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Forrester Research:
US online marketing will ramp up to $61 billion by 2012

When is it Time to Switch Your Email Marketing Provider?

by Kristina Smith on March 9, 2010

Whether you’re using a simple web-based platform or robust, customized software, your email marketing provider should be acting more like a partner than just someone sending you invoices every month.

Think back to when you chose your solution. No doubt you did a lot of research, compared pricing structures, and had an account rep there at all times to answer your questions and provide suggestions and best practices to get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

If that support has faded, it may be time to consider switching suppliers. Like a website, email is not a marketing tool you can set and forget. Every email you send out is a chance to learn, evaluate, and tweak. You should be constantly aiming to improve open rates, click throughs, referrals, and conversions.

Email creative should be updated regularly; colours and placements of copy and links should be tested. A good email provider will be monitoring your campaigns, and making unprompted suggestions. They will be actively working with you to get the most out of your email channel, still an incredibly valuable - and cost effective - marketing tool.

Support, too, is essential. If you have technical issues or run into Spam filtering problems, they should be accessible and able to work quickly to help solve these issues. They should have good relationships with the ISPs, relationships they nurture to keep their customers off the blacklists. Does yours? Ask them.

Services like creative advice, design, and analysis will probably come with a price tag, which is fair, but your vendor should be up front and provide an estimate before any work is performed.

If you’re not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling from your current email marketing provider, here’s a checklist you can use while researching a new one. While most offer the same basic services, differing mainly on features, platforms, and pricing, it’s the level of service that we’ll consider here:
 

  • Can they offer campaign performance and loyalty recommendations?
  • Do they monitor the familiar email rates and statistics for their customers, and offer feedback?
  • Does their system provide robust tracking and analysis tools?
  • Can they build creative templates for your business? At what cost?
  • Are they constantly refining and updating their software to take advantage of the latest technologies and trends in email and online marketing?
  • Do they offer unlimited personal coaching and support? Is it by phone, email, live chat or in person? Does it cost anything?
  • Do they provide whitepapers, webinars/seminars, a company blog, and/or other materials for training/knowledge?
  • What are they doing to maintain their credibility with the various servers, so you can enjoy a higher delivery rate?
  • Finally, what do their clients say about them? No, not the ones they give you as referrals – do some digging to find other companies using their service, and ask around before you make any commitments. 
     

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Optimizing META Descriptions for Search

by Kristina Smith on February 23, 2010

META descriptions are not used for ranking, but by the search engines to display a unique description (beneath the page title) in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

Like META keywords, there are pros and cons to using them as a part of your search marketing strategy. On one hand, it is good for branding, as you can get your message across exactly how to want it to read.

 

On the other, users might not see descriptions in the results with the keywords they are searching for highlighted, which tend to get much higher click thrus.

 

Getting the right balance of branding and highlighted terms can be worthwhile, but very time consuming. In fact, it's nearly impossible to get that balance unless it's tested and closely monitored.

 

Keen to do so? Start by clearing out your page descriptions to get a clear base line. Monitor how the pages are performing on their own, and what search terms people are finding them with.

 

You can then start altering the descriptions using the search terms, and compare success against the base line.

 

This should only be done to the most important pages and monitored closely, and often. The descriptions can be tweaked until an optimal balance is found.

 

Remember, that using the META description tag does NOT guarantee that the search engines will use your description. To increase the odds, make sure the description includes those key terms you hope the page will be found for. 

 

To put it another way, if your page ranks for a particular term — and that term is in the META Description tag — that will improve the chances of the tag being used.

 

The META description should be unique for every single page within your site. If you have a larger site, ask a search expert to create a schema to strategically build the descriptions. Good luck!

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