Deciding on an Email Service

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There are many email services that allow you to import your lists, layout emails, send, and run reports.  People often ask what service to use.  I’ll refrain from giving out company names because my answer is often different depending on client needs.

These services always charge in one of two ways.  It’s either a fee based on the amount of people in your list or a per email cost.  The price always scales.  So you pay less per person or per email as your quantity goes up.  I have found that all the main stream services you find online are reliable.  So often the service they offer at the price they offer is the biggest concern.  Typically, it breaks down like this.  If you are going to be sending frequently (at least once a month), it often makes sense to use the service that bills by the number of people in the list.  The only time this isn’t true is when the list is full of junk data.  This is a problem in and of itself but from a pricing standpoint it causes you to pay a higher price while not getting your message delivered.  If you are sending infrequently (sometimes once a month or less) then often the by email service is more appropriate.  Pricing tends to fluctuate between 5 and 1 cent an email, based on contract length and number of people.  This is an advantage to pricing by list when you have quarterly announcement or infrequent promotions. 

Other folks find small companies or affiliate services that offer an inexpensive email delivery system.  Others have an in-house database that allows for mass email sends.  My suggestion on both is to avoid them.  Both solutions have one major flaw.  They aren’t working to protect their sending rights.  Almost all of these services are blacklisted by major ISP’s, meaning people don’t get your emails.  The single greatest benefit to using a mainstream email service is that they work with ISP’s to maintain high rates of delivery.  Most small services and all in house services don’t.  I recently encountered a small affiliate email marketing service that was blocked by hotmail, yahoo, and AOL.  They were Gmail away from being blocked from all the big four.  I also once encountered an in-house database that had all email from a company registered as SPAM.  They were using their own site and servers to deliver the messages (which slowed all online activity) and due to a handful of SPAM complaints they were blacklisted.  They discovered the problem when their customer service emails weren’t received by customers.  The emails were being put in SPAM filters or blocked all together. 

It’s a lot of unnecessary work to save a little money.  Don’t run the risk of paying for something that isn’t providing the service advertised.  As it is with many cases, you get what you pay for.  If a service is unbelievably cheap it means they aren’t doing the back end work.  In email marketing shortcuts usually mean your message won’t be delivered.  Worse yet don’t inhibit the entire company’s ability to communicate via email  by using an untested in-house solution. 

So what service is right for you?  A reliable mainstream service is right for everyone.  From there, break down how many emails you plan on sending and how many people you send it to.  Most of the time you’ll find that the less than a month frequency trends toward a by email payment structure and once month or more frequency trends toward a by contact list payment structure. 

Need more help in setting up or running an email campaign? Call me (412.417.2309) and we can construct an ideal matrix for your company or organization.

– Eric
eMarketing Innovation

Email Marketing

How Should a Struggling Economy Affect Marketing?

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With the economy struggling many companies are looking to trim expenses.  One common target is the marketing budget.  While that certainly might be a reasonable plan, some people undertake it in a panic mode rather than examining it’s effect on the business.  For example, a common method is to simply have a set monthly budget and cut it by some percentage.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to analyse what is resulting in new business and remove the ineffective marketing efforts?  Before cutting marketing dollars to weather the economic climate, make sure you aren’t cutting a valuable vehicle for revenue.

I was recently speaking with a business owner that claimed she had lost a couple sizable clients,  could easily envision losing more in the down market, and was cutting marketing efforts to weather the storm.  I was confused because what I was hearing was that she was losing existing revenue and not putting any plans in place to replace it.  That sounds like a recipe to go out of business. 

No one is actively looking to go under, so be careful in what gets cut.  It is certainly not the time for frivolous spending but haphazard budget cutting can be equally disastrous.  A struggling economy should affect marketing.  It should make it more streamlined.  Analyze what you are currently doing from a marketing standpoint.  What activities are being done just because that’s what has always been done?  What marketing activities are generating leads and sales to keep the bottom line viable through this challenging time?  Remove the dead weight but be sure to nurture the effective strategies.

The worst thing that can be done to marketing is ending it without knowing why.  Many people will make that mistake over the coming months.  Those individuals that take the time to analyze their results will find themselves in an admirable position.  Not only will their marketing dollars be better spent than before, they will likely have less competition as other companies haphazardly cut marketing efforts to decrease costs.

Internet Marketing

Tabless Design is an Excuse to Raise Rates

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Of course there are many web professionals that will honestly and fairly detail the pros and cons of how they build a site.  Furthermore, they will reflect the amount of work in their fees.  However, there is a significant subset of designers and developers that use tabless/W3C compliancy jargon to make their proposal sound ultra official, hopefully enhance their “professional appearnence”,  and raise their price. 

