Often, tiny changes to an email ad can make a dramatic difference in your response rate. One easy change you can make that is guaranteed to increase your response rate is the use of personalization tokens in your ad.

A personalization token is a small snippet of code that tells the mailing software to insert a piece of information from your database into that email. It could be anything – the first name of the recipient or maybe the name of the product they were previously interested in. Essentially, this is a digital version of the “mail merge” you would do in a word processor.

One way to use the personalization token in an ad, that is often overlooked, is in the subject line of your email. So, let’s say you’re inviting your customers to a holiday party. Instead of saying, “You’re Invited!” in the subject line, you could say, “John, you’re invited!” The difference in the Open Rate (% of recipients that open your email) is dramatic.

Here are the stats of an ad without the personalization:

Now look at the open rate once we added in the personalization token to the subject line:

Voila, 24% increase in your open ratio from the exact same ad by just adding the recipient’s name in the subject line.

Your CTR (Click-Thru Ratio – % of recipients who click the link in your ad to visit your website) will also increase when using personalization tokens.  This is because the recipient will believe the message was tailored specifically to them versus a mass-email that was sent blindly to everyone.

Here are the CTR stats from the ad in the previous example without any personalization tokens:

Now here are the stats once we modified the ad to include the recipient’s name in a few locations within the body of the email:

Again, we see a 22%+ increase over the ad without any personalization in the body of the message.  This is a very basic example of how you can use personalization tokens to increase response.  Ideally, your entire message is catered around that one recipient – the essence of behavioral marketing.

Personalization tokens can beyond the recipient’s name.  You can include products they previously inquired about or their state (ex. We’re having a special on product they inquired about, only for residents of insert their state name).

In order to take full advantage of using personalization tokens in your email it is important that you track/record every action that is performed by the recipient.  If a recipient clicks on a link, that should be recorded in the database so you know which link they clicked (product they wanted, etc).  You can also utilize services to append your database with additional information on your recipients.

For more marketing tips check out our blog at http://www.boldmediagroup.com/blog

Email marketing may in fact be one of the most cost effective ways of getting the word out about your business.  You reach and enormous audience in a short period of time, literally with the click of a button.  Don’t let the simplicity of the process fool you — there are PLENTY of landmines to step on if you’re not careful that could turn your potentially successful email campaign into a waste of time and money.

Today’s Tip: Use HTML/TEXT Format

The software used by mail servers to determine whether or not it should deliver your email, or mark it as spam, works on a scoring system.  High ratio of image to text will get you enough points to get blocked.  Merely the presence of HTML code in your ad will also result in a higher spam score.

To help lower your spam score, ALWAYS send your ad in a Text/HTML format, which includes a text-only version of your ad. The spam scoring software will score the Text & HTML version separately and average the two.  Your text-only version is likely to score much lower (.25 – 1.0), since it won’t have graphics or any HTML code.  Your HTML version will score much higher (3.0-4.0).  When averaged, the message will have a score of ~ 2.5.  Generally, anything over 3.5-4.0 is will get you blocked (on a 10 point scale).

A great free tool to see how your email will score is: http://www.contactology.com/check_mqs.php

There’s another important reason to send your ad in Text/HTML vs only HTML.  Many corporate email systems simply will not display HTML emails.  By sending a Text version along with the HMTL, you are insuring those recipients will still see your ad. For example a recipient’s mail server running Lotus Notes will strip out the HMTL, but deliver the Text version.

For more tips on how to properly market your website checkout our blog at http://www.boldmediagroup.com/blog

There has never been a better time to get involved in Local SEO.

Throughout the course of 2010, Google has slowly been shifting more weight to local versus national results. This makes sense. If you google “pizza restaurants,” giving you the corporate website for Dominoes isn’t very helpful. You want to see where the LOCAL Dominoes is, or Oreganos, or Cibo or another local establishment you can actually physically visit and order from.

Google has changed in a big way the last couple weeks by dedicating the top listings in the search results to local businesses that have a Places page:

Almost the entire first page is dominated by local listings. This type of results page appears for many common types of businesses (dentists, lawyers, etc.). Try searching for your type of business and see if Google is displaying local listings in the same manner.

This is a huge opportunity for businesses to appear not only on the first page, but at the top of the first page. You’ll notice that the top listing only have a few reviews. One of the ways Google ranks local listings, is by number of positive reviews. This means the sooner you setup your Google places account and get your customers to review you, the better. The longer you wait, the further you will fall behind your competition.

We have a special package designed just for local businesses who want to get setup on Google Places and optimize their listing to appear higher in the results page for their targeted phrases and keywords. You can learn more by click here: Local SEO Package.

A proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plan should always start with installing a mechanism to track visitors, commonly called Analytics. Most search engines have free tools that can be used for this purpose, Google Analytics as an example. These web-based tracking programs work by placing a snippet of HTML code on each of the web pages you would like to track your visitors. This is important for a number of reasons:

1. Establish a benchmark: It is impossible to know or track your progress without knowing where you started. Indicators that should be tracked on are rankings, incoming traffic, and links.




2. After several months you will know exactly how many visitors to your website it will take to make an online sale (or appointment). This is known as your CPA (cost per acquisition).




3. You will also learn which keywords and phrases your visitors use that actually end up buying. With this information, you will be able to begin bidding on keywords without losing your shirt.

With this information in hand, you will further be able optimize your web pages for the very keywords your website buyers use to find you. The keywords and phrases should be used throughout all of your content: web pages, anchor text, alt text on images, blogs, etc.

If you are using web based analytics provided by the search engine you will also be able to keep an eye on any potential problems they may have in indexing portions of your website. Any errors related to spidering specific pages are typically available in these reports.

While these tips will help get you started, search engine optimization is a full time job and should be performed by an expert. If you are a Phoenix small business, consider starting the process by installing web analytics for your website. It will require some technical savvy, so if you are not comfortable accessing your site via FTP or updating the DNS entries on your domain, you may want to have a local Phoenix SEO expert help you.

What is link building?

This is the process of locating quality websites, and convincing that site’s owner to place a link somewhere on their website linking back to your website.

In some cases this is very easy and may involve something simple like submitting your website’s address to a local directory. For a Phoenix law firm, you might want to locate a directory of law firms in Phoenix and submit your listing with URL (website address).

While that may seem easy, there are a limited number of local directories you can submit your website to. After you’ve exhausted these options you will need to focus your efforts on locating quality websites in which you want your website and business to appear.

This does not mean submitting your website address and business on ANY website will help your SEO efforts. In fact, submitting your website on a lot of websites that have nothing to do with your industry is referred to as link spamming and may actually hurt your search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is to only list your website and business on websites where you would feel good about customers finding you.

For a Phoenix Law Firm, you may want to consider participating in blogs about recent court cases, or asking clients who have a website to link back to you. The more relevant, high-quality websites that link to you the more value your website will appear to have in the eyes of the major search engines.

Regardless of which websites you find to link to you, it is also important that the description and text associated with the link be keyword optimized so the search engines know when that link is relevant. Simply having the link be “John’s Law Firm,” with no anchor text will not do you any good unless someone is searching for “John’s Law Firm.”

Link building is only one step of many in the process of properly optimizing your website for search engines. A local Phoenix business owner serious about getting ranked higher in the search engines locally should work with an experienced SEO expert to make sure it is done properly.