Blogs, meanwhile, are great at attracting links from the blogosphere, because bloggers are rather cliquish and mostly tend to link to each other. So you’ll earn links as a blog that you wouldn’t normally earn otherwise.

Nonetheless, intentionally work to boost your link popularity; don’t just expect links to your blog to come on their own. One of the best ways to do this is by building relationships with bloggers by posting thoughtful comments on their blogs, by networking with them at real-world conferences like the Blog Business Summit and BlogHer, and by blogging about them. They’ll be more likely then to follow your blog and give you “hat tips” when they piggy-back on something interesting you’ve found online, and hopefully even include you on their “blogroll” (a link list of favorite blogs they read).

Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure

You pass all that hard-earned link popularity (PageRank) down through your blog’s archives through the blog’s internal hierarchical linking structure. Internal linking is one of your secret weapons, so make the most of it. Create a Top 10 list of your best posts and link to those posts from your blog’s home page. All your posts should include “Next Post” and “Previous Post” links, as well as a linked list of related posts. When writing blog posts, get in the habit of referring to any relevant old posts sitting in your archives.

Don’t use “click here” or “permalink” or “read more” in the anchor text of your internal links, because the search engines associate that underlined anchor text with the page to which you are linking. The engines will start to think all your pages are about such bizarre things as “click” or “here.” Given that, you’ll want to include important keywords in your internal links. The post’s title makes for a great anchor text, so make sure your post titles are clickable links.

Use the Neat-o tool to review the anchor text on your inbound links. Then ask your blogger friends who link to you with throwaway phrases like “click here” to change their wording.

A very powerful, somewhat advanced tactic is to provide visitors and spiders with a “tag cloud” full of keyword-rich text links that point to “tag pages” hosted on your blog. These are created automatically using a tagging plug-in like Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Importance of Title Tags

Title tags are the most important piece of text on a Web page. They’re given the most weight by search engines. So take the time to craft keyword-rich title tags for each post, category page, and of course, home page. If you must include your blog name in the title tag (not recommended), put it at the end of the title rather than at the beginning. Override the automatically generated title tags that are based on the post titles and replace them with custom-written title tags, using a blog plug-in.

URLs are very important to your blog’s rankings, too. Use “URL rewriting,” which is supported on most blog platforms, to create keyword-rich URLs that have no “stop characters” (question marks, ampersands or equals signs). Separate keywords with hyphens, not underscores, as Google doesn’t treat underscores as word separators.

Set up permanent (301 style) redirects from pages at yourblog.com to corresponding pages at www.yourblog.com, or you’ll end up with a duplicate site in the search engines. If you ever decide to switch blog platforms, maintain the old URLs through permanent redirects to preserve those valuable inbound links that point deep into your archives.

Heading tags (like H1, H2 etc.) get extra weight as opposed to regular body copy by the engines, so mark up post titles with H1 tags. Don’t mark up dates with heading tags (a fairly common mistake). On category pages, wrap the category name within an H1 tag. And on your tag pages, wrap the tag name within an H1.

Get ‘Sticky’

“Sticky” posts, which are posts that always appear at the top of the page regardless of the date, offer a clever way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page. The Adhesive plug-in will provide this “sticky” functionality to any WordPress-powered blog.

Optimize your RSS feeds too. Go with full-text feeds, not summary feeds. Provide at least 20 items in the feed, not just the default 10. Offer a range of feeds (not just one) by category, latest comments, comments by post and by tag. Have a keyword-rich title for each item, because that oftentimes will become anchor text.

For the same reason, put your most important keyword in the site’s title. Write a compelling site description because that gets displayed in various important places, such as in the “Related Blogs” results in Google Blog Search. Resist the temptation of appending a tracking code like source=rss to the URL, because it reduces the linked item’s link popularity potential. Include podcasts in your RSS feed as enclosures, as that can gain you additional visibility in podcast directories and search engines.

Stephan Spencer is president and founder of Netconcepts, a Web design and consulting firm specializing in search engine, optimal Web sites and applications. Reach him at

Your RSS feeds are a conduit for reaching influential bloggers who, for whatever reason, have an interest in your site. In addition, your RSS feeds could be picked up by RSS search engines like Feedster, Technorati and Google Blog Search. Many bloggers subscribe to search results feeds from these search engines to keep up with what is happening on a particular topic or industry. Thus, if something featured in your RSS feeds include the keywords that the blogger is tracking with their RSS search results subscription, you will end up getting in front of that blogger even if he or she is not subscribing directly to your RSS feed.

