Archive for August, 2009

Making Your eMail Marketing Campaign Stand Out

August 30th, 2009

On an average, we receive 7-10 unsolicited mails everyday. Do we really care to open them or just select and delete all such mails? Most of us have the tendency to delete them without opening then why should we expect that when we are sending a bulk mail people will open.marketing_e-mail

Email marketing do works and definitely one of the cheapest marketing channels to create brand awareness and generate leads. But some real smart approach is required to make your email marketing campaign stand out. Here are a few of them

Email List is Most important

If you want your email campaign to be successful take god care while creating your email list. Sending out to a few hundreds of targeted people is much better than sending to thousands of untargeted people. Getting clicks on your bulk mails will very much depend on the people who are receiving it.
Sending out mails without proper filtering of list is a waste of time and money.

Subject of Email

If you are a brand is popular including brand name in your subject line would be a good idea and will work better than any other catchy subject line. Since people would immediately know from where the mail has come from and chances of opening an email from known source is maximum.

If you are not so known brand its better to be straight and convey the purpose of your mail in the subject line. But avoid sounding like a salesman in your subject line.

email-marketing

Design of Email

Keep it as simple, short and light weight as possible. Theme based design, crisp copy and one call to action would be the best strategy. It is important to keep the weight of email file as light as possible.

Test Before Sending

An email looking absolutely perfect in your browser may not look so perfect when open with different email clients. If you want your email to look uniform across all email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, HotMail, Eudora, Outlook. etc. test it before sending. This becomes even more important if you are using mass mailing tool. Your might need to tune in your CSS file to make it look uniform.

Analysis and Reporting

This is very important for checking up the success of your campaign. Always use tracking code installed in your email to help you know Impressions, CTR, and Conversion from your email marketing campaign. It is recommended to try different version of mails and subject line if you have a large emails list. This will help you to test what works for your target audience.

10 Twitter Applications You Can Make Use Of

August 25th, 2009

Google Desktop: Google application for twitter let others know what are you doing? Read and update Twitters right on your desktop!

Autopilot Tweet - Full Twitter automation software for Twitter marketing includes a Twitter Friend Adder / Follower Adder, auto follow, follow by keywords, follow your followers, auto unfollow, schedule your tweets and automate most of the mundance daily chores of managing your Twitter account. You can automate Twitter for an extremely affordable price.

Catfood Follower - desktop Twitter tool for following new friends that follow you and removing friends that don’t follow you back.

Friendbar- A Firefox toolbar that is the best way to follow Twitter & Facebook updates, and post to Twitter and Facebook.

GeoTweeter - Puts the ‘where’ into your tweets! Messages automatically include a ‘schmap.me’ link, showing followers your exact location with a configurable map icon: say more about places you visit with an optional photo and star rating.

iClippy - Windows application that provides a transient online clipboard for the images, making copy-and-paste operations work online as seamlessly as it does offline. There’s a “post to Twitter” option as the image gets uploaded, makes posting visuals to Twitter a snap

JabberTwitterBridge — Java application to update Twitters, Jabber’s status (google talk gtalk) and Google calendar together (for example : In a meeting until 15h12) (Twitter to google talk, google talk to twitter, google calendar to google talk and google calendar to twitter)

mTweet - is a full mobile twitter client application running on Windows Mobile 6 or higher

QckTwit – A simple Twitter app that you can activate anytime by Shift+Alt+T and it would pop up presenting a text box to enter your update quickly. As soon as you press Ctrl+Enter, it will send update to Twitter and get out of your way. Separate box for URL. If your message exceeds Twitter’s limit then it will automatically break it down in multiple twits and color those extra chars differently. Open source, requires .Net 3.5

Sociagami – sociagami allows you to manage your multiple social network statuses from one beautiful Windows application. sociagami currently supports Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter status.

TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more.

Google Mail is The 3rd Largest Web e-Mail Services in U.S

August 17th, 2009

It’s just been 5 years when compared to Hotmail (launched in July 1996 ) Yahoomail (inaugurated in 19997) for Gmail beta release. But with 146 million monthly users is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S.

The good thing is that the Gmail service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite.

Google’s Gmail is now the third-largest Web e-mail service in the U.S., surpassing AOL e-mail with 37 million monthly unique users, according to new comScore estimates for July 2009.

Yahoo! Mail serves over 280 million users as of 2009, while hotmail has 47 million unique visitors. Lately, Gmail unique visitors have grown up by 25% while that of AOL has declined by 22 percent for the same period.

