But how do you know what changes to make to improve your website? The answer is simple: web analytics. With web analytics you can determine what works and doesn’t work on your website. Web analytics starts with statistics: numbers, percentages, and graphs. You need to understand the basic elements of web statistics before you can graduate to proper analysis of those figures and derive actionable insights from them. In this article I will try to explain the basic terminology of web statistics. Different web analysis programs sometimes use different wordings, but you will be able to recognize them and interpret them accordingly. Web statistics terminology Unique Visitors: this is the first statistic many rookie web analysts look at, but in my opinion it’s one of the least important numbers. It refers to the number of individuals that have visited your website in the given time frame. It is always a rough estimate as due to the limitations of web technology it’s nearly impossible to accurately determine how many people actually see your website. The raw figure is not that interesting, but as a trend over time it’s worth keeping an eye on, especially if you have initiatives running to draw more visitors to your site. Total Visits: this figure indicates how many times web users have visited your website. The same user can come back to look at your site again within the set time frame and will generate two or more visits to your site. This metric combined with unique visitors determines the stickiness of your website. It’s sometimes also referred to as sessions. Page Views: this metric indicates how many pages of your website have been shown to visitors. Don’t be surprised to learn that many visitors only look at one page of your site and then leave. Some visitors will click through to other pages and log multiple page views in your statistics. Combined with the total visits this gives you the average page views per visit, which is an indication of how engaging your site is. Hits: a remnant of the old days of web statistics, a hit is every single request a browser sends to the web server your site runs on. Every single separate element of a web page, including the HTML file, CSS stylesheet, and all the images, generate hits when someone views the page. These days it’s a fairly useless number, as any given web page can generate anything from one to fifty hits. Time on Site: this indicates how long an average a visitor has spent on your website before moving on. This can be a difficult statistic to use. If for example you have a blog, most of your website’s visitors won’t go beyond the homepage. This means your web analytics program probably won’t be able to see how long those visitors actually spend on your site, as they undertake no action that can be logged. It will count all those visits as zero seconds long, regardless of how long the user spent reading your content. Bounce Rate: this metric is usually attached to a single page on your website. It shows the number or percentage of visitors that saw only that page and then left shortly thereafter (usually within 5 to 10 seconds). For some reason those visitors clicked the back button, closed the browser window, or went to a different website immediately upon entering your site. This can have many different causes, but generally a high bounce rate on a page means that page isn’t very appealing and can use some improvement. Exit Rate: similar to bounce rate but also different in a very fundamental way, this metric indicates how many people came to a page on your website and then left. This goes beyond bounce rate as it counts those users that navigated through your site prior to exiting. Some pages should have a high exit rate, like for example the “Thank You” page after a submitted order. Good web analytics programs calculate the exit rate while omitting the bounces shown in the bounce rate, so you will get a good sense of where your site’s engagement with its users fails. Referrals: this is not a number but a list of sources of visits to your site. This contains everything from the search engines people used to find your site to links on other websites that users clicked on to get to your site. Ideally your analytics program should also tell you what keywords users typed into the search engines to find you, and on exactly what page of an external website the link to your site was found. There are other statistics worth looking at, such as the error codes (especially the 404 error) and visitor origins. But the metrics listed above are the core measurements that you need to have a good grasp on to gain valuable insights into user activity on your site.

In a new article for Search News Central I explore the lessons I’ve learned as a teacher of SEO: Search News Central: What I’ve learned from lecturing on SEO What I found most enlightening about doing lectures like these is that it made me re-evaluate what I know about SEO. After 7 years of professional SEO experience (14 years total SEO experience if you include my early days amateur SEO stuff for my own websites) there is a lot of amassed knowledge, embedded lingo, and basic assumptions that I use in my day to day work. When preparing my lecture I had to discard all of that and work from the bottom up. Staying with the educational theme, I wrote a blog post for State of Search listing the five best non-SEO books that I believe every SEO should read: State of Search: The 5 Best SEO Books That Aren’t About SEO I get asked quite often what beginning SEOs need to do to become advanced practitioners of our craft. Specifically they want to know which books to read. When I pondered this question in detail, I realised that the books that have shaped me the most as an SEO, and have helped bring my skills to higher levels, aren’t actually SEO books. Yet these books have been vital study material in my continued development as a SEO professional.

