The Fundamentals of Email Newsletters
The primary function of email newsletters is to get customers to buy. Simple, right? Well, there are so many places where things can go wrong, it is a miracle anyone converts. Here is the flow of an email:
1) Send email out (hopefully to the right address).
2) Mail goes through filters and arrives in their Inbox.
3) The customer likes our brand and the subject enough to open the email and check it out.
4) The customer is interested in the product and offer enough to click-through to the website.
5) Once on the website, then they can start shopping.
6) About 1-2% of people who made it to step 5 will buy.
7) Hopefully they will like the product enough not to return it.

Every step of the way, customers will stop shopping. Our goal is to carry as many people from step 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3, etc. Every time a customer advances to the next step, we think of this as a micro-conversion. We can’t make a sale if the customer doesn’t make it to the website.

Email marketing involves optimizing each of these steps. Improvements in any of these areas will lead to improvement in performance. Often we’ll spend a lot of time on step 4, the design of the email. I think this is because it is the most fun. Creating promos, looking at pictures, merchandising, & selecting models is much more interesting than staring at spreadsheets. But somebody has to do it!

A Real-life Example of Optimizing Step One: List Scrubbing
I just went through an email list with about two hundred thousand entries. Seven and a half percent of the addresses were formatted wrong. These are people who want to hear from you, but they typed their email wrong. 7.5% actually doesn’t sound like a lot of loss, right? Wrong. That is 15,000 people per email. Let’s examine how much money we are losing by doing some quick math.

We send a newsletter 2x a month. Open rate is 30%. CTR is 30%. Conversion rate is 1%. Avg Order $100.
{[(15,000) (2) (.3)] (.3) (.01) (100)}= $2700/month lost.

Ugh! That is money we threw away due to people typing their addresses wrong. But there is good news. This is a relatively easy thing to fix. You can buy software to do this, or get a programmer to help you, or fix this yourself in Excel.

Scrub Yourself
First, export all your addresses to Excel. The “trick” is to replace common bad addresses with good addresses. We know that every email address has the same format: name@domain.com. Here are some of the most common errors.
@yahoo.comm
Yahoo.com
@Yaho.com
@Yahoo.con
@yahoo,con

Find and replace (Ctrl-F) each of these variations with “@yahoo.com”. Do the same procedure for gmail, aol, msn, hotmail. Congrats. You just fixed half of the errors. I just made you $1300/month in a half hour.

Kind of.

To recoup the rest of the address, you will have to send the list to an intern and tell them to fix all the unique domain addresses. You’ll probably have people using their school or work addresses, and the replace function will not save you time on these. Also, remember to import your new email addresses to your email provider.

Conclusion
The good news is that there is an easy way to fix this problem going forward. Make your customer type their address twice when they subscribe. This way there will not be any formatting errors in your email list. Making these changes will have a large impact on any email campaign. This is just one step of the email optimization process.

Of course the quality is a lot nicer now.

There are several ways that you can make money using this business model. You need content, SEO, and analytics in order to get advertisers. It is a bit more complex, but these are the basics. The need for good content is a given, so I will concentrate on the other two areas.

Analytics for Digital Magazine & Content Sites

The primary issue is that your readers are consuming content in two completely different areas: the Adobe Reader Magazine and on the web. Some people will prefer one or the other, some both. You will probably have to reconcile this data for your advertisers.

Or just lose the magazine and go with only web content.

Assuming you must keep the magazine, here are the ways to monetize the content:
a) Adsense/ Doubleclick type ads (“non-guaranteed inventory”)
b) Direct advertiser purchases (“guaranteed inventory”)
c) Affiliate links
d) Paid Subscriptions
e) Selling users’ personal information or using it in some way.

A. To make money with this type of content you need good content (obviously), a lot of pages, and visible ads (because we want people to click on advertisers ads). Advertisers care about getting converting traffic to their traffic. If you don’t provide it, they will stop advertising on your domain.
The advantage of adsense is that you can set it and leave it and the inventory will be filled. The disadvantages are that you can’t place adsense on adobe pages and you have little control over your advertisers.

