Our opinion is that you don’t need to create the best website in the world in order for it to work. But what you do need to is to make sure that whatever it is your website is about, that it captures the users imagination and makes them want to find out more.

Visual appeal goes some way to achieving that and the level you take it to depends on what your website is about – but Coca Cola, as an example, have used some neat tricks so that when you take a look at each product in their range (http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/default.html) the screen zooms around to give a little flashy presentation.

You might not want to go to that level, but using techniques like Coca Cola have done means you can get a  lot more info on your website without overloading it. With only so much space on websites and impatient users that want things and they want them now you need to think very carefully about what your most important user-engaging features are and hit them with it straight away.

Carousels on websites have been around for some time now but the transition effects are become slicker all of the time. Users love to see slick graphical touches and when they get the ‘ooooh’ feeling they remember it, they’ll probably stay on your website for longer and they may even tell others - http://www.neteffekt.co.uk/email-marketing-screens.php

Sites like Amazon have the right idea when it comes to content placement by the way that after they’ve learned a bit about you they push more relevant content onto the screen by swapping out the generic place holder type offerings. It’s pretty basic but it makes me feel good because I feel like my web pages on Amazons aren’t like anyone elses. (Maybe that’s a little sad!)

This is definitely the way to go. Showing all users all of the same content each time they visit your site won’t give the user a feeling of satisfaction and it will become stale and boring for them over time.

When I use websites I want to know that the sites I’m using are learning about what I’m interested in and what I’m not interested in. It also helps refresh my memory when I revisit sites I’ve not been to for a while and draws my focus back to what I was last doing.

We’re already written a few articles on copy writing & content, email design, ecommerce features and usability that are also worth reading and they should help you consider how you can fine tune your users experience when interacting online with your business.

Don’t stop with your website and make sure that any other type of communication using email, social media, RSS or whatever else are just as engaging and are reinforcing your brand in the way you want them to.

We were invited (along with Oracle & Experian – amongst other big names),  to present at a recent event discussing this topic and to answer big questions on

• How to connect the new data generated by digital marketing with traditional transactional databases.
• How to develop a genuine 360 insight into your customer by using multiple information sources.
• How to make the most of new forms of targeting: behavioural, location – based and by recommendation.
• How to measure effectiveness and optimise budgets on this new data landscape.

Over the next few months we’ll be running a series of articles on our blog to help you find answers to the questions above to help you become more creative with your data and to get the most from it.

If you have time then it’s worth taking a minute to have a look at the presentation we ran on the day – http://www.ipa.co.uk/Content/Content-from-Being-creative-with-data-25th-November

…our technical director Dave also has a spot on the video interviews – http://www.ipa.co.uk/Content/Content-from-Being-creative-with-data-25th-November

Watch out on Twitter or our blog for the first article in the series. (…and don’t forget to sign-up to our monthly email)

Watch this video (1h 20m) and make you’re own mind up. We were impressed as we’re sure you will be and then you’re mind will be racing as you think of all the different ways Wave can make a difference to you.

It certainly got us thinking and just the thought of live updates on reviews while you’re looking at a product online, talk live to multiple people on chat forums, creating a customer support system that logs conversations to a knowledge base – you get the idea!

Run a few searches on Google for Wave and you’ll find tons of information and watch this space for the ideas we’re thinking about too!

As of 30th of September 2009 email might start to be called ‘old fashioned’!

Read more on the official Google Wave webpage – http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

One thing we all agree on though is that we want results and we want them fast!

Google Base may well help you do just that. It’s a free service, owned by Google, that enables you to tell them all about the products and services you sell – there are some rules and restrictions around this but it’s simple to do.

When users search Google your results will appear as ‘Shopping Results’ in a position on the screen that is almost as prominent as PPC.

It’s not a replacement for PPC and it’ll do nothing to increase your organic search rankings BUT it will definitely give you some fairly instant search visibility and it won’t cost you anything either.

Google search results usually show a screen with PPC on the right, and maybe at the top, and the organic search results down the left.

Depending on the search keywords and results Google may stick in Shopping Results on the left hand side just like in the screenshot below – the idea being that they’re trying to help you find relevant products and services in relation to your search terms.

Shopping Results inserted into the left-hand side

You need to give your products or services the best chance of appearing if you’re going to use Google Base so that’s where you need to follow the guidelines on how to submit information correctly. There’s no point going about it half-heartedly and you’ll need to optimise the content, price the items competitively, ensure image links are valid etc.

