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What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of marketing done through electronic mails as a mean to promote product or service. Email marketing is one of the easiest, fastest and cheapest ways of reaching the customer. There are three types of emails send out to customers:

1. Promotional Emails are sent to advertise about any product or service to the customer.  These emails should be able to convince the customer and encourage them to purchase the product.
2. Regular Emails are sent to strengthen the relationship with the customers and to establish relation with the prospects. 
3. Placing advertisements on the emails send by other people.

Advantages of Email Marketing:
Email marketing is an easy way to advertise on the World Wide Web. Besides being one of the easiest ways of advertisement, email marketing has other advantages:

• Email marketing has the ability to distribute the information to wide number of people at a low cost.
• If your email marketing campaign is strong enough, it can take the form of viral marketing which is the best way to spread the news.
• It takes less time than other marketing methods. (It generally takes just few seconds to send an email).
• More people rely on email as a way of communication making it possible for more audience to view the advertisement.
• Instead of waiting for the audience to visit your website, you can knock on their door steps and let them know about your offer.
• When we send out emails, we send them to the targeted market who wants to know more about our service or product and not bother those who are not interested.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing:
Every coin does have two sides and email marketing is not free from it. Along with the advantages, its drawbacks make many marketers take a step back in following it. The main downside being the unsolicited bulk-mail also known as Spam. In some countries unsolicited emailing is a punishable offense. The USA, for example has CAN-SPAM Act 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) which has very strict emailing rules like: no misleading information on emails, no deceptive subject lines, there should be an opt-out method, and promotional emails should identify itself as an advertisement and should include physical valid postal address. The other disadvantages include:

• Deliverability: Corporate firewalls, webmail systems and ISPs (Internet Service Provider) sometimes prevent suspicious emails. Hence there’s no guarantee of deliverability.
• Email Renderability: There are different email readers with different set-ups which make it difficult for HTML email creatives to be shown in the intended manner.
• Email Preferences: It is difficult to keep up with different recipients with different preferences for offers, frequency and content.

Email Content:
It is very important to create an effective email to be sent out to the readers. You email should provide all the valuable information, that’ll help the readers know more about your company and its product or services. You should have a strong benefit driven subject line to let the readers open the email. You need to build a good relationship with the subscribers in order to retain the current customers and build trust. It is necessary to make your email interesting and informative.

There are various tools available online for email marketing. You need to take the targeted email list and avoid buying just any other lists provided. You need to be creative and trustworthy to increase customers through email marketing.

OCTOBER 16, 2008 ISSUE #31

Tags: Email Marketing, HTML, Internet Marketing, market, method, online, prospect, subscribe, website

Google Adwords is one of the best advertising medium on the internet. Google is still ranked #1 when it comes to search engines and they place these advertisements on relevant search terms giving higher chances of the ad being clicked. The advertisers pay at least $1 per click for competitive keywords. But just paying more money does not guarantee the advertisement to be displayed on top. Google gives more preference to the most clicked ads than the highest paid ads. A simple equation might explain the reason behind this:
20 Clicks on Ad #1 ($1/click) > 2 Clicks on Ad #2 ($2/click).
Here you can see that 20 clicks on $1 per click ad generates $20 where as only 2 clicks on $2 ad generates $4, giving Google more profit from the $1 ad. Therefore it is very important that the advertisements placed are effective and that people are lured to click on it.
 

Rules of Google Adwords:

Besides your ad being creative and attractive, it has to follow few restrictions: read more »

Tags: Advertisement, Adwords, Google, internet, Keywords, link, research, search engines, service, url

It is pretty annoying when you try to open a website that takes ages to load. Not everyone is blessed with good internet speed and in the world where everything runs in the fast lane, slow loading websites are the worst mistake anyone can make. The worst thing that could happen with slow loading sites is losing the potential clients. There are thousands of competitors on the World Wide Web and the visitor will be easily driven to the competitor’s site. To avoid this you can follow few things to make your website load faster.

