Recommendations for actions – put a tick box at the side of notes so you can see when you’ve done it.

Tip: surround yourself with people that raise your game.

Systems are critical – marketing will only get you so far.

Journaling – exposed flaws in my thinking.  I discovered a lot.  Did 30 days every day and then 4-5 times a week.  We have an infinite capacity to rationalize – you have to see your own writing.

Eric Rees the lean startup book.  Basis of this talk.

Lesson 1

Stop falling in love with your idea.  They are worth nothing unless executed. Derek Sivers www.sivers.org/multiply a middling good idea, well executed can be huge.

Lesson 2

Forget about perfection – you can improve and should seek to do this.  Perfectionism can hold you back.

Lesson 3

Have a SYSTEM for choosing one project from many. Handout – How to pick a project

Speed – 1 to 10 score. how quickly can you do this project?

Revenue – how much money will it earn?

Certainty – how certain are you that you can pull this off?

Existing Assets – how much new stuff do you have to go out and create (new stuff slows you down).  could be a list, your blog, repurposing content you haven’t used in a while

Skills and Talents – how well does this match what you like to do and how you handle yourself? Colby Test (work style) and Strengthsfinder

Lesson 4

Have a System for evaluating the project (1 page business plan) www.leancanvas.com its free now.

[what's your unfair advantage?  the one thing that's hard to replicate]

Lesson 5

uncover ALL of your hidden assumptions – the journal is good here to check/reflect back.

E.g. Tactical Triangle www.tacticaltriangle.com download.  Traffic / Conversion / Economics (upsells and cross-sells).

Traffic: Do I know where I can get my traffic and what I pay for it?

Conversion: don’t make plans based on 10% conversions – what’s your process (JV, webinars)

Economics – pricing – will this pay for traffic / overhead

Lesson 6

Know the length of your runway

How long before your run out of money…Running Lean (pdf book used to be there).

Constraints are Resources (usually money); Ideas; Passion – Interest – Focus

Lesson 7

use the single workflow method

How to stuff 10 envelopes – it’s actually faster to use the single work flow method (not mass production of doing each task 10 times) do all steps for 1 envelope is faster.

Benefits – catch problem early (feedback); deliver a finished product to market faster (revenue)

Typical mistakes – juggling too many projects delays revenue start date (and increases risk of market shifting / competitors)

Single workflow means get to market faster, more data and feedback from buyers, get to the money earlier and have an audience for subsequent products

Lesson 8

Plan for dealing with shiny object disease!

Jump around inside a project – reduce complexity and pick small projects.  We are good at overestimating resources you need e.g. do you need JVs in place?

Simple as possible -MVP [what am I building to learn from the market? Build-measure-learn = repeat]  Start by working out what you want to learn before you build.  Can I measure this?

Lesson 9

Avoid death by Feature Creep

Surveys are good at working out pain points – they don’t tell you what product to build.

Free Tool – Trello – project management

To do – Doing – Done

Rule – any one person on the team only has one card on the doing column…. move back/forth

Lesson 10

Get market feedback early and often

What assumption are you testing? is your test set to record hard numbers? what’s the smallest, quickest product for running the test?

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Getting reliable answers from your customer research is important – but getting short cuts by asking the right quesions is more than half the battle.

We got a great set of four questions in the mail today.

4 Questions for customer insight

1. Why did you (sign up to our mailing list)?
2. What made you nearly not (sign up)?
3. What would make you spend more with us?
4. What’s your biggest question about (our product or service)?

What an awesome list.

Why these questions are golden

Why did you sign up? – give you real understanding about what the customer thinks drove them to click that button.  Remember, you can cross check this against your stats to see if this aligns.  And you might learn a lot from what the customer thinks drove them…

What made you nearly not (sign up)? – again, understand the principal thing that nearly stopped your desired action happening.  Can you affect that or influence it in future?  You betcha – this could be the insight that leads to the biggest improvement in your CTR.

What would make you spend more with us? rather a forward question – but you never know.  Some people may just need a tiny nudge.  Or they may perceive your pricing versus features incorrectly.  It may not be a matter of switching budgets or reducing your price.  Listen hard to these answers.

What’s your biggest question about (our product or service)? Great insights come here from your user because this shows where mis-understanding or mis-communication has occurred.  Could also give you ideas for new features or products for the future.

Do this for your brand

Don’t use a check box or pick list for this.  Free text answers will give you the best insights.

Adapt the questions to suit your situation.  The words I’ve put in brackets can be adjusted to suit your situation.

And figure out the best place to do the work… on the blog, in a newsletter, when someone unsubscribes or subscribes…. Let us know how you get on.

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TIN first came to our attention when it published this year’s TIN100 a ranking of the top 100 New Zealand and Australian technology companies.  We spoke to Greg Shanahan about the firm’s growth

I started the company in 1999 and it initially was running events for the tech sector – mainly around VC fund raising and information. I found a lack of business information in the business media about the tech sector generally which gave me the idea.

I decided to compile some data and start producing a report. Now  it’s become a tool for the sector and the only publication that quantifies and monitors the technology sector.  We research around 3 areas ICT, hi tech manufacturing and biotechnology.

How do people find out about TIN?

Not easily! Initially I did the report and it had 50 companies in 2005 and we expanded to 100 companies to get more of a representation.  There are now 200 NZ and 50 Australian firms included… .it has got itself a profile within the Tech sector.

Last year for the first time we engaged a PR company just as the document was starting to be used more by Government – the Ministry of Economic Deveolopment and Science and Innovation and other agencies who work to stimulate the economy. In NZ word of mouth happens.  And the PR and Government use has pushed the growth further

I’ve never understood PR well but since the launch on Monday we’ve been in 12 publicatios and 2 TV channels.  And now a blog!

How do you find the companies?

Initially it wasn’t sceintific – just ones I knew.  Now we have  sponsors who put forward names, and we also the scan media for reports on the tech sector and  also word of mouth.  Companies now come to us and ask why they aren’t in the report.   Which is what I dearly wanted to happen.