Within the feed, the titles of each of your items should be keyword-rich, because they will, more likely than not, become anchor text in the links that point to you from blogs and syndicating sites. It is important not only to have relevant keywords in each item title, but to also incorporate your brand name into the item title and include relevant keywords and synonyms into the <content: encoded> container.

Your overall feed should be optimized for the most important keyword you are targeting by including those keywords in the site’s <title> container. Also have a compelling site <description> that draws people in. When searching on Google Blog Search, related blogs will often be displayed at the top of the results. Google creates these listings from your feed’s title and description. You may be tempted to put tracking codes into the URLs of the links contained within your RSS feed, for example, appending a ?source=rss to the end of all your URLs. Don’t do it. It will dilute each page’s link gain (PageRank) by creating a duplicate version of each page with a unique URL, rather than aggregating link gain to one definitive version of the page.

RSS feeds can include “enclosures,” which are references to multimedia files. Podcasting is simply including enclosures in your RSS feeds so people can subscribe to the audio and video you produce without having to think about it. Your MP3 files will automatically download to the subscriber’s computer and into their iPod. Having an RSS feed with enclosures is your ticket into even more directories and search engines, namely podcast directories and search engines like Podcast Pickle. The most important podcast directory to get into is the iTunes directory run by Apple.

RSS feeds can be summaries or they can be full text. I strongly encourage you to offer full text feeds rather than summary feeds. You might think, “Well, I want the reader to have to click into my site to get the complete article,” however, you are robbing the feed of valuable keyword-rich, link-containing content with a summary-only feed.

Most RSS feeds include just the last 10 items published. I would suggest having at least 20. The more content in your feed for RSS search engines to sink their teeth into, the more things you are putting in front of bloggers and customers.

I also encourage you to have multiple feeds on your site, not just one. Each of your product categories could have its own RSS feed. Have a RSS feed of your best sellers, another for your clearance items, another for your new products, and another for your coupons and discounts. Someone may be only interested in one particular category of products that you sell; so give them the option of subscribing to an RSS feed of just those products.

This all may sound terribly complicated, but it isn’t. RSS is based on XML, which isn’t all that different to HTML. If your ecommerce platform doesn’t already generate RSS feeds for you, you have other options including a hosted service that scrapes your pages and creates RSS feeds for you (e.g., QuantumFeed), or you could even hand-code the RSS feed yourself with the aid of an editor program like FeedForAll or Jitbit.

As you might know, RSS stands for “really simple syndication”.‿ At its core, it really is simple. An RSS feed is merely an XML file that you host on your Web server — it kind of looks like HTML code. But don’t let its simplicity fool you; in the hands of a sophisticated marketer, the potential applications for RSS are huge. As a technology, it has been around for more than a few years now. It just hasn’t picked up steam until fairly recently — the upswing due in large part to the popularity of blogging.

People like to follow the blogs of others as much as they like to write their own blogs — perhaps more so. RSS makes that process easy and efficient. In fact, the only really practical way to follow numerous blogs on a regular basis is to use an RSS aggregator or newsreader. Can you imagine the alternative — visiting each blog’s Website one by one? Who’d have the time for that!

According to a Pew Internet & American Life study conducted last year, 5% of survey respondents subscribed to RSS feeds via newsreader software or a Web-based aggregator. Extrapolated out to all online Americans, that would amount to 6 million people who are consuming news and other information from blogs and content-rich Websites via RSS.

And that figure represents only those who knowingly subscribe to RSS feeds; many others subscribe to RSS feeds but don’t realize it. Users of the free My Yahoo! service, for example, can subscribe to RSS feeds without even being exposed to the term “RSS”. Yahoo! search results are peppered with listings containing an “Add to My Yahoo! link. And countless blogs prominently display a clickable “Add to My Yahoo! graphic. Clearly, a Yahoo! user need not know RSS is the enabler of such functionality.

Thankfully, bloggers don’t need to think too hard about RSS either. In fact, RSS is part and parcel of most blog software and hosted blog services nowadays: The RSS feeds are generated automatically without human intervention. So it’s not as if you have to go out of your way as a blogger to create an RSS feed.

