Absolute Blog

By Luke Petterson

Your business may have a decent sized email mailing list that you’ve compiled over time. If your business depends on using it’s email list to communicate with your clients or subscribers, you need to know about “email list churn” and how to handle it.

What is email list churn?

Email list “churn” is losing subscribers due to the fact they have changed or abandoned their email address. If a subscriber can longer access the email account that you send your mailings to they’ll no longer be a subscriber to your mailing list. Simple as that.

Your subscribers will change their email addresses from time to time. This is common. Changing email addresses could be due to:

• Changing jobs, and subsequently changing their work email address
• Getting sick of Hotmail and wanting to set up a Gmail account
• Getting overwhelmed with SPAM on an email account and abandoning it
• Wanting to change to a more fun or different email address, or to change their name
• And probably a myriad of other reasons

How many times have you changed your email address?

The numbers

The fact is, your list will probably lose about 1/3 or more of it’s subscribers yearly to email churn

This means if your list doesn’t keep growing, in just a few short years you’ll be left with zero or few subscribers. That’s a lot of churn, and that’s why it needs to be recognized and dealt with.

How to prevent or handle list churn

The most effective method to help avoid list churn is to offer subscribers a way to change their email address for their subscription.

Mailings commonly will contain links to allow users to unsubscribe, but it’s not so common to see the option to update subscription account options. Add this option to your email footers and your users will be able to provide you with a new email address if they change email accounts. It’s that easy.

Another way to prevent your list from dwindling is to actively promote it to attract new subscribers. Don’t just sit back and hope people will subscribe to your email list - ask everyone you come in contact with to sign up for your emails - both online and off. Some easy ways to do this are -

• Put a link to your email list in your email signature
• Tell your sales staff to ask everyone they talk with if they’ve subscribed
• Put out a guest book in your store and ask people to write in their email address so you can send them updates

In closing

Even with an email update option on your mailings, you will still lose subscribers to list churn. The only sure fire way to completely counter the effects of list churn is to continue to grow your list. Just make sure that all your new subscribers are officially opting in for your mailing list (keep it legal!).

Luke Petterson is the interactive director for Absolute Marketing Group of Moorhead, MN. Feel free to contact Luke at 218.284.1111 with any questions about email mailing list management for your business.

OK, I’m not going to lie to you, I probably couldn’t think of 101 ways to improve anyones web site, although I’ve seen a couple that might be close. One day I was sitting at our office at Bridgeview Plaza, just thinking about all the sites and clients that we’ve worked with over the past year. Most of our clients are really quite “Into” their site. They call often making changes, talk about adding things to their site and overall are very interested in how their site can help them grow their business. Hey, this is great for a web development company in Fargo-Moorhead, actually having clients embrace the online world. I might add they do reap the benefits for being proactive. Then, there’s the other ones, these are the sites we’ve developed and really never hear anything back from them. It’s not that they weren’t happy with their web site, we designed the web site, developed and launched the web site. To them, the site is complete and should not require any further edits.

Now, this really gets me thinking, can a web site ever be truly complete? Does Bob from accounting always have the same office or does he move, does he quit, does he take a new position? Why is Bob still on the website, he hasn’t worked here for 6 months. That’s just one sample why I believe a web site can truly never be complete. Which brings me to me exaggerated example of 101 ways to improve your website. There’s always something that can be added, subtracted, moved around, more content, more features, search engine optimized, you name it. A website should never be considered complete, only consider levels of completeness or phases. Once you complete one phase you should always be prepared to implement phase two. Sometimes it’s tough to tell a client, (that you’ve just launched their site) that their site already needs improvement and changes, but to complete in the world of today, it’s necessary. A website is the face of your company, keep it fresh, keep it clean and keep it growing, just like you want your company to be.

Call your web development company often, people like us always keep up on the latest and greatest technology and techniques. You’d be surprised at what we could do with your site.

After changing a WP blog to display a static home page, I was trying to find a way to also display Posts - the way they normally displayed on a default install - and make a link to that page. What I found instead was a nice, dynamic way to show posts, without separating them so much from the rest of the site content.

Playing with WordPress » Static frontpage - combined with dynamic content

On a recent site design, I ran across a rare CSS bug in IE 6 & 7. This site has a great demo of what goes wrong (view the buggy pages in IE 6 or 7 to see what I mean), and a very easy hack/fix.

IE6 resize bug position: relative becomes fixed - Friendly Bit

By Mark “milquetoast” Huesman

You’ve probably heard stories from a few friends about their Web site not turning out as expected. There are various reasons to why some people’s expectations aren’t met. In many instances, it’s due to inadequate content preparation and being unable to effectively communicate your vision to your web designer.

Putting Web site content before design; I’ll admit the concept used to sound a little foreign to me. I’m more of the “let’s just get it done” attitude. But after being thrust into the position of a Web site designer and planner, I’ve found that content writing and planning is a crucial initial task.

