GraphicMail supports database integration, segmentation, autoresponders and various other tricks and techniques that improve targeted communications. Advanced methods generate on-the-fly emails customized down to an individual recipient basis.

And every email campaign you send out generates a heap of actionable data you can use to refine your approach and messages.

Most of us don’t promote our businesses online for fun or because we don’t have anything better to do with our time, but because we want to increase sales online. Right? But how best do you generate sales online?

A Forbes study says marketers of all sizes should start with search. Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. The next-most-effective conversion tactic for smaller marketers was e-mail and email newsletters!

Businesses engage in email marketing because it works. And works well. Mark Brownlow, an expert in email marketing and leader in researching online marketing trends gives us the numbers...

• According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. The expected figure for 2010 is $42.08. As such, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined, such as print catalogs (reference).
• The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in Feb/March 2009 revealed that email and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO (reference).
• A summer 2009 survey of Irish marketers found 79% rating email marketing as important or very important to their marketing strategy (reference).
• Shop.org's State of Retailing Online 2009 survey of retailers found that "E-mail is the most mentioned successful tactic overall" (reference).
• In Datran Media's 2009 Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 80.4% of industry executives said the email channel performed strongly for their company. This was the top result (reference).
• A December 2008 survey of hundreds of marketers by MarketingSherpa saw pay-per-click search ads rank top for ROI, followed by email marketing to house lists in second place (reference).
• A February/March 2008 retailer survey by shop.org revealed that email marketing has the second lowest cost per order (CPO) of any online marketing tactic. The CPO of $6.85 compares favorably with, for example, paid search's CPO of $19.33 (reference).

The money is following the results...

• A December 2009 survey of 300 email marketers by Silverpop found that their companies were feeling the effects of recession, but "four out of 10 marketers reported that their email budgets in 2010 would increase, and nearly half (47 percent) said their budgets would stay the same" (see press release).
• A November 2009 survey of B2B marketers found that email marketing was likely to see more spending increase than any other form of online marketing bar website development (report).
• A Q2 2009 survey of over 5,000 senior US executives revealed that email marketing was the channel most likely to see an increase in marketing budget (see press report).
• 46% of North American small businesses surveyed in 2009 by Hurwitz & Associates use email marketing, with another 36% planning to do so in the coming year (press release).
• Seven out of ten UK marketers surveyed by the DMA in 2009 expected expenditure on email marketing to increase over the next 12 months (press release).
• In August, 2009, Veronis Suhler Stevenson's annual Communications Industry Forecast suggested total spend for email will grow from $11.9 billion in 2008 to $27.8 billion by 2013 (see press report).
• An April 2009 survey of senior marketing executives by the European Interactive Advertising Association revealed that 46% of respondents plan to invest more in email (report).
• In Datran Media's 2009 Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 58.5% of industry executives said they planned to increase investment in email. Only 5.7% planned to decrease it (reference).
• Internet Retailer's April 2009 email marketing survey found that 51.6% planned to increase spending on email during the recession, and only 4.7% planned to decrease it (reference).
• Shop.org's State of Retailing Online 2009 survey of retailers found that 88% of them list "e-mail as a high priority for the year" (reference).
• A 2009 survey of US B2B marketers by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research found that 39% planned to increase email budgets, while 11% planned a decrease (reference).
• The CMO Council's Marketing Outlook '09 Report reviewed the plans and opinions of 650 marketers. Email marketing was the top target area for investment in 2009 (press release).
• A survey of B2B marketers in November, 2008 noted that 68.3% intended increasing spending on email marketing in 2009 (reference).
• The DMA estimate spending on email marketing (in the USA) will increase from $600 million in 2008 to $700 million in 2009 (reference).
• A 2008 survey by Forrester Research revealed that 95% of surveyed marketers use email marketing, with another 4% planning to do so by year end (see reference).
• In a 2008 survey of 200 corporate markters, 74% said they would increase spending on email campaings over the next three years (article).

Source: www.email-marketing-reports.com

A wise word

Just like a garden only bears fruit if managed properly, so it is with email marketing. We know it can work, but you have to get the basics right. The basics of building a list of people who want to hear from you, crafting a message, and ensuring the emails get through to those on that list.” – Mark Brownlow

Make sure to get the latest email marketing tips and trends that GraphicMail shares on Twitter and Facebook.

You might be a guru at designing email marketing campaigns and making yourself known within the social media sphere, but how much do you really know about on site website optimisation? Search engine optimisation is a combination of techniques employed throughout your website to ensure you move up within the search engine results. Google has a great webmaster SEO document that outlines the various methods to use when designing and developing your website. Even if you already have a website, there are plenty of tips and tricks in the document to help you along.

So, have you been ignoring your website and not bothering to stick to the fundamental rules of search engine optimisation? Is there any point in working tirelessly at promoting yourself online if you have a failing website that actually has so much potential?

Here are a few quick tips on how to improve your rankings. And believe me, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Lets pretend you own a hotel website.

