This is a guest post from Carole Ziter of

Amy regularly uses the example of a supermarket when emphasizing the importance of user-friendly website navigation. She might say something like this:

When you go shopping in a major supermarket you know exactly what to expect – whether you’re in your home town or visiting any US city. You know where to find things because each aisle has a big sign above it telling you what is there. You also know that the onions will always be with the oranges in the produce department and the milk will always be with the eggs in the dairy case.

This is absolutely true – UNLESS – the supermarket is remodeling. Our local Price Chopper is expanding its footprint to offer more products and convenience, I suppose. But, until the renovation is complete, it’s a nightmare to shop there! Nothing is where it used to be except the original signs above the aisles, which no longer list the right products because they have been moved to another aisle.

And, I’m not the only frustrated shopper. Everyone is wandering around with puzzled looks on their faces combing the entire store in search of necessities they used to be able to locate in seconds. And, of course, no employees are ever available to offer assistance.

No doubt our new Price Chopper will be wonderful when it’s finished. But, until then, they will be losing business to competitors. I’m going to buy my groceries at another supermarket where I can easily find what I’m looking for.  And, I’m sure many of my fellow shoppers will do the same.

This experience translates directly to the importance of clearly defined website navigation. Confuse customers and there’s an excellent chance you will lose them. Only it will happen with lightning speed- as everything does online.  Savvy shoppers have no patience with websites that lead them on a wild goose chase or scavenger hunt. They have no time to decipher copy written in reverse type or wade through pages of irrelevant information.

They will frequent stores where merchandise is well-organized and easy to locate.  They will find a simple store directory more useful than a flashy billboard image.  They will appreciate a speedy checkout with only necessary information required.

What Amy always says is certainly true: 

User-friendly websites and supermarkets will never win beauty awards, but they will make shopping easy and efficient.

Too bad more online merchants don’t take heed.

{Note from Amy:  I recently wrote a post called “Don’t Move, Clean Your Damn House!”  The message is so applicable here.  If you haven’t read it, be sure to check it out.}

This is a guest post from Mark Amtower, the #1 Guru of Government Marketing from www.FederalDirect.net. 

Depending on how it is defined, business-to-government (B2G) can account for 30-45% of the GDP- at least a third of all spending in the United States. 

Here is the breakdown:

• 3,034 counties
• 19,429 municipalities
• 16,504 townships
• 35,052 special district governments
• 13,506 school districts
• 512 Native American nations
• 50 states
• District of Columbia
• 6 U.S. territories
• 1 federal government
• Total 88,095

And there are approximately 20,000,000 FTEs (full-time employees) – more than 1 out of 8 of all adults with full-time jobs.

If you add in healthcare, which many companies and researchers consider as an adjunct to the B2G market, the potential is enormous.

All levels of government buy every imaginable business product and service, and many consumer-type products as well.

But is this market for you? Here are just a few things you must consider before targeting B2G.

• The sales cycle is longer than B2B. You must be prepared to spend at least 12 months pursuing your initial sale;
• If you are targeting business you have to bid for, you need to get some top-notch training on the bid and proposal side of the equation. Bidding on government contracts without proper training is literally a no-win situation;
• If you want a GSA Schedule (aka, a GSA “number”), be advised that you rebate the GSA .75% on all sales – and they can come audit you without warning to ascertain that proper reimbursement is being made;
• Your sales team will need training in the nuances of selling to the government. There are a variety of nuances that make B2G sales different.

I don’t want to scare you away from the government market with the above items, but these are things you must be aware of on the front end.

If you want to get an idea of the potential for government sales, you need go no further than your last 6 months of your credit card sales. The three banks that issue federal SmartPay cards (government small purchase credit cards) have unique Bank Identification Numbers (BINs). The BIN is the first 4 digits of the credit card number. For Mastercard these are 5568 and 5565; for VISA 4716, 4614 and 4486.  These card prefixes are unique to government credit cards.