Try Out The New Search Engine By Google

August 11th, 2009

In my recent post Bing or not to Bing , I mentioned that the Google and Microsoft battle will bring in some real innovative products and services for web users and actually now we can see things taking shape and see some recent buzz coming out of both Google and Microsoft headquarters.

Google Chrome Operating System, Microsoft tying up with Yahoo Search to increase its search market share and now the Next Generation Search Engine by Google.

Google New Search Engine

What would be this new version of Google search engine would be. Google has just unveiled its “secret project” of “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search“ that aims at:

1.    Crawling a large chunk of the web
2.    Indexing the result pages and compute how reputable those pages are
3.    Ranking and returning the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible

Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, and Google welcomes feedback on any issues you see. Try out this new version of search engine by Google that perhaps also shows real time results.

Twitter Outage: Distributed Denial of Service Attack

August 6th, 2009

This is not the first time we all have faced Twitter outage. We have seen it quite a sometimes Twitter custom error page and most of the time it is due to over congestion of traffic- more than what is expected or planned for.

But this morning Twitter was hit with Distributed Denial of Service Attack or DDoS. Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon and other highly popular sites have faced this earlier and this time it is the most popular micro blogging platform Twitter.

What is DDoS?

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.

Though the means to carry out and target for DDoS attack may vary but the intention of DDoS attack is to prevent an internet site or service to operate efficiently either temporarily or indefinitely.

A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. These systems are compromised by attackers using a variety of methods.

Attackers have been known to use the following 4 programs to launch DDoS attacks: Trinoo, TFN, TFN2K and Stacheldraht

Distribution denial of services

History of DDos

The first well-publicized DDoS attack in the public press was in February 2000. On February 7, Yahoo! was the victim of a DDoS during which its Internet portal was inaccessible for three hours. On February 8, Amazon, Buy.com, CNN, and eBay were all hit by DDoS attacks that caused them to either stop functioning completely or slowed them down significantly.

Analysts estimated that during the three hours Yahoo was down, it suffered a loss of e-commerce and advertising revenue that amounted to about $500,000. According to book seller Amazon.com, its widely publicized attack resulted in a loss of $600,000 during the 10 hours it was down.

Denial-of-service attacks and the law
In the Police and Justice Act 2006, the United Kingdom specifically outlawed denial-of-service attacks and set a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

Why should you spend on getting quality content For your website?

August 1st, 2009

You have very limited time to impress your visitor. Hence, every aspect that goes into the content of your webpage has to be well thought of before giving them a space in your webpage. The power of good content

Web marketing experts after several researches have concluded some interesting facts that can help you to understand the importance of having purposeful and appealing content in your website.

Some of the important facts are:

Text Matters More To Serious Buyers:

The Poynter School of Journalism conducted a survey in 1994 to find out “how users read on web”? The findings of the report were later confirmed by another survey on the same subject in 1997.

The increasing trends and usage of internet in the new millennium once again inspired them to cross check their earlier two findings by conducting yet another survey on the same subject in the year 2000.

The findings of each report had some deviations but one thing was common in each survey. “Of users’ first three eye-fixations on a page, only 22% were on graphics; 78% were on text”.

Nielsen Norman Group’s recent usability studies using eye tracking technology confirms many of the findings from Poynter school.

Most Of Web Surfers Do Interlaced Browsing

This is one of the most common activities performed by billons of interne users. It means, one keeps on switching between multiple websites. They would read on one window and then switch to another window to visit another website. And then return to the first window and read some more on the first site; possibly to turn to the second window again later in the session.

To overcome this, your website must have turbo charged content to register your brands in the minds of visitors. Catchy headlines and purposely appealing copies written by professional content writers should only be integrated in your website.

You Have Limited Time To Impress Your Visitors

You have a very limited time, on an average just 5 seconds, to impress and convince your visitors.

This means every word that is written on your website must carry positive stimulus for your readers.

Poorly written copy or content begets nothing but can burn hole in your pocket.

While use of limited but targeted and emotion triggering words can compel visitors to explore and act in desired manner.

You Need To Convey Your Brand Message Effectively

Your website is a platform to deliver your brand messages to your target audience. Millions of peoplewith different mindset, objective, culture and educational background will come across your website.

It is challenging but highly important to effectively and uniformly convey your brand messages to all.

Web content writing is an art, expression of which requires marketing brains with creative bloods pumping the adrenalins. Only professional content writers with years of experience in web content writing and passion to write killer sales copy can deliver you the best content writing services.

Spend a little time and money in getting the professional content writing services for your website or else you may loose business.