Web users who visit any site do so because they focus their search using keywords that match or are similar to your products or services. The challenge is to compete with the escalating number of contenders with sites offering similar services or products as yours. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into the picture.

SEO can be defined as positioning your site for maximum search engine visibility. Maximum visibility can be reached through obtaining top rankings on search engines. Many people would be inclined to think that achieving top rankings on search engines is just about the creation and addition of meta tags, and the submission of your site to the major search engine indexes and directories.

But it’s a lot more than that. Internet directories are managed by Human Editors, while search engines depend on crawling “spider robots” as well as index pages, based on the specific engine’s algorithms. Many people are unaware that Internet Directories such as Yahoo!, LookSmart, About.com, Zeal, and The Open Directory Project do not use meta tag information at all.

SEO is a complex blend of variables comprised of research on keyword popularity, clear and easy navigation, marketplace research, website design, call-to-action, conversion ,measurement, , metrics analysis and reporting. It is a procedure that makes one’s website content more search engine friendly, thereby pulling relevant traffic to your site via the major search engines and directories.

Another important point to be remembered is that mere submission to these directories does not ensure a top search engine ranking for your set of particular targeted keywords. There are specific submission criteria that have to be followed in order to achieve a high rank in these directories.

The two-pronged approach for UnReal Web Marketing is fundamental focus on Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. Our extensive research on every intrinsic aspect of search engines for over nine years has yielded us beneficial insights. These insights have helped us to offer the best possible search engine optimization solutions.

Our full range of services include search engine registration, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing, website hosting, monitoring of search engine activity, screening of websites for search engine readiness, and intense search engine directory marketing campaigns for large corporations and small businesses alike.

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A B2B email campaign is very different from a B2C campaign. According to Simms Jenkins there are three major differences:

1. Your tone should be much like it would be in a face-to-face meeting with your prospects: direct, professional and in a manner that makes your audience want to do business with you. Don’t waste your time building up to the pitch — state why you are sending this message and what’s in it for the recipient.
2. The message should clearly articulate the purpose and value to the subscribers while making it easy for them to identify and act on any call to action. Don’t bog them down with too many cross promotional messages or secondary marketing messages. Allow them to scan the email and find out what’s in it for them.
3. Your main measurement analysis should not be based on opens and clicks but on how many leads are generated. Careful attention should be paid to forwards and any additional email subscriptions generated from the campaign. A high open and clickthrough rate but lack of leads could mean you put up too many barriers to capture the lead. Ensure your landing page and relevant gateway pages (for example, the white paper sign-up page) are easy to find and utilize. This may take some coordination that goes outside the realm of a typical email manager.

Simms lists these 10 best practices in B2B email marketing:

• Know your audience: If you are mailing to IT network administrators, an image-heavy newsletter probably will not be well received. Instead, send a text-only message. Follow the cues of what your audience is like and don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Mobile email triage is real: An increasing number of business executives use their mobile devices/PDAs to perform email triage. This means that if you have a weak message or lack something compelling or of immediate value to your email, you may have the busy exec delete your email while in a meeting. On the flip side, a unique email with a relevant purpose may get saved for the executive to read in the office.
• Make it easy for the mobile audience: Click here to read on your mobile phone is becoming more commonplace on B2B emails and may help you escape mobile email rendering snafus.
• From & Subject lines: Emails from a CEO to a fellow executive tend to resonate. Ensure your From line is from someone who matters. Combine this with a short Subject line that can break through the clutter while demonstrating a reason for the user to read this email.
• Short and sweet: Whether read on an iPhone or laptop, make your message count. That means make sure it gets read. Long emails without clear calls to action will get skimmed and deleted. Make your value proposition above the fold and obvious to the people that will browse over your email looking for a reason to read (or delete).
• Don’t oversell: Too many promises, customer raves or pricing information may overwhelm your audience and diminish your opportunity to have people click on a link where they can find the details of the service or product being offered.
• Respect the audience’s time: Frequency is a significant issue for all mailings, but if a business subscriber doesn’t respond to the first two messages, it doesn’t mean you should send to him even more frequently.
• Test: I received seven different emails from a lead generation company in the span of five minutes this morning. The emails actually contained decent messaging and links to at least one relevant case study. They had me until hello occurred seven times. Someone was asleep at the wheel when the campaigns were segmented and set. Do your due diligence before an email is sent as these campaigns did more damage than good.
• Offer something unique: A white paper can often work, but they are everywhere, aren’t they? Provide access and perks that are gold to the C-suite audience. For example, one client attempting to register business executives for an annual event tested pricing breaks versus admission to a VIP event. Remember, the B2B audience usually isn’t spending its own money so you can guess which offer performed better.
• Remarket: Create a follow-up campaigns based on how each user responded (or didn’t) to the initial campaign. Using your metrics can guide you to a better and more relevant strategy.