How to get your firm included

Typically people phone or send in contact information off the website.

The research takes the form of exhaustive contact with the companies – we start with 250 firms send them survey forms and ask to fill them in – after the cut off period we send them the information about their profile for verification and we also ask for CEO photos from leading companies.

Feedback - we try to take a step up every year – we try to keep polishing it for graphics and focus on the issues that are relevent and trying to distil what’s going on.  Perhaps our biggest achievement in NZ has been to change the understanding of the impotance of the technology export sector.

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All the names listed can be purchased by subscription from our sister website Brands Seeking Agencies.com

Remember, many of these businesses visit our site because they are looking for information about new business and about creative marketing agencies.  They may be in the market for a new agency – try getting in touch.

Agencies

• Emmis, a diversified communications company, USA
• OMD, media agency, New York, NY, USA
• BlenderBox, an interactive agency, New York, USA
• C2 Group, helping companies make a name for themselves on the web, Michigan, USA
• Builder Advertising and Marketing, real estate marketing agency, Toronto, Canada
• The Real Adventure, Digital and direct marketing communications, Bath UK
• Brand Learning, expert in both marketing and learning, Teddington, UK
• Foote, Cone and Belding, above the line advertising agency, Malaysia
• Keiler & Company, advertising and branding, Farmington, CT, USA
• Mypec, a marketing, events and publishing agency, Leeds, UK

Brands

• Radioshack, electronics retailer, wants “Twitter competition ideas” Fort Worth, TX, USA
• Spartanburg Herald Journal, newspaper publishing group, SC, USA
• Second Nature, education for sustainability, USA
• Adecco Services, recruitment services, Australia
• Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal, Queensland’s premier coal export facility, Australia
• Hoffmann LaRoche, healthcare pharmaceuticals for cancer, USA
• The Hollywood Agency, where social climbers get themselves placed with celebrities, USA
• Morgan Keenan, regional investment firm, Memphis TN, USA
• Revo Technik, car tuning software, Daventry, Northants, UK
• EDB, IT consulting, Sweden
• Roux Associates, Environmental consulting and management, NY, USA
• Medical Council of Canada, professional registration body, Canada
• United States Marine Corps, military regiment, USA
• IBM developer networks, Rational Development, USA
• Gunite Group, building cleaning and restoration, St Ives, Cambridge, UK
• Conduit, a network of web and mobile app publishers
• Moose Toys, online toy brands, Australia

Brands Seeking Agencies

• Property Developer needs to know “How does an advertising firm bill clients”, FL, USA
• Healthcare brand wants “Agency creative brief”, New York State, USA
• City Hall, wants to know “How to write an agency briefing”, IA, USA
• Internet security firm wants “Magazine Agencies”, UK
• Merchant bank seeking “financial services creative agency”, USA
• Disney Worldwide Services wants “concert tickets twitter contest”, USA
• Leapfrog, educational toy retailer wants Twitter contest ideas, USA
• Goodwin Group, Executive search wants Facebook and Twitter contest idea, Atlanta, GA, USA
• London Zoo, wants a twitter competition, London UK
• Financial advisory seeking “creative marketing ideas for a travel agency”, CA, USA
• Recycling firm wants competition ideas, Reading, UK
• Oficina de Servicios Legislativos de Puerto Rico wants guidelines for writing a web design proposal, Puerto Rico, USA
• Musanada, serving the Abu Dhabi Government wants “web 2 tools survey”, UAE
• Independent retailer needs help “writing a pitch for an advertising agency”, Kuwait
• Canadian city wants “Economic Development Marketing Agencies”, Canada
• Financial services firm wants “ad agency pitch brief”, New York City, USA
• Wedding photographer wants creative new email marketing ideas, IL, USA
• National utility wants “cold email introduction” assistance, London UK
• Andertons Music Store wants “Twitter competition, UK
• Financial Investment firm wants “Member-get-member Loyalty”, Germany
• EF, international study exchange program wants successful twitter contests, New Zealand

RFPs

• Prince Edward island, Canada – website design and development
• New Jersey, public health quality improvement website design
• New York, digital strategy for online marketing and e-commerce sales

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So,you want to brief an agency to redesign your website.  What is the best way to write a brief so that all the areas you need designed are covered?

Helpfully, OneSourceGraphics have written out their detailed survey which sets of the principal questions to which an agency will need answers before pricing up a brief.

So you want to redesign your website

Here are the questions you should answer:

This form will answer the question of what the site’s supposed to do for your business and what the site will look like.

First Name (required)

Last Name (required)

Company (required)

Email (required)

Phone Number

Website URL: (if available)

1. Why do you want to have a new website, or have your current site redesigned?
2. What will happen if you don’t have a new website, or have your current site redesigned?
3. Please describe your organization in a few sentences.
4. What is there about you and your background that sets you apart for a special (niche) group of potential customers?
5. What problems do your prospects have that your business solves?
6. How can your particular work background help prospects, compared to others in your industry? What’s special about your work experience?
7. Why do you believe site visitors should do business with you rather than with a competitor?
8. Do you have a slogan or tagline that clearly describes what you offer in terms of benefits or features?
9. Please describe your potential customers. Pay special attention to their income, interests, gender, age, even type of computer they use, e.g., old with dialup account or newer with broadband. If your website is a business-to-business site, what sort of companies are you hoping to attract?
10. What is your budget for this project? (required)Very Small Project $75 – $300;Small Project $300 – $750; Medium Project $750 – $1,500;Large Project $1,500 – $3,000;Very Large Project > $3,000
11. Who are the decision makers on this project? What is the turnaround time for making a decision?
12. What staff will be involved? What are their roles? Is there a webmaster on your staff?
13. What is your deadline for completing the site?
14. Please list the names of five other sites that you like. Why are they attractive to you?
15. Have you researched your online competition so you have an idea of what you do and don’t want on your site?
16. What do you NOT want on your site in terms of text, content, etc.?
17. Where is the website content coming from? Who’s responsible for updating it? Is it ready for use on your website?
18. Do you have a logo?
19. Are you planning to do online sales? If so, what is the product, and how many items do you want to sell online?
20. If you’re planning to sell online, are you set up to accept credit cards?
21. How much time will you be able to spend online, responding to inquiries that come in via your website? Once a day? Several hours a day?
22. If you were using a search engine, what words or phrases would you use to find your site? Which of these words or phrases is most important? Second? Third?
23. Other than what search engines will produce, what methods do you have in mind to spread the word about your website?
24. Once your website is completed, how long do you think it will be before you begin bringing in significant business from the website?
25. How do you plan to encourage repeat visitors and referrals?