It seems that tableless is becoming the only unique identifier for these groups.  Typically it’s wrapped up in a lot of technical speak that puts down any other way of building a site.  I tend to look at it as a bogus value proposition.  Rather than talking about turn around time, value add services, prices, or long term benefits to having a business relationship, they laud tableless design as the end all in site creation.  If a designer or developer harps on tableless or W3C compliance and doesn’t cover many other issues beware.  There’s a good chance they are trying to make themselves appear as one of a limited group of people offering this service.

The good news is that many designers and firms are beginning to use tableless and W3C compliant code.  Using it a unique identifier will likely disappear over the next few years.

Internet Marketing, Web Maintenance

Tableless Design and Code Compliancy Won’t Help Site Conversions

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Most companies and organizations wouldn’t be content with just having a site.  Many people settle for that, but it isn’t their ideal situation.  Most people want to generate revenue or some kind of action item from their site.  Tableless design does nothing to promote that.  It’s an exercise in clean code and to some extent, accessibility.  That by itself won’t create any conversions on a website.

My rule of thumb is to make tableless or W3C compliant code on the “nice to have” list.  Priority should be placed on meeting business or organizational goals.  Put resources in place to ensure people can locate your site and have clear direction to convert to your desired next step.  If resources are left, then it’s time to explore ideal ways to build the site.  Make sure the end goal is met before moving on to secondary preferences.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Web Maintenance

Tableless Design Does Not Effect Search Engine Rankings

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A common misconception that has been growing is  W3C compliance and tableless design increases my position on search engines.  The fact is that doesn’t seem to be the case.  The line of thinking is that only W3C compliancy is set as a web standard and search engines will cater their results to favor compliant websites because it has an easier time sorting through the code.  Tests have experienced mixed results and some have actually shown worse results from the complaint pages.  While people argue both sides of this, I think it’s fair to conclude that search engines put little, if any, emphasis on whether a site is tableless and/or complaint.

It’s common for designers and developers to claim that keeping the content separate from the layout (as is the case in tableless and usually w3C complaint pages) helps search engines sort data.  That doesn’t seem to be true.  In fact it’s been shown that using separate CSS formatting can hurt keyword rankings as many search engines look for the traditional format tags like bolding <strong>.  Most tableless designs avoid those tags.

The point is not to knock W3C compliance.  In fact, I’d encourage people to have the clean code that comes from W3C compliancy.  From the blog link above I’ll steal 1.5 of his three advantages (Not sold that the other 1.5 is true):

  • W3C Compliance will ensure that your website is accessible to the disabled.
  • W3C Compliance will help your website be accessed through different devices like cellular phones and PDA’s.

What concerns me is the misinformation being provided to effect planning or buying decisions.  Better SEO is a questionable benefit and likely not one at all.  Again Tableless and W3C complaincy have many advantages, just make sure you understand what they are and aren’t buying into questionable claims.

Search Engine Optimization, Web Maintenance

Tableless Design Can be a Problem Across Browsers

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I think the biggest problem I currently have with tableless design is that it that it can be a problem displaying on different browsers.  Table design has already gone through these growing pains.  I rarely find an issue anymore with a browser or operating system displaying a tabled design inaccurately.  The browser code has been refined over a decade and a half to make rendering HTML pretty consistent.  Tableless design is way behind the curve here.  Browsers rarely render sites exactly the same and tableless design is subject to all the compatibility problems sites used to encounter 10 years ago.

It is common to see rendering mistakes on tableless sites, even ones built by large specialized design firms.  In many cases, it doesn’t bother me. If a picture bumps to the left a few extra pixels, who cares?  The problem is that it can often render so poorly that text gets cut off or overlapped.  That’s a major problem.  That is a problem that can negatively effect the user experience and site conversion. 