We didn’t have to wait long. Within minutes of Google’s announcement of their latest feature, Google Instant, the blogosphere was abuzz with the news that this would really mean the death of SEO. Naturally this was a total fabrication. People who understand search engines, SEO, and user behaviour, actually realised that this made SEO all the more important. At most SEO would have to shift its focus somewhat, but ranking high for popular search terms has only become more vital for any online business. Since we SEO professionals have had to defend the existence of SEO for years, I decided to build a small site dedicated to end the ‘SEO is dead’ argument once and for all. Inspired by Mark Bronlow’s ‘Email is not dead‘ site, I launched SEO is not dead: The site contains a number of statistics on internet and search engine use, links to and quotes from industry specialists talking about the life of SEO, and videos and quotes from senior people working for major search engines. So the next time you hear someone proclaim the death of SEO, send them here.

Search engines are the motors that drive traffic to your website. Getting your site ranked highly in search engines is an important factor of success. The discipline that focuses on this is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. In an effort to help beginning webmasters get underway with SEO Google has published a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF). It’s a very useful document that describes the basics of good SEO. Some of the topics in this guide have also been a part of previous blog posts here, such as: Page titles Site navigation Good content Headlines Using images Web Analytics Other topics in Google’s SEO Starter Guide include description tags, URL structure, anchor text, the robots.txt file, and more. It’s an excellent guide for both new and experienced webmasters that want a solid handle on how to build and maintain a successful website. Download Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF)

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 17 Feb 2010.) Fortunately the average user doesn’t see the vast majority of spam messages. Spam filters are incredibly smart pieces of software, using advanced algorithms to filter out nearly all spam messages. The more you use a spam filter, the smarter it gets as it learns what is spam and what are genuine emails. Yet sending millions of emails at once is so cheap and easily done that a spammer only needs a few of his messages to get through the filters, and even fewer users to actually buy something from that spam message, to make a profit already. And that’s the core that lies at the heart of unsolicited spam, as well as legit email marketing – it’s cheap and it works. While a spammer is happy with a 0.01% response rate on his spam emails, a well-crafted opt-in email campaign can deliver much higher returns for an organisation. Smart email marketers have learned to go beyond just sending standard commercial messages. The key is what is called ‘permission marketing’ – getting the user’s permission to send him emails, and delivering what the user expects. A key approach to permission-based email marketing is newsletters. In a newsletter a company can package its commercial message around interesting and newsworthy content. By combining well-written, engaging content with a subtle commercial message, newsletters can form the solid backbone of a company’s email marketing strategy. This approach has worked well for decades, and is one of the reasons why email marketing is still around after all this time. Another reason is that email as a communication system has proven remarkably robust. Many new ways of communicating instantly and across vast distances have emerged – instant messaging, text messaging, twitter – but the preferred method of communicating online is still email. For some reason email resonates with us. It manages to strike a nearly perfect balance between speed and length. Whether it’s a one-word message or an email with several megabytes worth of attachments, emails travel around the world nearly instantly and arrive with almost flawless precision. Because of this our email inbox is the focal point of our online existence. Email and the World Wide Web are essentially different aspects of the Internet, but we’ve become so accustomed to email that often we fail to realise this. Instead we perceive email as an entirely separate thing. As long as our daily online journeys start with firing up our email programmes, email marketing will continue to thrive. Unfortunately, so will spam.