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Welcome to Blog number 14  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows.

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• Boosting relevance: why you should learn more about your subscribers.
• Risks and downsides: why you should think twice about custom fields.
• Alternatives to custom fields.
• Custom field usage.
  • Planning.
  • Collection.
  • Reporting.
  • Personalization.
  • Segmentation.
• Thinking outside the demographic box.
• A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Why learn more about your subscribers

The ability to customize your mailings to subscribers (and, via segmentation, which subscribers you mail in the first place), is a more advanced part of email marketing than most casual bloggers will typically reach.

That said, the more you know about your subscribers, the more you can tune your interactions with them, and so the better your results will be. Think for a moment how you might be able to improve your interactions with your readership if you knew more than their email address:

• If you knew buying history you can offer you best / newest customers early bird discounts or special packages;
• If you knew location you could invite people to your next training course, tweet up or conference in that city;
• If you knew their names you could make your mailings more personal;
• If you knew their gender or age range you could write more articles that appealed to that group;
• If you knew their Twitter account you can follow them in social media.

It’s possible to do all of this without having this extra data – typically known as custom fields – but when you can’t target content to the right people at the right time then you’re losing relevance. Relevance is the core benefit to using custom fields: it allows you to really get very focused with your content (especially non-automated delivery), which means greater relevance to your target audience. That in turn leads to better response rates.

Risks and downsides

Before diving into custom fields, however, my advice to bloggers is to think twice about it. As bloggers we’re typically content marketers, and our focus is that content and our audience. One of the benefits of using email marketing (and, specifically, fully automated email marketing like FeedBlitz delivers) is that it’s easy. You can do a really good job with some up-front work and let the automation take care of getting your word out.

This is less true with custom fields. Custom fields take work; it’s going to take more time from you to set up, use and manage them. You need to determine whether that time’s worth it.

Secondly, collecting that data from subscribers when they sign up will reduce your list growth rate, simply because any extra friction in the process reduces your growth rate. Even asking for basics such as a first name or the recipient’s gender will increase the bounce rate from the form. The more you ask for, the greater the hit. Again, up to you if that hit is worthwhile (you can test it, of course!).

Also bear in mind that, unless the extra data is coming from you (e.g. purchase history), user entered data can be unreliable. People lie. They type badly. There may be several ways to enter the same information e.g. in the US, they might report their state as “MA”, “Mass” or “Massachusetts”! That makes extra work (yet again) for you in terms of trying to prevent that or bearing it in mind when you come to use your custom fields.

Finally, various jurisdictions have laws about user data and privacy. If you collect custom data and the user demands you change it, you pretty much have to change it. More work there as well.

So it’s perfectly OK to say, like the idea, I have better things to do and my results are great as is. That said, the larger your list becomes, the harder it is to back fill custom field data if you have a change of heart or hire someone (e.g. a VA) to help you with your blog or list.

Custom field alternatives: Multiple Lists

If you want to segment your audience, bear in mind that there are simpler alternatives to using custom fields on a single list. Use multiple lists! Have one list for group A, another for group B etc., and power both from the same blog using tag filters. Easy to set up, the subscribers self-select into the right list at subscription time, much less work all around for you. For basic segmentation I would recommend this approach for bloggers instead of custom fields.

Basic custom field usage

A primer on jargon

• Custom fields – Data you associate with a subscriber, such as their name, location or birthday.
• Personalization – Using that data to modify the content of your mailing.
• Segmentation – Using the data to select individuals from a list for a mailing instead of mailing the whole list.

Planning

So you’re ready to take the plunge? OK, first you need to do a little planning. Think about:

• What do you want to do with the extra data?
• Where is the data coming from?
• What about existing list members where you didn’t collect the data?
• Is all the data going to be required or optional?
• What data will the user add, and what will you add yourself?

Say you’re running a mommy blog. Most of your readers are going to be, by definition, women. It makes little sense to use gender as a custom field. So don’t ask for it. Make a “Just For Dads” list instead.
You may also have data that you want to associate with a subscriber instead of having them add it themselves. Say you’re a gym and you want to give everyone a special offer on the anniversary of their membership – you can add their “Member since” or “Month Joined” data yourself. You don’t want to ask subscribers when they joined on the subscription form, since they might not be members (yet!) or they might not remember. If subscribers have to start thinking as they subscribe then they’ll lose momentum, and list growth will suffer.

This is also an example of data you might want to hide from a user. Others might include whether the user is a prospect, customer or partner – data you might use to tune a mailing later.

Decide, too, which data is essential to your plans. Name? Gender? Location? Job title? Experience level? Make essential data required, and the rest optional. But be really brutal on prioritization; remember that the more friction you add (required fields) the lower your growth rate will be. On the other hand, the more friction you add, the more committed the subscribers are who join your list. If you’re getting a lot of “tire-kickers” adding themselves, extra friction might very well be a Good Thing. Extra friction (in the form of extensive required fields) is also very useful if your list is being used as a lead generation tool for your business. You want the leads to be as pre-qualified as possible.