Having said all that, designers and developers are getting more savvy at tackling these problems.  The trouble is that it usually requires (what my last post warned of) a stock layout with little variation from other sites or additional coding to render more accurately across platforms and browsers.  Those might not be deal breakers but something to consider.  Extra cose is also a common explanation for increased setup fees.  Usually the problem is that no one can foresee all of these issues.  Even the best designers and developers that test for rendering problems are likely to miss some.  The good news is that the testing can minimize risk of a bad user experience.   The bad news is that some visitors will likely encounter a problem.  I’m not sold that WCC compliance with separate CSS layouts is worth that.  There are few things that compare to a good user experience and site conversion. For me, tableless design is not one of them and often looks like an unnecessary risk.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Web Maintenance

Tableless Design Seems to Limit Layouts

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I am by no means an expert on layouts with tableless design, so this is based on my perspective of the sites I’ve witnessed being produced.  They all have a similar layout.  There is a banner along the top, often a set of links along the right or left, a footer, and a blank area in the middle with content.  The imagery and colors change but the fundamental structure is static.  While there isn’t anything wrong with that, it is limiting.  There also seems to be a standard set of roll over options that tend to pop up.  I suspect this is because many designers are reusing others code in an attempt to be “modern”.  If tableless design does limit layout, it can make a site seem  less professional because of a “template feel”.

I tend to believe that this isn’t actually a problem with the technology but with many designers/developers.  While the structure of the layout seems pretty static (if anyone knows of a unique tableless layout with unconventional or custom layout, please leave it in the comments)  I have to believe that given enough time and expertise that almost any layout could be achieved.  The problem is that many designers/developers want to be tableless and WCC compliant but don’t have the knowledge to build a site like that from scratch.  So they end up using preexisting templates and claiming them as there own.  This is extremely common when a separate blog is created.

Why is this a problem?  The first is that you aren’t getting what you pay for.  Building small customizations on top of a preexisting template is not that challenging.  Furthermore, unless significant testing is done, it might cause layout conflicts down the road.  Finally it makes the site more generic.  Templates have a way of surfacing in a lot of places and it always detracts from a site if people see the layout as a cookie cutter of someone else’s.  Most company’s are carbon copies of their competitor so their site shouldn’t be either.  Especially if they’ve bought a product they believe is custom.  While table design does have draw backs, I’ve seen just about any layout succeed.  The method has had years of innovation where designers and developers can achieve some extremely impressive layouts on the web.

So if you want a tableless design, make sure you understand how the layout will be created and that there might be some restraints on the look.  Is it a custom site or is it a template with a few changes made? Neither choice is necessarily wrong, but you need to understand the pros and cons and should be seeing a discount on any template tweaked site.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Web Maintenance

Table Design Isn’t Going Away Soon

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The first reason offered by web professionals who are unreasonably devoted to tableless design is that table design is outdated.  It’s going to be obsolete within a few years.  While I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, I’m absolutely confident that tabled design isn’t suddenly going to stop working.  Every time I hear this stated, I question whether it is genuinely believed or just a “sales feature/benefit” line.  Table layouts are a way of structuring a web page, not software, so massive changes would need made to the fundamental structure of HTML for them to be obsolete.

Not sure you believe me that tables are not on the way out? Visit some of your favorite sites on the internet.  View the code by right clicking and selecting “View Source”.  Look through there and see if you see any <table> tags. <tr> and <td> tags are also fair signifiers.  I’m willing to bet at least half the sites you encounter will have them. 

Browsers aren’t going to stop supporting table layouts because there are too many sites using it.  Would you use a browser where at least half the webpages you visited didn’t display accurately?  I know I wouldn’t.  The companies that make web browsers strive to make them as universal as possible so people will use them.  It’s not in their best interest to stop supporting a common layout.  Tableless design can make for cleaner code and is a completely valid way of working.  However, if a reason offered is that table layouts are going to be obsolete, beware, you might have an unreasonable fanatic on your hands.

Internet Marketing, Web Maintenance

Tableless Design, CSS, and W3C Compliance is Not the End Goal

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The following opinion has made me unpopular with more than one web designer.  My primary focus is not web design, while I do fulfill that role at times, I find myself working with and around web designers and developers more often than competing with them.  When looking at a web designer’s work, it is very common to have people promote themselves because they use CSS and W3C compliant code, not tables for layout.  While I have no problem with that at all and am quick to compliment designers for taking an active role in a new form of web layout, I do resent the growing belief that it is the only way of doing things and anything else is inferior.  Furthermore, many designers focus solely on this aspect of their work and often ignore the real site goals.  At the end of the day, most people and companies don’t care about how a site is constructed, they care about the results it achieves. 

If a designer or developer is only focused on their tableless designs, be wary.  Chances are they are focused on a web professional’s ideal, not about what results you want to achieve with your site.  There are more and more sites being built focusing more on tableless layouts rather than sales or lead conversion.  While that makes the web designer proud, it rarely satisfies the site owner.  Remember to have goals for your site and if the designer or developer is forgetting those to fulfill their own ideals, it’s time to abandon those ideals and refocus.