…and we all know where that road is headed. If I were a genuine conspiracy nutcase I’d have no problem believing that Google is a fully controlled subsidiary of the American intelligence apparatus. I mean, the things Google are up to are just so perfectly suited for full scale surveillance of every individual on earth, it would make even the most obedient and disinformed tabloid-reading cable news-watching civilian lemming wonder if Larry and Sergey aren’t secretly on the NSA’s payroll. Just look at the technologies Google is currently operating and/or developing. As the world’s most widely used internet search engine, Google already knows everything you type in to its search box and the websites you then choose to visit. As it crawls and indexes all these websites, it knows everything you read online. Combined with the way that ridiculous Google+ ‘social network’ is being shoved down your throat, Google knows who your friends and family are, what companies you are associated with and in what capacity, and a whole load of demographical information you probably didn’t know you were sharing with Google in the first place. Then of course take Gmail in to consideration; Google knows who you email and what you email about. And if you’re using Chrome as a browser (or even Firefox; Mozilla’s biggest donor is Google), even if you stay outside of Google’s enormous internet ecosystem – a nearly impossible task – Google can still look at everything you do online. Beyond the internet, Google is developing self-driving cars. Not because of any desire to improve road safety, mind you. No, with self-driving cars Google can make sure you spend your entire commute online, so you have more time to use its services and it can show you more ads. Of course as a side benefit of self-driving cars, Google will know everywhere you go. Not that it needs robot cars for this in the first place – that Android phone in your pocket is quite capable of informing Google about your whereabouts and your likely activities. As one of its ‘moonshot’ ideas Google is thinking about using balloons to provide internet access to developing countries. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Even when you look beyond the obvious profiteering motive of getting more people online and using Google so it can show ads to them too and mine all their personal data. Not that people in developing countries have that much disposable income to spend on stuff Google sells ads for, so you wonder why it wants to get those people online and harvest all that information…. Altruism, you say? Pfft, stop being such a tool. No, with internet balloons (which could very easily be equipped with cameras, negating the need for expensive spy satellites) everywhere over Africa, the Middle East, and South America the NSA Google can monitor what those pesky independently-minded revolutionaries – also known as ‘terrrrists‘ – are up to. Wouldn’t want anyone to think they could escape the grasp of western capitalist imperialism, would we? Am I in to batshit insanity territory now? Off my rockers with crazy conspiracy theories? Well, what if I told you that Google is looking in to putting microphones everywhere so it can “respond to your verbal queries” and “bring you the information you want”? Yes, because putting microphones in every building on every street is not at all the hallmark of a maniacally obsessed totalitarian surveillance state. As if those omnipresent CCTV cameras with facial recognition software weren’t bad enough. But it gets worse. Microphones that listen to your every spoken word are not enough – what if you’re thinking something that the NSA Google might want to arrest you for respond to? Well, Google has an answer to that too: embedded microchips in your brain. I’m not even joking. Google’s chief engineer is apparently really thinking about this scenario. Aside from the fairly obvious problems with a profit-driven company in a US legal jurisdiction given access to, quite literally, your thoughts, it gets even scarier when you know that with small electric currents you can influence your brain in very direct and powerful ways. In short, with embedded microchips Google can control what you think. (Of course with Google Glass, soon to move from those unwieldy glasses to much more elegant contact lenses, Google can pretty much control what you see in the first place. Mind control is surplus to requirement when you already control people’s visual reality.) For a truly comprehensive and entirely pervasive totalitarian surveillance state, it doesn’t get much better than that. Millions of obedient consumerist slaves, hotwired with microchips and contact lenses to Google’s Central Processing Unit, their every thought and action monitored and, if deemed undesirable, adjusted. Now the only thing Google needs to ensure total undisputed world domination is killer robots.