Some of the biggest challenges with custom fields, though, come from back filling data from existing subscribers, and what to do when that data (or optional fields) isn’t there. There’s nothing worse than a mailing that starts “Dear Valued Customer” since that actually shows the very opposite. What are you going to do if you don’t have the subscriber’s first name? Can you find a decent default? Can you conditionally exclude personalization elements if there’s no data? Is there a form or link you can mail out to have the older subscribers add their data? Think, too, about segmentation. If you’re going to segment by state, say, what do you do with users for whom you have no state data? Always mail them, just in case? Or never mail them?

Planning is essential. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step.

Collection

For new subscribers, this is pretty easy: ask for the data they can supply at subscription time. If you want to restrict choices to a few, make the field a choice field (such as a list box or radio buttons) to avoid the MA / Mass / Massachusetts issue.

For data, you provide, e.g. a link to your contact management or CRM system, you’re going to have to sync the email database with your CRM’s data. That requires manual or automated import / export – more work.

For the old list, you’re going to have to ask them to add the data. You’ll need a link to your form from your provider and you’re going to have to send them to your readers. Since there’s no real incentive to having existing subscribers tell you more about themselves (they’re already on the list; they’ve done the hard part), don’t expect great results from this. You can offer incentives and prizes to help, but be prepared to live with data gaps. Since you’ve done your planning up front, this won’t be an issue, right? Right! But you can add a link to the form in your template, so you can give readers a chance to provide or update their data with every email.

Reporting

One use of custom fields is not to use them in your outbound mailing at all. You can think of them as simply a one-time survey. Looking at the data can be interesting, though, so don’t neglect reporting once you’ve set up your custom fields. You may well be surprised at what you learn, and that in turn can lead you to produce better, more relevant content, or enable you to reach out to your subscribers in other ways.

Personalization

Not just “Dear Jane” instead of “Dear jane@example.com” (although that’s good too). You can personalize based content based on customer status (regular / preferred), gender and more. So with FeedBlitz, for example, you could conditionally include (or exclude) content from a different feed in your mailings based on the subscriber’s status.

Also understand that “content” isn’t just what’s in your post. It can also mean the HTML you format the post with. So you can change, for example, an image or color scheme based on custom demographic data.
There are dangers here, though. Beware customizing the subject line, as that looks really spammy. Test for cases where the data is missing or defaulted, so that the email still looks good. If you use conditional substitution, test again. If you want to test design changes “safely”, clone your list, place test addresses in there with the test cases you want to use, and test using that list before moving your design into production.

Did I mention this was work?

Segmentation

A great example for segmentation is going local. Say your blog is really focused on events in your area. You can collect the ZIP code from subscribers, and then mail only people in the relevant zip code for info on that area. From a monetization perspective, you can start to sell sponsorships and advertising into your segments once your list gets big enough (but keep the messages relevant else you’ll lose people). Once you get good with targeting and customization you can really make every email work much harder for you.

Again, however, there are traps for the unwary. Segmented mailings are typically slower than “all readers” mailings simply because your email service has to figure out whether each subscriber qualifies; personalization (if you’re using it) adds to the load too. It may not be significant but you should test using a non-time critical mailing to understand the difference.

Secondly, a botched segment mailing can be downright embarrassing. Make sure you have tested / evaluated the segment before you use it with the tools your email service provides; you don’t want to send a blast about an upgrade discount to people who’ve already paid full freight. And it doesn’t take much imagination to envisage even worse scenarios.

If you have a segment you like, save it if you can to make it easy to reuse in the future; it’s both a real time-saver and SNAFU risk reducer.

Thinking outside the demographic box

Demographics – broadly speaking: name, gender, location – are the typical use for custom fields, especially for personalization and segmentation. But you can do more than this. I’ve talked about using internal data (customer class or purchase history, for example) as one type of data. You can use activity stream information (did they click or open an email recently) as another. If you collect twitter, facebook or web site links, you can use that too. In fact, simply knowing a subscriber has a website or twitter account may be enough to work with - you may not need to know the details to get a good segment going.

You can also get completely obsessive about this stuff too, so beware the law of diminishing returns. For example, you can make smaller and smaller segments to get more precise, but if you get to the point where it would be faster to use your personal email app to do the mailing, you’ve gone too far. As with most things in marketing, your mileage may vary. Test, measure and update.

Ultimately, remember that custom fields and the benefits they bring are only really good at optimizing your existing list. If you’re not getting the basics right – subscription form positioning; compelling and relevant content; gripping subject lines; effective calls to action – then you’re missing a bigger opportunity. Plan for custom fields up front if you have the luxury to do so, but I’d recommend that you make sure you’re well past square one with your blog and basic email marketing before you start digging into custom fields and the work they add. Your time is limited and precious; be sure you’re spending it wisely.

A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users

Custom fields are a lot of work, but they can be excellent tools for making better use of your list. The features are complex and can be found under the Newsletters tab at FeedBlitz; click the “Custom Fields” button in the left side bar. Since there’s a lot of ground to cover, there is also a sequence of FeedBlitz-specific tutorial posts on using custom fields and entries in the FeedBlitz knowledge base – click here to start.

Next week we will have  Blog 15 – HTML Email Design Tips

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 12  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 11 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn the content triggers that can lead to your mail being junked, even when you’re using a high-reputation mailing service like FeedBlitz, and what to do about it.

[This is the eleventh article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Blogs are Email Marketing Accidents Waiting to Happen

When you blog and send your words of wisdom out to your subscribers, you are not only a blogger but also a marketer. You may not like to think of yourself that way, but it’s basically true.

The thing is, of course, is that most bloggers are untrained as marketers. Specifically, we’re largely not trained as email marketers. We put up our subscription forms and hope for the best. Usually, that’s fine.

But sometimes that lack of expertise can hurt, because it can lead us to create content that ends up setting off content filters. It’s actually all too easy to do, in fact, because in social media we can easily add widgets and plugins that are designed for the web, but which can completely foul up your feed and eviscerate your mailings. Blogging and social media enable us to make the kind of “rookie” error that a professional, corporate email marketer would never let see the light of day.