But with other applications of RSS outside of blogs — like the publication of new stock arrivals or the latest clearance items — it’s a little more involved. You could instruct your e-commerce platform or content management system to generate the required XML files. Amazon.com, for instance, extended its e-commerce platform to serve up a range of product-related RSS feeds, broken down into dozens of product categories (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/xs/syndicate.html).

Or you could use a hosted RSS creation service that “scrapes” content from Web pages and creates an RSS feed automatically. Online retailer eHobbies employs such a service to generate three RSS feeds: Bestsellers, New Items, and Now Back in Stock. Because the Yahoo! Stores platform that eHobbies is on doesn’t support RSS feed creation, it has opted for a hosted “scraping” approach provided by my company, Netconcepts.

AGGREGATORS AND NEWSREADERS

Web-based aggregators are Websites that allow you to sign up for an account and create a personalized start page that displays the latest posts from your favorite blogs. My Yahoo! is one of many examples of Web-based aggregators.

Alternatively, you could follow RSS feeds by installing software on your PC that grabs the latest headlines via RSS. Rather than visiting a Web page to catch up on the latest happenings on your favorite blogs, you would launch a program on your computer. That program could be a stand-alone application whose sole job is to pull RSS feeds from the Web and display them for you, or it could be a plug-in that extends the functionality of a program that you already have — such as Outlook, Firefox, or Internet Explorer — to include RSS reading.

For instance, if you are a Microsoft Outlook user, you can buy the NewsGator plug-in and then use Outlook to catch up on the latest happenings in the blogosphere. You can even forward an item from an RSS feed to a colleague right within Outlook just as you would forward an e-mail — with the click of a button.

RSS adoption, I believe, will reach a tipping point very soon and go mainstream with the next release of Internet Explorer, IE7. This will offer RSS reading capability built right into the browser — no plug-ins required. Considering the base that Explorer has, that will make for a lot of potential RSS subscribers.

SYNDICATION TO OTHER SITES

As previously mentioned, one of the key benefits of RSS is the ability to syndicate your content to other Websites. This could be in the form of special offers, newly published articles, white papers, research studies, discussion forum posts, and so forth. An RSS feed doesn’t have to contain your blog posts. It can really be for anything. And if your syndicated content is of value to a Website owner’s visitors, it’s a good bet that he’ll be receptive to serving that content on his site.

Associated with your content are links that are included in the RSS feed. Those links will, of course, generate some amount of traffic for you, from visitors clicking through on the Website displaying your content.

Those links will also provide you with a search engine optimization benefit, in the form of increased link popularity and keyword-rich link text. The additional links are registered by the search engines as a “vote” or a “thumbs up” that builds your Google PageRank score and ultimately improves your search engine rankings. But the link text is of particular note: The major search engines — Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search — all weigh heavily the underlined text used in the link pointing to your Web page.

So if a link used the words “click here” in the link text, it would get the benefit of a PageRank “vote”, but the context of the vote would be all wrong — unless of course you were going after a high ranking for the search term “click here”. What you really want are keywords that people — specifically your customers and prospective customers — search for.

In many cases, you can control what link text is used on other Websites through RSS. When a site owner pulls content from an RSS feed, he typically uses the item’s title as the link text when linking to that item. So by paying careful attention to the words you employ in those titles, you can significantly affect your rankings for selected search terms.

Consider, for example, that the number-one search result in Google for the search term “trustrank” is an article that has been syndicated via RSS, published on the popular technology news site Slashdot. You can see that the URL for this article contains “from=RSS”, a telltale sign that the article link was disseminated exclusively through an RSS feed.

Further inspection confirmed that this URL does not appear anywhere on Slashdot’s site, except within its RSS feed. Yet this article has achieved a top ranking in Google. I credit this in large part to the inbound links and the link text that was used. I doubt that this article would have achieved a number-one ranking for “trustrank” if Slashdot hadn’t incorporated that word into its RSS item title, because then fewer sites would have included the word in their link text.

