Blue Ember Design » Online Marketing

4 Reasons Open Source Email Marketing Sucks

Garrett St. John — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:00:36 +0000

We’ve tried quite a few open source email marketing solutions from Mailman, to PHPMailer, to poMMo and they all suck for one reason or another. Here are our reasons why:

1. They are self hosted solutions
In our experience, self hosting email marketing rarely works out well. Most hosting providers have tight limits on how many emails can be sent per hour from a given domain. A somewhat average limit of 300 emails/hour implies that it would take 16 hours and 40 minutes to email a list of 5,000 addresses. While that could be acceptable in certain circumstances, it is less than ideal for a big marketing push or product launch. Hit 10,000+ addresses and you are talking in days, not hours. No good for us or our clients!

2. They have clunky and non-intuitive interfaces
We’re BIG supporters of open source software, but have yet to see an open source email marketing tool that has been as slick as the likes of Campaign Monitor or MailChimp. When passing off open source software to a client, pray they are somewhat technology proficient or you have a support nightmare on your hands. The best client interface we’ve seen to date is poMMo, but it still leaves much to be desired.

3. They lack crucial features for professional use
To be usable by a business with any sizable email address list, an email marketing tool has a few “must-have” features:

Email throttling
Intuitive and simple administration interface
Elegant WYSIWYG email editor (with the ability hand-edit HTML if necessary)
Automated bounce handling
Comprehensive analytical tools to measure campaign success

4. There is no strong community
Unlike many other great open source projects, we’ve found much to be desired in the communities for the top open source email solutions. This makes support and bug fixes a disaster zone.

You tell us…
Have you found any great open source email marketing tools that we have missed? Disagree? Let us hear from you…

PPC or SEO: Which is Best for My Company?

Garrett St. John — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:00:24 +0000

Many companies, especially in the current tough economy, are looking at their marketing budgets and are asking a very important question: “Where can we spend our marketing dollars and make the largest impact?”

When making this decision it’s important to consider that both PPC advertising and SEO have their merits. At the same time, they also have dissimilar levels of commitment (both in time and money) and use entirely different methods for determining their success. We’ll look into those differences here in an effort to help in the decision-making process.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Advertising online is an easy and quick way to drive traffic to a website. If executed correctly, traffic will arrive on highly targeted keywords and improve sales conversion rates. As long as the advertising bills are paid, website traffic should stay at its elevated level. However, stop paying and they’ll cut traffic just as fast as it started.

So what does this mean for a company? It means that pay per click advertising is a great way to instantly generate new traffic. As long as the campaign is active, the traffic will flow. This model makes cost per click (CPC) a perfect way to determine the return on investment (ROI) because of its distinct start/stop times and set number of marketing dollars spent.

Unlike pay per click advertising, these lines are not so clear with a search engine optimization campaign.

Search Engine Optimization

In most cases, it’s accurate to say that an SEO marketing campaign with a high quality search engine optimization company will result in a lower CPC than a pay per click advertising campaign. Here’s why:

Unlike pay per click advertising, search engine optimization is a lasting investment into the quality and success of a company’s website. There is no clear end to when an SEO campaign stops being effective. A 12-month campaign with an SEO professional that is halted due to budget issues will continue to exhibit improved results well after the work has entirely stopped. Depending on the industry, the competition, and the quality of the SEO, improved results could last for weeks or even potentially years. Because of the indefinite end to its results, cost per click is not an adequate way to determine the return on investment of an SEO campaign.

If the results are so long-lasting, why isn’t everyone going with SEO? Largely because there is a minimum required commitment to search engine optimization. A campaign can take weeks or months to start showing improved results and even more importantly will require patience, diligence and time to build into a highly successful campaign. If either time or money are limited, it’s likely that a pay per click advertising campaign is going to be the best short-term choice.

So Which is Right For My Company?

After reading this article, it should hopefully be clear that there are some core differences between how pay per click advertising and search engine optimization work and how their results should be quantified. Pay per click advertising campaigns have a hard start and end date, immediately drive targeted traffic, and have a simple formula to determine their ROI. Meanwhile, an SEO campaign may take longer to put into place at a higher initial cost, but the results will long outlast those of PPC advertising.

Want more information or need help? Blue Ember Design can build a quality Search Engine Optimization or PPC Advertising campaign for your company.

poMMo: Open Source Email Marketing Software

Garrett St. John — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:00:05 +0000

Update: We have been using poMMo for a solid month now with one of our clients and unfortunately we can no longer recommend it as a high-quality piece of email marketing software. It appears to have been out of active development for some time (Latest release was Apr 03 2008) and while there is a community around poMMo, it’s limited in its ability to support issues.

——

While Blue Ember Design does offer its own email marketing solution, we occasionally have some smaller clients that want to use self-hosted email marketing software. Although not typically advisable, we do allow it for some clients with small subscriber lists (the idea being that it will get them started and they can move over later).

Up until last week, we really were pretty disappointed with many of the open source email marketing software options. In the past we have implemented GNU Mailman as well as PHPMailer-ML for our clients, but each of these has their major downfalls. Mailman just feels way too bulky, takes too much hand editing for configuration, and is a beast for client training. PHPMailer-ML was simple to configure, but had a pretty clunky interface. We also ran into some issues with the database connection being dropped while sending leaving us no clue where it left off. So the search for a great free email marketing solution continued. Enter poMMo.

poMMo is very easy to configure and has a decent looking, easy-to-use interface. There is one configuration file that really only required MySQL database connection information and the system is off and running. It self-installs and does it in a way that it could be run “out-of the box”. Of course we do customize the HTML emails for our customers, but that was just as easy with its email template feature.

