INTRODUCTION

E-mail marketing or Electronic Mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mails as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to: Sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage Customer loyalty and repeat business; Sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately; and sending e-mails over the Internet, for the purpose of informing or educating.

ADVANTAGES

• A mailing list provides the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost.
• Compared to other media investments such as  direct mail or printed  newsletter e-mail is less expensive.
• An exact  return on investments can be tracked (“track to basket”) and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to  search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
• The delivery time for an e-mail message is short (i.e., seconds or minutes) as compared to a mailed advertisement (i.e., one or more days).
• An advertiser is able to “push” the message to its audience, as opposed to  website-based advertising, which relies on a customer to visit that website.
• E-mail messages are easy to track. An advertiser can  track users via  autoresponders,  web bugs, bounce messages unsubscribe requests,  read receipts, click through, etc. These mechanisms can be used to measure  open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing.
• Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Over half of  internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.
• Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger (1) other messages to be delivered automatically, or (2) other events, such as updating the profile of the recipient to indicate a specific interest category.
• E-mail marketing is paper-free (i.e., “green”).
• Tracking and response metrics enables tuning and optimisation of the E-mail marketing channel by a process of testing different variants and calculation of statistically significant results.
• E-mail is popular with digital products marketers.

DISADVATAGES

• Many companies use e-mail marketing to communicate with existing customers, but many other companies send unsolicited bulk e-mail, also known as spam.
• The sheer volume of spam has led some users to mistake legitimate commercial e-mail for spam. This situation arises when a user receives e-mail from a mailing list to which he/she subscribes. Additional confusion arises when both legitimate and spam messages have a similar appearance, as when messages include  HTML and graphics.
• One effective technique used by established email marketing companies is to require what is known as the “double opt-in” method of requiring a potential recipient to manually confirm their request for information by clicking a unique link which includes a unique identification code to confirm that the owner of the recipient email address has indeed requested the information.

E-MAIL MARKETING TOOLS

E-mail delivery

You need to have a medium to use to send emails. Depending on the size of your addressbook and the frequency, you can choose which program to use to send emails.

If you will be sending less than 500 emails per day, then a normal email account is enough. POP3 accounts have various email sending limits. They are those that limit in hourly basis (200 emails per hour) and those that limit per day (the highest being 2000 per day). Check with your web host to know your sending limits. Otherwise your account will be blocked if you exceed the limits. Free mailing platforms also have varied limits. Gmail has the highest with 500 emails, then yahoo at 200 sent in batches of 50 and hotmail at 200 per day.

If you intend to send more than 500 emails per day, it’s the time you need to solicit commercial programs.or mailing lists programs. There are various commercial and open source programs that you can use to develop an emailing platform. The most common ones are constant contact, sendblaster, phplist, mailman, pommo. weber etc. These mailing lists have a capacity to deliver even about 100,000 emails per day. However, it has to depend on the mailing server you are using. It should not have email sending limits.

Email creation

The emails to be sent needs to be formatted. There are two modes of sending emails; text or html.

Text emails are just words which are simply formatted. You cannot include images when sending with this format. The format is simple, light and easy to send. You can send these emails in large batches. They are actually like the normal emails we send hence they end up right into the inbox (not junk folder)

HTML emails are emails which are highly formatted. Sometime you will see them look like websites. They include text formatting, images and graphics and even other media like videos and music. They are smart and presentable. These emails are heavy and complicated. They take time to send and might load the server. Its recommended to send them in small batches. Since these mails are the one used by advertisers in spams, they are often filtered to the junk folder by email clients.

Address Book management

You will need to have valid email address to send the emails to. Organizations and individuals gather addresses into the addressbook from the customers, friends and family. The size of your address book determines the platform and format to use.

Small organizations can use normal emails since their addressbook are small whereas large organizations can purchase commercial solutions that don’t limit their capabilities.

Its important you have an addressbook that can be able to group of filter addresses by groups. This ensures that you can be able to send specific emails to niche groups. It enhance effective communication and targeted marketing.

EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGIES

There are several ways of doing email marketing depending on what you want relied over internet. Most organizations will use email marketing to do the following:

Customer Relationship Management: It can be used when an organization want to relay important information about a product or service to their existing customers like product enhancement, service reminders, product safety, service improvement etc.

E-Newsletters: Organizations can be sending regular newsletters to their subscribers. These newsletters will provide information within and without the organization. It could also be information about a certain service or industry. E-newsletter is refered to as a gentleman spam. Its both informative, educative and also commercial since you can slot advertisement slots in the newsletter.

Announcements and Alerts: Mailing lists are also use for announcements. Most organizations have announcements to make to their customers. To make it personal and quick, they send emails to each and every one of them. For instance, an internet service provider will send an email to its 10,000 subscribers list to tell then of a potential virus circulating in the internet.

Sales: The times of knocking on people’s doors to solicit for business are gone. People are using the internet to do cold calling. Internet is very effective because you can contact thousands of people in one hour what you could do to only one person in door to door selling. Organizations are using email marketing to generate sales leads. With effective follow-up, they eventually become business.

One of the most important and often overlooked methods of promoting you online  is your email signature file (sometimes called a “sig”). There are two types of signature files, one is the more simple one at the close of each email, the other might be attached to writing or discussion group posts, etc. and is sometimes called a byline.

Regardless of the usage, having an effectively written signature can make the difference in higher sales, more networking contacts and more prosperity for you today! Use at least the following as a guide, to build a signature file that will help you meet your needs, and reach your goals.

1. Your Name and the Name of Your Business. You cannot build your brand or name recognition without it. No one would forget to include this, right?

2. Your email address. If you have written compelling content, people will want to contact you. Having your email address immediately available (and clickable) is the best means to satisfy the need to “do it now”. Since some email clients don’t recognize and hotlink email addresses, consider putting the mailto: in front of your address. This ensures your address is a hyper link (i.e. mailto:info@bizkenya.com)

Other information you should include is:

3. Telephone numbers

4. Postal address

5. Physical address

6. Website address

7. Social networks and IM profile access
The more contact options you offer the better. However make it simple and avoid overcrowding it.

|DOMAINS| WEB HOSTING | WEB DESIGN | E-BUSINESS |

These are colors that are used in Web design.

It’s hard to choose from hundreds of service providers. Here is a list of things you should consider when looking for your hosting company.

1. Tech Support (Support and Troubleshooting)
Technical problems can arise anytime. A good web hosting company will always help you overcome technical failure as early as possible. Therefore, 24×7×365 support is important – there must be a professional team with sufficient knowledge about the problem available at all times. Email, live chat or phone – all forms of communication must be available to you.

2. Well-defined agreements
There are web hosting companies that promise a lot of things. Do not go with the words – asking for something in black and white. The agreement should include what the service provider will offer you and your course of action in case they fail to stick to the agreement.

3. Flexibility
Looking for operators who are flexible enough to meet your business needs change. As your business grows, you may need a larger web space, greater bandwidth, seamless service and advanced technology. Judging whether operators can extend the standards higher.

4. Personalized Business Relationships
A popular web hosting companies always offer personal service to solve technical problems with ease. Once you know who can help you resolve billing issues, and who the right person to contact if your site is not active you can solve problems easily. Make sure your service provider will give you a list of personal contacts.

5. Infrastructure
Ensure that service providers can protect you from natural disasters, malicious scripts, technical errors and other problems. Back up recovery and protective hardware and software must be present to maintain the servers and data centers.

6. Reputation of providers
It is very difficult to assess companies and their service quality by asking a few questions. Therefore, the agreement with the well-known provider. Looking for an award winning and most discussed on the web host your country. Be assured that they will return more than what you invest. Or get referred by a friend.
7. Data center location
Some web hosting locations provide unstable hosting due to their location. Its always advisable to get hosting from stable locations.
8. Understanding the hosting package
Most web hosting providers offer different hosting. specific features packaged together to form a different plan. Make sure your hosting plan has the features you need.

