‘Best Practices’ Articles

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you.”
–The Velveteen Rabbit

The World Wide Web is a great levelling field. Small companies with intuitive, well-designed web sites appear to wield the same clout as larger corporations. When the face of a company is reduced to markup language and slick graphics, what is real? When perception is reality, what perception is right?

More importantly, how do you convince customers of your reality? (more…)

More and more email programs are blocking images. If the layout of your email depends on the placement of certain images, then the look-and-feel of your email can be seriously compromised.

So what can be done?

Get Rid of Unneeded Images
For a long time, web pages and emails were laid out with blank images padding the edges of every element, small images rounding out the corners, and headers built of large banners. Get rid of them! When images are blocked on an email like this, the results are disastrous. (more…)

Email marketing success includes ensuring your email messages are delivered and have a shot at being opened. We’ll take a look at some steps you can take to increase the chances your email will make it to an inbox and get opened.

Delivery issues include messages the recipient confuses with spam, simply misses, or doesn’t recognize, along with filtering, blocking, and bulk-folder challenges. (more…)

Many companies collect customer and prospect email addresses as a matter of course. Most are careful to obtain permission to use those addresses for marketing purposes. Those addresses are added to a database… and there they remain. Along come the marketers that classify and segment users to send targeted offers and promotions. Unfortunately, this campaign-driven, target-oriented approach can lead to some addresses not receiving any messages for months, even years.

During that time a lot can happen to an address. That can substantially affect how your messages are received, and how your company is perceived. (more…)

Because of the increase in spam, many legitimate companies and organizations unwarrantedly get slapped with the label of spammer. An organization or company may offer its Web site’s visitors registration to an e-mail list or newsletter. Inadvertently, visitors forget that they registered for the service and report the email as spam. (more…)