Here are some of the features we like about poMMo:

Email throttling (by total emails sent and by destination domain)
Auto generated HTML subscription forms
Custom field collection (First Name, Last Name, City, State, etc.)
Groups for mailing a subset of the full subscriber list
HTML and Text-Only email options
Email history stored as HTML pages for archiving. This is great for mail reader issues with HTML.

Known Issues and Desired Features

There is an issue with the admin interface in Firefox where the body of the content falls below the sidebar. This is just a small CSS issue that can be fixed with some slight tweaking.
The system is set up to have an email address that receives bounces, but there is no automated bounce processor. It would be nice if it could automatically unsubscribe invalid addresses after a set number of bounces.
When composing emails, poMMo uses FCKeditor to allow for advance editing. The software doesn’t display the ‘Source’ button to view the email as HTML. This would be nice for advanced users that want to hand manipulate their email’s HTML. Just a small hang up =)

Social Networking to Expand Your Business

Garrett St. John — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:00:18 +0000

Social networking is a major buzzword in the marketing and sales world these days. It can easily become a complicated practice that consumes full days out of the week if not correctly executed. Here are some tips on how to effectively social network online to expand your business.

Pick Between One or Two Social Networks
It seems that every day a new social networking website launches offering a different set of features or new ways to connect. In order to be most effective, pick no more than two and focus all attention on their success. The goal should be the quality of relationships, not the broad range of exposure.

Keep Business and Personal Accounts Separate
It’s very difficult to manage personal and business matters within the same account and not have them overlap. A potential client will likely be turned off when discovering details on a not-so-glamorous trip to the country western bar last weekend. Likewise, friends are likely bored by the latest home sales trends in the San Francisco Bay Area. Save both parties the unnecessary noise and keep different accounts.

Complete Your Profile
It should be a priority to complete your profile and replace the default profile image. To gain influence and trust, others should have a sense of your investment in the community. A complete profile conveys a “buy in” as well as provides a chance to share your accomplishments and expertise.

Be Yourself
Nobody wants to be approached and have a sales pitch shoved down his or her throat. Online social networking is no different. Be yourself and strike up natural conversation. The best bet is always to be conversational, informative, and helpful.

Social Sites Are Not a Sales Medium
In business, social sites provide a chance to expand the network of people whom trust you. Any trust earned will translate to sales and referrals in time.

Find the “Influencers”
It is the general rule that every site has its influencers. These individuals have significant impact within the community and are very active contributors. Find these users and begin to build a relationship. By associating with influencers it raises your own credibility within the network.

Be Selective When Accepting “Friends”
This can sound counter-intuitive on the surface, but the goal is not to acquire a million friends. Much more success can be found in having less than 100 high quality relationships that are maintained effectively.

Make Introductions Between Members
As in the real world, making introductions between two parties gives the perception that you are acquainted with many people and useful for expanding others’ networks. People respect and appreciate someone who is not purely self-serving.

Move the Discussion to Your Blog
We’ve discussed reasons to have a company blog in the past, but blogs naturally serve as a great medium for discussion. Share a relevant post on your blog that answers someone’s question or fills a specific need. This discrete marketing technique won’t offend the community because of the strong value your content has added.

What other social networking tips have you found to be helpful in the expansion of your business?

4 Reasons To Have a Company Blog

4 Reasons To Have a Company Blog

Garrett St. John — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:00:54 +0000

Why do you need a company blog? Isn’t blogging just for professional writers or angst-filled teenagers? Hardly. Here are four quality reasons that your company should have a blog.

Search Engine Ranking – Search engines love blogs. Why?
1. Sitemaps – A sitemap is a file which helps search engines locate URLs available for crawling. Most popular blogging software have a feature that does this automatically.
2. Pings – In terms of blogging, a ping is an automatic online notification that new content has been posted to a blog. This ping is often sent to web services like Technorati, Google, and others to notify them that the blog is updated and should be indexed.
3. Categories/Tags – Blog posts are often associated with categories and tags in order to group similar topics together. Effective categorizing and tagging will many times result in both better search engine rankings as well as more pageviews per visitor because of it’s similar content.
4. Fresh Content – Search engines love fresh content. An active website with regularly updated information will be indexed more frequently and likely be considered as more relevant in the longer term.
Customer Confidence – Visitors need a reason to trust your company as well as your services/products. A blog can be used to convey knowledge, expertise, and professionalism. The better a potential customer trusts a company, the more confident they will be in making a purchase.
Social Networking – Sites like MySpace and Facebook are typically considered to define “Social Networking”. While that is true in many ways, social networking is much more broad. Through a blog, a company can post information about their business, their product, or their industry and open it for conversation through comments. This back-and-forth on a common topic is great for generating new product ideas, improving existing services, providing support, and more.
Cost Effectiveness – To be able to create new, fresh content without a blogging or CMS platform can become costly. To produce content like a blog, tens or hundreds of individual pages would need to be created individually by a web designer. By using a blog, a company can save money in the longer term.

Let Blue Ember Design educate you on the details of blogging and get you started with your own custom blog design.