If your Marketing campaign by e-mail should be more Interactive?

Editor's note:
This is a guest contribution by Amanda DiSilvestro. Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to background checks. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory - Business.com.

Companies are still working to discover the cure for email marketing deletion. You might have your list perfected, your newsletters segmented, and a lot of great images, but for some reason people tend to delete these emails even before they get to that great attention grabber you worked so hard to create.

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Email marketing is a great way to get your content in front of consumers, but getting it to stay there, that part has yet to be perfected. The question then is this: What will get consumers interested in our messages?

One of the latest and greatest tricks is interaction. Consumers like to be involved as much as possible with the things they see online, so bringing that element into an email marketing campaign is a great idea. Although most companies have stuck to catchy headlines and interesting graphics in the past, 2012 is going to move email marketing into an interactive state. After all, turning away from a piece of content and ignoring a link is easy, but it's a bit harder to turn away from an opportunity to participate in something.

The trick to email marketing interaction, however, isn't to send readers to another webpage where you have something interactive planned. The cool, fun way to interact should be right there in the email marketing message itself. For this reason, some types of interaction work well, but others are better left for a different campaign.

Consider the following types of interaction and whether or not you should use them when marketing through email.

[Good] Surveys and polls will not take up a lot of space in your email marketing message, yet it will give readers the sense of participation. If you're trying to prove a point or ask for opinions, it might be a good idea to ask a question and hope for feedback. People will be more likely to pay attention to something that they know is quick and easy. and if they're interested in the results they may be more willing to read the content.

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After all, it's much easier and faster to vote on an issue than read an entire piece of content on the issue. If you can configure the message to show a chart or graph after each vote, people will likely feel even more engaged. After all, why vote if you can't even see the results?

[Bad] Putting up a video or offering a live chat is a great idea, but not in an email marketing campaign. Videos are notorious for taking a while to load, and with email marketing you don't have a large enough window of time. When people open up that email, they need to be engaged, and looking at a black screen that says "buffering" just won't cut it.

The same problem occurs with live chat. If you want to give readers the option of clicking a link to view a video or chat live with a team member, by all means go for it. Just know that this isn't quite interactive within the actual campaign, so likely won't gain any new readers.

[Good]Unless today is the first day you've been online since the 90's, you know that social media has exploded onto the scene. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now Google +, social networking is becoming more important than ever. According to Facebook statistics, one in every nine people on Earth has a Facebook account. In other words, people love to share things they find online with their friends and those starting a small business can't get enough of these networks.

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Place social sharing buttons on your email marketing campaign, and you're sure to have more interaction than if you were to send out a plain piece of content. This will also show readers how often an article has been shared. thus giving it even more appeal (people tend to listen to their peers as opposed to the company trying to make money, nothing personal).

[Depends..]In general, I would say that infographics will help keep people engaged. Although this isn't necessarily interaction, it is an alternative to plain text. According to Jungle Minds Digital Consultancy, ' 87% of people who saw an infographic read the accompanying text, whereas only 41% read the text of an "ordinary" page.'

In other words, infographics can be extremely effective. They will work great in an email message if you keep the infographics simple. If you have a huge infographic that takes too long to load, you will lose your readers. If you can keep it simple and engaging, then an infographic will work great.

[Bad] Directing people from one page to a different page for interaction simply won't work. People enjoy interaction, but not enough to go out and find it. If it's there, they'll take a look, but otherwise they will probably pass. Simply clicking on a link is the most basic form of interaction. In fact, with all of the other types of interaction available, clicking on a link hardly counts.

Ultimately, having quality content is the most important thing in an email marketing campaign. You can have all the bells and whistles and fun interactive opportunities you want, but none of it will matter if your content is poorly written. People will be able to see through all of the exciting interactive elements, so make sure that interaction is the last piece to your email marketing puzzle.

This post is published by a Hongkiat.com staff (editors, interns, sometimes Hongkiat Lim himself) or a guest contributor.

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Bloggers: 10 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to any successful blogging campaign. Therefore it should be implemented in the right manner. SEO itself is quite intricate for numerous reasons, but mainly because Google uses an algorithm, which takes several factors into account when ranking a webpage, and they keep changing it.

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There are virtually so many SEO myths that it has become very difficult to know what’s 100% true, but I can advise you on which SEO mistakes you should not make:

You might get a short term boost by buying links if your website is already popular, but you’re still taking a risk here. Paid links are sometimes flagged by Google’s search engine experts. You may wonder, how will they ever catch me? Well, Google’s bots and a special team at the company search for questionable linking patterns every single day!

For example, if you pay for a few hundred links to be pointed to your website in the very same day, some links will probably be flagged as a sort of ‘irregular linking activity’. Links from totally unrelated categories will seem suspicious as well.

