Nexternal Nexus v.4.03  
 
The Nexternal Nexus is a monthly newsletter sent by Nexternal Solutions to people serious about online sales. We hope that this information is useful in improving your online business.		  
 
 
 
  • Email Service Providers
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  • Big Changes At Yahoo!
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    Email Service Providers

    Customer retention is a top priority for any business. Most companies garner 80% of their revenue from just 20% of their customer base. Extending your reach to even a few more customers can lead to a significant boost in revenue as well as increased customer satisfaction. Providing your customers with information that they have specifically requested is key in any medium, but it is particularly beneficial with email. Email is fast and inexpensive.

    How do you collect information from your visitors and convert these people into paying customers with a significant lifetime value? Many online retailers are flocking to Email Service Providers (ESPs) that enable you to control your own destiny when it comes to email marketing campaigns.

    There are many things to consider when making a decision on whether to outsource this task or keep it in house.

    Why Outsource?

    1. List Management

    Managing your email lists can be a hassle…if you let it. Trusting a reputable company is a step in the right direction. With the right tool, you’re in control. You should be allowed to have multiple lists and be able to upload, download and collect email addresses as much as possible.

    At the very least, here is what you should be able to do with an outsourced ESP:

  • View your list – Get a snapshot of who is signing up for your offers and who is on your list.
  • Search for a particular email address – Perhaps a user wants to subscribe or unsubscribe, this tool should be at your fingertips.
  • Upload your list – Whether you need to append an existing list or upload a new list, you should be able to easily do this without technical expertise.
  • Collect Email Addresses – Any provider should give you a tool to capture valuable data from the people who visit your website immediately. You can collect demographic data, but you should also be able to customize your own data and capture information on what they may have an interest in receiving communications about. Look for a tool that offers “Double Opt-in” which simply means they are clicking on a link to confirm they are the rightful owner of that email address and would like to receive emails from you.

    Don’t let these tasks bog down your IT department if you even have one. Find a tool that is user friendly enough to enable even a novice to do it online. Managing your lists should not be a hassle for you or the rest of your company.

    2. Create Email Campaigns – Novices and Experts Welcome!

    An ESP should enable you to create an email yourself using wizard-like templates, or you should be able to use your own creative ideas from your in-house designer to maintain consistent branding. Creating the email should be a simple task if you use the right tools.

    Testing your email is a plus in any system you use, so you’ll be able to see what it will look like in multiple email readers (AOL, Yahoo!, Outlook) and make changes from there.

    Make sure your ESP is “Can SPAM” compliant. This simply means that they are compliant with the new Federal Law passed in December of 2003 requiring the bare minimum for their clients to include a valid postal address, a non-deceptive subject and "from" labels in every outgoing email.

    3. Reporting – Get Access to Your Responses!

    When you narrow down your list of providers, don’t forget to find out what reporting packages they offer. What do they offer for response reporting? At the very least you should be getting the following:

  • The time the campaign mailed
  • The final quantity mailed after duplicates and bounces/unsubscribes
  • The number of HTML opens
  • The number of clicks on any link in the email
  • The total number of bounced messages
  • The total number of people who unsubscribe
  • Ability to download any of this information.

    Some companies will even go further and give you reports based on different domains (AOL.com, Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com).

    4. The Bounced Email – What’s the secret?

    When you send an email to an address that doesn’t exist, you get an undeliverable email right? Well imagine what your email box would look like if you sent thousands of emails and got a 10% bounce rate? Your inbox would be flooded!

    The secret to managing bounces is to set up a server specifically for bounced email. Almost all ESPs do this on behalf of their customers. What a good provider will do for you is re-try your bounces in the event that someone has a full mailbox or that the particular ISP is down for some reason. The retry should be multiple times and over the course of a few days.

    In any event, bounced email management can be a nightmare if you’re trying to take this on in-house. Why? Because when an email is returned for non-deliverability, a “code” is sent back with the bounced email. The problem is that ISPs don’t standardize their codes so you may think it’s a bounced email when in reality there might be another problem. Most ESPs have this part down and can tell what a bounced email address is.