Any sales using these numbers are official federal purchases. If you run a report on these you can get an idea of what you are already doing regarding selling to the Feds. That still leaves state, local, education and healthcare. 

One other thing to check when you run the BIN report: historically federal credit card sales run 10-20% larger than B2B sales using credit cards. See if this holds true for you.

You can be selling to the government with knowing it, without a contract, because “micropurchases” (sales under $3,000) do not require a contract. {Note from Amy: Mark has promised he will write more on credit card sales in a future blog post.}

If all of the above has increased your desire to look further into the government market, here is one more thing to consider: Top management must devote both time and resources to market entry. Often this means bringing in senior staff and or a consulting firm to help start your B2G program.

In a recent study by American Express Open™, AmEx research showed that companies that were successful coming into the B2G market spent on average slightly over $80,000 in the first two years on various types of outside assistance.

The potential payoff is huge, and well worth the investment.

Amtower can be reached at http://www.governmentmarketmaster.com/.  If you want to know anything (and I mean ANYTHING) about how to best work with the government, he’s the ONLY guy to ask.   Period.  (Little known secret about Amtower — he’s also flipping brilliant at all things LinkedIn.) 

This is a guest post from Sappho.  If someone told me the world was going to end and I could only save a dozen of my favorite people, Sappho would be first amongst the list.  She’s unbelievably smart but the truth is that her intelligence is not the reason I’d bring her along with me.  When I say she’s quick-witted, we’re talking lightspeed snarky.  I need a pause button when I am hanging with her — just so I can finish one laugh before beginning another.  Oh, and for the record, she’s one hell of a copywriter too.

I recently had to stop a colleague from sending out an e-newsletter with the subject line, “B2G1 Roses.”

“But it’s a good deal,” he insisted. “People should know.”

I replied that it didn’t sound like a good deal; it sounded like a rejected character from the original Star Wars movie, which most of our customers did not see in 1977 because they were too old for it.

“But everybody knows what it means, right?” my colleague insisted.

I said that I hoped not, because if they did, the subject line would actually read, “Buy 2 Get 1 Roses,” which is a little too close to the actual experience many gardeners have with growing roses. So I suggested he spell out the words “Buy” and “Get,” then add the critical “Free” afterwards.

He agreed, but not without grumbling that my additions made the subject line “really long,” nearly exceeding the 6-word maximum limit recommended by market research. {Note from Amy: The golden rule about subject lines?  There are no rules.  You have to do what’s best for YOUR business.}

I probably would have forgotten about this little incident if it hadn’t gotten reinforced the following day when, on our way to the beach in a car crowded with fast-food bags and teenagers, my husband remarked irritably, “What is bogo milk and why do I want it?”

I looked up and read the announcement in front of a drugstore: BOGO Milk. Really? My tech-savvy (well, he has an iPhone) husband was blind to the ubiquity of BOGO? So I quickly asked the kids what the sign stood for. Both of them stopped texting long enough to tell me they didn’t know either (but were they being honest, or texting LMAO to their friends just seconds later?).

“It means buy one, get one,” I told my husband.

He laughed. “Well, there’s a concept.”

All of this reminded me uncomfortably of an ad my aunt had wrestled with in the local newspaper last summer. A computer-addicted septuagenarian who spends her leisure time outbidding the less nimble for antique quilt tops on eBay, she has shown me a thing or two about manipulating a PayPal account, but she was baffled by this part of an ad placed by her favorite Mexican restaurant:

Text El Jimador to 39756

Bring text to checkout & receive Special Discount

“There aren’t enough digits in the phone number,” was her first comment, followed by, “And whoever heard of printing out a text?”

Her solution, of course, was to carefully cut out the ad from the paper and wave it under the nose of the waiter at El Jimador, who made sure she got the Special Discount, in addition to the profuse apologies of the manager and a paper coupon for a free margarita on her next visit.