I was very pleasantly surprised this morning when I learned that this humble blog has been shortlisted for the Best Blog award at the upcoming 2013 UK Search Awards. Looking at the other nominations, I’m deeply honoured to be listed in such distinguished company. I’ve been a fan of nearly all of the blogs on the shortlist, and have in the past contributed guest articles to two other nominated blogs: Holistic Search and the Koozai blog. Martin Macdonald’s excellent personal blog as well as Receptional’s outstanding blog are also on the list, ensuring my chances of actually winning the award are optimistically described as ‘slim to none’. Still to be nominated is a huge honour, and I will definitely be attending the award ceremony in London in November – if only to catch up and share drinks & stories with my many friends in the UK search industry. It also means I will have to take this wee personal space more seriously in the future. I’ll endeavour to publish more worthy content here – though I’ll keep my best stuff reserved for State of Digital, as always. :)

This often happens when those that designed and implemented the site’s navigation lost sight of its true purpose: to help users find their way through the website. Sometimes the navigation is rendered in Flash or JavaScript, ensuring that it won’t work properly in all browsers and that search engines won’t be able to use the navigation to find all the pages on your website. This will cause all kinds of long term problems with your site’s visibility in search engines and usability for visitors. When you decide on the navigation of your website you need to keep its purpose in mind. Navigation is meant to be used by visitors to find content on your site. Here are some tips on creating a good navigation structure for your site: The navigation on your site need to be clear and visible. If you hide your navigation among other loud design elements, users won’t be able to find it right away. Keep the list of items short and use submenus to divide your content into logical structures. If you have a lot of content spread over many different pages, think hard about a good, sensible structure that results in short lists of navigation items. Consider the order of your navigation items. What are the most important pages you want your visitors to see? Put those higher in the navigation. If you have content you feel is critical for your users to see, don’t hide it deep in your navigation tree but give it a prominent place. Use plain HTML for your navigation. Don’t hide your navigation in slick JavaScript or Flash-applications. It’s OK to use images and mouse-overs, as long as you can accomplish it with plain HTML and CSS. If you insist on JavaScript or Flash, know that a percentage of your site’s visitors won’t be able to use it properly. Indicate the current page. Users always need to know where they are on your site. You can accomplish this by indicating in your navigation what the current page is. You can use highlighted text, a different background, or any other visual way of indicating where the user is in your overall site navigation. Don’t hide pages from your navigation. Every page on your site should be a part of your navigation structure. If you really want to hide a page from the regular site navigation, ask yourself what that page’s purpose is and why you really want to hide it. Your site’s navigation alone isn’t sufficient. Also link to the content on your site from within the text. When you do this, try to use the same link names as in your navigation structure, so that users won’t be confused as to where they’re going when they click on that link. Always keep in mind that navigation exists to help your users find what they’re looking for. It should never be a hindrance. It’s OK to sacrifice the ‘cool’-factor. First and foremost your website’s navigation needs to do its job properly. If you have a tip of your own for creating great website navigation, please leave a comment!

Yesterday I attended a fascinating lecture by Ben Hammersley, organised by the British council, about the future of the internet. Read my write-up of the lecture on The Tomorrow Lab blog here. There was one small blemish on this otherwise superb evening. At one point an audience member – probably not coincidentally a grey-haired man wearing a checked shirt – in the course of asking a question, referred to SEO (with venom dripping from his voice as he pronounced the acronym) as “snake-oil” and the embodiment of all that was wrong with the corporatisation of the internet. At that time I thought to myself, ‘I need to have a chat with this guy after the lecture and set him straight.’ But then, as I contemplated it a little, I changed my mind. No, I was not going to set this guy straight. I don’t need to. This was, after all, a member of a self-selected audience. This was a lecture about the internet, about digital technologies and what they can bring us. This talk was the sort of thing that would only be of interest to digital natives, to people who immerse themselves in all things digital. Because this man was part of this audience, it was exceptionally unlikely he was anything but a most avid user of the internet. Here is a man who probably types queries in to Google several times of day. Here is a man who, every time he clicks on a link on a search engine results page, reaps the outcomes of SEO again and again and again. If there was ever a type of man who should not need to be explained what SEO really is and what it can do for him, it’s this man right here. The fact that he so obviously loathed SEO and what he perceived it to stand for, can only be a symptom of a much greater ailment than a misunderstanding of what SEO is. That ailment is, of course, wilful ignorance. I don’t need to defend SEO. Its virtues and usage are demonstrated millions of times a day, every single time someone types a query in to a search box. And those who, even now, still don’t understand it – especially those who actively engage with the internet on a daily basis – are beyond redemption. If there was ever an apt time to use the phrase “not seeing the woods for the trees”, this would be it. SEO doesn’t need to be explained, or defended, or educated on. SEO simply is. It doesn’t care whether you ‘believe’ in it or not. You either use it, or you perish.