When the search results show Google selects a few products to show on the screen, if relevant, with a link to drill-down into the full results.

What’s also good about Google Base is that if you’re using Google Analytics then the traffic that Google Base generates for your site will be recorded as a traffic source within the reports – basically, you can see how much traffic it’s generating and how many sales you’re getting as a result!

Obviously, our v.stall ecommerce solution takes care of all this for you but if you’re not one of the lucky ones using one of our solutions then maybe this is something you should look into.

Click here for more info from Google about Google Base

As ever, we’re here to help so email us on hello@neteffekt.co.uk or call us on 0870 41 777 41 to talk more

But on the other hand, the excitement of whizzy tools like Google Analytics can sometimes mean that more fundamental things are overlooked in relation to how your website is performing.

Think about implementing feedback loops for customers and it’ll give you the best and most honest information around. OK, so some of the feedback may be a little harsh and some of it may be useless but it’s all information that will give you a better understanding of what your customers really want, what they don’t like and what they do like about your website. They may even be nice to you ;0)

We’ve picked out 2 really good feedback loop services than can help you make your websites do more and help to retain more customers. We’re not affiliated with any of these companies but I thought it’d be useful to pick out a couple of real life services that do the job. I do like the look of them both though…

Product Reviews
Everyone uses product reviews these days and it makes perfect sense to do just that. If you’re going to spend £100 on a shiny new thing then you’re going to want to know if it’s worth the money and that it can do the job.

You can easily find the best priced product by using Google Base, Kelkoo and other comparison tools but what you really want to know is what the people who bought it thought of it.

At the same time, you don’t want to cram so many product reviews into your website so that the layout becomes horrible to use and services like Reevoo have overcome this with a number of different ways to layout and style the process of capturing and displaying product reviews on your website.

For more info on Reevoo click here

Customer Satisfaction Surveys
When customers engage with your website their experiences can vary massively because of things like browser differences, operating systems, network connectivity, how skilled the user is etc etc.

You don’t have control of how they interact and the thing is, you’ll never know exactly what happened and what they thought unless you ask them.

Surveying customers can be really low-effort in terms of set-up and deployment and what’s great is that it gives you the very best information on how to keep your customers happy. OK, so some customers won’t respond and you might get some abuse but you’ll be left with info you and your team can really work with.

Shopzilla lets you set-up your own surveys online and they’ll collate and send you the data so all you need to do is make sure your customers are asked to participate.

We’ve talked about automated messaging on our blog before and if you utilise that as a way to deliver surveys using email to your customers, say 3 days after they bought, then the whole process can be automated and set-up with low-effort and low-cost.

…what you waiting for?

Seriously though, you should think about surveys and product reviews for your website. Even if you decide one or both is not for you then at least give them some thought as these could be a couple of things, which are relatively easy to implement, that are holding your website back.

Once your campaign is released by the “send” button, your emails face numerous hazards on the way to the inbox. Spend any time in the world of email delivery and you’ll see that your reputation as a sender of emails has a big impact on their success at negotiating these hazards.

The better your reputation, the more emails get delivered.

But what determines your reputation? Are ISPs sharing reputation information? Does a good reputation protect you from one-off delivery mistakes? How does authentication fit into all this?

OK, when the guardians of the world’s email accounts look at your incoming email, we know they use your sender reputation as a top criterion for deciding whether, or not, to deliver your message.

Reputation boils down to four primary metrics. This doesn’t mean other metrics are not in play, but there are four primary metrics most large ISPs use in establishing what your reputation is.

• Spam complaint rate: the percentage of people complaining that a marketers email is Spam.
• Unknown user rate: The percentage of email going to addresses that no longer exist.
• Hitting Spam traps: ISPs often turn unused addresses into Spam traps. Hit these, and there is going to be trouble
• Adhering to published ISP policies in relation to sending rates, open connections and retry periods in order to respect their available resources.

Is reputation tied to your sending IP address or your domain?
At the moment, most ISPs are using IP addresses, but it looks like the market is shifting to an IP/ domain pairing future for reputation. Authentication, particularly DomainKeys and the publishing of SPF records, will help ISPs assign reputations more precisely, by tying this reputation to both sender IP addresses and sender domains.

What about unique or shared IP addresses?
A unique sending IP address range is better for reputation management, provided you do wear that white hat and you’re willing to have that scrutiny put on yourself. For any business responsible for the delivery of high-volume commercial emails then a dedicated IP infrastructure should be there.

