Can you afford to make registration optional?

Couple of months ago I was buying air tickets on a travel portal, and found an interesting feature. It had a link which said, if you are in a hurry, purchase a ticket as a guest user itself. Registration was optional on that site.

I fell in love with that travel portal instantly as they gave me the customer the choice of initiating a relationship with them. I didn't have to register upfront to use their service. I bookmarked the site and made my purchase in a giffy. I did eventually register on the site on my third visit to purchase a ticket.

So what do you think, should resources such as product demos, white papers, webinars etc be hidden behind big Lead capture/Registration forms or should you just trust your customers to come back for more and initiate a dialog with you when they are ready?

3 Ways to make your Auto Responder more Personal

Here are 3 Ways to make your Auto Responder setup in your Marketing Automation System more Personal and Humane.

1)Include original message in the reply inline or as an attachment
2)Prefix your automated reply with 'Re:' and the original incoming email's subject
3)Respond after a short delay (5-10 minutes) instead of instantly.

When we normally reply to an email message, the original message is included in the reply automatically inline or as an attachment, the text 'Re:' is prefixed to the original subject and used in the subject of the email, also there is a time delay involved in reading the original email and framing a reply to it.

Making your automated system mimic a normal user could help in making your corporate email communications more Personal and Humane.

5 Ways to Leverage Search KeyWords

Search keywords tell you what the user is looking for. It could be extracted from referral urls coming from search engines, collected from the search box present on your site. These keywords could be stored in the system as part of the contacts profile information.

It could be used
1)For Search Engine Optimization of your web pages.
2)Dynamically change the page content based on these keywords
3)In the email subject to increase open rates
4)In customizing content to be sent to the user
5)Segmenting contacts based on keywords

Social Networking Potential of your Contact

Social Networking Potential (SNP) is a numeric coefficient, derived through algorithms to represent both the size of an individual's social network and their ability to influence that network.

As a marketer, you could create a potentially successful viral marketing campaign by targeting contacts with high SNP score with content that is relevant and appealing to this segment.

Here are 6 attributes on which you could assign points and score the social networking potential of your contact.
1)Is he/she an active member of social networking sites like facebook, myspace, orkut...?
2)Does he/she blog or post on websites?
3)Does he/she contribute to publications?
4)Does he/she hold any leadership positions?
5)Has he/she provided you with quality referrals in the past?
6)Is he/she a member of a group you might be interested in?

Virtual Business Cards and Calendars

A vCard and vCalendar could be very useful attachments to add in your email especially if you have a lot of customers who use mail clients like Microsoft Outlook which support them.

1)Attaching a vCard in your emails would make it easier for your email recepient to add your complete information to their Address Book. A vCard could hold your name, address information, phone numbers,URL's, logos, photographs, and even audio clips.

2)A vCalendar/iCalendar could be attached to your email to send out meeting requests, event announcement and tasks which would get added to your customer's calendar.

I'm sure most of you might already be attaching it on your outbound emails too, but do you scan your inbox for vCards? Could it be parsed to update the profile of your contact? There could be customers who have configured their mail clients to attach their vCard in all outbound emails.

Tar-pitting

"Tarpitting" also known as 'Teergrubing' is a way of reducing spam or spam-related attacks (such as directory harvesting). It involves delaying SMTP communications with remote servers suspected of sending unsolicited e-mail. This slows down the the automated email sender threads of spammers as they are forced to spend more time to send out the email and in some cases give up all together as their session timesout.

There are a lot of variants of this, some servers might tarpit based on sender reputation, while others look out for number of concurrent connections made, number of recepients addressed in the RCPT TO field of the same connection etc.

Metrics which show the average smtp session time and number of time smtp session timeouts per email domain might be a good way to find out if you are being tarpitted by a particular domain.