B. There are two types of ad purchases: An ad in the digital magazine and an ad on the site. Getting companies to buy inventory on the site will be relatively easy. Just provide them stats. Getting them to buy space in the digital magazine will be much more difficult. Obviously it may just involve getting a salesman to talk an advertiser into giving you money. More likely it will involve a complex analysis in which you show how many of your website readers subscribe/download the magazine, and what do you know about those users. You can use analytics for this. IF you have everything set up properly it still will take time (to accumulate historical data) and a great analyst to figure out how to “spin” the data into actual business drivers.

C. Affiliate links are relatively easy to set up. You sign up and then embed links in your content. If someone clicks and then goes and makes a purchase you get a percentage. The risk is that you will alienate your readers if you do it poorly or too often, or you will send readers off your site and they will not purchase.

D. If you can get people to pay you directly for your content- that is great. Signing up for an RSS feed is ok too.

E. If you have people’s info, you can sell them stuff. There is a line between re-marketing and creepy that could hurt your brand.

I would assume that most companies use a combination of all of these methods. The problem is that some of these can be labor intensive (C), require incredible talent (A, B, C), and require tough decisions from upper management regarding how to allocate limited resources. In each case, intelligent business decisions will lead to larger advertisers, so analytics plays a huge role in the content business. Also, content sites tend to be the largest.

Acquiring Readers with SEO, Paid search, and Social

You need readers in order to have a business. Good content is important, but it needs to be optimized for SEO so that the engines will pick up your content. Good SEO takes a long time, and gains are incremental. At times SEO can conflict with content and design, so you must have a strong decision-maker at the top who is responsible for SEO/Content/Design conflicts.

There are some cases it may be worthwhile to purchase readers (e.g. advertise) so that visitors to your website buy from your advertisers (hopefully for more than you paid to acquire them). This is called arbitrage; this practice is looked upon unfavorably by some companies, and can get you permanently banned, so be careful how you use it.

Social media is a great way to get a loyal readership going. I would look to involve an intern in this process. It would be a good introduction into the world of internet marketing.

Remarketing is hot in the internet marketing world. It is becoming easier and cheaper to implement, thus lowering the barrier to entry. In the online world, the term “remarketing” is used to discuss efforts to acquire customers who have already visited your site or opened an email. If someone has never visited your site, you cannot “RE-market to them”.

As of today, remarketing is only used on the display network. However, it seems that Google or MSN could use that data to customize your search network ads sometime in the future. With the focus on “personalized search” I would think this is on its way.

Facts about Remarketing
The segment of traffic that comes to our site and leaves without converting will be the target of most remarketing campaigns. Since these visitors have already shown a previous interest in our site we can make three assumptions about them:

1. Remarketing segments will always be a subset of the general population. Thus, the impressions and traffic you receive are likely to be small.

2. Remarketing campaigns will cost less to convert since this segment has already demonstrated interest in your brand. We might think of their prior exposure to our brand as a kind of micro-conversion. If your brand is worth anything, remarketing should cost less than the general segment.

3. Remarketing segments are worth more to us than the general population. Feel free to spend more to insure these visitors see your ads.

Tips and More Details on Remarketing
Two other quick things that you need to know about remarketing. One, this remarketing “magic” is created done by using tagging in your analytics/ ppc/ display tool. Your analytics /ppc /display guy should be able to help you.

Keep it simple. There are many more advanced ways to use remarketing which are beyond the scope of this article. If you are not using remarketing, feel free to use it as I described. Even this is way beyond most companies’ capabilities (because they don’t get enough traffic, or lack the resources to analyze the data).

* There are some exceptions to this case. In ecommerce, often time customers need to be reacquired each time they search for a new product. However, let’s ignore this situation for the sake of simplicity.

No one outside of Google (Yahoo, MSN) knows the algorithm for calculating the Google organic SERPS. But we all give advice –and with such certainty!—about how to improve organic rankings. That makes me very uneasy…I don’t like being proved wrong. I don’t need Matt Cutts to issue a statement condemning italics after I tell all my friends and admirers that italics are the secret to high rankings.

For the most part I tell everyone the same thing: concentrate on link-building and good copy if you want to improve your SEO. Your site is not so advanced that you need to think about anything else.
Of course, no exec wants to hear this. I get hateful looks like “how dare he tell me something I could have read on Wikipedia”. They want inside information and conspiracy theories.

