Using Outlook to send bulk e-newsletters to your customers? Whoa! Stop Right There!

Ask yourself these vital questions:

• What % of my customers receive my emails?
• What % of my customers actually open my emails?

Now if I was to tell you that out of the 1,000 emails you send each month…

• 110 never receive it;
• 620 never bothered opening it;
• and that only 54 click on anything within the email.

…would you still bother sending it? Probably not.

So? What am I doing wrong?

Well, there’s a chance your mailing list is out of date, that many of the email addresses are no longer used or are misspelt, or have been entered as .com’s instead of .co.uk’s. Then there’s the free email providers such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail all of whom have strict rules and monitoring in place to stop us from getting “spammed” or “phished” so they do two main things:

1.) Block emails from sources they believe to be spammers, based on a bizare and often unpredictable set of rules.

2.) Throw any low risk spam into your  “Junk Folder” so it doesnt upset the bona fide emails in your lovely inbox.

This of course means your beautifully-crafted email doesn’t get through to a vast percentage of your customers.

Even if your email is one of the lucky, triumphant ones and makes it to the inbox like one of those virtual tadpoles you see on sex education videos at school, it then has to convince the recipient to click “open”…

A whole new host of issues then arises:

• Is the subject heading inviting/encouraging/inspiring/intriguing?
• Does it come from a reliable source?
• Is it swamped in a sea of more interesting emails?

Finally, the most important part – once opened, how do you keep the reader engaged and how on earth do you get them to click on that link directing them to your website so they can Buy, Buy, Buy! I’m not going to tell you that, but…

MailChimp Storms the Microsoft Castle!

MailChimp has all the other answers!

We’ve used MailChimp for a couple of years now and honestly struggle to find much fault with it! (Hmmm – Well I guess it could be FREE??)

It stores and manages your entire mailing list, helps you create a sign-up page for your website, gives you email templates, provides detailed reports and most importantly …

Integrates All This “Social Media” Malarky

Ok, so everyones told you how important it is to be a Twit, to have 4,000 “friends” on Facebook, that your meant to “Digg” everything thats “Delicious” on YourSpace or MyTube? Well, MailChimp provides you with a slick way to adhere to all this advice, simply click the buttons once your spanking new email newsletter gets sent and you’ll be taken to all the relevant social media sites so you can make the most of your latest work of litery genius.

Practicing What You Preach

We recently launched our LandingNet Chinwag – our laid-back approach to e-shots, e-newsletters, email marketing…whatever you want to call it!

The results were great, more than doubling the industry averages for the percentage of emails opened and clicked on, whilst receiving a tiny fraction of the average “bounce” rate.

“Hard Bounces” are those where the email address does not exist and is instantly returned by the email provider.

“Soft Bounces” are where the recipients inbox might be full or the email provider has tried to deliver the email but after several attempts it fails.

Our LandingNet Chinwag only  received two “bounces” one hard, one soft and the hard bounce was actually our fault – we entered the email address in wrong! Whoops – hey, no-ones perfect right?? ;O)

So Microsoft are trying to change the world again with their new search platform Bing. Apparently it isn’t a search engine anymore it is a ‘decision engine’ so is this offering anything new or are they just trying to reinvent the wheel.

Over the years search is not something that Microsoft have done well and I wonder who is more worried – Microsoft on hearing the news that Google will soon be releasing an operating system Chrome OS or Google when they saw Bing.

At first sight bing has a nice clean interface and I’m sure the use of images will have people setting it to their homepage to see what image they are displaying today, but what is under the hood. Ultimately the success of a search engine is down to the search algorithm and the results it produces which is why Google has such a huge market share (81.22%). Where others put monetisation above results, Google put results above monetisation and stole the market. More recently google have become more and more of a corporate machine and I would suggest that the quality of the search results have suffered leaving the way for other companies to reclaim some of the market share.

I have only just started to use bling and only when I remember to use it, but most of the time I will still type my search into the google toolbar I have installed. Google will be a hard habit to break but the proof is in the eating as they say so why not use this comparison site for a bit, which brings up the results side by side and decide for yourself.

One thing you can be sure of is that anything that keeps Google ‘on their toes’ can only be good for the end user and Microsoft with their huge advertising budget will do that. Microsoft have extensive knowledge in usability and Google have extensive knowledge in search algorithms but the difference between these two is that the first is transparent and the second a closely guarded secret, so whilst microsoft continue to try and make Bing peoples default search engine by its interface and good usability Google will continue to improve their algorithm and then as Microsoft launch new functionality Google will just pick the bits they want and apply them to their search engine.

We also have to ask the question – why Bing? A quick look at the dictionary reveals:

Bing – a heap or pile
Bling – flashy; ostentatious; glitzy

So you decide is Bing just a bing of s***e or just a bit of bling or is it something that can truely challenge Google.

One more dictionary definition for you comes from the urban dictionary.

Enough said I think.

How many websites do you come across on a daily basis that do not work? Either a page doesn’t exist, or the page doesn’t load or the page load’s, but doesn’t display properly.

The reason this can happen is because not enough testing has gone into the site. Some Webmasters assume if it works for them, it will work for everyone right? Wrong.

Different people use different browsers, the most common are IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari for Mac users. Because a website displays ok in IE, does not mean it will display the same in Firefox, this is why it is important to test your website compatibility in different browsers.

As well as testing how your site displays in different browsers, it is just as important to test the accessibility of your site.

Website Accessibility is becoming more of an issue, so much so, website companies can be sued if their websites are not accessible to all users. It is in everyone’s interest who runs a website to check with their various laws on the stance of website accessibility and what you can do to ensure you website is accessible.

There are many tools you can use to ensure your website is accessible. World Web Consortium (W3C) website offers guidelines for web content accessibility which will help you tweak your site and bring it into line to make is fully accessible. Other tools you can use for testing are webxact.watchfire.com. WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

If you use Firefox, a useful extension which acts a screen reader is Fangs. Fangs will show you how screen readers view your pages enabling you to tweak the textual content of your webpages.

Another thing to consider about your website is how fast your pages load. The quicker your pages load, the happier your visitors are. You can test the speed of your pages by using tools such as OctaGate.

Although the majority of Internet users are now on broadband, there are still those who access the web via dial-up. Therefore you should still consider the speed of your site and the load times of your pages.

Broken URLs are a common in alot of websites. A website may link to an external website, yet never check to see if that site or page still exists some months/years down the line. You may even move a webpage on your own site and not update your own links. W3c’s Link Checker is a useful online tool which enables you to check your website for broken links.

There are many tools on the web that you can use to check your website compatibility and your website accessibility. The testing of your website is a very important part of the success of your website performance. Testing does not just occur the first time your website goes live, it should be a continuous part of your overall maintenance schedule.