For any commercial sender of high volume email, ensuring you do everything legitimately and are as transparent as possible is really the largest risk mitigator for your email program. Ensure you follow authentication standards, ensure all technology implementations are in place and that you have a keen and watchful eye on your email reputation.

More Info
This article will have given you a high-level insight into what Sender Reputation & Deliverability is all about and if you want some more detailed info then take a look at this article - Am I a reputable sender?

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

If your interested in having your own mail server to protect your reputation then give us a call on 0870 41 777 41 - it costs less than you may think!

The reputation of your mail server is one of the most critical factors in delivering your message so we have put together a “rough guide” to becoming a reputable sender.

Being in control of your own reputation
Have you got any idea which mail servers are used to send your email messages, any idea of the reputation associated with them? Many online solutions use a pool of shared servers which are used to distribute messages for all of their clients – this means someone elses poorly targeted campaign could be having an adverse effect on the deliverability of yours!

Having your own dedicated mail server puts YOU in control of your own reputation, the only mail that will ever be delivered from that mail server is yours and therefore the reputation of the server is related solely to the way in which you act as a responsible sender.

Start slowly
So you have you brand new shiny mail server that the world does not know about or trust! How do you start to build reputation correctly? – here’s a tip, don’t send thousands of messages to the ISP’s as fast as you can – they will likely view you as a spammer and you’ll be lucky to get even a few messages through to the inbox.

You need to “warm up” your mail server by throttling the rate at which it delivers the messages to the ISP until they start to view you as a reputable sender, when they trust you then bit-by-bit you can start to increase the rate at which you send.

Keeping your list clean
Ensure your lists are thoroughly cleansed by unsubscribing addresses that are no longer valid. Continually attempting to send emails to dead mailboxes needlessly uses resources on the ISP’s servers leading them to view you as a less reputable sender.

Our solution has rules you can set-up to automate cleansing based on mail server response meaning that with very little effort your database can be part-cleansed for you.

Sending responsibly
The big ISP players such as Yahoo!, AOL and Hotmail deal with an unfeasibly large amount of email each day and from time to time their resources are stretched. As a result, ISPs may start to request that the delivery of your emails are deferred so they can deal with them later. Responsible email senders will respect the wishes of the ISP and will continue to send messages at a much slower rate, failing to respond in this way may lead to you being viewed as a less reputable sender.

Targeting your mail
People don’t mind receiving targeted messages that are appropriate to their interests or buying patterns, simply sending your message in an old fashioned “broadcast” way can lead to much higher complaint rates from your recipients. The higher the complaint rate the lower your reputation becomes.

Ensure your email marketing solution has all of the features you require to segment your data properly by profiling users based on responses and interaction with your campaigns and websites.

Listening to feedback
Even though your lists are all legally opted-in, cleansed & you campaigns targeted, users can still hit “this is spam” buttons in their email client – it’s a fact of life, people may have forgotten they subscribed or they simply haven’t read the message and realised who it was from.

Hitting the spam button does not unsubscribe them from your lists!

Most of the major ISP’s provide feedback on spam reports which allow you to ensure the complainants are removed from your database. This process will allow you to reduce your complaint rates over time and therefore increase your reputation as a sender.

Am I a reputable sender?
Ask yourself a question – Can your email marketing solution provide all of these facilities?

If the answer is NO then your valuable message may not be getting to your intended recipients!

If your interested in having your own mail server to protect your reputation give us a call it costs less than you may think!

Keeping your data clean means your business will ultimately achieve reduced marketing costs and greatly improved response rates through better data management, and at the same time ensure compliance.

If you think about it, the cost to cleanse your existing lists may be significantly lower than acquiring a new customer or prospect. Is having a clean, deliverable database of contacts who have maintained a relationship with your company worth the investment?

…of course there’s only one answer to that question – ‘Yes!’

Keeping your data clean is an ongoing process and not something that needs to be done every now and then. Invest the time and you’ll get the rewards. Start with some basic things like these

• Opt-out ‘Hard Bounces’ that repeatedly fail to be delivered
• Correct obvious typos like adi.toal@yahoo.xom or toaly@hotmial.com
• Get rid of junk email addresses like kjhdfjhdfsd@yahoo.com
• Remove things like abuse@hotmail.com and postmaster@yahoo.com

Our solution has configurable automated cleansing that will opt-out users that repeatedly bounce and if you have features like this available to you then make use them.

Don’t think it’s a bad thing to get rid of invalid data. Yes, your lists may reduce in size but the quality will increase massively.

After each of your campaigns you should be making use of the delivery statistics to work out whether there is any post-send cleansing you can do.

