DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for the ‘Online Marketing demistified’ Category

The concept of email marketing has come a long way since its humble beginnings and having worked in the space I know there is wide variety in quality when it comes to the selection of a a good Email Service Provider. Many times I have seen people compromise the deliverability of their email in favour of keeping costs down. Obviously if you invest your time, energy and dollars into building a list and putting a newsletter together, it makes sense that you are getting good levels of deliverabilty. My favourite analogy to explain this is stolen from the direct mail days. Imagine you went to the expense of acquiring a list, doing the creative, printing and fulfilling then the postman only delivered 30% of your campaign. Would that be acceptable to you? Probably not so it shouldn’t be acceptable online either.

Early systems were focussed mainly on simply getting the message out (or email blasting), where as the next generation of ESP’s recognised that with so much competition in the inbox, its important to send more personalised messaging in order for your message to get read. So a good ESP will provide the facility to segment and target a message and be more conversational.

My current ESP of choice is Aweber largely due to the cost but also because it delivers all the features of a next generation system. In addition to list segmentation, great delivery and reporting, Aweber comes with some neat additional features…
Blog broadcast – Subscribers to my blog will know that I offer a weekly digest of my blogposts. This is all taken care of by Aweber automatically which I love.

Email to Twitter – Bloggers or companies who love the twitter phenominan will be interested to know that posts cam be published to a feed in Aweber and inturn syndicated to your twitter account. So basically, your newsletters can be read by your twitter followers too.

Readers of DaveBirchall.com are able to try Aweber for themselves by visiting the following link.

Best of all you can set up and get started in less than five minutes.

Chances are (if you use the web) you have see the letters RSS splattered across the internet, but there is a supringly small amount of users actually using RSS. The last stat I heard said that fewer than 15% of internet users subscribed to feeds.

So if you don’t know what RSS is then your not alone and this may be your chance to do something different in your field that can make a big difference. RSS is based on XML and makes the transfer of information from one internet site to another easier.

For example, if a web page was regularly updated and you throught the information was useful, you could subscribe to the feed by clicking the RSS button. You simply need a feed reader or a piece of software with RSS built in to it… Here are some examples.

Outlook 2007

I am a new convert to Outlookand I see RSS is included as standard. This could be particularly useful if you like infomation to appear in the same environment as incoming mail and tasks.

Internet Explorer

The latest release has a RSS reader built in too. Click the star icon and find it between you favourite and your history listings

Google Reader

This is my preferred choice because I am usually signed into my account using my google apps and I can access the same feeds from any machine with out having to think too hard. As your would expect from google its free

click http://reader.google.com for more info.

So now you have a reader you just need to subscribe to the feed. There’s one at the top right corner of the page to practice on. As a worse case scenario, you may need to copy and paste the URL into your chosen reader.

Get it? Good!

So what can RSS do for your business?

Well think of it like this. If people can subscribe to your site you have the power to broadcast the content of your site immeasurably. Your content can form part of other peoples blogs, social networks and mash ups across the webiverse!

Remember the case of Corey the party goer who’s party got out of control? RSS feeds broadcast his invitation many times over without him knowing. If he were an online marketer he would be heralded a genius! So if you can master RSS your can reach a new audience in ways you never thought possible.

Not only that but as RSS becomes more popular you can appeal to an ‘opt in’ audience where email has become tired and less effective.

Enjoy!