My friend who is a salesman always tries to remind me, “No one wants to be ‘leveled with’; make sure you wait until they give you the job to try anything silly like that. In fact, don’t ‘level with’ anyone, ever. In fact, what you need to do is hire me to do your talking for you”.

Since I enjoy work, I am going to let my readers in on The-Next-Big-Secret-SEO-Variable: Reading Level. For a couple months I have noticed that one of the search parameters in Google’s advanced search is called “Reading Level”. The user can select “Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced”. Or you can leave them mixed together.

Why Will Reading Level Matter for SEO
To be clear, right now I doubt reading level affect your SERPS, though it will soon. Answer this question: “Does Google value user-experience?” Yes. Bounce rate and page load time can negatively affect your ranking. The next question would be, “what makes for a better experience, things that are easy to read or things that are hard?” Easy things, of course.

There are many ways that this change could be implemented in the serps. Currently, you are given the choice to choose between basic, intermediate, advanced. I guarantee “advanced” won’t be the highest choice. Thus, if brilliant page ranks #1 but is written in advanced language, it may not be as valuable as something that currently ranks #10 but is written in basic language.

There are other ways the change could be implemented. Google could simply tweak the rankings of sites that are written better. By “Better” I mean “Basic”. Anyone who sat through a horrible class should understand. There is nothing inherently good about advanced language. Even if the subject is a horribly advanced subject like particle physics, basic language is best. The purpose of language is to communicate.

So How Can I Use This Knowledge to My Advantage?
I would still refer you to my first paragraph. Concentrate on links and content. You really shouldn’t be doing anything different. This is a just a way that Google showing us that I am right (I mean, that content is important).

If you really want to act on this info here are a couple things you can do:
1) Hire a better copywriter.
2) Write shorter sentences.
3) Writer shorter paragraphs.
4) Use shorter words.

What is Adwords Experiments?
Due to Adwords’ concepts of “account history”, you are rewarded for past performance. Thus, you must think twice about every change you make to the account as your changes have a permanent effect!
Have you ever had a “brilliant idea” that you couldn’t get your boss to sign off on? Adwords Experiments is great for cases like these. Make a change to a campaign, check it in a month, and then celebrate your great results. If your idea was horrible, “undo” the results without harming your account history!

Adwords Experiments allows you to make changes to your account that you can undo if you don’t like the results. Usually, we make changes to our accounts and then look in the account history (or our memory) to keep track of progress. This is adequate 95% of the time. For the other times, we can use Adwords Experiments.

How Does Adwords Experiments Work?
Adwords will test the control group vs your new experimental group and tell you the winner. If you want to keep the changes at the end of the experiment you just click a button and your changes are implemented. If not, your changes go back to the way they were before the experiment.

If you make a dumb decision, it will still have a negative effect on the company. It might negatively effect sales or CTR or whatever during the experiment. Using Adwords Experiments you won’t be permanently punished for trying to improve your account.
This is all that a marketer wants.

When Should I Use Adwords Experiments?
If you are making a risky change to the account, make an experiment. Testing new copy is not risky. Raising the price of a high performing keyword is not risky. Adding a bunch of new negative keywords to a campaign makes me nervous, so I would set up an experiment. Splitting up a high-performing adgroup into two makes me nervous, so I would set up an experiment.

The Positives of Adwords Experiments:
1) You can make risky changes to the account without fear of permanently damaging your account history.
2) One great feature of Adwords Experiments is that it automatically calculates statistical significance. I wonder why this has to be limited to experiments? It is such a useful feature! It would be great in many of Google’s products.
3) Certain variables can only be properly tested by using the Adwords Experiment feature. (One feature that comes to mind is determining ROI-based-on-keyword-position. Previously our testing has had to simulate this effect, or make inductions based upon time-shifting results. That is fine, and we are able to produce actionable-data, but this new way is a little better).