But are our e-commerce customers this lucky, or this persistent? Do we even know what they don’t understand about our cryptic subject lines and mysterious offers, or realize how we are disappointing them with our flights of verbal fancy? I confess that I was really excited when I received a recent email from the veterinarian with the subject line, “Activate Your Pet Portal Now.” Immediately I pictured some sort of tunnel — perhaps a huge pneumatic tube? — that could transport Spanky, Butter, Bob, and Goblin straight to the vet without pet carriers, shredded car upholstery, and those nasty fights in the waiting room. (Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be just an online recordkeeping system.) And just yesterday a cruise line promised me that I could “Sail from [my] backyard for less than $70/day,” which is pretty impressive considering I live 5 hours from the coast.

Anyone who has had to write large numbers of e-newsletters or churn out repetitive website headlines knows the temptation to come up with something, anything new to say — or, failing that, a new way to say the same old thing. It’s easy to forget that to our customers, phrases such as Buy 1 Get 1 Free are nothing short of poetry, and like all classic refrains, only improve with repetition.

Want to get a hold of Sappho?  Write info@amyafrica.com.  Yeah, that’s right.  You have to go through me to get her e-mail address.  Does the Colonel give out his secret KFC recipe?  I think not.  I promise I won’t charge you but there will be a comprehensive background check… 

You probably don’t know anything about Chris Noyes, but you might want to.

That’s because his service business has grown tremendously this year, even with a slow economy — thanks to a combination of traditional direct marketing web marketing and good old fashioned customer service. Simply put, Chris is a great marketer.  There are marketing lessons in his story that can benefit every person who sells products or services, whether you are strictly web-based or not.

Chris cleans roofs.  He also cleans siding, decks, porches, walkways — almost anything on the outside of your house — using environmentally safe cleaning methods.  He also sells gutter protection systems and installs awnings.  You can see all his services on his web site, proexteriorcleaning.com.  He has plenty of competition in his area but he’s scorching the competition, and “cleaning up” profit-wise, because he is tireless in following basic, smart marketing techniques:

He Asks Prospects to Take Action.  No matter where you go on proexteriorcleaning.com, you are never out of sight of a link to get a free estimate. It’s in the text, in bullets, and in all quadrants. And you can get your estimate by phone or email.  (Are you asking for action or for the order enough on your site?)

Fast Response. His customers always remark on how quickly Chris gets back to them — even on weekends.  Fast response is not just convenient for the prospect, it’s a confidence builder.  (How quickly do you respond to customer contacts?)

Good Response.  Chris’s responses aren’t just fast, though. They’re good.  Whether by phone or email, Chris is one of the most pleasant, personable, easy-to-work-with people you’ll ever deal with as a customer. The testimonials on his website often compliment him on his professionalism.  Lesson:  Your responses to customers — whether direct interaction, emails, or web pages — need to be good responses, not just fast. Remember, every click on your site is essentially a question.  How good, how informative, and how convincing your response is in every case will largely determine how successful you are.  (Hint: Get your navigation right, and make sure your pages answer the “questions” people are asking as they are searching.) Chris also warrants all his work unconditionally.

Discounts and Offers.  If you visit proexteriorcleaning.com, you can get special limited time savings on roof cleaning by email.  If you talk to Chris in person, chances are you’ll get a discount on any particular service, or a combo discount on several services. An offer never hurts.  As Chris will tell you, though, it really pays to be flexible about offers, so you can offer one that the prospects wants. As web marketers, more of us need to be testing offers, both in email programs and on site, so that we not only know which offers are most effective, but so we can tailor our offers to suit individual prospects, or groups of prospects.  (Lesson:  Mine your customer data and sales histories.  Offer them what they are most likely to want, not just what you want to offer.)

