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How to create effective email newsletters

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

Email newsletters are the bread and butter of email marketing. Almost any site with a central theme and regular content updates deserves a newsletter of some sort. A newsletter is an excellent tool to engage your target audience in an ongoing digital conversation, keep top-of-mind awareness, and drive a continual flow of web traffic.

Of course the first tip I’ll give you for creating a successful newsletter is to promote it everywhere. Place a registration field on every page of your website. Ask customers in your physical store if they’d like to receive the newsletter when they’re making a purchase. Place a link to it on your receipts, flyers, anywhere appropriate that will enable you to grow your subscriber list.

Tips for paid bloggers - from an advertiser

I've been paying bloggers to review products/services now for almost a year. I've also written the occasional sponsored post myself. I've used some of the popular platforms, such as PayPerPost and Linkworth, and I've contacted bloggers individually. Some reviews have been great 'link juice', they've brought traffic and leads, generated buzz, and even aided search ranking positions! Others, however, have been utter crap, and it's quite obvious that some bloggers are just out to make a quick buck.

Because of those bloggers, I've put together a list of my annoyances as an advertiser. These are not rules, you can do what you want, if you feel like taking the money and putting forth a minimal amount of effort, then that's your prerogative. However, taking these suggestions will add quality and value to your blog, which of course will benefit in long run. You'll receive better feedback/rating/tack from the advertiser, and in turn you'll qualify for more and better posting opportunities in the future. You'll also maintain greater relevancy on your blog, which search engines will reward with more traffic, and this of course makes you more valuable to advertisers.

OK, enough said, on with the tips...

What are email blocklists?

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

Blocklists are the bane of many an email marketers' existence. Blocklists are exactly that – a list of domains/senders which are blocked (they are interchangeably referred to as blacklists). There are public blocklists that businesses can reference, most large businesses and ISPs also have their own blocklists, and even subscribers themselves can have their own 'blocklist', depending on their email client. Obviously, we're more concerned about the larger blocklists, because those are the ones that can prevent us from reaching a large portion of our subscriber base.

What is email sender reputation?

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

Your sender reputation is the single most influential external factor in whether or not your email is delivered. Just like your reputation as an individual, your reputation builds over time. Every email you send can affect that reputation positively or negatively. Every spam complaint, every list with anything more than a tiny percentage of undeliverable addresses, can detract from your sender reputation.

What is email accreditation?

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

Accreditation is something that I personally do not agree with. It is a way of paying to ensure that your emails get delivered. You can register with an accreditation company, such as GoodMail Systems (conveniently partnered with Yahoo! and AOL) and Habeas, and pay a fee to receive email VIP treatment so to speak.

Google Analytics - Browser Capabilities

The Browser capabilities reporting within Google Analytics is pretty self-explanatory. Essentially, they are segmentation reports, telling you who uses which browsers and operating systems, as well as the functional capabilities (such as Flash).

Logfile-based web analytics solutions, such as AWstats, can report on the browser and OS as well of your visitors, but it takes a 'tagged' solution to read the specific capabilities of live browsers.

What is email authentication?

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

Authentication is fairly self-explanatory – it is a framework for authenticating you as a sender. To greatly over-simplify the definition, it's a way of proclaiming that you are a legitimate company, you really are who you claim to be, and your email is not spam.

Where to place the unsubscribe link

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

This tends to be one of the more controversial email marketing topics. I like to ask people: “where do you think the unsubscribe link should be placed in your email?” Of course, most people place the unsubscribe/opt out links at bottom of the email, and they feel that that's exactly where it should be.

I completely understand the rationale. After all, you work so hard to build your list and get more subscribers, why would you want to allow them to easily get off your list? It should be at the bottom of the email, so they don't see it unless they've gone through the entire email!