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Most email marketers do not view soft bounces as being a major cause for concern, so rarely, if ever, have any specific strategies been in place for dealing with them. Soft bounces are a very strong indication that one or more ISPs were concerned enough about the reputation of the IP address you are using,  your mailing volumes or the level of SPAM complaints you are generating to temporarily block your campaign.

Over the last two years our agency has begun to take soft bounces very seriously indeed. Compared with soft bounces, hard bounces are relatively straight forward – there are far fewer reasons for their occurrence and only one way of dealing with them, which is to remove them from your list.

The reason so many people don’t treat soft bounces seriously enough seems to be because most definitions of a soft bounce are outdated.  

Here are but two typical examples of the definition of a soft bounce taken from well respected sources:

• A soft bounce just means the recipient’s email account was ‘temporarily unavailable’. Maybe their server was busy, or the recipient was away on vacation, or their account was too full.
• A soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s mail server replies with an error other than 5xx, or never replies at all. An example of a soft bounce error could be caused by a server that overloaded or a user whose mailbox is full.

Most current definitions of a soft bounce do not really convey any sense of urgency or importance, worst of all they seem to indicate that the bounce had nothing to do with your mail marketing practice at all. After all what can you do to stop someone’s server crashing or being taken down for maintenance or a subscriber’s mailbox filling up while they are on holiday?

Some ESPs set the default for removing soft bounces at 10 or more and best practice guidelines typically suggest removal after 3 subsequent bounces, further reducing the sense of urgency.

General definitions of a soft bounce and guidelines for dealing with them haven’t changed for at least five years!

In this time inbox sizes have dramatically increased so ‘mailbox full’ messages are highly unlikely to occur; Gmail currently offer 7GB of storage! I don’t know anyone who has exceeded their Gmail or for that matter Yahoo or Hotmail storage limit and even if there are such people, they are hardly representative of the average consumer. Even if you have a large number of people using their work email address, how many companies start bouncing potentially valuable communications without letting the user know that their inbox is due a spring clean.

I also suspect that bounces caused by overloaded ISPs (Hotmail etc.) or corporate servers are not as common as the definitions quoted above would seem to indicate.

This means that the most likely cause of soft bounces is ISP blocking.

The way ISPs deal with spam has become much more aggressive and incredibly sophisticated. For a start they are very quick to start blocking emails when they identify suspicious patterns of behaviour from a given sender, IP address or range.

Typical causes of blocking are: lack of authentication or accreditation; poor or unproven IP reputation; fluctuations in the volume of messages sent from the IP address you are using and spam complaints attributed to your IP address. It’s important to bear in mind that you may incur soft bounces because of the behaviour of companies sharing your IP address, making the way your ESP handles its shared IP addresses very important.

Emails blocked in this way are recorded as soft bounces, so your soft bounces are important indicators of how ‘Spammy’ ISP’s think you are at a given point in time. They are an indication of a drop in reputation for the IP address you are using, uneven mailing patterns and/or an increase in the level of SPAM complaints your email is generating.  All of these things are things that you and your ESP can do something about!

The purest definition of a soft bounce is ‘A delivery failure with a 4XX/Transient bounce code’ examples of which are:

• 421 Grey listing = Re-try now and send again
• 451 no reverse DNS = Re-try now and send again later after you fix your DNS

Soft bounces should be regularly investigated because we believe that they are more likely to be caused by temporary ISP blocking than temporary problems related to individual subscribers.

I would strongly recommend that anyone wanting to get a better understanding of where soft bounces fit in the overall scheme of deliverability should read the excellent 4 part series of articles on ‘How Email Works’ by Dennis Dayman of Eloqua

Dela Quist
Alchemy Worx

This article was written by Dela Quist CEO of Alchemy Worx and is based on an article in the current issue of Email-Worx a fortnightly newsletter for people interested in email marketing issues.

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Derek Gehl: E-Business Top Secret: Get Your E-mail Opened When it comes to e-mail marketing, it’s all about the subject line. Make the most of yours. By Derek Gehl   |   January 15, 2009

By Derek Gehl

As the economy continues along its unsteady path, many small-business owners have been asking me what they can do to keep their businesses financially healthy over the coming months.

I recommend you start by leveraging the tools you already have, and making sure you’re using them as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Take your e-mail marketing, for instance. When you stay in touch with your regular customers and subscribers–and send them valuable information–they’ll view you as a credible resource, an expert in your field, and most important, someone who’s watching out for their best interests.

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And they’ll reward you with their loyalty (and continued purchases).

But first you have to get those e-mails opened.

With floods of e-mail arriving every hour, most people are ruthless about deleting anything they even suspect won’t interest them. Not only that, they’re also just as likely to report unwanted e-mails as spam as they are to delete them. So if you’re not writing compelling subject lines that get the e-mails opened, all your hard work is lost.