Upsell and Cross Sell.  If you want your roof cleaned of black stains (generally caused by algae) Chris will tell you about the fungicide he can apply to your roof after cleaning it, to keep the algae from coming back.  It makes sense, it saves you money in the long run, and many customers chose it.  Also, while Chris is up on your roof, he may notice that your gutter is clogged with leaves.  Did you know that he can install a gutter protection system that can keep your gutter permanently free of debris?  (Upselling and cross selling is such basic, effective marketing, yet so few companies are doing it well. How about your site?)

Superior Customer Follow Up:  When was the last time you got a Thank-You gift from a professional who did work at your house?  If you were Chris’ Noyes customer, you would get one!  And that’s not all.  Chris follows up on every job, recontacting the customer to make sure they are completely satisfied, and giving them a gift for being his customer.  But that’s not all.  He also gives them coupons good for savings off future services.  And he gives them discount coupons for his services that customers can give to their friends and neighbors. His customers even get a second gift if one of the coupons they give to a neighbor results in a sale. Talk about building loyalty and repeat business!  (How are you using the opportunity an order gives you to make your customer a booster for life?)  Chris tries hard to make every customer feel pampered and special.  The testimonials he receives are proof of how successful that can be.

How Important are Those Testimonials?  In the case of Pro Exterior Cleaning, extremely important.   That’s because of the way Chris has discovered his web site works for him.  Of course, he gets customers right off the web, but most people find him first from his print ads, radio ads, and promotions (such as doing pro bono roof cleaning for local charities.)  But what his customers tell him is that his web site is the “closer” — its testimonials, assurances, and  projected professionalism are what “seal the deal”, making prospects choose him over the competition, and calling him for an estimate.

Then, There’s His “Sideways” Marketing.  Roofers, painters and similar tradesmen often put signs out in front of the house they are working on, to get business from the neighborhood.  But Chris even goes beyond that.  Everywhere he goes, he sees roofs that need cleaning.  He’s got a doorhanger that explains his services with before and after photos that he can leave for the homeowner.  He’s also got a doorhanger that he can distribute ahead of time in the neighborhood where he plans to be working, literally inviting the neighbors to come down and inspect his work (which can easily be seen from the road.)  He’s also got postcards that he can send out in any particular area (with his customer’s permission), saying that “we just cleaned the roof at 18 Maple Street — drive by it and take a look.  If you like what you see, we’re offering $50 off any roof cleaning booked in the next two weeks.”  (Think this doesn’t have applications for web marketing?  Think again.  Is your URL printed on your shipping boxes?  Does it appear in decals on your products, where it will be seen by the pubic.  How about the URLs for any mini-sites you have? Are you on the social media sites devoted to interests related to your product, e.g. fishing sites, gardening sites, wedding sites?  Links and URLs to your site are sideways marketing, and there are a lot of free opportunities out there. 

Now, about that roof of yours…are you plagued with black stains, lichen, or moss??? If so, I know a great solution…

This is a guest post from Dave Cleveland, one of my favorite people on the planet.  He sent me this post out-of-the-blue in an effort (more like a conspiracy) to get me to start blogging again.   Want to take bets as to whether or not it will work?

Dear Google,

First, I want to thank you for all your help.  I am a big fan and loyal follower.

When it comes to comparison shopping, online research, travel planning, and a long list of otherwise time-consuming tasks … well, you’re the best!   

Google, you are my library, Yellow Pages, and shopping mall — all in one — and I appreciate the time and frustration you save me.

While I’m clueless about how you magically match the minutest details to my search queries, I’m not clueless about direct mail and what makes it work.

That’s my second reason for writing.  There’s a darn good chance the 6×9 letter mailing I recently received from you didn’t perform as well as you’d hoped it would.

As a token of my appreciation for all you do for me, I’d like to offer you some free professional advice. 

While there are dozens of best practices for leveraging your direct mail success, here are some  tips to get started.  (By the way, these are tried-and-true tactics applied by direct response writers across all media – both on- and offline.)