There are also problems that can creep in because of design decisions that may render your email unreadable and therefore useless; although I’ve touched on these before I’ll go over this ground again in a little more detail.

Hold On – Isn’t Reputation King?

Ah yes, indeed it is (You have been paying attention! Thanks!). You’re not going to get your blog’s mailings anywhere without using an email provider like FeedBlitz with excellent sender reputation and low complaint rates. Having a good sender, especially one that’s on white lists and feedback loops (again, you-know-who), does a lot to eliminate the risk of content rules routing the email to junk.

A lot, but not necessarily everything. Basically, when your email is run through the inbound ISP’s content filters, a score of some sort is applied to it. Let’s say that having a high score is a bad thing, and the higher your score the more likely your email is going to be flagged as junk. Worse, if your subscriber uses a separate email app (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird etc.) to read her email, that app knows absolutely nothing about sender reputation. Your email is downloaded to your email app, and the only tool it can basically apply to that inbound mail to stop spam is content filtering. So it refilters your messages again, but this time you don’t benefit from the trusted sender advantage.

How Content Filters Work

When your email arrives at the ISP from a sender with a great reputation, it benefits by having its score reduced somewhat from the get go. It might benefit a little; it might benefit a lot. Unsurprisingly, ISPs don’t share their rules, but open source projects like Spam Assassin work this way. Anyway, using a service like FeedBlitz enables you to start with a reduced baseline spamminess score before the content filters go to work. They raise your score and finally, based on that score, your email is sent to the inbox – or to The Other Place.

Usually, reputation trumps content (i.e. your baseline benefit of using a reputable sender massively outweighs content analysis) unless you are, in fact, writing something spammy. Our experience is that, even for our frugal deal bloggers, who are always talking about free this, 20% off that and sample the other (generally spammy content phrases), their email usually gets straight to the inbox, no problem.

So why fret about content then? Well, some kinds of content will greatly raise your spamminess score. Another is that the ISP’s content filters aren’t the only ones your email has to pass before it gets to the inbox; you need your email to be able to get past the desktop software filters I mentioned above too. Since trusted sender doesn’t apply here, it’s possible to lose the battle for the inbox at this very last stage.

To avoid that you need to steer clear of the Three Danger Zones of Spamminess. Grab your online GPS and read on! We have a map…

Danger Zone 1: The Subject Line

The first thing to realize is that your subject line will be scanned by content filters as well as the body of the email itself. A truly spammy subject line will get your mail junked just as much as talking about dodgy pills or offshore banking accounts where you can net bajillions o’ bucks in the body of your email.

So as well as following the tips in an earlier LBB about keeping subject lines short, imperative and attention-grabbing, avoid these errors:

• DON’T SHOUT.
• Especially don’t shout FREE, SAMPLE and % OFF.
• Don’t over use exclamation points!!!!
• Don’t over-use other symbols $$ #!% in your subject line either.
• Phil, don’t personalize the subject line with the recipient’s name.

The last one may seem counter-intuitive; after all personalization typically increases open and response rates. But mail whose subject line starts with “Yourname, blah blah blah” is almost always spam and will be treated as such by the filters. By all means personalize the subject if you can, e.g. “We recommend this zoom lens for your Nikon D40 camera” if your recipient bought a D40 from your store recently. Just don’t use their name in the subject line.

Danger Zone 2: Accidentally Spammy Content

Here it gets more complicated. Not only are content filters (and I’m including your computer’s anti-virus software in this category) looking for keywords, they’re also looking to see whether your message might be malware (a virus). Sometimes the most innocent things can trigger alarms, leading to the junk folder or scary security alerts. (I’m not intending to cover all the ins and outs of content filters here – life’s too short! Just the pertinent parts a blogger can easily foul up on).

A quick technical detour is in order for a moment. The vast majority of email today is HTML email; mini web pages, in effect. HTML is made up of tags that produce your text, break it into paragraphs etc. All handled by your blog automatically and then converted to email by services like FeedBlitz.

But some tags have been abused by viruses and other villainy to the point that email apps won’t display them (see this knowledge base article on why video typically won’t work in email, for example, and how FeedBlitz saves the day for video posts). This especially applies to tags for JavaScript, forms and what are called IFrames.

The reason why you need to care about this is that the vast majority of blogging widgets use – guess what! JavaScript, forms and IFrames. If those widgets live on your blog’s sidebar and not in the post then you’re fine. But if you do have these tags in your post (or they’re added to the feed by a “helpful” plugin or widget on your blog) then they won’t work in your email and they probably won’t work for your RSS readers either. This is why blogs and bloggers are so much more likely to fall afoul of content rules than professional email marketers: it’s simply too easy to break them with all the cool toys social media let’s us add to our sites!

But script doesn’t work in email, so ad networks and other active content won’t work. A preponderance of script will damage your spamminess score badly. If you do insert a script-based object into your post (e.g. a survey), make sure that it has a noscript tag that will offer email and feed readers a useful alternative. FeedBlitz will help here – it strips script from your content before it mails it out in an effort to increase deliverability and reduce risk for the reader.

IFrames can show up with some affiliate programs and other add ins. While they’ll probably pass muster with a content filter, your reader’s security software will probably be very unhappy seeing an iframe in your email if that iframe references a page that isn’t on your web site. Some Amazon affiliate links for specific books are iframes and can fall into this category, leading to scary, scary security alerts (almost always false alarms, but that’s life) when your email is scanned by the subscriber’s anti-virus app. Use images or static inline code instead; just say “no” to iframes in your posts.

Then there’s forms. Don’t put whole forms in your email. They’re unlikely to work in many email systems (but will probably display just fine, creating much subscriber frustration when they fail to work). If you want a subscriber to fill out a form, use the mail with a compelling call to action to drive them back to your site instead.

Remember: You’re fine if your gidgets, gadgets and doohickeys are in side bars etc. It’s when they get into the actual post content itself that you have to be careful.