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 3 Feb 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is defined as ‘the process of improving ranking in search engine results’. When search engines first appeared on the scene in the 1990’s to help people make sense of the exponential growth of websites, it suddenly became important to show up first in these search engine results pages. Savvy entrepreneurs quickly figured out how search engines worked and what a website needed to rank first, and the dark art of SEO was born. The first search engines were relatively simplistic pieces of software that crawled the world wide web and matched words found on websites to search queries entered by its users. All a search engine optimiser needed to do to get his site to the number one spot was stuff as many keywords on a website as possible. Whether or not that site was actually useful and relevant for the user’s query didn’t matter, at least not for the optimisers. It’s at this stage the SEO industry earned its dubious reputation, a blemish it has yet to discard. This of course led to abundant complaints from search engine users who were looking for one thing but ended up on websites that offered something entirely different. In response search engines got smarter, but search engine optimisers got smarter as well, and the arms race has been on ever since. The big breakthrough came with Google who in 1997 added a whole new approach to determining what websites were really relevant for a given search query. Keywords on a page were still important, but more important than keywords were the links from other websites pointing to that page. Google’s idea was that every link to a website counts as a vote, a recommendation from one website owner to another. The more links point to a website, the more important that website is. That, in a nutshell, is Google’s secret recipe, and while it’s gone through many iterations over the years the core premise remains intact. Search engine optimisers were quick to catch on. The focus shifted from optimising sites for keywords to optimising them for links. The goal is to get as many other websites as possible to link to your website. Unscrupulous optimisers, the same types that didn’t hesitate to stuff as many ‘Britney Spears Nude’ keywords on a website that sold vacuum cleaners just to get extra traffic, devised all kinds of different schemes to quickly and cheaply generate as many links as possible. Search engines like Google also kept updating their software to filter out these false links, trying to count only those links it considered to be real recommendations. But the web is so unimaginably vast that search engines have no choice but to rely on automatic processes to filter these false links. Machines, no matter how clever we try to make them, are easily fooled, and the ‘black-hat’ search engine optimisers (contrary to ‘white-hat’ optimisers that use only legitimate methods) are smart and inventive. But perhaps the era of unscrupulous optimisers is nearing its end. The past few years have been very exciting for website owners and search engine optimisers. Search engines have enhanced their results pages with all types of extra content such as YouTube videos and local businesses. Recently new tweets about the topic a user is searching for started showing up in Google results as well. The latest refinement Google is deploying, called Social Search, integrates content from the user’s online social circle. If, for example, you are searching on Google for a holiday home in Portugal, and one of your Twitter friends blogged about it, Google will show that blog in your results. This new level of personalisation of search engine results, combined with other changes Google has made and continues to refine, means that search engine optimisers are increasingly unable to rely on the basic optimisation factors of keywords and links. There are signs that indicate Internet users are being drawn more and more to online community website such as Facebook and Twitter and begin their search for online products and services there as well. Why trust an anonymous search engine result if you can get a recommendation from a real friend? Or at least a real friend of a real friend. Black-hat optimisers will continue to try and outsmart search engines and force their websites to the top of the list. Setting up fake social media accounts is already a common practice, as any Twitter and Facebook user can attest to, but generally these are easy to spot and filter. I wouldn’t go as far as to proclaim the death of SEO – this has been done many times before and been proven wrong each time – but as web search moves towards social media, and social media becomes more about web search, it’s definitely going to change the search engine optimisation landscape.

