining what type of email service best suits your business needs, today and in the long-term. There are two main choices when establishing and maintaining email marketing programs: a desktop email marketing application or an email campaign submission service. Let me describe the two options in greater detail. Email Marketing Application - Tools such as these allow you to create, manage and distribute your own customized email campaigns. Cost is usually a one-time software purchase. This approach is best suited to companies with a fairly well defined target market and corresponding email distribution list. This approach can also be used if your target audience is growing and/or changing. The software applications available allow the user to build, maintain and change their own email distribution lists, create rich messages and distribute their campaigns. I would recommend this type of product to those businesses with a pre-identified target audience and the ability to access a distribution list to reach this audience. With a desktop application your original investment provides you with the flexibility to manage and define your own email distribution lists. This is the type of service for you if you're interested in owning and maintaining your own list and using this list as part of the intellectual property of your business. Some products to check out: Broadcast by Mailworkz Gammadyne Mailer by Gammadyne Mailoop Campaign Submission Service - When you use this type of service you are contracting a third-party to provide you with the interface to your customers and/or target audience. The agent will distribute your message to one or several opt-in email lists that have been provided based upon some stated interest on the part of the recipients. These are lists of people who have registered for certain websites, e-zines or newsletters or have asked to receive information via email and have stated their interested in certain subjects. The agent or submission service will work with you to determine the list that best matches your product, service or announcement - working together you will use pre-existing lists to create a target email audience for your company's use. The submission service will receive your message and distribute to one or more of the email lists. There is a quality control element in place as you are are sending relevant information to recipients that have already stated an interest in a related subject matter and most likely the message will not be viewed as spam. Cost usually runs on an eight to 30 cent per email sent charge. The submission service allows you to work with experts in the field of gathering e-mail distribution lists based on subject(s) interest and the application of this technology in receiving information. Each time you want to distribute a message you rely on these service providers for their advice, lists and expertise in distributing your information. If you're new to the e-mail marketing forum and your business does not yet have a substantial e-mail distribution list - this service may be able to fill the gap and get you into the game. Some submission services: A couple of items to keep in mind - the overall cost of your email marketing efforts, campaign tracking reports and the future role of email marketing in your overall direct marketing plans. There are plenty of choices in the marketplace - educate yourself and make the best decision for your organization. 1000MB Hosting "Dr Ebiz" "What is the difference between hard and soft bounce backs and undeliverables?" Marty Mullane, AHI "Hard bounces" occur when e-mails are returned ("bounced back") from invalid e-mail addresses. Either the recipient no longer has an e-mail account ("user unknown") or the domain name doesn't exist ("host unknown"). These are permanent, undeliverable "fatal errors," and should be unsubscribed. "Soft bounces" are temporary bounces and aren't as precisely defined. They can occur for a number of technical reasons -- the recipients mail server is temporarily unavailable, the recipient's inbox is full, an "out of office" autoreply is received, autoreply change of address notice has been sent, etc. Better list server software is programmed to unsubscribe hard bounces immediately, but wait on soft bounces to make sure that the problem isn't resolved over the next few days or weeks. The list owner can often instruct list server software to unsubscribe soft bounces after a specific time, say, five bounces over a two-week period. More definitions can be found at ListLingo.com. "Copyright 2003, Ralph F. Wilson. All rights reserved. Used by permission."
Maximizing Search Engine Traffic We love Live Person, having used it on our site for more than three years. We are also using it in our newsletters and customer emails. They now have an exciting new feature called Live Keyword that lets us view, real-time, which keywords have been used to reach our site. This has great ROI potential as it helps us determine which keywords our visitors are using and allows us to tailor our customer service and sales responses. Here is the low-down on Live Keyword: LivePerson, a leading provider of technology for real-time sales, customer service and marketing solutions, has launched a new feature, Live Keyword, which lets you:
How does Live Keyword work?Agent Alerts View Customer Details Close the Sale and Provide
Extraordinary Support
How can Live Keyword benefit your online business?
Why is Live Keyword such a powerful feature?According to a survey from DoubleClick (December 2002), 41% of U.S. online buyers say that they find the websites they use to research a purchase by using search engines. To help businesses identify these top prospects on their website, LivePerson automatically highlights which website visitors came from a search engine and allows online customer service or sales agents to view the search engine and the keyword used by the visitor. With this information, agents can offer an unprecedented level of customer service and increase close rates and total sale value. A high percentage of online purchases originate from search engines. Visitors coming from search engines are hot leads and should be given preferential treatment. Live Keyword enables users to do just this: maximize the value of your search engine traffic.
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2003 Mailworkz. All Rights Reserved.
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