The value of email marketing in New Zealand has been growing steadily over the years. Not surprisingly email marketing and online communications are the most popular media of choice now, particularly email marketing.

Email is a powerful marketing tool and it integrates well with traditional media. It spurs immediate action, thus generating direct sales, registrations, growth of database and more. It is also more cost effective than paper-based direct mail and achieves greater ROI. However, it is wrought with challenges. And with the passing of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act, it’s important for organisations to ensure compliance whilst developing their marketing plans.

Integrated Email Marketing and Online Communications takes a practical approach to ensure continued acquisition, growth and retention of customers through targeted, robust, tried and tested strategies to help lift your email marketing strategies. To help you gain the upper hand over your competition, the course also covers some popular online communications tools that you could implement to supplement your email marketing strategy.

DAY ONE
Digital Communications — Email Marketing, Online and Offline Media
Customers today have more choice available than ever before of how they are communicated with. Customers ultimately want to control the frequency, the content and how they receive their communications. This session covers how email fits within the full marketing mix and how it integrates with other online and offline media.

• What are digital communications?
• How do digital communications fit within the full marketing mix?
• Marketing through email, RSS, blogging, txt, websites
• Platforms – desktop computers, mobile devices
• Integration with other online media
• Integration with offline direct marketing

Developing an Email Strategy
Many companies spend a lot of time, effort and budget acquiring email addresses, but neglect to develop an effective communication strategy once they have them. You’ll learn to develop strategic communication plans to maximise the potential for robust marketing strategies through this session.

• Developing the digital communication strategic plan
• Objectives, strategies and tactical elements
• Understanding the email marketing and digital communications
  process
• How to integrate email marketing into other online and offline media

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act: Your Legal Obligations
Understand and ensure that your organisation meets the requirements of the Electronic Messages Act 2007.

• Definition of spam
• Definition of permission levels
• Permission vs. memorable permission
• Industry guidelines and best practices
• How will the Act affect your marketing plans?
• What are the penalties and costs associated with breaches?
• How tight is the current legislation – what are the ways around it?
• How to ensure compliance
• International spam laws – do they apply to companies in NZ?

Data Management: Building and Maintaining a List
Data is at the heart of any form of direct marketing including “email”. It pays to identify the data that you need to collect in order to personalise communications and provide effective reporting.

• Structuring your database – what type of data do you need?
• What are the reporting data requirements?
• “Quantity” vs. “Quality” – retaining the active subscriber
• Cleaning and maintaining data – changes, adds, deletes, fixing misspellings
• What is “provable permission” – recording and time stamping of permission received
• “Offline permission” – how to record permission granted through the call centre, trade shows, network meeting and face-to-face sales activity
• Managing permission across an organisation

In-House or Outsource – Assessing Email Service Providers
Finding the right email service provider is a critical choice for any company. You will explore and learn ways to find the right vendor and technology to manage your campaigns now and into the future through this session.

• How to assess your needs
• Questions you should be asking
• Assessing email service providers in NZ and overseas
• Liaising with your email service provider

DAY TWO
Winning Creative Strategies & Execution for Email
Create email messages that stand out, get read and get the response you plan for.

• “Memorable permission” – planning content your subscribers actually want to read
• Exploring the 19 creative elements (the from line – email brand value, the subject line, the preview pane, position of logo, ratio of text to images, design layout, number and type of links, navigation bar, inclusion of photography, feature offers, location of call-to-action, the words you use and personalisation etc.)
• Email mandatories
• What are the technical specifications?
• Designing effective landing pages and forms
• Use of rich media – video and audio
• Eyetracking and multivariate testing

Increasing Conversion Rates
This session covers how to use data to improve conversions such as open rates, click rates, inquiries and sales.

• Reporting data
• Behavioural targeting
• Event triggered campaigns

Deliverability, Filters and Rendering
Learn techniques to avoid the dreaded “spam” folder and “report spam” button.

• Data collection and tracking
• Filters and list management
• Deliverability reporting codes – messages sent back from ISPs
• About false positives
• Whitelisting – how to get your message delivered every single time
• Image suppression – what’s getting delivered?
• Authentication and reputation
• Rendering your message in email readers

RSS – Spam Free Communications
Is RSS the holy grail of online communications? Lean how to send communications that are completely spam free.

• What is RSS and why use it?
• What are some of the popular RSS readers available?
• iRSS – individualized RSS, sending personalised communications just like email
• Content distribution and syndication

Blogging – Participating in the Ongoing Conversation

• The New Zealand and international blogospheres
• Starting a blog - how to choose a theme
• Posting content – what, how, when
• Dealing with comments
• Making friends – increase your presence in the blogosphere
• Integrating your blog with email and RSS
• Use of video (vlogging) and audio (podcasting)
• Reporting on performance

Panelists:
Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development Content Acquisition, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision

Speakers:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google
Doug Hay, Principal & CEO, Expansion Plus Inc.

Moderator:
Ian McAnerin, CEO, McAnerin Networks Inc.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Mitch Joel, President , Twist Image
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

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

Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Panelists:
Steve Spangler, CEO, Steve Spangler Science Inc.
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder & EVP Marketing, Ice.com

Moderator:
Niall Kennedy, Principal, Hat Trick Media

Panelists:
Bill Flitter, Founder and VP of Marketing, Pheedo
Don Loeb, FeedBurner
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, Feedburner
Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies

Speakers:
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, FeedBurner