Email allows you to engage with your website visitors in two-way conversations, enabling you to connect with your customers. Email marketing is a great way to enhance customer retention as well as cross-sell and up-sell your products and services. But you can’t just start harvesting email addresses and spam them at your whim. You need to develop a solid email marketing strategy based on your customers’ needs and requirements. In this article I will outline the basics of email marketing to help you get started. 1. BUILD YOUR LIST The most important aspect of your email marketing is the list of email addresses your messages are sent to. A good way to build your list is to have a sign-up form on your website that allows visitors to subscribe to your emails. You can also harvest emails from your online order process and contact forms, as long as you give users a clear way to opt-out – or better still, opt them out by default and make opt-in optional. There are varying levels of legislation for each country regarding opting your users in on your email lists, so be sure to do some research and find out what the requirements are where you’re based. It’s usually best to err on the safe side, as not only will this ensure your emails won’t be marked as spam, your users will appreciate it and you’ll have a greater level of engagement with your subscribers. 2. WRITE YOUR MESSAGE A good email starts with a great subject line. Users are bombarded with dozens, if not hundreds, of emails a day, and the first thing they see when your emails arrive is the subject line. This is the most important aspect of your email that determines whether or not a user will open the email and read it. Tips for good subject lines: Clarify the benefit: users have crowded inboxes so your email’s subject line needs to communicate a clear benefit. What will a subscriber get out of it if he opens and reads your email? Personalise: use the recipient’s name in the subject line, as this helps your email stand out and helps make a connection with the recipient. Ask a provocative question: Questions make recipients wonder and often encourage them to open your email. An example would be “Are you at risk of overpaying on your insurance?”. Avoid spam words: words like ‘cheap’, ‘free’, ‘instant’, and dozens more are often interpreted as signs of spam. Be mindful of character limitations: many email clients cut the subject line off at some point, either due to the user’s screen resolution or the program’s layout. Understand what part of the subject is seen by most of your recipients. Test, test, test: try out different subject lines with different formats and benefits, and never stop experimenting. Next is the actual content of the email. Needless to say this needs to match the subject line. If you make a promise in the subject that you don’t keep in the content, chances are most readers will either delete your message straight away, unsubscribe from your list, or report your email as spam. Too many spam reports and your email will never reach another inbox ever again, instead being redirected to your recipients’ junk mail folders and thus oblivion. It’s generally a good idea to write email content following the same guidelines as for website content: strong headlines, structured content, and clear calls-to-action. This means starting with a strong headline that describes the content accurately and challenges users to read it. Then you need to divide your content into short paragraphs that are easy to read – large blocks of text are unattractive and discourage readers. It’s also a good idea to emphasize key phrases in your text with bold and italics so that readers that quickly scan through it still catch the general idea. And finally you need to finish with a clear call-to-action. What do you want readers to do with what you’ve just told them? If you want them to visit your website and buy a product, tell them! If you want them to forward your email to their contacts, encourage them! Use buttons in combination with text links and get users to interact with your email. 3. FORMAT YOUR EMAIL A good subject line and strong content aren’t enough to get the most out of your emails. Your message needs to look good too. A plain text email will look boring no matter how good the content is. Nearly all email programs support HTML emails, which means you can write email messages the same way as you build web pages. However, there is one big difference: there are huge limitations on the HTML code you can use in emails. Every email program, from Outlook to Hotmail, from Gmail to Thunderbird, handles HTML differently. On top of that many advanced features used in webpages, such as CSS and JavaScript, won’t work at all in most email programs. This means you need to keep the HTML code as simple and straightforward as you can. A good rule of thumb is to avoid using any CSS and scripting languages, and stick to plain simple HTML code using tables to build your email’s layout. If you don’t have sufficient knowledge of HTML, there are literally thousands of email templates available for download online which you can use and adapt for your own emails. Of course you can also avoid the whole HTML hassle and just use plain text emails, as long as you understand that your emails will look unexciting and may not be as effective. 