Target the right people with the right message.  This is direct marketing’s Golden Rule.  I know you thought you were targeting business owners with your mail piece.  And, yes, I fit that description.  Here’s the hitch.  That cardboard See-How-Much-We-Can-Save-You Calculator you enclosed for me calculated savings for companies with 10 to 2,500 employees. I have 1 ½.  So, you missed the mark with me and probably many others.

Next time, make sure you understand who is in the audience you’re reaching so your message is relevant and your offer provides genuine value.

Use hot spots to engage skimmers and scanners.  Hot spots are where your eye goes first whether it’s scanning envelopes, letters, emails or Web pages.   Hot spots – including first and last sentences, bulleted copy and a letter or email’s P.S. — are the places to put your important benefits (not features) t grab the attention of skimmers and scanners.  Unfortunately, your letter’s hot spots earned a D+.  Here’s why. 

Your first sentence is a ho-hum statement of fact with no reader benefit: “Traditional business email and collaboration tools can be costly to purchase, set-up and maintain.”  Yeah … so ….  Next time lead with an attention-grabbing opener focused on either the enclosed free Savings Calculator or your 30-day free trial.

Later in the letter, you highlighted 5 features (not benefits) with eye-catching bullets and no explanation of their benefit.  Your reader wants to know, “What’s in it for me?”   What does a “99.9% uptime service level agreement (SLA”) do for me?  What does it mean to have “robust security and compliance functionality?”    

Here’s a biggie.  Your letter lacked the hottest of all hot spots — a P.S.  Studies show 30% of scanners and simmers read the P.S. first.  A letter without one misses a golden opportunity to reel in more readers.  So remember, hot spots are magnets that draw people into your direct mail, email, home or landing page

Capitalize on your offer.  Offers entice people to do what you want them to do – click, call, come in.  They push fence-sitters over the edge of indecision.

This means your offer needs to be the focus of your message.

In your case, Google, your offer has two strong elements – the free Savings Calculator and 30-day free trial.  But, you buried them.  The calculator isn’t mentioned until the second to last sentence … and your free trial is sandwiched in the middle of the third paragraph.  Next time, spotlight these in hot spots starting on the outer envelope.  Make them the centerpiece of your mailing. 

If you want more response-boosting tips, check this out.      

Your faithful fan,

Pat

P.S. If you’re reading this, you’ve proven my point about the power of the P.S. and deserve a bonus tip.  Engaging copy is YOU focused.  This means you should outnumber I, we and your company name 2 to 1 in your copy/content.   In your letter’s case, the count was upside down at 1 to 3.  There’s a free tool out there called the We-We Calculator that can help you find out if your copy/content is customer focused.  Normally, I tell people to Google it; I’ll save you the trouble and provide the link.

{Note from Amy: I honestly can’t say enough good things about Pat.  Read her work, you’ll figure out why in less than 2.2 seconds.  I guarantee it.   Pat can be reached at www.patfriesen.com.} 

This is a guest post from Geoff Wolf. There are a lot of multichannel (multi-touch, multi-whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it) consultants out there.  The majority of them couldn’t sell (or give) a hamburger to a hungry man and I am completely convinced they’re only “consultants” because nobody on earth is crazy enough to hire them.   Geoff is one of the very few exceptions I’ve ever met.  (And yes, I mean that quite literally.)   He’s been helping clients overcome their multichannel challenges for a long time and he’s exceptional at it.  Maybe it’s because he has owned a couple businesses.  Perhaps it’s because he listens to AND identifies with his clients (a rarity these days.)  Likely,  it’s because he’s just razor-sharp.  Either way, I am happy to have him here… 

I believe the role of perceptions in marketing is often overlooked within today’s analytic madness (yes, we do need that madness).  The human mind is at the center of how we understand words, images and messages.   By the way, my proofreader is on vacation this week so if I misspell something within this writing or perhaps even skip a word, please forgive me.    Fortunately for me, even my editor is vacation too so I can really ignore the usual rules of the trade.

