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.

Integrated Push Pull Strategy

Imagine you had a travel portal and you sent out the following email to your mailing list

Dear Mr. Smith,

Find out fast when you can save on flights to your favorite destinations! It's easy and it's free, thanks to our new RSS feed. Just choose the destinations you'd like us to watch, and we'll keep you informed through My Yahoo!, My MSN, Pluck or another RSS news reader of your choice.

You have actually sent out an email encouraging people to pull content even though they had already permitted you to push content to them!!

Does this mean you no longer push content via Email? Nope, that's where your Integrated Push Pull Strategy should help you decide what and when to push and pull. Here's a sample strategy below.

Integrated Push Pull Strategy:
1)Push important messages that need to be acted upon quickly
2)Encourage users to create custom feeds and pull it
3)Push if user no longer pulling your feeds.
4)Ensure same content doesnot get pulled and pushed

So what's your Push Pull strategy going to be?

Applying Tag Cloud Previews in Segmenting Contacts

Tag Cloud preview could be a great visual tool to identify common patterns in your contact list and target them better by segmenting based on these attribute values.

Here's an example of a tag cloud preview based on 'Contact Work City' generated from my contact database.