4. USE EMAIL MARKETING SOFTWARE So you’ve built a list of subscribers, written a good email and formatted it in an attractive layout, and you’re ready to send it out. You can use your own email address for this and manually send it – this is adequate for small lists. (Just make sure to use BCC so your readers don’t see the whole mailing list!) But if you want to get serious with email marketing, the best approach is to use professional email marketing software. Good email marketing software does most of the hard work for you: managing your subscriber lists, building good HTML emails, and reporting on the success of your email campaigns. There are hundreds of options available, usually in the form of online services, and for all different business sizes. So you don’t need to have a big budget to make use of good email marketing software. A good place to start is AWeber, a very popular online email marketing service provider that offers cheap rates for lists under 500 subscribers and has over a hundred ready-made HTML templates to choose from. 5. MEASURE AND IMPROVE Once you’ve sent out your first email campaign it’s important to analyse how it performed. Did you achieve what you hoped for? If not, why? Was the open rate low? You may need to work on better subject lines. Were there few clicks from the email to your website? Maybe you need better content or stronger calls-to-action, or maybe the HTML layout wasn’t right. With email marketing, as with your website, you’re never done testing and improving. There’s always a way to get more out of your marketing campaigns and increase user engagement. Never get complacent, but strive to continually improve your email marketing. 6. ENGAGE IN CONVERSATIONS Email started out as a two-way communication medium. Despite the rise of unsolicited bulk email, that core essence of email hasn’t changed. Don’t just send out your campaigns and turn a deaf ear to what your subscribers say, but engage with them. A good way to do this is to make sure that the reply-to address of your email campaigns is a valid email address. Yes, you may get a lot of mail delivery errors and out of office replies, but you will find that many users will reply to your email marketing campaign in various ways. This is not a bad thing – quite the contrary, it means that they took the time and effort to respond to your message. Engage with your readers in conversations, whether they’re complaining about your email or complimenting you. Not only can you get valuable feedback on your email marketing, you will also build customer loyalty this way as well as enhance your online reputation. Another method is to put polls, surveys, and contests in your emails. This increases user interaction with your emails and will allow you to gather valuable information from your customers. TO SUMMARIZE Email marketing is a powerful instrument that can bring strong value to your online marketing efforts. A well-run email campaign will ensure your customers keep coming back to your website. A badly run campaign however can have a detrimental effect on your reputation and might hurt your long-term prospects. So put the effort in and you’ll find the rewards will exceed your expectations.

Last week at the inaugural BelTech conference I was allowed to go on stage and rant for a good half hour about one of my pet topics: User Experience design. I’ve never been a fan of technology for its own sake. Technological innovation should exist only to serve us, to help solve problems and improve lives. And UX design should be at the core of technology, because it results in technology designed to be used and enjoyed. In my presentation I explained some core UX concepts and hopefully showed a strong case for embedding UX design in to the foundation of every technology project, be it an app, website, or device. The whole talk was recorded so you can view it here, and the slides are embedded below. Following my talk I was joined on stage by Gareth Dunlop and Rick Monro from Fathom for a panel discussion about UX, moderated by Kainos’s Tom Gray. It proved a very fruitful session and I felt we discussed many important aspects of UX and how to embed it in business practices. I was honoured to be part of this first Belfast Technology conference, expertly organised by Aisling Events and with many superb talks and sessions. My own favourite session was without a doubt the Women in Technology panel with Mary McKenna, Emma Mulqueeny, Alaina Percival, and moderated by Sheree Atcheson. It was a powerful session where some incredibly important issues about women in the tech industry were discussed. Kainos has said this is just the first of an annual series of Belfast Technology conferences, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s edition!