Now, did you notice I skipped the word “on” above between “is” and “vacation?”   Those of you who are copywriters or had the good English teachers in high school probably noticed the word missing.  The rest of us did not catch the error or need to as our brains simply filled in the missing word because we expected it to be there in the first place.  

Since this is the Qlog, I have license to diverge…… speaking of high school, we actually used to play chess in our boring high school classes.    The board was written in pen and the chess pieces in pencil.  You would simply pass the paper back and forth, determine what move the opponent had made, and then make your next move.   Maybe that is why my high school girlfriend ditched me?    

So, the brain fills stuff in for us based on our history of experiences.  Rather than fake a psychology lecture here, let’s just all agree that this is true.   What happens when one of our marketing messages is created and sent to the consumer?   

I just checked my email and found a chocolate offer.  Yes, that is my marketing habit, I noticed one “with an offer” even though I have not purchased from them in five years.   The “marketing” brains behind this ad offered me “$5 off shipping for 3 days only!”  My “consumer” brain saw chocolate in the email, which made my mouth start watering and sent me directly to the cabinet for some chocolate.  Then, I returned to the email, decided I already have enough chocolate for the next month, and moved on.

Perhaps a message addressing their unique selling proposition, like “the chocolate keeps me looking younger” or “why buying their chocolate earns brownie points with my wife,” may have been more persuasive to my taste buds.  Or, why do I need to have more chocolate stashed than I can eat right now?  (A future ship date would have been helpful).  Or, if 10% of the proceeds go to saving the whales, then every 10^th bite will be guilt-free.

Can I prove this theory with analytics and testing?   Yes, a worthy investment.

A colleague reminded me yesterday that marketing is 50% analytics and 50% intuition.  The intuition half is about your perceptions interacting with the consumers’ perceptions.  Staying focused on a clear, unique selling proposition is the best way to manage perceptions in today’s marketing environment.

Geoff Wolf can be reached at Geoff.wolf@lenser.com

This is a guest post from Dave Cleveland, a copywriter, graphic artist and marketer from Woodstock, VT.   I’ve worked with Dave since I was knee-high to a grasshopper (read: a very, very long time)  and he’s unequivocally one of my favorite people on the planet.  Despite his alarmingly bad taste in politicians, he’s one of the sharpest, most creative people you’ll ever meet. 

In a recent QLOG, Amy warned against sending emails that were all image and no text, because so many recipients these days have their images turned off, or they use a service like Gmail where many people have it set up that images are not loaded unless they say to load them. So if your HTML email is all image, none of your message gets through.  Also, some email programs are suspicious of all-image emails, and label them junk.

But how DO you get text into your HTML emails effectively, using a program like Dreamweaver? This post will show you one way to do that.  I’m not saying it’s the only way, but it has been effective, allowing me to have good-looking graphics for people who want them, making sure the most important parts of my sales message can be seen by people with their images off, and getting low SPAM scores.

First, create a master image of your email (I use Fireworks for this, but Photoshop or any other similar program will work.)   In your design, create at least one place for text. You can actually put the type in as part of the image for now.  The text doesn’t have to be a lot of text — just a paragraph or two is sufficient — but it should be enough that the major points of your email — including your offer, your phone number, and a link to start ordering — are covered there. 

(The point here is to make it so that if this text is the only thing people see in their email, they can still get the main message of your email, and be able to start the ordering process by clicking through to your site.)  Click here to see a sample email. You can and should still put the main parts of your message in your graphics, too.

I generally create the text as an image first, so I know it looks the way I want it to, and then I duplicate the text in a word processing or text file. Important — Save this word processing text and put it aside for a minute to use later, but don’t style it in the word processing program.

Then, slice up your image as usual, and be sure to put the entire text portion of your email in its own slice.

Next, go into your HTML creation program, such as Dreamweaver, and create a simple HTML table, with one column the same width as your master image, and with three rows.