THE LEADING EDGE OF RSS

The latest, most widely adopted version of RSS is RSS 2.0. Why should you care? Because RSS 2.0 supports what are called enclosures, which include audio and video. This is where podcasting comes in. If you have an RSS 2.0 feed, you can incorporate audio clips saved in MP3 format into that feed. That audio then gets disseminated to your RSS subscribers. Those subscribers with podcast-capable newsreaders would then automatically download the MP3 files onto their computer and ultimately onto their MP3 player. So, for example, a user of Apple iTunes who subscribes to podcast feeds would, overnight, automatically obtain the latest MP3 files referenced in these feeds and synchronized with his iPod. The user would then wake up, grab their iPod out of its dock, and listen to the latest podcasts on his morning jog or commute into the office.

You can podcast video too, although with video it is not something you can play on an iPod currently. You can, however, watch these video clips at your leisure on your computer. A new buzzword has even been invented that refers specifically to the podcasting of video: “vodcasting”.

I have encouraged a client of mine, Steve Spangler, CEO of Colorado-based science-toys catalog Steve Spangler Science, to get into podcasting and vodcasting as a way to reach out and build relationships with the company’s primary customer base, namely teachers. His podcasting has been very warmly received. He mixes it up between audio-only interviews, audio-only monologues, and video segments of science-experiment demonstrations.

As a panelist at the recent Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas, Spangler regaled a packed room with his exploits as a blogger and podcaster. It seems to be working. Thirteen percent of last month’s online sales were attributable to his blog, and the majority of his blog posts this past month have been podcasts.

EVOLUTION OF RSS FEEDS

As the RSS technology matures, it will catch up with the functionality available to e-mail marketers. In fact, you can already track your RSS subscribers. And you can track which items they read, using “Web bugs” like those that get surreptitiously embedded into everyone’s e-mail campaigns to measure “opens”. Similarly, click-throughs from an RSS feed can be monitored using click-tracked URLs, in the same way e-mail click-throughs are tracked. Feedburner is a painless and inexpensive third-party service for tracking RSS subscribers, click-throughs, and reads.

Some of the more advanced e-mail marketers personalize their e-mails to the individual subscribers, taking into account such things as the subscriber’s interests, order history, and surfing behavior. You can do this with RSS as well, providing a personalized feed for each individual subscriber. Software company VMware provides a customized RSS feed in which subscribers can specify their areas of interest and get a feed that focused solely on those areas of interest.

When new channels that reach consumers come into existence, advertisers quickly follow. RSS is no exception: Currently a small but growing number of Websites sell advertising space within their RSS feeds. Of those that do, most use an RSS advertising network, such as Pheedo. Introducing ads into a feed for the first time is a delicate matter. The popular tech blog Signal vs. Noise tested the insertion of ads into its RSS feed and received such reader backlash that it pulled the ads and suspended the trial.

With the accelerating pace of technology, the reaction time for companies to absorb and leverage new technology is shrinking. RSS is a technology that is going to grow quickly. When it comes to offering RSS feeds, don’t wait; find your feet now, and you’ll stand a much better chance of acquiring and retaining a loyal RSS subscriber base into the future.

Stephan Spencer is founder/president of Netconcepts, a Madison, WI-based e-marketing agency, and coauthor of the Multichannel Merchant special report “State of Search Engine Marketing for Retailers 1.0.”

SIDEBAR: Key benefits of RSS to online merchants

In part one, we discussed the coming of age of email marketing. Here, in the second part, we discuss the block-and-tackle issues of getting past the spam filters so your message is heard.

Spam filters tend to be the bane of the email marketer’s existence. Getting past them is a serious challenge, and it is becoming increasingly harder. How can an email marketer consistently bypass those spam filters?

Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question here. If you are a marketer who is truly focused on the customer’s needs and on creating relevancy for that customer, you will already have a strategy that is focused on ensuring that your email conversations are relevant to your customers and are delivering value in relation to their needs.

Having said that, you can be doing everything right… and your mail might still end up in a junk folder — unless you go that extra step. In the B2B world, you are now at the mercy of every gatekeeper in every company you are trying to deliver into, and that becomes a much more important dynamic. Confirmed opt-in is obviously the best way to go.

Whether you are a B2C company or a B2B company, it is important to invest resources into staying on top of these issues. It’s a moving target: new authentication procedures, shifts in adoption of varying anti-spam technology, and knowing what is the current flavor-of-the-month with spam filters that evolve as each day passes.

Unless you have in-house resources to track these changes, you may need to consider working with an email service provider that has invested in this capability.