When an email is sent to a mail server it always responds with a ‘Yes, thats been accepted’ or a fail response if the message can’t be delivered. Looking at the fail responses, which are categorised into ‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ bounces, provide you with a very valuable source of information to help with data cleansing.

Mail server responses will also help you identify other problems such as blocking, content errors and a range of other things. Again, all useful info and if you spend the time looking into this side of things you’ll see improvements in each of your future campaigns and you’ll start to capitalise on your investment into data cleansing.

Data cleansing is a critical element of your email marketing campaigns and if you want us to help you get your lists into shape then get in touch by calling 0870 41 777 41 or email hello@neteffekt.co.uk

You might alter the layout slightly but the main header, footer and link elements aren’t going to change that often.

What we know is that there are quite a few problems that need to be overcome when creating email templates and that if things like email standards and design issues are overlooked then they can cause you major headaches with deliverability, readability and Junk mail.

The good news is that we’ve just cracked it with our new customisable email templates that you can edit online in a similar way to how you would update a Word document.

We’ve taken care of ensuring that templates are fully tested and complaint and that the layouts appear correctly in all major email clients.

A big benefit of using customisable email templates is that you only pay for the template to be designed once! …after that you just amend, re-use and save yourself some money at the same time.

From a testing point of view you can also be confident that there are no issues with the layout and how it looks in different email clients, giving you more time to focus on the important stuff like content and when to send your campaign.

You can do all the things you’re able to do with bespoke templates as well, so if you want to personalise your message, use merge fields, track performance, trigger messages or whatever else then customisable templates let you do it.

Editable Template Elements

More good news is that we don’t charge for using the customisable templates feature, it’s simply there if you want it at no extra cost!

If you already have a campaign template that you want to customise and use on a regular basis then thats no problem either. Let us take a look at it and we can convert it for you.

We think this is a great feature and something you could put to effective use so if you want to know more about customisable templates, or any other bits of our solution, then get in touch by calling 0870 41 777 41 or email hello@neteffekt.co.uk

Well… You’ll need to and it can be a massive job in terms of setting up accounts with Gmail, Hotmail, Lotus Notes et al.

…then, you’ll be into checking the inbox of each email program and fixing issues one by one. Not the best job in the World and also one where mistakes and errors can easily be overlooked.

On the other hand, you could just cross your fingers and click send! We wouldn’t recommend that though, especially as there is a much better and easier way of making sure your email designs render correctly in all major email programs and so they don’t get trapped in Spam filters.

Preview your emails
Our solution shows you screenshots of your email newsletter as it looks across all major email clients.

Within a few minutes you will have performed thorough testing very easily which when done manually is not only time consuming but expensive too.

Desktop email clients

• Apple Mail 3
• Apple Mail 2.1
• Lotus Notes 8
• Lotus Notes 7
• Lotus Notes 6.5
• Outlook 2007
• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2002/XP
• Outlook 2000

Web-based email clients

• AOL Mail
• Gmail
• Gmail (older version)
• Live Hotmail
• Mail.com
• Yahoo! Mail
• Yahoo! Mail Classic

Comprehensive Spam analysis
We can test your email through a wide range of Spam filters. From consumer desktop filters, to high-end gateway systems used by ISPs and large corporations. If your email doesn’t pass them all, we show you exactly what caused the problem so you can fix it quickly.

Desktop Spam filters

• Apple Mail 3
• Apple Mail 2.1
• McAfee Spam Killer
• Norton AntiSpam
• Outlook 2007
• Outlook 2003

Server-side Spam filters

• AOL
• Barracuda
• Brightmail
• Gmail
• Hotmail
• MessageLabs
• Postini
• SpamAssassin
• Yahoo!

See it from all angles
You’ll see your email exactly as your recipients will. For every applicable email client you’ll be able to see the following:

Your email in the inbox
Check your subject line length, and what excerpt text the email client shows.

Your email in the preview pane
See how much content fits “above the fold”.

Your email with images blocked
Almost all recent email clients block images. Check that your email still looks acceptable with and without images displayed.

Publish your results
When you’ve completed your testing, one click publishes an entire compatibility report which you can share.

The report summarises all your results so others can quickly get an overview of all the work you’ve done.

The reports are a fantastic way of delivering your results to your clients and colleagues.

Ensure your messages are delivered perfectly. Painlessly test your emails on all major email clients and spam filters using our solution!

Get in touch if you want to find out more by calling 0870 41 777 41 or email hello@neteffekt.co.uk