Finally, there are bad neighborhoods. If you link to a bad neighborhood (or what the content filter thinks looks like it’s going to be a bad place to send a reader), your email is going to be junked. This did, in fact, happen to one of our clients; Yahoo was sending their email to junk consistently whereas none of our other clients was having the same problem. The issue boiled down to exactly one link in their email. Sent without the link, the email landed in the inbox perfectly, every time. With the link, away to junk it went, every time. There was nothing wrong with the link (or the site it linked to) per se; it just happened to push Yahoo’s content filter over the edge.

So sometimes you can simply be unlucky; it happens. But if you’re using an ESP their support function or professional services group may be able to help.

Danger Zone 3: Graphic Design SNAFUs

Speaking too Softly and Shouting Too Loudly

Content filters look to see if they think you’re trying to hide content from the user, because doing so is inherently suspect. So very small fonts, colors that are the same as – or very similar to – background colors are all flags on the play. Don’t do it.

Ditto for very, very large fonts and over use of bright, attention grabbing colors are also flags. Anything SCREAMING FOR ATTENTION is going to bump your spamminess score heavily in the wrong direction, so nix the 72 point bold red font with the yellow background, OK? Keep the graphic design tone in a normal voice and everything in plain sight and you’ll be fine.

Unfortunately, there are other ways graphic design can mess things up just by accidentally crippling readability, especially for older email clients and many webmail readers.

Dark Backgrounds

Some email apps won’t display backgrounds, especially if the background is an image and not a solid background color. Since you have a dark background and therefore light text on it, without a dark background your light text is now displayed on a white background. It’s illegible now! We recommend using a light background and dark fonts for your copy all the time; you can surround them with images and backgrounds that won’t affect readability if they’re not displayed, but will still look right when thy are.

Using Styles that Aren’t There

Styles and stylesheets, a.k.a. CSS, allow graphic designers great control over how web pages display online. In email, though, not every email app supports all the CSS your designer puts in. Worse, if your post uses styles that are only mentioned in the web site but not defined in the post itself, your feed and emails are not going to render the way you intended at all. This is why, for example, may WordPress blogs specify floating images online, but in feeds and emails they don’t wrap properly; the stylesheets aren’t there to tell the subscriber’s app how to display the image, so it uses the default. (That’s why FeedBlitz has a set of template tags to force images to wrap the way you want, even if they don’t start out that way.)

And that’s the best that can happen. If your post inadvertently uses a style that’s used by your subscriber’s webmail or feed reader, your post is going to use that style. Results: who the heck knows! Probably something that will make your subscriber very unhappy. Ask your graphic designer not to use obvious CSS class names like “header”, “footer” or “style1″, “style2″ etc. – they’re much more likely to conflict with a webmail reader’s CSS namespace if you do. Make class names more specific to your site and you’ll avoid this kind of naming collision.

Too Complex HTML and CSS

Finally, don’t use overly complex HTML and CSS positioning within the post to manage your content. Keep post HTML really, really simple. The more complex it is, the less likely it will be faithfully rendered on subscriber email apps. Gmail, for example, is simply awful IMHO at rendering anything beyond trivial HTML content even with styles.

KISS, though, and you’ll be fine!

The Good News on Graphic Design

Once you have a graphic design in place, test it. If problems occur, fix them before you go live with the design. When you have the design working and rendering acceptably across the board, the good news is that you’ll have avoided the majority of graphic design risks mentioned above, permanently.

Whitelists Solve (Almost) Everything

If you are white listed in your subscriber’s email systems (ISP and desktop app, if applicable) then you are going to pretty much avoid all of content filtering problems. Always ask to be whitelisted when your subscribers join your list or interact with a landing page.

Next week we will have  Blog 13 – One Blog, Many Lists, Much Success

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 9  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 8 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• How list-building incentive programs can harm you
• How to make incentive programs work without complaints
• Six great ideas for your subscription activation landing page

As usual, at the end of the article is a set of action items for you to put into practice right now.

[This is the ninth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

Incentive Risk

In prior articles on List Building for Bloggers I’ve talked about using incentives to help accelerate list growth; they’re an easy way to get people to opt into your list.

The problem with incentives, however, is that you do get a certain proportion of “tire kickers” who’ll opt in to get the goodies and then opt out as soon as they can. Not especially ethical, somewhat frustrating, but it comes with the territory.

However, there’s a bigger risk when using incentives that can affect your deliverability and your relations with your email service provider (ESP). What you can see is higher complaint rates – sometimes significantly so – with subscribers properly opted in via incentive programs. ESPs and ISPs really, really don’t like high complaint rates, so reducing complaint rates is essential. And incentive programs can create complaint spikes that you want to minimize.

Why does this happen? Well, for several reasons:

1. If the opt in to your mailing list wasn’t explicit when the user signed up for the incentive, then any increase in complaint rates is justified: you don’t have permission. It doesn’t matter if “consent” is buried in the competition rules – if the user didn’t explicitly opt in, you’re spamming them.
2. If the content you’re sending them is unrelated to the incentive, then you’ll see high unsubscribe rates.
3. If your incentive program is run on your site by a third party service, which (for the sake of argument) properly dual opt-ins the contestants before giving them the reward, you will still get high complaint rates if the link between you, the service and your mailing list is unclear.
4. If you run the program through a well-run third party service and you delay importing the contestants, your import won’t be timely, and so many contestants may have forgotten that they got that coupon from you three weeks ago. Result: high complaint rates from the forgetful.
5. If you run your import from your contest provider and then immediately send out a mailing, you’re going to get high complaint rates because you haven’t given your entrants time to read your welcome message before you hit them up with your mailing. Again, this will raise complaint rates.
6. Your next mailing is too “salesy” and new recipients will perceive you as a spammer.

It’s all too easy to fall into some of these traps – it can happen to the best of us now and again. How, then, to manage this risk and stay on the good side of your ESP, ISP and protect your reputation?