The Negatives- Unfortunately there are a lot of negatives. Perhaps some of them will be ironed out.
1) You can only run one experiment at a time at the campaign level. E-commerce sites tend to have tons of campaigns, so this will not be an issue for you if you are E-commerce. Lead-generation sites tend to have fewer campaigns. You may have set up your account so that you have a ton of adgroups and few campaigns. If this is the case you will be limited to one experiment at a time. (I would not recommend changing your account structure simply to get around this).
2) The interface is complex: make sure your first experiment is simple. Until you get the hang of the interface, don’t make complex experiments. Try messing around with numbers rather than keywords the first time out.
3) Remember that any changes make will have ramifications campaign-wide. A small change to one adgroup may effect another adgroup. Make sure you look for those. Some of the effects to other adgroups are non-intuitive, but that may just be an indication that I designed a poor experiment.
4) You can’t save your experiment history. If you want to save your results you will have to export them and keep a log.

To Summarize:
-Make BOLD changes to your account so that your results will be statistically significant. Bid much higher or much lower.
-Make your first experiment simple.
-Most of your testing can still be done without using this feature. You can still experiment in Adwords without using “Adwords Experiments”.

1) What should I be spending per month
2) What will my setup costs be if I don’t already have an account.

What Should I Spend Per Month?
There are several ways to answer this question. You may want to consider these answers before you hire a pay per click management team. Some popular answers to this question are “what you can afford to lose”, “it depends on the industry”, and “about whatever you think you can afford to spend”. Those are all reasonable answers for some clients.

For advanced businessmen and women I think the following answer is better: “If you could buy one dollar bills for $.99, how many would you buy?” Obviously you would want to buy as many as possible, or spend infinite amounts. Even though margins are low (in this example), the more you spend, the more you make.

Would you still be interested in this deal if you had to pay someone else to arrange this service for you? Again, the answer would be yes. While this eats into your margins (again), you are still in a position to make a ton of money if you put up the money.

Lets bring this back to pay per click. Due to advances in tracking technology, we are able to calculate the amount of money you are spending and the amount of money you are making directly from pay per click ads. If this is a positive number, it is no different than the above example, where you are buying dollar bills for $.99.

This advice has is limitations, but not in the ways you might expect. The obvious limitation is that there is not an infinite supply of customers. This manifests itself in the following way: the more you spend, the higher the cost of acquisition, which will eat into your margins. However, if you do not yet have a solid account, you probably do not need to be concerned about this.

Setup Costs
The other limitation to this advice is that it will cost you money to get your account to a profitable state. Accounts are rarely profitable on day one. You will have to invest some money upfront in your advertising, just like all other forms of advertising. This cost varies from company to company. A pharmaceutical company that advertises to every country will pay a lot more than a mom-and-pop button-making shop that serves only San Diego.

Thus, there are two variables to keep in mind that will affect your startup costs (not to be confused with “setup costs”, which is the cost your ppc company charges you to setup the account): How competitive your industry is and how large the geographic region you want to advertise to is.

If you are stuck in the beginning phases of your affiliate marketing program, using your web analytics package might be the ticket to gathering all the “low-hanging-affiliate-fruit”. Assuming you have a website that represents your business (brick-n-mortar, or web-based, it doesn’t matter) as well as a web analytics package, keep reading.

The Web Referrals Report
Login to your analytics package. We are looking for a report called “referrals” or “web referrals by source” depending on your program. In google analytics, use the following sequence:
Traffic Sources> Referring Sites

Your report should look something like below: (clickable)

What Should I Look For In The Referral Report?
The referral report shows links and traffic to my site from other websites. It doesn’t show traffic from search engines, or emails; those are in different reports. If someone linked to your site on their site (and someone clicked that link) you’ll see that here. You can also see the different statistics comparing the quantity and quality of different sources. Click on the “ecommerce” tab if you are an ecommerce site to see which sites are bringing you traffic that results in sales. If you aren’t ecommerce, your tab will read “goals”.

That may help you select potential affiliates.

What Does This Have To Do With Affiliates?
An Affiliate is someone that drives traffic to your site in exchange for a percentage of sales or a set amount per lead. These sites on this report are already doing that! You can see which sites are bringing traffic and sales. If they are bringing you 5 sales a day without trying, imagine how many sales they could bring if you offered them an incentive.

