Five Tips for Building Better Segments

One key lesson we've learned about e-mail marketing over years is this: One size does not fit all. The more relevant your messages are to your subscribers' needs, wants, and expectations, the better the response and deliverability.

In order to create relevant messages you must be able to create good segments from your house list. Further, good segments require good information collected from subscribers when they sign up.

If you don't collect much information from subscribers beyond e-mail address, how can you create highly targeted segments?

You probably have a little more information than you realize. You should be able to sort your list by opt-in date, e-mail address domain, or partner vs. direct opt-in, for example. These may not create the most personable segments, but they can still be useful to observe how each one is different in respect to engagement.

You'll still need to gather additional data points from subscribers. The following list of ways to collect more information can be used to create segments and relevant messages.

1. Invite readers to fill out or update their profiles.

This is one of the best ways I know of to get your readers to share valuable information with you, but you have to proceed carefully. After all, online consumers are growing wary of sharing too much personal information until they get to know you better.

You can't request too much information at sign-up, and the link at the bottom of your message probably gets very little activity. You must, therefore, be able to answer the unspoken question: "Why should I tell you anything about me?"

The answer, of course, is you need to know more so you can send only the most useful kinds of messages. Frame the invitation that way and send it in a welcome message or an additional communication within a week or so after opt-in. Add a small incentive, such as a discount coupon or extra download, to sweeten the deal.

Alternately, ask readers to fill out a survey. Keep it very short and simple. No more than 3-5 questions. Offer a checklist rather than require essays. Even a simple request such as "help us improve this newsletter" can yield a motherlode of fresh data from your most active or engaged readers.

2. Use the search engine optimization terms that drive the most traffic to your site.

I picked up this tip at the recent Email Insiders Summit. What search words do people use to find your site? Web analytics can reveal what visitors are most interested in. Which pages get the most visits, or the longest page views? Where do people come from, and where do they go when they leave? Incorporate the terms they used to find you in the first place into message content, subject lines, calls-to-action and other communications, such as the preference page invitation.

Then, review the data manually. Tally key words and phrases used to find your brand. You'll quickly see a pattern you can use.

3. Target messages based on subscribers' past behavior.

Use behavior data to segment out inactive users (those who haven't opened or clicked in a set time period) to capture those who clicked on product links in earlier e-mails but didn't buy, or who bought from you once but never again.

I'm receiving this type of e-mail from an online florist whose subject line "Come Back and Save an Extra 10%!" reminds me I've purchased before. Because I had a previous good experience, I read their messages.

4. Interview the people who talk directly with your customers.

These include your customer-service or call-center people who should be familiar enough with your Web site to offer feedback or pass along comments about the site's usability or what customers are looking for when they call. Again, you can turn this information around to create useful segments that speak to customers' needs or interests.

5. See where people click in your e-mail messages.

If I'm promoting men's shoes but a large portion of my audience clicks the links for women's shoes, I can use that data to promote woman's shoes in the next offer.

Don't forget to include a link to a mobile-friendly version. If you see a lot of action on that link, that's the clue you have a large mobile readership. At the bottom of the text-only versions, offer a link and invite mobile readers to update their profiles and switch to that e-mail format.

source:http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3627972

Search Engine Marketing Issues: Changing URLs

I would highly recommend *not* changing your URLs at all. It is a common misconception that keywords in URLs are somehow helpful to search engine rankings, when in reality, they have very little (if any) effect on
rankings.

The reasons why people believe they help rankings are many, but generally center on a mixing up of cause and effect, as many people learning about SEO are apt to do.

For instance, when you do a keyword phrase search at Google, you will see your keywords bolded on the search engine results page, including keywords that appear in the URLs. People see this and assume that it means Google factors the bolded words into their relevancy algorithms. Yet, the software that does the bolding is just that -- software that is programmed to bold the queried words that show up in the listings. It's a huge leap to think that the bold type has anything to do with Google's actual algorithm.

Another reason why people wrongly assume that keyword phrases in URLs are a factor in getting a page to show up in the search results is because the top results do indeed often use keyworded URLs! But (and this is a big but) websites that use keyword-rich URLs are using them because someone, somewhere is attempting to optimize the pages to show up in the search results -- which means they are doing a lot more than simply putting keywords in URLs as part of their website optimization. Very rarely will you see a page show up in the search results if the only place the keyword phrase appears is the URL. Most likely the phrase is also being used in the Title tag and other visible places on the page. So again, there's a mixing up of cause and effect.

What has happened over the years is that the mixer-uppers have spread the word that keywords in URLs will help with rankings, so others believe it and make changes to their own URLs, making more and more keyword-rich URLs appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Which, of course, feeds the myth-monster even more!

All that said, this is somewhat of a tricky one to prove one way or another
,and it certainly doesn't hurt to use keyword-rich URLs when building a new website. It often makes it easier to remember the URL, which is why on our
new High Rankings site most of our URLs will have keywords. It's not for SEO purposes, but for usability purposes. If we didn't have to change our URLs due to switching backend platforms, we definitely wouldn't go changing to
keyword-rich file names. But since we had to change them anyhow, I figured we could use our site as a test bed to see what happens when you change URLs. (And yes, I realize we could have done some complicated things behind
the scenes to continue to keep our URLs the same as they were, but in this case, we felt changing them and redirecting was our best solution.

Especially as I can probably get a few good articles out of it later!)

I can't stress enough that you should never change URLs simply for SEO purposes. But if you do have to change them, and you do want to eke out any possible search engine benefit that you might get, then you should not use
underscores between the words, but hyphens instead. Even though Google recently announced that they were going to start reading underscores as a word separator, traditionally they haven't. They do read hyphens as a separator, however. So if Google decides to use URLs to rank pages, then you'd want to at least create them in a way they can read. You would also not want to put two words together like "twowords.html " as they don't separate words that are mashed together that way either.

Where you may benefit from a keyword-rich URL that has its words separated by a hyphen is when another site links to your page by using just the URL because it becomes somewhat of a keyword-rich anchor text link. For example,
if someone links to your page with this URL www.example.com/keyword1-keyword2 (instead of using traditional anchor text) you'd still have keyword1-keyword2 as part of the anchor text, which does tell the search engines that the page they're about to go to is at least somewhat relevant to those keyword phrases.

So in answer to the original question, instead of changing the existing URLs, make sure you've optimized the page elements that do matter --especially the Title tag, the anchor text pointing to that page, and the words on the actual page itself -- and don't worry about the URLs. Changing them can lose any "age equity" that you may have built up with your old URLs, with minimal (if any) effect on rankings.

If after all this you still feel the need to change them, be sure to put 301-redirects in place from the old URLs to the new, and use hyphens rather than underscores.

Source:http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1759/1/Search-Engine-Marketing-Issues-Changing-URLs/Page1.html