1. Have your incentive program add entrants directly to the mailing list by incenting them to join the list in the first place. This way there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening, there’s no import process to run through, and you can deliver the reward via an autoresponder or custom landing page once the subscriber activates. This eliminates pretty much all the issues outlined above. Everything is timely and relevant. So, instead of “Enter your email address for a $5 discount” your incentive is “Subscribe to our mailing list for a $5 discount” – it makes a big difference!
2. For contest-specific forms, make the opt-in clear and explicit. Remember, you need to get permission. Whether you run your own form or out source to a third party contest management or fulfillment firm, you can easily add an opt-in checkbox to the form via APIs (FeedBlitz‘s APIs are here; this one easily adds an opt in checkbox to a form). Why? Because if there’s anything to take away from this series it’s that permission and relevance are key, and without them you’re getting a one-way ticket to Complaintville.
3. Be timely. If you have to import people into your list from your incentive campaign, do so as soon as is practicable after the entrant is validated. Ideally within minutes, and certainly that day. That way your entrant will still remember your promotion.
4. If you can tailor the opt in confirmation mailing for your properly run incentive program, have it make clear that signing up will add them to your mailing list. Setting expectations early and often is a great way to reduce complaints and unsubscribes.
5. Use your autoresponder and / or import message to remind them how they got into your list. So don’t make your note say “Welcome to the SuperWidgets Mailing List” – instead make it “Thank you for using our $5 coupon – Welcome!” (or whatever) and use the note to make it clear that they’re now on your list as they agreed to be when they signed up.
6. Use an autoresponder to follow up a few days later, perhaps for a survey (“Did you use that coupon?” or “Tell us how you liked our widget”) or something helpful (“Five online stores where you can spend redeem the voucher”) or another offer (“10% off if you buy from us with discount code PQRS”). If you respectfully keep in touch with useful, valuable information you will see much greater engagement, even if a “regular” mailing hasn’t gone out yet.
7. Don’t rush your next mailing. Autoresponders aside – which should be immediate – if you’ve imported a bunch of incentive program entrants don’t blast them five minutes after the import completes; it’s too spammy. You haven’t given them time to read your import message yet. Be patient and wait till tomorrow. It’s worth it.

Follow these tips and your incentives programs, whether you run them yourself or outsource, will rock your list with engaged, happy subscribers who won’t complain on the first mailing.

Six Top Landing Page Tips

The most import piece of online real estate in the email subscription process is the post-activation landing page - what a subscriber sees when they wrap up the dual opt in subscription process. At that point they’re excited about joining the list – they just went through dual-opt in for you – and are engaged with your content.

The activation landing page is your best chance to make the most of that excitement. While your mileage may vary, here are some thoughts for how you can direct that energy to benefit you:

• Deliver a reward. A PDF eBook, white paper, coupon, a discount on a product / service – whatever it is you can use the landing page to deliver it to your excited new follower.
• Offer more subscriptions. Got more niche lists or partner sites? Invite the reader to sign up for them. Running other programs? Ditto. Your landing page can also reduce any friction associated with these actions by auto-filling any applicable forms with information you know about the new subscriber (minimally, their email address).
• Ask for a referral. They like you; have them tell their friends! You can use a simple form for this.
• Leverage social media. Have a “tweet this” or Facebook status update form available where your new reader can say “I just joined the MegaCorp mailing list for the latest on antique flange sprocket hobbyists” in a tweet, Facebook status update or LinkedIn note. Spread the word.
• Build what @ProBlogger calls a sneeze page of popular posts and deliver it here. This keeps the new subscriber on your site while they’re excited about you and inclined to explore. Great if you monetize via ads.
• Don’t go overboard! Pick one, maybe two of these ideas and have clear, direct calls to action. Otherwise you’ll simply confuse the new subscriber and all their energy and excitement may dissipate in a cloud of confusion. You don’t want that.

Go ahead, optimize! You can also run different calls to action on your landing pages to see which work best. Test, measure, optimize; rinse and repeat.

Your Action Items

• If you’re running an incentive check that you’re compliant with the best practices outlined above.
• If you’re selecting a third party incentive or fulfillment service ensure that they use confirmed dual opt in and can get you your entrant data quickly if they can’t integrate via API.
• If you’re not incenting subscribers … why not? Fix that!
• Build your activation landing page using one of the top tips.

Next week we will have  Blog 10 – From Fan to Sp*m and Anti-Social Networking

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Welcome to Blog number 8  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows. Read Blog 7 here

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Autoresponders offer a different way of making your blog’s list more valuable. Autoresponders – mailings that send predefined content on a schedule – allow you to interact with your list beyond the traditional content-driven approach bloggers typically used. You end up with more opportunities to interact with, sell to and learn from your audience.

With a little imagination and a look through your archives, autoresponders are a great way to get closer to your subscribers and increase their financial value to you.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn

• What is an autoresponder
• How subscribers can join an autoresponder
• Planning your autoresponder content
• Delivering Incentives
• Multi-Step Autoresponders
• Using Autoresponders to Sell: Drip Marketing
• Serializing eBooks
• Testing

As usual, at the end of the article is a set of action items for you to put into practice right now.

[This is the eighth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

What is an Autoresponder?

As mentioned above, an autoresponder is merely a fixed sequence of one or more emails that is sent to a subscriber once she joins the autoresponder’s mailing list. Once the sequence has been sent to the recipient, they no longer receive further mailings from that list. There’s a detailed explanation, with examples, of how an autoresponder differs from a typical blog-powered mailing list here at the FeedBlitz Knowledge Base.

Autoresponders are called “autoresponders” because they’re most often started automatically in response to an event, such as a subscriber joining your main mailing list. In a sense, when an autoresponder starts up for a new subscriber, their single activation adds them to two distinct lists: the mailing list they’re opting in to, and the autoresponder that is spawned as a result of that activation.