There are other benefits to using this report to help you find affiliates: if someone takes the time to link to your site, they are already aware of your brand. That will make contacting them, and “selling” your product easier. The fact that they have a link to your site also indicates that they thought their customers might be interested in your site. They are already sold.

Looking Closer at The Report
You should not just send out a blanket email to all the sites that link to you. You will have to click on their website and see why they linked to your site. There are a couple types of links that are common, but would not be appropriate for affiliate requests:

1) Directories
2) News stories
3) Links from professional acquaintances. (Don’t ask your lawyer to be an affiliate)
4) Employees’ myspace pages

It might not seem like there will be many links left. That will depend on the size of your site and how long it has been active. At the very least this will give you an idea how to approach improving your affiliate program.

An advertiser spends $100 every day of the week except for Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, the company spends $250. Currently Adwords does not allow you to easily account for this scenario. The closest they come is Google offers you the ability to bid a certain percentage higher or lower on certain days.
That is not what we want.

We could wake up at 12am on Wednesday and change the spend from $100 to $250 and then change it back at midnight. However that seems like a lot of work, with not enough return.
However, there is another way. An Adwords hack, if you will. It ads a lot of complexity to the account, so I only recommend this solution for advertisers that anticipate a great discrepancy in daily spending (based on the day of the week).

Here is how it works: (We will pretend you have an account with one campaign for simplicity sake.)

1) Turn off all spending on Wednesdays by bidding on keywords at 0% on Wednesdays.
2) In Google Adwords Editor copy the campaign and repaste it. Rename the new Campaign “Wednesdays”.
3) In the “Wednesdays” campaign, turn off spending on all days except Wednesday. Set the daily spend to $250.

The result is that campaign one will bid $100/day mon, tue, thur, fri, sat, sun. Your new “Wednesday” campaign will bid on the exact same keywords on Wednesdays but the daily spend will be $250 on Wednesdays.

You can repeat this process for multiple campaigns if you have more than one.

Ideally, this seems like a feature that would be should be addressed by Google’s people. Perhaps it could be added to the interface to save time and avoid confusion.
If you need help with this procedure contact me.

Why is Aggregate Conversion Rate not important?
Aggregate Conversion Rate is not important because you will always be willing to sacrifice your conversion rate for increased revenue.
For example:
Say you are paying $1/ visitor and converting at 5%. You get 100 visitors a day.
I tell you that there is a potential stream of traffic that you have not taken advantage of. This stream costs $.10/visitor and converts at 1%. (Both customers spend the same amount).
Would you want the traffic?
Would you be happy with increased revenue and decreased conversion rate?
Yes, of course. This would be great.
Could this ever happen? Yes, it happens all the time. Each revenue source (or channel) converts at a different rate and will change your aggregate conversion rate if you decide to incorporate that channel. The content network might convert at a different rate than the search network. As long as they are both profitable, they are worthwhile investments.
Never focus on the conversion rate, focus on profitability and maximizing conversions.

*Number #2 has something to do with abandonment rate. That is, conversion rate + abandonment rate will always add up to 1 (or 100%). We do not have a good term for conversion rate #2 (that I can think of) so we refer to its opposite term, the abandonment rate.

The other similarity is that both services are often performed by the same agency or individual.

SEO

Are you looking to invest in the long-term success of your company? Are you patient enough to wait for results?

If the answer is “Yes” then SEO may be your choice.

PPC

Do you need results now? Are you prepared to spend more money to get the results you want?

If the answer is “Yes” then PPC may be your choice.




The Strengths and Weaknesses of SEO and PPC

SEO

Strengths:

The effects of good SEO are relatively permanent.

The upfront cost of SEO is less than PPC.

Weakness:

It may take two months to see results.

PPC

Strengths:

Very quick results compared to SEO

You can bring traffic/customers to your site instantly.

Weakness:

PPC is more costly than SEO.

PPC does not help the sites’ development for the future. If you stop spending you will stop seeing the positive effects.




Which is Better for my Business: PPC or SEO?

The answer is “it is unique for every business”.  It depends on your goals and budget. Often a business owner will know for certain which service she wants to try, sometimes they will ask for input from us.  If you have a question contact us and we’ll answer any questions.