You also need to ensure that your strategies are actually working for you. A service provider can help you set up test accounts to track how your email is being rendered to your email clients. Make sure that the messages you think are relevant and appropriate for the ISP are actually rendering correctly when you get through. Take a global view, too, on the need for ISP relations.

Email tools will enable you to score your email before you send it out. Some of these are actually built right into the email software.

DoubleClick, for instance, has a tool that allows its clients to score the content of their messages against various spam blocking and filtering applications. It is just one of many tools available that will help marketers identify and correct some of those issues. For those who aren’t using a service with spam scoring capabilities built-in, there is a free spam scoring tool available from GravityMail.

A mailbox monitoring service can seed your email list with test accounts across all top ISPs — and measure not just whether the message was delivered but also where it got delivered. One thing you have to be sensitive to is whether your messages are ending up in bulk mail folders or junk mail folders. That’s important, because according to research, consumers and email recipients tend not to check those accounts.

Email marketers should also consider delivering content via RSS. It is a great supplemental channel; when combined with your database, it can be event-driven and can be tracked — illuminating subscriber behaviors such as opens and click-throughs. If you are already using an internal content management system for your email marketing, you can easily customize it to do the same. While RSS publishing and marketing technology is not as developed as it could be, there are opportunities for companies to bravely take RSS marketing to the next level.

Our experts could have devoted an entire day to this topic, but in short they agree that if you are not investing in managing email deliverability, either through your own in-house resources or through external resources, you are likely to face a lot of issues that you may not even realize today.

Anti-spam laws: What you’re probably missing

The passing of the CAN-SPAM Act into law spawned a host of marketing professionals dispensing advice, but very few lawyers who could effectively interpret the law. If you have a major email marketing program in your company or work in the email marketing industry, don’t rely on just articles for your information. It is worth talking to a lawyer to make sure that you are in compliance.

You would be amazed at the number of large companies that still don’t include a physical address in their email communications. The CAN-SPAM Act, with regard to civil liabilities, also applies to just one email message — in other words, one salesperson sending one message and not just newsletters or ads going to tens of thousands of people. It’s a good idea to periodically remind your people to include your company’s address in all email communications.

In addition, the CAN-SPAM Act has requirements with regard to header information. If you are sending out email from your own email server, make sure that your IP address has a reverse lookup. CAN-SPAM applies to all commercial email, including permission-based email. It requires an identifier in the email subject, and the best way to deal with this is to make sure you always use your company name or its abbreviation in your commercial email.

When it comes to Europe, the EU Directive is only a set of guidelines with no specific rules for email marketing. Every EU country may interpret these individually. While in some countries there is spam legislation, in others there is privacy legislation, and sometimes there can be a mix of up to five or six legislations dictating what you can or cannot do as an email marketer. The only rule of thumb is to seek legal counsel when email marketing in Europe, because there are risks.

It’s an evolving landscape, too, as evidenced by the FCC’s recently released guidelines (visit www.fcc.gov for more information) that wireless email domains be treated differently and have a higher threshold for whether you should be mailing commercial messages to them.

In a similar vein, the FTC has put out guidelines around the Primary Purpose Rule, which pertains to whether a message is considered commercial or transactional. Different standards pertain to each.

Hopefully, you have a strong legal skill set within your in-house privacy team, because you need to be tracking these issues. Otherwise, work with providers that can really help you stay on top of these issues… because it isn’t just one “gotcha” at any one point in time.

Multi-list suppression

Is there a way around multi-list suppression, which CAN-SPAM seems to require? This has become a very hot question.

It is the marketers’ responsibility to manage opt-outs and ensure that their efforts are CAN-SPAM compliant, regardless of where they are getting their lists. Companies like Unsubscribe Central and Smart Source have created tools that help marketers leverage lists from multiple sources. These software programs harvest information from secondary list sources as well as house lists.

If you are renting lists or working with shared lists or a list aggregator, make sure that you are working with people who comply with all CAN-SPAM practices. Before you decide to rent a list from a provider or share a list, do an audit. Ask for proof of how the provider has been managing opt-outs in the past. Ask for examples of client companies that you can speak with so you can talk to someone about what the provider has really done. Do due diligence up front and build a warranty into your contract, so that if something goes wrong (if the provider doesn’t uphold its end of the bargain, or the list it gives you is somehow inappropriate or not compliant), you are protected.