1. Images:
   Large sized images could be blamed for slow loading sites. Images are an essential part of your website. In order to let the images load faster you need to follow these steps:
   • The first thing you need to do is size your image correctly. You cannot decrease the size of an image by just decreasing the height and width. If you have an image of size 40k, decreasing its width and height will still make it the same 40k size. I was making the same mistake on my blog till someone pointed it out to me. When I did this the image’s quality degraded. You can use image editor like Adobe Photoshop to decrease the size of the image.
   • The second important thing is to use proper format. If you have complex pictures .jpg format works the best. For simple images with fewer colors .gif files are appropriate. .png format works for both but they could have larger file size.
   • You can even slice images in order to decrease its size. Image slicing is the process of slicing a larger image into smaller images and then putting them back together using an HTML table. This reduces the file size of the image and makes the web page download faster.
   • Using thumbnails is also a good idea to make the pages load faster. You can use Java Script and display only the thumbnail size of the picture and let the user see the larger image only when he clicks on the image.
2. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Files:
   Table based sites might take longer time to load. The better alternative is using CSS files. The advantage in using these files is that the browser cache can directly read the .css file which makes it convenient and takes lesser time than to read each tag every time the page loads. You can also compress your CSS files. read more »

   Tags: css, flash, HTML, images, internet, website
   

With the growing popularity of video on the web, people are finding new ways to promote their videos and be seen on search engine results as well. The video should portray and be able to send the message to the viewers. The other interesting fact is, creativity is really important when it comes to video marketing. If it is the same commercial you watch it on t.v, then well people would rather prefer that than go online and download something they are familiar with. It should be unique and the presentation should bring on the desire. Lets say you are selling a software, the best way to shoot online marketing video for it would be to show its best features highlighting on how easy it is to use. There are analytics tools like YouTube Insight which displays the statistics for the YouTube Videos like the number of views, the demographic and geographic views and the medium through which people have found a certain video. 

I have collected few guidelines and tips on how you can promote and optimize your videos to get more traffic and views. 

1. Keyword Research:
   The first step includes keyword research. In order to optimize anything on web (a website, blog) you need to do proper keyword research. You need to list all the possible keywords relevant to your video. Next you need to check on the search results for these terms and see the performance of the top position results. You need to check their view counts, the feedback of the users, the posted date and the relevancy. These will help you find out how popular these key terms are along with how people react to it and it has already passed its due date. These will also help you come up with better video.
2. Video Editing:
   You need to produce shorter and interesting clips to attract visitors. People are more thrilled by shorter videos than the longer ones and you can also submit short videos to the search engines. You can add your web address to the video as a graphic. You can also place a link to the original video on this shorter clip make this link your subdomain.  read more »

   Tags: blog, Google, internet, keyword, marketing, online, search engines, video optimizaiton, visitor, web, website, youtube
   

Flickr:

Web 2.0 is about socializing on the web world, which includes sharing various news, articles, jokes and pictures. Among all these, pictures are considered as one of the best medium to convey the message to the audience and are used in great deal in marketing. Flickr is one of the best places to share pictures and manage them. It is one of the easiest photo management and sharing application on web today. Flickr has more than 775,000 registered users, has 30 percent monthly growth rate, 19.5 billion+ photos and is the 5th most popular photo sharing site overall. The reason behind its popularity is its easy-to-use interface and social computing tools.

Opening a Flickr account is really easy, you need to sign in with your yahoo account, register for a Flickr account which is free and you can upload the pictures and manage them. You can also download the Flickr Uploadr tool to upload your pictures easily and of course faster. According to Rohit Bhargava, “Flickr is not just a community of photos, it is a community where high quality photography is appreciated.” So before you start off with anything, make sure you have good pictures with you. You can then join various Flickr groups and add photos there following their posting rules. Flickr group where like minded people join and share their creativity related to the group theme for example people who are interested in shoes, can join groups: Men’s shoes or shoes.com and many more.

Marketing:

You can use Flickr to spread the word about your company. The tool here is your pictures which need to be good enough to attract people’s attention. Here’s how you can make use of your Flickr account to advertise your product or service.

1. Flickr Screen Name:
   The Flickr screen name is the one that represents your account. It is the name that will be used with every photo you upload, attached with your comments, any message you post on the group discussion and everywhere else on Flickr. Since this name is so important you use your company’s URL as your screen name. By doing you are advertising your URL without much effort. read more »

   Tags: article, flickr, keyword, list, market, target, visitor, web 2.0, web marketing, website, Yahoo