Ensure you have meta tags

Meta tags basically provide a label and a description for a particular page within your website. The meta tags should be different for each page within your website and should contain information about that particular page. Meta tags are the first things that the search engines see; for them it's sort of a summary of the page they are about to look at. For example, on a hotel website the page about bright pink hotels should have meta tags containing keywords about bright pink hotels. Then, your bright blue hotels page should contain keywords relating to bright blue hotels. The words you use in your title MUST be used and repeated in your description meta tag and throughout the copy on your web page!

Consider each page in your website as an individual that needs a name and a description. My company is GraphicMail, and I am a page in that company but I am also an individual that has a name.

Your meta tags are placed in the header tags of your website HTML code; and the meta tags appear in the search engines results.

The meta tags are easy to insert into each page of your website. They must appear after the <head> tag and before the </head> tag. As a matter of fact, you can just copy the below text and copy and paste it into the header tag on each of your pages within your website.

Make sure you don't have duplicate content

Check you do not have duplicate content. I know you own a hotel website and you have supplied marketing copy for your pink hotel to numerous websites; but search engines HATE this and you will be severley penalised! Search engines see you as a school kid who has copied somebody else's work. A quick and easy way to double check for duplicate copy is to grab a few sentences and put it into the search engines using apostrophes. If you enclose text in apostrophes search engines will return results matching exact sentences. So, for your hotel website, type in "I love my blue and pink hotels because of their striking modern rooms and elegant finishes" into the search engine. If the results are returned and they are exactly the same, then modify your content.

Even if you have permission to use copy, tweak it. Make sure you have fresh, original content - and lots of it! Search engines love words!

Get quality links pointing to your website

Links pointing to your website from another website count as a VOTE. Try get as many good quality votes as possible. Make sure links come from are websites that are industry related or news websites. If you are a travel website, find other travel websites that are good quality and ask them to put a link to your website from theirs. Normally they will ask you to do the same for them. It’s called reciprocal linking. Just ensure you don’t exchange links with a bad website ! 

Even more importantly, links that come from authority websites like news and educational insitutions are considered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you are in travel, you might want to try and get a link from Lonelyplanet.com.

Link between pages on your website. Remember, each link is a vote – so why not create internal links between important pages within your website?  If I am on your hotel accommodation page, then write something like “now you have booked your pink hotel accommodation, try book car hire in Greece”. Then link that to your car hire in Greece page!

There are many different ways of having links (votes) pointing to your website. If you own a product, try get a product review done. It’ll boost your brand online and provide links to your website. 

The more quality votes you have, the more chance you stand of winning in the search engines!

Submit articles to free article directories

If you have keywords that you would like your website to rank for, then write a decent article targetting those keywords. Submit the article to ezinearticles.com or any free article directory. Do remember to put your company name at the footer of the article and link it to your website.

If I have created a travel website and used all the important words like hotels, tours, packages throughout the website and also want to rank for keywords like self-drive holidays, then I would write an article using this keyword. It saves having to create a random page within my website.

There are many, many handy ethical tips and tricks when it comes to improving your website rankings. Download the Google PDF mentioned above – it’ll become your bible!

Part 2 of SEO tips coming soon…

Carolynne

Way to a man's heart is not only through his stomach - sometime, you simply need the right keywords.

It's not only the opposite sex that we need to woo with the right choice of words - but also our clients. Most of us wouldn't call our client relationship a love affair, but an affair it is nonetheless. We need to choose the right words to get our clients visiting our site. You have to apply a bit of psychology - what words would they use to get through to you? Not online what you should be doing with your loved ones. But unlike our romantic advances in life, the words we choose for our websites and blogs don't do well with poetical license. They need to be as precise as possible.

Phew. So you're already struggling with the communication in your relationship/s. You don't hear what she says and he doesn't react to what you say.  And you're not much of a wordsmith. So what can you do to get the right keywords to promote your site with search engines?

There are two free keyword tools that we can recommend to you.

1 - Google has launched their new Beta Keyword Tool end of September. Paul Broomfield from Vertical Leap Search Engine Marketing points out that the new tool can be found by clicking the ‘Tools’ (or ‘Opportunities’) tab and clicking on the keyword tool. You will then see the following beta link at the top of the page ‘Check out the new Keyword Tool (beta)’, that will direct you through to the new beta keyword tool. Thanks, Paul! In order for you to use the new Beta Google Keyword Tool, you will need to set up an Adwords Account. This is free of charge... until you decide to link a PPC campaign to your site (paid Google ads). Why not try it out?

NB: If you just want to do a general keyword search, for instance to get the right set of keywords for your content writing, use the seasoned Google Keyword Tool - to see a full list of keyword ideas customized to your website (typically excluding those already in your account), you would still have to sign in to your Google Adwords Account.

2 - WordStream have now launched their free new keyword tool. Similar to Google, you can just search for a keyword such as "email marketing" and wait for the return of related keywords that are relevant to your desired search query. You can export the selected keywords or have them emailed to you. Vertical Leap recommends using this keyword tool alongside the Google keyword tool to ensure you have all long tail keyword areas and permutations covered within your SEO and PPC campaigns to maximize ROI.