The CAN-SPAM Act applies to senders — not as you and I might define a sender, but as the statute defines a sender. When the Act first came into being, people argued that you needed to worry about multi-list suppression when you rented an email list from, say, a third-party vendor.

Interestingly, the FTC recently handed down an opinion that has been posted on the Direct Marketing Association Web site that says the following: If you run a third-party list and someone advertises on your list but the messages you send out contain only the design of your advertisers (full message ads, not short ads within newsletters) then you as the publisher (i.e., the list owner), as well as the advertiser, are going to have to remove opt-outs from your respective lists.

However, if you are a list owner and you send out ads wrapped in a branded template that looks like a newsletter you published and recipients know who is sending it time after time, CAN-SPAM is only going to apply to you, the list owner and not to the advertiser. The advertiser is almost like an author providing an article for your newsletter.

The key is what the recipient thinks. Life becomes a lot simpler by using a branded template that looks exactly the same in every mailing, because people then know exactly from whom they are getting that email; that’s what CAN-SPAM cares about. And, in that situation, only the list owner would have to deal with opt-outs, which makes a lot more sense from a logistical perspective, because, as an advertiser, it’s not your list. You are just advertising, and it’s not fair to expect you to deal with opt-outs from that list. That said, this is not an FTC rule at this point, merely an opinion.

What makes a remarkable campaign?

We all recognize an ordinary campaign. It says: “Hey, everybody, buy one and get one free. Sign up now!” It’s a big blast campaign that communicates the same messages to millions of people.

An extraordinary campaign is not a campaign at all — but an email relationship that delivers value and carefully monitors frequency. Somewhere in between your audience, your product and the value that you provide is a newsletter or a series of emails that people not only want to get but will forward to friends and bring you more subscribers.

An extraordinary email management system is one that knows who you are, knows what you like, knows how often you want to receive emails and sends email for you instead of the sender.

The spectrum of email sophistication consists of three segments. The first is very basic. These are folks who are fairly new and are taking the blast approach. They are sending the same message to all of their customers, maybe once a week, just because that seems like a good rule of thumb. But there’s no real analysis or customer information that’s being put into helping them decide how to vary the content or the frequency of the message.

Then there are the middle-of-the-road folks. These are people who are a little more experienced and are just starting to toy with some customer segmentation. So they maybe have two, three, four customer segments, and they are really trying to send different messages to those customer segments based on demographics, past purchase behavior, etc.

Then we have the much more sophisticated folks who are going about an email conversation approach. They are really thinking about what motivates the customer to respond and buy and “How should I be sequencing my messages to get them to further engage in a relationship with me?”

A great example in the sophisticated arena is ski resort company IntraWest. Its strategy has been to engage in an email conversation after the customer books but before he or she visits the resort. Within a period of about six weeks from the time you make your reservation to the time you visit the resort, IntraWest sends different messages that are focused on helping you secure your ski lessons, rent your equipment and upgrade your room.

From IntraWest’s perspective, the idea is to gain more revenue from customers. The value it is providing to customers is in helping them prepare for the trip, enjoy an even better vacation, and feel as if IntraWest has their best interests at heart.

Essential components to any email campaign are the quality of the list, the creative content of the email you are sending out, and the landing page you are directing your recipients to. An ordinary campaign usually focuses on just one or two of these, while an extraordinary one focuses on all three.

Think of email as telling a story — an ongoing story in which you develop a relationship with the recipient over the course of several messages. This allows you to focus on one idea per email message. One of the problems, particularly in B2B email, is that the products that the companies are trying to promote are very complex. They try to discuss all the features in just one email message. Focusing on one feature per email is much more effective.

Extraordinary campaigns incorporate testing and how that message is cued up. It is not uncommon to see a 20% lift in performance in an email campaign simply by just testing different subject lines. Companies need to be more disciplined in this regard.

Extraordinary campaigns also create a dialogue with trigger- or event-based messages based on recent customer activity, a milestone in their customer life cycle or a particular event, all of which are well-received by the recipient. Focusing on a strategic direction for the business involves more time and analysis of results, but a business lives and breathes based on one-to-one connections with its customers.