Do NOT use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style your email, or the text you will be putting into it.  That’s because the most commonly used email programs can ignore the CSS info in your file header — so unlike web pages, CSS-styled emails may not look styled at all.  Instead, you need to use old-fashioned “in-line” styling, which I’ll explain in a minute.

So, you’ve now got a 3-rowed table.  Leave the first row blank for now.  In the second row, import your entire sliced graphic.  Then, click on the slice that will contain the final text you’ve created and delete the text that may be in there now as a graphic, if that’s the way you created your master image.  What you want there now is just an empty table cell.   Here’s where we’ll use our in-line styling.

In DreamWeaver, set up your screen so it’s split between Code View and Design View, so you can see both.  Click in the table cell that will contain your final text.  In the Code view screen, you’ll see code that looks something like this:

<td>&nbsp;</td>

Highlight the &nbsp;  part with your cursor, and substitute the following code:

<p style=”font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; line-height: 12px; font-weight: normal;color: #000000;”> copy here </p>

Then click on the design portion of the screen.  The words “copy here” should now appear in your table cell.  (You may want to set the Horizontal table cell setting to “left” and the Vertical to “Top.”) You’ve just created your inline style, and are ready to put in the actual type you want, and change the styling if need be.

Go get the text from your word processing file, copy it, and paste it in place of the words “copy here”.  (You can do this in Dreamweaver in the design screen or the code screen.)  Your text will now appear, styled in Trebuchet,  11 px tall with a line height of 12px.   Now, if you want a different type face, type color, etc. just make the changes in the code snippet, and your text will reformat when you click back on the design screen.

Email programs recognize in-line styling like this, and your email will look like you want it to in most email programs.  (Use pixels instead of points for type sizes, as point size may vary some between Macs and PCs. I also suggest you use common PC faces like Arial, Trebuchet, and Verdana, so it will be likely your recipients will have that typeface.) 

To get line breaks use the Insert line break command in Dreamweaver.  To get bold type,  use the Bold (B) button in Dreamweaver, so you will be using the >strong< styling. If you want to do some more research, you’ll discover you can control even more factors with such in-line styling.

We’re almost done.

We still have an empty top row, and an empty bottom row.  In both, in code view you should  put in your styling code again, so the words “copy here” appears in both rows.

In the top row, you can put your message about “click here if you can’t see this email”.

But I also strongly suggest you put in a simple text sentence that summarizes your offer or the most important message of your email — remember, this may be the first and only text your recipient reads, if his images are turned off.

In the last row, put your standard unsubscribe text.

And finally, go back to each slice or image in your email, and use ALT Text liberally. When the images are off, the ALT text is still visible in programs like Gmail.  So use that text to explain your offer, repeat your phone number, emphasize your deadline, and more.

There.  You have readable text in your subject line, your lead-in eyebrow, the body of your email, and in the Alt text.  People can get a lot of your message, even with images off.

P.S. Make that message good enough — in all your emails — and your customers will start turning those images back on for you.

Chris Ziter, resident expert at Eight By Eight, adds:

1. Using a lot of and/or large images could trigger SPAM filters.  Many desktop/server/gateway filters consider the balance between images and text when flagging as well as the image size.

2. Inline styles are stripped out of some email clients (Gmail, for example) so if you want to be sure the styling works, you need to stick to the antiquated <font> tags to declare font size, color, family, etc.  I typically do a mixture of both so it “gracefully degrades” to the email client’s restrictions.

3.  Dave has a design wrapping around a text area.  If the user’s email/browser settings are set to display larger of if you don’t leave proper space below the HTML text for it to grow vertically, the content could break that area of the design (which may look sloppy).  I try to avoid that when designing emails. And when I get a design that presents that issue, there is usually a way to work around it.

If you start a blog, it’s inevitable that you are going to stare at a blank screen and have absolutely no idea what the hell to write about. I’ve been blogging almost daily for over four years, and I still struggle with what to write about. But here are five post ideas that can help you break the writer’s block and get over the hump:

1 – Don’t write about your products, write about how your products fit into your customer’s lives. This is the biggie. If you can master this one step, your blog will be more effective than 99.9% of the company blogs out there. I call this finding the ‘Bigger Idea’ for your blog.

