It is hard to be an online business these days. There is so much competition that your brand can easily get lost in the crowd. Don’t even get me started on the difficulties of successfully spreading any type of email advertisements. Google and Yahoo are constantly becoming more adept at blocking mass emails. This hysteria over spam emails reached such a frenzy that many of my regular emails get blocked by the filtering systems. Yes, today it is hard to be a successful online business.

However, before you panic please let me give you some good news. Due to my extensive internet marketing experience, I have identified a number of winning techniques for attracting and keeping your customers attention. The following are some of the best ways to capture new customers through the use of bulk emails, while at the same time avoiding the typical spam filters.

Use Every Opportunity to Spread Your Message

A recent study done by StrongMail discovered that 60% of businesses do not include additional promotional offers in their typical correspondence with customers. This is a lost opportunity!

When sending website registration email or order confirmations, make sure to include additional information on upcoming sales or offer special promotions. The customer is already expecting to receive an email confirming their original transaction, so they are much more likely to take your new offer seriously. Amazon.com is a master of this technique. If you order something from Amazon.com, you should expect to get an email inviting you to consider some of their other products.

Best thing about using this technique is that primarily transactional emails are not considered to be spam by FTC. Just make sure to keep your additional offers and advertisements to a limited amount.

Consider the Overall Reputation of Your Company.

Most businesses do not realize that ISPs tends to group together all of the emails coming from the same IP address. Therefore, if one part of the company engages in dubious mass mailing practices, it could cause delivery problems for the more reputable department.

When creating a mass mailing strategy, make sure to co-ordinate all parts of your business. After all you could be sending regular service updates from one department, weekly promotional offers from another, and registration reminders from the third department. Taken all together it could be an excessive use of your mailing capability and can get you flagged by the ISPs. Instead, try to combine some of these messages (look above for suggestions), and you could have more of an impact on your customers.

Choose the Right Bulk Email Software

You might think that emails should be easy. After all you just need to send a few emails to your customers. You might wonder why you even need any special software. I recommend that you purchase some type of bulk email software, because it will help you create and implement a complete marketing strategy. Without the use of special software you are piecing together different strategies that do not have common goals and might even conflict with one another. As I have said before, it is not uncommon for departments to be doing something completely different from one another.

Before deciding on the right software, consider all the emailing needs of your business. If your primary use for mass emails is to update your customers on major changes, you likely won’t need a lot of complex features. If on the other hand you need to have regularly scheduled emails you will want to consider features that provide more support. Finally if you need a well developed list management tool to track your customer’s actions and responses, you might want an email service that actually tracks when users click on your links or accept your email offers. Finally, consider such options as automatic unsubscribe feature, HTML versus text emails, availability of test emails and general support services.

Every webmaster wonders what they can do to improve the popularity of their webpage. Should they write more articles, lower their prices or create a message board? Well the answer to this predicament could be found in the new eye tracking studies, which measure people’s physical responses to the web. The latest eye tracking studies demonstrate how people read web content and how their brains acquire or discard information. This means that you can actually create content that makes use of this information. By targeting your preferred market in the best possible way, you will be able to increase your site’s popularity and go up in rankings. After all the old adage holds true: give your customers what they want and they will be back for more.

People like to believe that they are utterly unique and that they have their own singular way of doing things. Nevertheless, this is simply not true. The following are some of the rules and patterns that came out of these eye tracking studies. I also included suggestions of how you can use these findings to improve your own webpages.

Rule #1 – Reading Patterns

No matter what type of web content people are reading they have a tendency to read in an F pattern.

• Users first read the top line of the page from left to right.
• Users then move down the page and again read from left to right.
• Finally, in order to finish the page, users visually scan the rest of the content from top to bottom focusing on the left side of the page.

What you can learn from this:

• The starting sentences of the first two paragraphs must be exceptionally interesting to encourage people to keep reading.
• If you have links that you want people to click on, place them on the left side of the screen. This might require reformatting the article.
• Divide the article into sections and place the headings of each section on the left side of the screen. This way you have a greater chance of attracting users’ attention while they are scanning the article.

Rule #2 – White Space

Most webmasters think that white-space is boring and that users will ignore sites that heavily rely on this technique. However, eye tracking studies show that users actually understand more and are happier when they are presented with less content.

• People’s comprehension increases when they are offered shorter articles.
• Bullets and subheadings improve the overall grasp of the information presented.
• Pictures make the overall article more memorable to the users.

What you can learn from this:

• Keep your articles short and use bullet points or subheadings to underline key ideas.
• Use interesting pictures to make information more memorable. But be careful not to overdo this or you risk losing more than you gain.
• Always keep your target market in mind. Make the article as long as you can, but not a word longer than necessary.
• Cut down on the noise and make your message crisp and clear for your users. Eliminate extra graphics, background colors, and unnecessary words.

Rule # 3 - Elderly & Low-Literacy Users

As web is expanding and reaching new parts of the world’s population, low-literacy users are becoming much more common. The studies show that they have very different reading patterns than your typical internet population. Even if your business does not target third-world population, you should understand these results since older users display very similar reading patterns.

• Low-literacy users do not scan the pages in a way that high-literacy users have become accustomed to doing.
• Low-literacy individual read almost every single word in an article before they are ready to move on.
• Low-literacy readers can become frustrated if too many pictures interrupt the flow of the article. These readers are willing to leave the article if the structure or content gets to be too complicated.
• Low-literacy readers do not like long articles since they often require them to scroll down and this breaks their concentration.

What you can learn from this:

• Your site should have information that is delivered in short and crisp paragraphs. Do not use complicated words, and keep your sentences short.
• If you want to use pictures place them at the very end or the very beginning of the paragraph. Do not intermingle text and graphics.
• Keep your articles short so that scrolling is not necessary to read the whole article.