Today’s technology has paved a level playing field such that anyone can do good email if they want to. Take a little company like JamBase, an event ticketing business that takes time to understand the genres of music you like and the kinds of venues you are likely to see a concert in. It sends you emails that are timely and relevant based on those combinations: namely, the right band or the right event in the right venue. As a result, you get emails sporadically — perhaps three emails in a month, but then you may not hear from them for three months because they don’t have anything relevant to say to you.

The net result is you pay more attention, you respond more and you appreciate them because they are educating you with messages like: “Hey, if you like Guster, Chris, this band is very similar. They’ve got some new music. Click here to see a download, and they are going to be playing at this venue that I know you like.” That’s an example of an outstanding email communication, and it doesn’t take a lot of resources to do it right.

Most effective email marketing tactics

Turn off images in your emails. Make sure your campaigns look good without them. Really focus on your “From” line, “Subject” line, and preview pane view. Identify which one hyperlink out of all the hyperlinks in your email is the one golden hyperlink that should carry most of your traffic.

Statistics reveal the vast proportion of people who click on links generally click on only one link, even though you may have dozens in your campaign. Make your golden hyperlink easy to see, the obvious choice to direct people into the area you really want them to go.

Test. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do, and probably the least utilized. You can have the best looking creative in the world… and the worst one might perform better in an email. Unless you are testing these elements, you don’t know that. In fact, keep testing, and keep measuring. You will be amazed at what works and what doesn’t. Think about integrating Web analytics into your email so you’ve got a total picture of what is really happening.

How often should you email? Today’s technology means you should be able to email every subscriber at the right frequency for them. Give your customers the choice. When they subscribe, identify what frequency and what subject matters they want from you, and send them the content they want.

Practice serial storytelling. It is the complete opposite of the so-called email blast. It contains a rich contextual framework that, basically, applies on two levels. If you are placing an ad in the newsletter, how good is the surrounding content in which your ad is going to be placed? If you are sending out an entire email message, again, how good is that content and what other types of email messages are you sending out? The richer the context of your promotional messages, the more likely a quid pro quo develops between you and the recipient so that they pay more attention to what you are trying to say.

The big issues facing email marketing

Thanks to the magic of email, you can communicate with anyone at the right time with the right message in the right context. We are moving rapidly from the idea of email as a cheap mass-marketing tool to email as an unbelievably effective one-to-one communication tool. It will be full steam ahead throughout 2006.

Data integration also looks to be a big player in 2006, as marketers leverage email in conjunction with other marketing channels. For the last three or four years, email has been largely a standalone communication channel, albeit a great way to communicate with your customers.

An even better way is to create a multi-channel conversation with your customers. Soon we will see those sophisticated folks who are now doing email conversations move into cross-channel conversations, employing email in conjunction with phone calls, online ads, and postal mail as a seamless way to talk to their customers through whatever channel the customer prefers — and potentially through several different channels, depending on where they are in the conversation.

There is a lot of conversation going on right now in the US relating to data and privacy, and various problems being reported in the press about data breaches. There is likely to be a spillover effect on how legislators and others scrutinize the use of client data. Data will have to exist in an environment that involves more oversight from governments and possibly other organizations as well.

Companies will once again focus on email list growth. Over recent years, the notion of growing lists and bringing in new customers hasn’t been a focal point as it was in the early days of email. Realizing that those fresh new names on their customer files are the most responsive, a lot of companies will start dedicating attention, resources and investment dollars into growing that list once again — but it won’t be as easy, because people are now reluctant to provide email addresses to just anybody who asks for it. It has to be earned.

Deliverability will continue to be an issue. We are not going to stop spam in its tracks, which means marketers have got to be a lot smarter about what they are sending. Phishing may overtake spam in terms of the kind of email that marketers are really concerned about, due to its damage to brands and reputations.

2006 will be the year when marketers finally “get it”—that testing plus measurement equals return on investment. Not just “Did they open it? Did they read it? Did they click on it,” but “Let’s do some further measurements, let’s do the data integration to see whether or not they clicked through and got to the money page, whether that’s a purchase or a download or a registration.” They will look at the cost of sales on using email as a promotional tool and ask: “Are we getting the payoff we want, including measuring the impact it has on our brand?” They’ll be measuring attitudes, not just clicks. Marketers will finally click on to this for a competitive edge.