For example, Kodak has a blog called A Thousand Words. Now if you’ve never visited their blog, you would probably assume that Kodak would be using the blog to promote their cameras and other products. It only makes sense, right?

Well it might make sense to you, but it doesn’t make sense to Kodak’s readers. Because if someone is interested in getting information about Kodak’s cameras, they don’t go to Kodak’s blog to get that information. They go to sites that review Kodak’s cameras, like Amazon. Or they search photography message boards to see what other customers have to say about Kodak’s cameras.

And Kodak understands this, so they instead focus A Thousand Words on discussing PHOTOGRAPHY. By shifting the focus away from directly promoting their cameras, and instead teaching readers how to be better photographers, they have made the content on the blog MUCH more valuable for their readers. Think about it, if you are in the market for a new digital camera, which post would you rather read; ‘Ten Reasons Why Your Next Camera Should Be a Kodak’, or ‘Ten Steps to Taking the Perfect Picture Every Time’?

The first one is self-promotional, the second one teaches you how to be a better photographer. Obviously, the second one is more valuable to readers.

2 – Write about the latest news and trends in your industry. Think about it, this is information that you are keeping up with anyway, so why not share it with your readers? In fact, pick a day of the week, say every Wednesday, and write up a ‘Here’s What’s Happening in the Retail Industry’. Or change it for whatever industry you are in.

This not only forces you to stay up to date on what’s happening in your industry, but by sharing that information with your readers, you are creating value for them AND helping to establish your expertise and knowledge of your space. AND by doing this once a week, you’ve already guaranteed your blog will have at least one new post up a week. Which means you’ve probably cut your blogging workload by 50-100%.

3 – Write about your employees. This one can work out well, but you have to be careful in how you do it. Believe it or not, most readers WANT to know more about the people that write the blogs they read, and by extension, you can also share some of the things that make your employees tick.

For example, on Graco’s blog, usually every Wednesday, they post a photo of one of their employees with their families, and normally with their children. You might think ‘Who cares?’, but Graco’s blog is aimed at parents, especially young parents. So if Graco can show and tell you a bit about the lives of their employees, who are also young parents, it helps re-inforce the idea that Graco’s employees can relate to their customers. That they too, are young parents that are going through the same issues in their lives that many of their customers are. It helps the readers connect with the bloggers and the company.

4 – Write about your customers. Find your evangelists, and put the spotlight on them. Do you have one guy that’s been a weekly customer for the past 30 years? Why not snap a quick picture of him when he comes in next week, and write up a post about him? Then show him the post the next time he comes in.

This shows your readers that you actually care about your customers. That you appreciate them and their business. Sure, it isn’t directly promotional, but it directly promotes the fact that your company values and appreciates the people that are keeping you in business. It also makes your readers more likely to trust what you write, and want to do business with you.

5 – Write about your readers. Does Cara always comment on your posts? Does Jim link to your blog and encourage his readers to read your blog? Why not write a post thanking them? And when you do, link to THEIR blogs and encourage your readers to check them out.

This shows your readers that you appreciate them, and guess what? It gives both Cara and Jim the added incentive to keep commenting on and linking to your blog. And it also encourages the rest of your readers to do the same thing.

Whether it’s your customers or your blog’s readers, when they are engaging in the type of behavior that benefits you, find ways to encourage that behavior in the future.

If you’d like to learn more about how to improve your blogging efforts, check out Mack’s site, http://www.mackcollier.com.  If you want to talk to him directly about how he can help your company get started with its blogging or social media efforts, you can either email him at mack.collier@gmail.com or call him at 1-256-668-8207.  Do it now.  Right this very minute.

Kim Painley of Kinetic Marketing Consultants is a master of PPC…