So what’s the difference?  Traditionally websites have been built on a table system with images or text or both inserted into the table fields.  A new method of building a site has arrived that puts all the layout and text styles into a separate CSS file.  All that exists on the actual webpage is the content.  All layout information is referenced from the CSS file.  As I see it, the biggest benefit to using tableless design is that the designer can separate the content of the page from the layout.  The advantage here is that it opens up many possibilities for content changes without changing any layout files which can be leveraged for easier updates and maintenance.  The other benefit is that there is an attempt to make web code more standardized and adhering to W3C compliance should allow some future proofing to a newly built site.  Meaning the site won’t need redone within several years because of outdated code.

Having said that, I’d like to lay out several reasons I think designers make it a focus and why the average person doesn’t, and probably shouldn’t, care how the site is laid out.

  • Table design is not going to be outdated anytime soon. 
  • Tableless design seems to limit layout
  • Tableless design can be problematic across browsers
  • Tableless design doesn’t effect search engine rank
  • Tableless design doesn’t change site conversion
  • Tableless design is an excuse to raise rates (sounds official)

In my coming posts I will deal with each topic and provide some insight into discovering whether someone looking to build a site should or shouldn’t be concerned with tableless layout and W3C code compliance.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion, Web Maintenance

Beware Website Templates

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It’s a common idea to have a site designed and then take over the maintenance.  Usually the request is pretty simple.  Create a design and leave a system for updating text.  At times this is a reasonable solution.  Most of the time I encounter it, it was a disaster waiting to happen.  Why?  The answer typically comes down to a lack of qualification either from the site designer or the site owner.

Most potential clients are skeptical when I advise they don’t use a template.  The thought is usually that I am trying to get an unnecessary maintenance agreement.  So I thought I’d use my criteria for deciding if a template is a good idea or not into a written outline here:

  • Is it a Free-bee or add-on from the web hosting company?
    I can’t tell you how many people have become clients after getting into some kind of web template product.  Many simply don’t work.  The most common ones that fail come free with a website hosting package.  Usually they have a handful of templates which are customizable (meaning you can upload a logo somewhere).  I have yet to find one that actually lays the page out usefully and gives enough flexibility to update any content and expand the site.  Most of the time it won’t even render tect edits where the user intended.  Doing simple things like form submissions is usually out of the question.  It either isn’t an option at all or doesn’t actually function.  Remember, you get what you pay for and free templating is often as valuable as the price-tag.
  • Can the designer/developer set up a usable site template?
    Unfortunately in the web world people are quick to make promises and slow to deliver.  If a designer or developer is putting in some kind of template that is editable by the client, do they understand it.  There are a lot of good designer/developers and good template services.  Unfortunately there seem to be more bad ones.  Make sure when hiring the person that they can tell you what platform they will build on and how you will have access to it.  I recently got a client who had to scrap an entire site template system because it was set up so strictly to initial demands and had absolutely no room for growth.  Understand what you are getting and how it can adapt to you or your organization’s needs.
  • Who is responsible for updating the content?
    Many times the failure is not with the designer or developer but with the site owner.  They place demands on what should be editable but never get to the editing.  If I speak with a potential client and they can’t provide one or two names of dedicated people within the organization that will be responsible for the site, I always recommend not setting up a template.  The reason is it won’t get changed.  People are busy and unless someone has volunteered or been assigned the responsibility, it will fall through the cracks.  That means wasted money on the setup for something that won’t get used. 
  • Is the assigned person technically competent?
    When a person has been chosen, is it realistic that they can manage the process?  The most common platforms used for templates can usually be set up with a simple interface.  It isn’t uncommon to do an hour  tutorial and have the user comfortable with the interface and features.  However, this assumes that the individual responsible for site updates is relatively proficient on a computer.  I once struggled through a tutorial with an administrative assistant at a small organization and told her the editing features were much like Microsoft Word.  She let me know she didn’t know how to use that either.  That site never got updated because the poor woman didn’t know the basics of computer use.  It’s not her fault, the task never should have been given to her until she learned some basic competency skills.

So if you are contemplating having a site set up that you can edit yourself, think through these 4 questions.  If you find that you are uncomfortable with your or the designer/developers ability to execute, rethink the idea.  You’re likely just putting off the inevitable and handling the problem initially can save a lot of money and effort down the line.  Having an editable feature almost always costs additional set up fees and if set up poorly will increase the cost of getting it transferred to another platform or technology.  Often times a small maintenance agreement or a la carte change pricing is far less expensive and much less of a headache.  Don’t assume in this case that handling it yourself is less expensive.  Figure out what is most realistic and is most cost effective.

Web Maintenance
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