Consolidating technology platforms will begin to ease the retrieval of data, facilitating the increased use of segmentation and personalization. With RSS as one application and email another, the need to do centralized management of data collection, data mining and content delivery will become apparent.

Tackling spam issues and deliverability in-house is no fun, and we are likely to see the consolidation of smaller email service providers because of deliverability issues, with privacy and data security feeding that trend.

Five years from now, we are likely to see sophistication around the end user’s ability to control email, with more gatekeeper devices managing people’s inboxes. We will see tools that enable people to search the content of their email, categorize and save messages. Email marketing will evolve to keep pace with these gatekeeper features, and you will need a very good relationship with the customer to do so.

Rich media is likely to have a role within email. For a variety of reasons, including virus concerns around how it displays in a recipient’s inbox, rich media hasn’t really taken off. Overcoming some of those challenges will result in its taking center stage in email, as in the online advertising that we see today.

Inbox studies indicate consumers get a little over 300 emails a week, including personal emails, marketing messages and spam. By 2010, this number is projected to grow to around 500, after a leveling off around 2008 due to a couple of happenings expected around then.

The first is a tapering off in email for acquisition purposes, as marketers finally realize the amount of money they are spending on renting lists isn’t worth it for the response they are getting.

Second, spam will decline with the introduction of a postage stamp, or some form of currency or charge for email delivery. There are predictions, too, that people will opt in to about 17 marketing promotional emails each week.

RSS will increasingly integrate with email clients such as Outlook. It is already happening. Marketers, particularly RSS marketers, will compete against not only other email messages but also other RSS feeds which may have greater relevance than email messages because RSS is easier to unsubscribe from than email. If you no longer want an RSS feed in your newsreader or aggregator, it takes just two seconds to remove it.

Perhaps marketers may not get better, but email quality nonetheless will. Filters will simply allow you to see only the messages you want. Whether by postage stamp, artificial intelligence or just because email systems will be able to recognize what you like, you will be able to open up the box that says “this is work-related, this is from family, this is advertising for air travel, this is advertising for clothing,” and you go to the one you are interested in at the moment. And that’s what RSS does for consumers right now.

Having just finished reading a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, written by Ray Kurzweil, one of the most famous artificial intelligence experts in the world, I am quite convinced that in five years we are going to see some fundamental changes due to artificial intelligence and computer processor speed improvements and so forth. All in all, it’s a pretty exciting time.

Webfeeds — XML files containing a list of late-breaking content items — also have a positive effect on search rankings by encouraging additional inbound linking. These could be blog posts, news headlines, new or best-selling products, clearance items, etc.

A feed will be in either the Really Simple Syndication standard or the ATOM standard and typically contains information such as titles, descriptions, Web addresses and publication dates.

By providing one or more feeds on your Web site, you can get syndicated onto other sites that wish to use your content to augment their own. This will result in deep links into your pages of late-breaking content. For example, Slashdot.org has news headlines and associated links syndicated onto numerous other Web sites, including Nanodot.org.

What is it about links that make them so crucial to search engine optimization? From the engines’ perspective, links connote importance. In a way, a link acts like a vote. A Web site with few inbound links won’t appear to the search engines to be worthy of a top ranking for any popular search keywords.

Not all links are created equal, either. A link from Jim-Bob’s personal home page won’t benefit nearly as much as a link from CNN.com. Furthermore, the anchor (i.e. underlined) text in links gets special consideration by the search engines: the keywords in that anchor text are associated with the page that is linked to. That’s why a search for “miserable failure” returns such politically charged results, even though the words “miserable” and “failure” appear nowhere on the HTML of those top-ranking pages.

Two great ways to acquire links with keyword-rich anchor text are blogging and syndicating your content through Webfeeds. It starts with naming your blog with your targeted keywords. Incorporating keywords into the titles of your blog posts and the titles of your RSS items also will yield a rankings benefit.

Over time, the major engines are going to use Webfeed technology in more sophisticated ways. Yahoo currently offers a Web-based aggregator called My Yahoo that you can add RSS feeds to with one click, using the “Add to My Yahoo” link that appears in some listings in the Yahoo search results.

MSN Search lets you subscribe to search results as RSS feeds. Some specialized feed search engines like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub let you subscribe to an RSS feed of search results that pull data from an index of Webfeeds, but I’m confident the major engines will offer the same sort of functionality.