I would recommend the old fashioned method of comment linking, manually — your blog will still be able to grow, albeit at a steady pace. Over time, the end results will be worthwhile. If you are however settled on purchasing links, do not use the same anchor text for all of them; mix it up a bit.

Many bloggers I know try to target the same topic with a variation of essentially very similar keywords. For instance, ‘make money on facebook’ and ‘making money with your facebook’ are quite similar, and creating a completely different page for each keyword won’t add much value to your site.

How much can you really play with topics or keywords that are essentially identical? If you can’t, then you’ll probably end up writing the same content for both keywords, which poses a risk of a search engine penalty. Instead, you should try to penetrate one original topic or keyword in detail and make an effort to strengthen each post.

Don’t get me wrong, PageRank is important for any website’s success. The higher the PageRank you have, the better you rank in search engines, and the more visitors you’ll get. However, it’s definitely not the only metric that’ll help you improve your blog’s success. Furthermore, Google has mentioned previously that PageRank is just one of two hundred (wow!) indicators used to crawl and rank a website. Instead, you should focus on your analytics, ROI, and relevancy as recommended by Google itself.

The title tag is undeniably one of the most important aspects when it comes to search engine rankings. Beginner bloggers usually write a post with a long title that describes the topic in too many words. First, you want to keep the title rather short, (not more than 60 characters) but more importantly, you should aim your focus at optimizing the title tags.

For example, if you write a post titled ‘What Is A Niche Blog And How Do I Create It?’ your title tag should be more targeted towards a keyword, perhaps something like ‘What Is A Niche Blog?’ with ‘a niche blog’ being a possible keyword. You would surely want to check the popularity of the respective keyword with a keyword tool such as Google Adwords before optimizing for it. Consider changing it and you may enjoy a better placement in the search engines and as a result, more visitors.

While many bloggers depend on content to grow their blog, there are some who had become obsessed with the design of their blog. Don’t get me wrong, if you don’t have an appealing design, some visitors won’t be attracted to your website. However, using too many graphics or images will overcrowd your page and slow it down.

I see many sites using Flash and sacrificing page speed for motion and sounds. Definitely an attractive setting, but not a worthy enough tradeoff. This will also prevent search engine bots from being able to crawl your pages at a desirable faster rate.

Blog services that offer free hosting such as Blogger, TypePad, and many others, can offer a decent platform and an excellent value. However, they are not flexible enough to be able to install the Plugins, themes, and other extensions you truly desire for superior SEO results.

All it will take is to register your own domain, and to purchase an inexpensive hosting plan. If you do enough shopping around, you shouldn’t spend more than $50 for both for the year. It’s worth a few bucks per month to have total control over your website. The power of independence can reap great rewards when your blogging operation grows.

Probably one of the most common SEO mistakes is common stuffing. It’s not only unethical, but also will hurt your search rankings. If you really want to rank for a bunch of keywords, create a separate page for each keyword and optimize for it accordingly. Instead of using hidden or duplicate text, focus on creating useful pages that have your keywords implemented in them as part of the content. Trying to manipulate a search engine like Google is a big no-no.

Many websites, especially blogs, suffer from posts that are too short. I personally get at least a few guest post submissions per day, and more than often, I have to reject them on the basis that they are too short to publish. How great can a piece be if it’s written at just 400 words? Writing extremely short posts hurts reader loyalty plus your page could be considered as low quality when it comes to SEO rankings.

There’s not only one right way to optimize your posts for the search engine, but there are general proven methods you can use. For example, in regards to link building, several bloggers I know make the mistake of only linking to the front page of their website. Instead, you should build links that also point to your top, most popular posts. There’s always something new to learn about SEO, so make sure your optimization knowledge is up to date by reading articles or guides from qualified authors such as Google’s Matt Cutts.

While Google reportedly (WebCEO software) doesn’t place a big emphasis on ALT tags, other search engines such as AOL, Bing, and Yahoo do. The truth is that a picture is just an image file if it’s not optimized for a keyword. To optimize it, use the ALT tag when inserting your image in a post; you’ll definitely see better results. Also, consider naming the file of the image as your keyword or at least to a defining term. If you’re blogging about copyright laws, name your image as ‘copyright-laws.jpg’, not something like ‘picture10.jpg’ — that simply won’t do you any good.

I see additional SEO mistakes regularly, such as the use of generic descriptions for posts, not updating the sitemap, broken 404 pages, and grammatical errors in various site contents. Most of all, I see posts that lack organization and simply contain too much text without separation of any sort, such as spacing or headings. That’s simply unattractive to your valued readers. It takes away from the overall experience, and the quality of your website will take a beating. These SEO mistakes may seem basic to some but shouldn’t be overlooked or ignored. Better yet, consider evaluating your blog right away to ensure that your overall SEO is in check.

Isaac is a full time blogger, also the founder of HIT - a site that provides bloggers with blogging tips and how to profit from blogs. Visit Isaac's blog.

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