9. Scalability
Go to scalable hosting plans. Likelihood of your web hosting requirements will change as your business grows. For example, you may need some email id and several sub-domains in the future. You may need a few technical and hardware upgrades as well. Make sure your hosting plan allows you to do this and when required.

10. Cost
Never compromise with quality for the sake of saving, low-cost service could damage your reputation and reduce your profits. By hosting your business web site hosting service providers who are competent, you can ensure success, profitability, customer satisfaction and goodwill.

For Fire fox

Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return.

Look for “network.http.keep-alive”. If it’s false, double-click that line and to change it to true.

Make sure “network.http.version” is set to “1.1″.

Look for “network.http.pipelining”. If it’s false, double-click that line and change it to true.

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to true by double-clicking it.

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to 8 by double-clicking it. This means it will make 8 requests at once. There is no point setting it higher then 8 as it is capped at 8 max. The default value for this setting is 4.

Optional: Right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it shows you the information it receives. This is particularly helpful on pages with search bars, however, it doesn’t actually make the page load faster.

Alternate Method for Broadband Users

Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return.

Alter the entries as follows:

• Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

• If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

For Internet Explorer

Click “Start” and then Click “Run” as in the picture.

Type “regedit” in the Run input box that appears and then click “Ok” as in the picture.

Now that should have opened the Registry Editor and what your going to do is when I say expand something you will click the “+” sign right next to the file. So first we will expand “HKEY_CURRENT_USER” as in the picture. Please note that if a file is already expanded it will have “-” sign next to it.

Next expand “Software” then from that expand “Microsoft” then from that expand “Windows” and then from that expand “CurrentVersion” and then finally from just click the folder “Internet Settings” and it should look similar to the picture. You will no longer be using the left part of the registry editor you will be using the right portion.

Ok if you have the files “MaxConnections Per1_0Server” and “MaxConnections PerServer” listed you can skip to Step 7. In my case I didn’t have them so I will show you how to make them. Right click anywhere in the right section of the registry editor and then put you mouse over “New” and from the drop down menu left click “DWORD Value” as shown in the picture.

Once you have clicked it you will have a new DWORD Value that you will be able to name. Name the file “MaxConnections Per1_0Server” and then make another DWORD Value the same way you did in Step 5, but name it “MaxConnections PerServer” as shown in the picture.

Now double click “MaxConnections Per1_0Server” and set the Base to “Decimal” and for Value Data type “10″ and then click “Ok” as shown in the picture. Repeat this process for “MaxConnections PerServer”.

Now you are done. Your Internet Explorer should load pages faster now. Enjoy!

Introduction to Web Designing

Web designing is the second phase of web development. Its in this phase that you get information and mould it into systematic and logical content presented in the web in smart designs. Web designing is a process. It starts with web design planning, information collection to content arrangement and  designing. The process ends at hosting and testing.

Types of websites.

There are two types of websites; static and dynamic.

Static websites are designed offline and uploaded after completion. The websites have static information that can only be changed by downloading the site, updating and uploading it again in a web server. The software to develop the site is installed in the computer and the website is usually saved in html format and uploaded to the web server. The language commonly used in developing static websites is html.

Dynamic websites are designed online. The designing software is loaded into the web server and becomes part of the website. The site runs on a database for storing information. This is a relatively new technology compared with the static websites. They are also referred to web 2.0 The most common dynamic websites are corporate sites, intranets and extranets and blogs. The sites can be added information instantly, change design in a click and are updated in real time. The language used in these websites is PHP. BIZKENYA websites fall under this category.

Web Designing Process

Web design planning: Web development starts with a need and idea. Most people will find the need to become more professional in their communication and profiling. Others have the need to acquire effective marketing strategy. All these needs moves the organization’s owners and managers to seek web solutions.

Planning is very necessary. You will need to plan if you will register the domain, configure emails and develop the site at the same time or you will give the phases some break. Its however recommended that you develop your site as soon as you register the domain to avoid ‘Emptiness’; where the visitors find an empty site upon visiting your site.

In web design planning, you look into the nature and size of information, features, the availability of the information (in digital or hardcopy form), the updatedness of the information, the audience of your website, the audience content needs and expectations, the content selection and formatting, grammar and choice of words.

