If anyone thinks that email marketing has gotten easier in the past few years, they couldn’t be more wrong. For starters, the majority of people get a lot of SPAM in their e-mails every day, making them more aggressive with the DELETE button (even with legitimate offers and newsletters that they’ve elected to recieved). And of course CAN-SPAM compliance issues make the entire web-based e-mail marketing process “easier said than done" to say the least. That’s why choosing an e-mail marketing service should be done with a bit research and a lot of care. Here are a few things to look for while you seek out your ideal service.
1. Easy Set-up and Management. Your ideal service will be easy to use, maintain and configure, with enough options to give you what you need from the very beginning. Be sure that there’s adequate customer service and support available to you when you need it.
2. “Smart" Tracking Features. This is mandatory feature, enabling you to know instantly which autoresponders and messages are pulling in the most, as in direct marketing you really need to be able to track everything you possibly can. This way, you can easily figure out which offers and messages are working the best and eliminate the ones that aren’t performing.
3. Database Access. The ability to access and manage your database of prospects is imperative to any successful e-mail marketing plan. You should be able to add subscribers, view removals, update messages, etc. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (when it’s convenient for you, not your service provider).
4. The ability to “get it in". Messages from many e-mail marketing solutions will have a tough time getting through ISPs, let alone staying out of the “bulk" folder. The best email campaign on the net won’t do anyone any good if it gets deleted before it can be read. Ensure that any prospective solution actually gets a high percentage of messages through to recipients.
Of course there are other features you’ll certainly want, like CAN-SPAM compliance (to keep you and your autoresponder out of legal trouble), SPAM-Check (to analyze your message and tell you how to improve it so your message gets to the recipient’s inbox, not their bulk folder), and the ability to attach files to your messages. While these special features might not seem critical to you now, one day in the future they may just be a necessity, so be sure that your e-mail service can expand to meet the needs of your growing business.
In practice, however, the exercise is not all that simple. A lot of effort and time and sometimes money may have to be spent. When the Internet was young in promoting web-based businesses, establishing reciprocal links between websites with related business interests was quite common and profitable. Over time, two things changed the scenario for reciprocal links. The advent of Google as a search engine with its novel concept of ranking web pages was a major development that affected reciprocal links in the long run.
The more the number of one-way inbound links to your website page, the better the page ranking by the search engine. In pursuit of better ranked pages, people started offering outbound links to other websites in order to attract inbound links by way of reciprocity, and this without rhyme or reason.
The other thing that happened was that a lot of unscrupulous webmasters and evil-minded people started taking undue advantage of the rush for reciprocal links with the aim of improving the ranking of their pages and making a quick buck.
Some of them used devious techniques to make your reciprocal link appear to be an outbound one to the search engine, depriving you of your advantage of getting back a link to your page. A situation arose in which search engines started downgrading the pages that demonstrated artificial or unnatural linking patterns.
Will increasing the number of reciprocal links help improve the ranking of your website pages, in this background? On the contrary, search engines tend to penalize websites with too many page-links to unrelated sites because the search engines do not hold any value in such links. Your search engine page rank will take a nose dive.
But our title question is not fully answered yet. If you qualify the type of reciprocal links by dedicating a small number of such links to websites that have relevance, in that they augment one another's traffic, then reciprocal links become worthy of the effort involved in designing proper web pages with enhanced focus on the exact purpose of your website.
Do not indulge in having outbound links to questionable sites.
Do not deal with any automated network-links that are not subject to any editor-discretion. Reject linking services that offer you either incentives or guarantees to provide an unlimited or large number of reciprocal links to sites to which you have no reason to get connected. Avoid such other pitfalls and your effort in having reciprocal links will surely pay dividends.
Search engines and webmasters will not object to links that end up in effecting end-user benefits making them entirely worth the effort, if you are willing to spend it.
Both Stewart Hayden & Inderpreet Singh are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Stewart Hayden has sinced written about articles on various topics from Email Advertising. Stewart Hayden recommends that you visit/ for more information on email marketing.. Stewart Hayden's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.