Open rates for email campaigns are dropping every year - but is the open rate an acceptable statistic for measuring how successful your campaign is? If your email doesn’t reach your prospect, how can they open it?

To increase your return on investment from email marketing, first look at whether your intended recipients actually receive your email. Your deliverability rate, the percentage of your list that actually gets your email delivered to their inbox, is the first statistic that you need to improve. Here are some tips for doing it:

1. Use double opt-in to make sure that the recipient wants to be on your list. When a user signs up to your newsletter from your website, send a confirmation email that must be replied to (or a link that must be clicked) before users are placed on your list.

2. If some of the addresses on your list persistently ‘bounce’ (i.e. emails can not be delivered to them), remove them from your list. Service providers track bounced emails, and your email can be blocked if it causes regular bounces.

3. Choose your words carefully. If at all possible, avoid words such as ‘medication’, ‘money’, ‘poker’, ‘viagra’ and so on. There’s a good list of spam-words here.

4. The HTML code you use in your emails may be affecting your deliverability. Make sure your images use “alt” tags, be careful with tracking your emails for responses, and have a read of this article to make sure your HTML is up to scratch. If you put your email up on your website, you can validate the HTML code on the W3C Markup Validation Service.

As always, the Wikipedia website is a solid source of information. Check out their article on email spam. And be sure to keep your list, content and HTML clean if you want to get your message out.

Google Analytics, one of the latest tools from Google, is a very effective way to find out how many people are coming to your website. It’s got several features that put it head and shoulders above the rest of the website visitor analysis packages:

1. Easy to set up and manage
2. Integrates well with Google AdWords
3. You can find out your conversion rates from different sources
4. It’s very easy to see where visitors are coming from geographically
5. Key data for marketers, webmasters and content publishers is easily accessible
6. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s free!

Setting up Analytics couldn’t be simpler. You register for a free account; Google gives you a piece of code to put on your pages, and you’re up and running.

When Analytics starts tracking your site, you’ll be able to access an interface that looks like this:

The first graph (top-left) gives a trend analysis of how many visitors are coming to your website, and how many pages they are viewing. By clicking on the calendar on the left-hand side of the page, you can check visitors by day, week, month and year. It’s very easy to see what days, weeks and months are busiest on your website with this information.

The top-right graph shows what percentage of visitors has been to the site before. This is interesting information, and gives you a good insight into visitor loyalty and frequency.

The map on the bottom-left shows where your visitors come from geographically. In the case of this website, Ireland and the UK provide most of the visitors, though you can see visitors coming from all over the Continent and the US. Note that Google can tell the county (and even the neighbourhood) that a visitor comes from, down to pinpointing a visitor to the Rathmines neighbourhood.

The bottom-right graph shows the source of the visitor. Did they come directly to the site, or did they visit from Google, Yahoo or MSN? Maybe they were referred by your email marketing campaign, or by a banner ad? Or maybe they clicked a link to visit your website. This graph is excellent for telling you how your search engine marketing is performing.

I’ll go into the simplicity and excellence of Google Analytics in further posts, but for the moment, let me just say that I highly recommend it. Of course, if you’d like to have Google Analytics on your website, we can help to implement it for you.

What’s the most popular search term of all, I hear you ask? Is it “free stuff”, “ringtones”, “hotels”, “jobs”, or “jokes”? Surprisingly, none of these keywords appear in the top 50 searched-for terms on the Internet.

No, people instead prefer to search for things you’d thing they’d found already. Nielsen/NetRatings (PDF file) released a study of the most popular searches in November 2005, and came up with some interesting results.

“ebay” received just under 14 million searches, closely followed by “google”, with just over 13 million. “yahoo” clocked 8 million searches, and “yahoo.com” was searched for 6.5 million times. Other entries included “ask jeeves” (3.4 million), “msn” (3.2 million), and “ebay.com” (3.1 million searches).
Hold on. Why would anyone search for “ebay.com”? Just put a “www.” before that and you’re there! And why search for “google”, “yahoo” or “msn”? Don’t they know how to use this Internet?

No, there’s something afoot here. People can’t really be searching for the ebay website. Something else is going on.

People are using search engines in new ways – to get quickly to the websites they want. Think about it. If your homepage is Google or Yahoo, typing in “rte” should bring up www.rte.ie ad the first result. You click on it. It brings you to the RTE site without you having to go to the trouble of entering “www.” and “.ie”. Simple!