Information collection

There are two types of information gathered for web development. The text and the images.

Text information are the words used to develop content. These words join together to provide a story plot to be used in your site. When collecting text information, its important to focus on the information that define and describe your organization. This include the organization history, philosophy, pitch, product and service/program and projects details, personnel and partners information, contacts and variable important news and press. For organizations, most of the text information is contained in the profiles and catalogues.

Images are simply a thousand words as they say. You should select images that are harmonious with the text and theme. For instance if you are writing the content for a product, the image should be the product picture. The images should be sharp, quality and up-to-date.

Content arrangement

After you get the information (both text and image), it need to be arranged into pages. Websites’ content is arranged in pages and posts. Static websites contain only pages but dynamic sites, contain both pages and posts.

Page Development: Pages in websites are developed using software. Upon forming the website structure and design, the web designer develops the pages. The pages contains a harmonious combination of text and images. The images can be static or flashy. The choice of background color, font, text size, color and alignment is important.

Page arrangement: After creating pages, they need to be arranged systematically. The common arrangement is Home, About us, Products, Team and Contact. (Check and example in our Bronze Package) and for complex site, each page can have sub-pages and sub-sub pages.

Web designing

In this case, we are referring to structure design. Website content is presented in beautiful structures for easy accessibility. Designing of these structures are solely dependent on the web designer’s creativity.

In static websites, designing is hard and tedious for the designer. After designing and uploading the site, changing design involves another tedious and time consuming process. This tend to make the process expensive and rigid. And a resultant content and design outdate.

For dynamic websites, the designs are referred to as themes. These themes are changeable instantly. They adopt the available content and only changes the structural design. The web designer have several theme guides that he can customize to design the theme for your website. The client can even choose the theme to adopt in the site. The process make it easy and flexible. And also cost effective.

Web hosting and testing

Website hosting is the uploading process. For static websites, the designer designs the website and content and after completion uploads it into the web server. For dynamic websites, the hosting is done by uploading the software first, then using it to design the website.

After hosting, its important to test your website using different web browsers. This ensures that the structures do not break and the features are functional. The most common browsers used are Microsoft internet explorer, firefox, opera and safari. To test, open the browser and open your site using the browser. Then see if the site ok.

Over the years, a lot has changed in how marketers do business. Once upon a time, we’d sit down and make a boat load of cold calls to people we either never had met or that we had barely gotten to know in various situations. It was torturous and it didn’t work very well. When the Internet came along, marketing seemed to get easier because of email, but in truth it got even more complex due to the many vagaries and complexities that go into text.

So, what exactly is the difference between cold calling and email marketing and how can you take advantage of it when trying to build your next marketing campaign? Here are some thoughts.

If you’re anything like me, cold calling is your single least favorite thing to do. I came across cold calling when i was doing insurance sales. We would go door to door convincing people to buy insurance. Most of the times we will get abused and others even thrown out of the office. But like martyrs, we were ready for it and we took it as part of the businesses. But as time went by, i hated it.
When i got into web solutions sales, i met Email marketing. I would sent a newsletter and wait for prospective clients to contact me. It worked and it saved me alot of pain caused by cold calling. In Email marketing, We set up autoresponder lists, send out newsletters and tap into leads without having to talk to them. You talk to them when closing the sale.
Cold calling rocks!
Those that i left in insurance are die hard cold callers. They would come to visit me in my office and after the lengthy conversation, they would move out cold calling to my neighbors. A lot of us embrace the opportunity to use email instead of building a relationship with prospects. Cold callers have the advantage of doing business our of relationships. Quite solid.

Email Marketing is the thing.

I personally would never go back to cold calling unless my business depended on it, but that doesn’t mean I slack off in my approach either. You’ve got to be interesting and you have to offer value. With the Internet model has come attraction marketing, which is more or less required to be successful with your campaigns. You cannot simply say “buy this” and wait for them to make a decision. You got to talk to them and convince them. You must create a relationship, build trust, and then tap into that trust with specific sales pitches catered to your audience.