Here are five tips for writing effective e-mail subject lines that can easily double the open (and click-through) rates on your next e-mail.

Tip #1: Use personalization for added attention
Sending out an e-mail with a personalized subject line is the equivalent of calling someone’s name in a crowd: It has that same power to grab his attention.

By now, using the recipient’s name in your subject line is pretty standard. But that’s only the start. You can take personalization further by adding another personal detail to the subject line, like the city your customers live in.

Start with a subject line that looks like this: “Janet, want to get out of the city this weekend?”

Then make it really compelling by adding personal details: “Janet, want to get out of Tucson this weekend?”

A DoubleClick survey found that the most important factor in generating a response was offering a product the recipients wanted at the time. You can accomplish that by segmenting your market, allowing you to personalize the offers or the information in your e-mails to make them timely and relevant.

That means collecting as much data as possible on each person on your mailing list. Then you can create separate campaigns that will appeal to each segment of your audience (e.g., subscribers; people who have purchased once; and people who have purchased more than once).

If your offer is highly personalized, your subject lines can be, too.

And the great thing is that there are plenty of tools out there that can manage and merge in your data to create targeted e-mail campaigns. (We like iContact.com.)

Tip #2: Keep your subject lines short
Here’s a test: Take a look at the subject lines in your inbox. Are there any that stand out more than others? Any that you read first or get you interested in learning more? Chances are it’s the shorter subject lines that grab you, right?

It’s actually been proven that subject lines with 41 characters or under get higher opening and click-through rates than longer ones. So keep it short and sweet. You don’t need to explain in detail what the e-mail is about in the subject line; you just need to give enough information to make people want to open the e-mail to read more. E-mails alerting recipients to a regular subscription product or downloadable information can be longer–test and see what works.

Make sure you put your benefit, offer or most important element in the first few words of the subject line, too. That way, if someone’s e-mail program cuts off the end of the subject line (which is pretty common) you’ll still get your main point across.

Tip #3: Keep the formatting simple and understated
If you sent an e-mail to a friend, would you type your subject line like this?

“Free Beer And Pizza — You’re Invited!!”

Or how about like this?

“FREE BEER AND PIZZA — YOU’RE INVITED!!”  

It’s pretty unlikely, right? So why would your e-mails to your customers and subscribers have subject lines that were formatted like that?

The more your subject lines look like personal e-mails from friends, family members or business associates, the more likely it is that they’ll be opened. The more they look like a hard-sell sales pitch, the less effective they’ll be.

So avoid capitalization, exclamation marks and dollar signs, which can increase the chances of having your messages flagged as spam, and will be sure to set off warning bells with your recipients.

Tip #4: Use a compelling angle to get your readers interested
Of course, getting your readers to open your e-mails requires more than personalization and formatting. You’ll still need to come up with an interesting angle that grabs your customers’ attention and makes them want to open the e-mail.

Here are some ideas for subject lines that we’ve had success with in the past:

• Make an announcement or share news: People want to be the first to find out new things, especially if your site covers a specific industry.
• Make your reader curious: Suggest that the reader is missing out on an important offer or piece of information. When you use this technique, make sure you leave something to the imagination. For example: “Paul, are you making this common mistake?”
• Create a sense of urgency: Consider creating a sense of urgency in your subject line by limiting time (“Frank, only three days left”) or quantity (“Mary, only 250 copies available”).
• Emphasize benefits: Another powerful approach for your subject line is to state how your readers will benefit from your e-mail. If you can tell them how they’re going to save money, save time, make their lives easier, etc., by opening and reading your message, you’ll have the most success.

Tip #5: Make sure your subject line relates to the content of the e-mail
Nobody likes to be fooled or tricked, so make sure your subject line is related to your actual message–in fact, it’s a legal requirement under the CAN-SPAM Act that the subject line be authentic and not misleading.

If your subject line says “Mary, three ways to save money,” you need to make sure you actually are talking about that, and preferably within the first few lines. Otherwise, your visitors will feel cheated, and that will hurt your credibility.

And don’t forget about the preview pane. Statistics from MarketingSherpa show that 26.6 percent of consumers read e-mails that way. And 69 percent of people reading e-mail at work do so with the preview pane turned on. You risk losing those readers if you don’t follow up your subject line almost immediately in the body of the e-mail.

It’s time worth spending to come up with subject lines that will entice people to open your e-mails. Those five or six words are vital to your business because they connect you with your most valuable potential customers. So never stop testing them and trying new ones.

Derek Gehl is Entrepreneur.com’s e-business columnist and CEO of the Internet Marketing Center. He’s an internationally renowned internet marketing expert whose techniques and strategies for building a successful online business have been implemented by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His comprehensive internet marketing guide, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, has been an online bestseller for 10 years.

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