And the rise of the Google Toolbar means that you can perform a search with one click, regardless of what corner of the Internet you’re exploring.

Also, the rise (and fall and stabilisation at a mediocre takeup level) of WAP and the emergence of i-mode (which really is excellent for checking the latest scores, getting the news, booking a flight and all that) have changed the way we search. A default option on i-mode is to “Search Google”. Entering a www.domain.com address on a mobile phone is much harder than just searching “domain” on Google.

So what does this mean? Has the address bar met its end? Does anyone go to the bother of typing in the full domain name anymore? Well, I use the address bar to find sites I know, but this latest research highlights how crucial search engines have become to the online experience.

Google have launched a new tool, Google Trends. This cool tool tells you how many searches have been done on Google for the terms you enter. The graph format is very nice, but it would be good to have a value on the Y-axis.

Google Trends is really effective for comparing one search term against another, or to see how interest in a person or subject has changed over time. Some good examples:

- People like dogs more than cats in most English-speaking countries, including Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia.
- Ronaldinho has overtaken David Beckham as most talked-about footballer.
- London and Paris are more popular cities than Madrid, Berlin and Rome.
- Heineken is currently the most popular beer, with Budweiser, Carlsberg and Coors trailing.
An excellent feature of the Google Trends tool is that you can drill down to specific countries - and Ireland’s included in the list. So, we can tell that Irish users of Google search for Dublin a lot more than Cork and Galway. But in a marketing sense, we can get some really good information. Some examples:

- “house” has consistently been searched for more than “property”.
- “bmw” is being searched for more than “toyota” - evidence of our current upwardly-mobile nature.
- “blog” is searched for much more than “rss” or “podcast”, showing it’s being accepted more and more by the mainstream.
- Searches for “bulmers” peak in the summer months, the only time of year they number more than searches for “guinness”.
- Searches for the three main broadsheet newspapers in Ireland makes for interesting viewing.

You could spend hours trying different searches on this, and it’s a really good gauge of search habits that can be drilled down to a country level. For popular topics, Google puts markers next to major news events, which is a really good way of seeing how web users react to news stories.
If you’re in marketing, Google Trends is something you need to add to your bookmarks.

Your new website has just gone live. You’ve invested quite a bit in it - money, hours, sweat, etc. It’s been project-managed perfectly; the brief has been adhered to perfectly.

And it’s been worth it. Beautiful Flash design, swirling animations, all the bleeding-edge technologies that your designers advocated, a shimmering Java applet of your office’s reflection on the Liffey…beautiful. Just beautiful.

You sit back and wait for the enquiries.

Nothing.

Three months later, you’re wondering where it all went wrong. Where has your target market disappeared to?

The likely answer is they’ve gone down the road to a competitor with a website that they can use.

If you’re planning a web project, these tips will give you a bit of a background to usabililty. Your website needs to CONVERT visitors to customers and qualified sales leads. Usability is the science of doing this.

A recent study found that users decide whether they like a website or not within half a second. Yours needs to appeal from the start. So read these tips and use them.

TIP #1: Visit the following websites: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ireland.com, DAFT.ie and RTE.ie Spend a few minutes on them. This is the Internet to millions of people, and these people want all websites to work like this. The more your site is like these websites, the better your site will convert. Simplicity is key.

TIP #2: If you want visitors to do business with you, make it as simple as possible to do business with you. If Dunnes Stores made you run an obstacle course with shopping basket in hand, would you keep shopping there? People don’t have much time these days - make it easy for them. Don’t make them have to open an account before they can purchase anything. Don’t make them have to click six times to get to their product. Don’t use long, unwieldy forms to collect personal data. This is an extension of TIP #1. Keep it simple!

TIP #3: “Speak to the dog, about what matters to the dog, in the language of the dog” (Jeff Eisenberg, ‘Call to Action‘. Your copy needs to be geared towards your target market. People don’t want to know that:

- they’re welcome to your website.
- you are a total solutions provider.
- you empower global communications providers with real-time data.
- they are visitor number 538.People do want to know that:

- there’s a 40% discount on blue widgets until Friday.
- your site is on a secure server.
- you offer free delivery.
- you guarantee the cheapest widgets in Ireland.Remember, unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will leave your site and never return. A few simple changes can make a big difference. And if you’re planning a re-design, make sure you take these tips on board.

Have you seen any of the above design mistakes? Leave a comment below.