Autoresponders can be single emails (e.g. “thank you for subscribing”) or complex multi-step sequences, such as email courses. They’re often used for what’s called “drip marketing.” No matter what you use an autoresponder for, you must treat it like your main blog’s mailings. Content should be relevant, calls to action direct, subject lines compelling etc. Having got your subscriber onto the autoresponder, don’t flub it!

How Subscribers Join an Autoresponder

The majority of autoresponders are event-based; subscribers are added to the responder after some other automated action takes place. These events could be:

• Activating a subscription
• Completing a registration form (e.g. for a product, site, webcast, contest, survey or download)
• Buying a product or service from you.

Don’t just think online: An “event” can also be a real-world event, such as attending a seminar, conference or course. As long as you have explicit permission from offline event attendees, an autoresponder is a great way to thank them for showing up.

More sophisticated marketers can also use the lack of an event to trigger targeted autoresponders. So the lack of the desired event taking place, such as abandoning a shopping cart, not completing a payment form, failing to download the software, not making that donation, can trigger an autoresponder to encourage the visitor to finish the play.

Finally, subscribers can join an autoresponder just like they do your mailing list: via an online form. This is ideal if you’re promoting a serialized email-based course, for example. The subscriber simply signs up and receives lesson one immediately!

Planning your Autoresponder Content

Since there are many different uses for autoresponders, the content can vary greatly. Remember, though, no matter what, each mailing should feature these two items:

• Relevant content
• Direct call to action

Even if your autoresponder is a simple, single “thank you for subscribing” message, make it work for you. Tell the recipient to visit your list of most popular posts, or follow you on Twitter, or friend you on Facebook. Got an app? Tell them to download it. You get the idea!

Delivering Incentives

In an earlier List Building for Bloggers article I discussed using incentives as a way to help grow your list faster. An autoresponder is the way to deliver that sign up reward to new subscribers. Place the incentive, such as your coupon, discount code or link to a download, into the autoresponder’s first article and you deliver instant gratification to your new subscriber, proving you can be trusted. Don’t forget to add a call to action!

Multi-Step Autoresponders

Autoresponders can have more than one email in their sequence. So once they start, they keep sending to the recipient until the sequence completes. As you plan your sequence, make sure that it matches your subscriber’s expectations. If they are signing up for a 13-week email course on (say) becoming a better photographer, send them their next lesson once a week. Daily would be overwhelming. On the other hand, if your pitch is “ten days to be a better rose gardener” then a daily mailing is clearly appropriate.

If your multi-step autoresponder isn’t directly signed up for but is instead triggered by an external event, a daily send might be too much (leading to higher than necessary unsubscribe rates) if you are also sending a more-or-less daily mailing from your blog. Pace the autoresponder appropriately based on the other mailings you’d typically expect to send during the autoresponder’s sequence.

For bloggers, a great way to set up a multi-step responder is to mix and match content once every 3-7 days as the sequence unfolds. You might, for example:

1. Start with a “thank you” and send the incentive to the new subscriber
2. Send a list of your most popular posts and invite them to browse
3. Send the outline of your eBook and invite them to download / buy the whole thing
4. Send a survey about your site and offerings – how can you improve?
5. Send a hints and tips article from the archives on a relevant subject
6. Got other sites or more than one mailing list? Invite them to take a look.
7. Any archived videos, webcasts? These are great for autoresponders
8. Send an affiliate link to a relevant product or vendor
9. Another survey – would they recommend you to a friend? Why? Why not?
10. Testimonials and recommendations
11. Useful third party resources
12. … etc.

If you have strong content (and you do – you’re a blogger), multi-step autoresponders are great ways to repurpose older editorial as long as it’s still relevant.

Finally, here’s a great multi-step tip: Reward someone for sticking with the sequence. So every mailing might have a post script hinting that there’s an even better reward for staying with the program – and then, in the last mailing in the sequence, you deliver it.

Using Autoresponders to Sell

In the above example sequence we presented two direct opportunities to sell directly from the autoresponder itself – an eBook and an affiliate link.

You can also use them for “Drip Marketing” – a term beloved by internet marketers everywhere. Basically, the idea is that it takes about 7 interactions (say 3 to 10) with a new contact before they’ll buy from you. So having got them onto a list, you can use your autoresponder to repeatedly market to them and ask them to buy.

Use your responder to displace competitors and promote your self with a buying tips guide, for example. If you’re more a consumer-based sale, consider offering an increasing discount the further into the sequence you get to see if you can push them over the edge and get them to buy. This last approach – increasingly powerful offers as time goes by, along with other incentives such as free shipping – works particularly well if your autoresponder is being initiated by an “event” such as shopping cart abandonment.

Ideal content for drip marketing autoresponders includes:

• Sample videos and other collateral
• Testimonials and case studies
• Getting started tips
• Links to user groups
• Sample products
• Increasing discounts
• Bundling products
• Price beaks on shipping etc.

The great thing about using drip marketing for sales is that your autoresponder can start to function as a mini-ATM machine, giving you cash 24×7 while all you do is blog. It’s doing the heavy lifting for you!

Author, Author!

Finally, a great use for autoresponders is content serialization. If you have an eBook –and they’re increasingly popular these days – deliver a section a day or a chapter a week (hmm, just like List Building for Bloggers!) – to reward new subscribers. Or, send the first three chapters as part of your drip marketing campaign to get the recipient to buy the whole book.

Testing the Results

Not sure what’s going to work best? Test. For incentive autoresponders, mix up your offer every week or every month and see what happens. For multi-step drip marketing autoresponders, try mixing up the order of your offers and see if that affects take up. Examine the results, optimize, and reap the rewards.

Your Action Items

• Establish a simple “Thank You Autoresponder” NOW
• Create a reward for subscribing and deliver it on your autoresponder
• Build a multi-step autoresponder from repurposed content / eBooks
• If you use a shopping cart see if you can implement abandonment mailings
• Measure, optimize, repeat!

Next week we will have  Blog 9 – Six Winning Ideas for your Landing Page (and How to Avoid Incentive Program Risks)

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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