    5. Whitelists – What Are They and Who Is On Them?

    When you do outsource, make sure your ESP is whitelisted with the major ISPs. What does whitelisting mean? It simply means the receiving ISP (AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail) knows that the ESP sending mail on your behalf is legitimate and that all of the mail that comes from that ESP can get into the inbox of the recipient owning an AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail or any other ISP email address. ESPs who are whitelisted have seen the importance and cultivated relationships with the ISPs over the years so that they become a trusted sender.

    You’ll typically find that AOL is around 30% of your consumer lists while Yahoo! and Hotmail run a close second which is why it’s important for you to get your email through. If you’re operating in the business to business arena these consumer email accounts are much less a percentage of your lists.

    If your company is serious about marketing to existing customers, it is worth investigating Email Service Providers.

    This is the first in a series of articles related to email marketing provided by VerticalResponse Inc. Vertical Response, Inc. is a leading provider of self-service and customized direct marketing solutions, empowering small and medium sized businesses to build, control and measure their own direct marketing campaigns.

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    Big Changes At Yahoo!

    In the past month or so, Yahoo has made some of the biggest changes to date in the ever-escalating search engine wars. For those of you who do not yet know, here is a bit of background history as to what has been going on. In the past year or so, Yahoo purchased AltaVista and FAST, then Overture and Inktomi. Overture previously provided pay-per-click (PPC) results to Yahoo search engines results pages (serps) as well as to other search engine’s serps, most notably MSN. In buying Overture, Yahoo took this outsourcing in-house. But, this only accounted for part of the equation. The bigger part was that their primary search results, the natural search results as opposed to the PPC search results, were still being provided by Google, a primary factor why Google’s serps reached up to 80% of all serps. The next bombshell dropped by Yahoo was its announcement that it was going to replace Google serps with Inktomi results. This was a blow to Google and a boost to Yahoo & Inktomi. Yahoo was well on its way to independence.

    On March 2nd, Yahoo finally made the switch from Google to Inktomi-powered search results. Now that it is live, there is a lot of speculation as to the future of search and, specifically, the future of search at Yahoo.

    Here are some of the highlights of the Yahoo changes. The old Inktomi Index Connect - XML Feeds are now called Overture Site Match where you could pay for inclusion just like you previously would have for Inktomi, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. It really is the same thing, only with a new name. This service is primarily designed for sites with over 500 pages and/or sites that change frequently and require being crawled by the Yahoo robot every 48 hours. Its advantages are that it guarantees inclusion, guarantees that you’d be indexed within 48 hours and every 48 hours thereafter, and that your site will be reviewed by a human editor.

    The old Inktomi Site Submit that cost $39 has now been replaced by Yahoo Free Add URL. This is recommended for all sites that are currently not in the new Yahoo index. To check to see if you are in the new index, visit www.yahoo.com and do a search for “site:http://www.sitename.com”. This is highly recommended for all small to medium sized business sites. The link to the free Add URL is at http://submit.search.yahoo.com. Yahoo suggests submitting only your home page as its crawlers should find the other pages of your site. However, consider also submitting your site map page to increase the likelihood that all pages will be crawled.

    So, which do you use, the Overture Site Match or the Free Add URL? Essentially, unless you need your URLs spidered and updated every 48 hours, don't pay for inclusion with Overture Site Match. You might also consider Overture Site Match if you are having problems getting your URLs indexed for free. Sometime this can happen if your URL has characters in it that aren't search engine friendly. Regardless, try the free submit first.

    Overture Site Match fees are as follows: $49 for the first URL submitted, the next 2-10 URLs are $29 each and each URL after that is $10 each. All fees are renewed annually. Then, the ongoing fees are either 15 cents or 30 cents per click, depending on how Yahoo categorizes your content and/or what you sell. Thus, it is possible that with Overtire site match, you could be paying 30 cents per click when you possibly could be paying even less with Overture PPC. See http://submit.search.yahoo.com for more info. Caveat Emptor!

    The question that remains is what about the $299 annual fee many webmasters are paying Yahoo for inclusion in their directory? Well, that question still remains to be addressed by Yahoo. Conventional wisdom would have it that if you’re already in and up for renewal, you should continue to pay to be included, but if you’re not yet in, hold off for now.

    		 
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    Copyright 2009 Nexternal Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be republished in whole, or in part, without the express written consent of the publisher.

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