Web site content is nothing more than plain ol’ words tied together to make sentences, which then make paragraphs, and so on and so forth. Seems simple enough, but it’s the number one critical element that stalls a project.

The goal is to write copy that matches the type of site you want to develop. This is typically based on your target audience, type of service you offer and sometimes budget. Here are a few tips on how to overcome the hurdle of putting together content for your Web site.

Informational: Basic Site

These types of sites basically provide online information to your clients or future customers about your brick-and-mortar business. Informational sites typically contain an array of pages such as: home, about us, gallery, services, contact, etc.

This concise Web site should showcase your business. The copy should be easy to scan and read and get more in-depth/technical only where it needs to be. People are viewing this site for basic information about you. Provide that for them, and then make it easy for them to contact you and find your real-world location.

Sales Generator: Sales Prospecting Site or Resource Site

With this type of Web site, your goal is to generate new sales and to use it as a major part of your advertising strategy. Writing content for this type of Web site will require a bit more commitment than a smaller static/rarely updated Web site.

The long-term goal of this site is to generate traffic to your site and increase your online presence. Writing keyword rich content is a must so that search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo find and index your Web site appropriately. You will also want to have some sort of system in place to allow you to add fresh content to your site over time. Keeping the content on your site updated and fresh will attract visitors looking for the most recent information available.

Online Store: E-commerce

Writing content for an online store requires mixing keyword rich content with great sales messages. The keyword rich content will help to drive traffic to your site and the sales messages built into the content will get them to purchase your products.

Think about “key words or phrases” that you type in Google to find specific products or services. These are the words you want to work into your copy. Write about your products and why your products are better than the competition’s products. Write about how your products benefit your potential customers. Keep the content sales driven and think about cross selling products.

Help Your Web Designer Understand Your Vision

So, here we are. You’re ready to take the plunge and develop a Web site. You know your business and products better than anybody else, so put it into words and visuals (photos).

Once you have a good bulk of information and graphics (content), you’ll be able to start organizing your Web site. Gather all this content and start to break it all up into what would represent individual Web pages. What content will go where on your site? How do you convey your plan to your Web designer?

Here are a couple of suggested methods:

1. Cut and paste pieces of paper with your photo choices and copy together. Seems like a child’s art project but what the heck, some people are visual. This is actually a great way to lay out a Web site. It will look like a “collage,” but the main point is to show your Web designer what will go where on each page.
2. Use software such as Microsoft Word to layout the page content and visuals you’ve selected. This can be done similar to the collage suggestion. The main objective is to organize each Web site page into one file on your desktop. That way the Web designer can “cut and paste” the pre-approved text and photos.
3. You can even take the last suggestion a step further and create a folder structure that represents the page structure on your site. Each folder represents a Web site page. Within that folder, put all page copy and graphics that you want to have on that page. This makes it easy for the Web designer to understand what content and graphics go on each page, and keeps the entire Web site content package organized.

Feeling Overwhelmed?

Are you intimidated by the idea of putting together all the copy and content for your Web site? A final suggestion to those intimidated by this process is to JUST DO IT! Don’t think so hard about it and just start writing down ideas. Your Web designer will be much happier to receive a pile of information from you that needs to be organized and polished than receiving absolutely nothing from you.

With the fast-paced world we live in, you may not have time to put together your content, but you also can’t afford to not get your business online TODAY. If tackling the content of your Web site is still too much of a task for you, ask your Web designer about content writing services. Most Web design and development firms have them available.

Mark Huesman is creative director at Absolute Marketing Group of Moorhead. For more information, feel free to contact Mark at 218-284-1111 or mark@absolutemg.com.

Being a senior in college, I’ve heard my earfuls on the need to “gain experience.” What is this elusive experience that no college graduate seems to have? How do we gain it and why are so many graduates seemingly unprepared for the “real world”?

In search of this experience that seemed so necessary, I applied to intern at Absolute. The first day I came into Absolute, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, especially having no prior marketing or advertising knowledge. I was afraid that my art, English, and Spanish majors would be a poor fit with my graphic design internship. Looking back on the past three months, I think I’ve been proven wrong.

I was surprised to find that my first project was from an actual client. I guess I figured that still being a student learning graphic design, I would start on conceptual work like we do in class - creating logos for fake companies, brainstorming ideas for fake campaigns, etc.

But I’ve been pleased to find that every design I’ve worked on at Absolute has been of practical use to a certain company or organization. In that sense, Absolute has been a great place to gain real world experience. Whether it’s meeting with clients, working on teams to complete a project, or brainstorming new ideas to be directly approved by the client, this is real time experience that can’t be gained at school, behind the books. In addition, my background has been very beneficial as I’ve been asked to design, write, edit, and conceptualize on numerous accounts. Maybe that’s what everybody means by “real world” experience…