The confirmation/thank you that you get when you first sign up for an email newsletter, a webinar, a special offer, or what have you, is a really important first impression. If you send a confirmation email, that email sets the tone for your email relationship and, if it is personality-free and dry and offers no value, not only is it a wasted opportunity it really starts things off on the wrong foot.

I have blogged before about how to write Thank You emails. Now MarketingSherpa has covered the related topic, of Thank You web pages...

According to MarketingSherpa: "When a prospect signs up for a webinar -- or a white paper or newsletter for that matter -- be sure to include more hotlinks or offers on the 'Thank you' page they see right after submitting their registration. Prospects are in the perfect mood right then to learn more about you, so they may click on links for white papers or other offers. Why not deepen the relationship right then?"

In fact, their research pointed to 39% of viewers accepting offers on 'thank you' pages.

It is amazing the proliferation of "thank you for (ordering/signing up/inquiring)" pages that contain ... well, nothing else. No offer. No suggestions like "if you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy reading this ...white paper, article, news release." As MarketingSherpa says "they are wasting valuable real estate."

A fundraising/nonprofit consultant I know says that the 'thank you' is the beginning of the next 'ask'. There's a lesson here for us for-profit folks too: don't let an opportunity go by where you could be cross-selling and up-selling.

Optimizing your site for higher search engine rankings is an obvious activity for anyone with a website. Optimizing your site for higher conversion rates is another obvious one. But how about optimizing for higher advertising revenue — specifically, a bigger check from Google for the AdSense ads that you display on your site.

Consider for example if you had a website on redecorating for Do-It-Yourselfers. You might have a page all about "housepainting." But, as described in this article in USA Today about webmasters making money off of AdSense, "housepainting" isn't a great money term for AdSense revenue — it's only a 20-cent word. "Home improvement," on the other hand, is worth $2. That's a $1.80 difference.

So in effect you can give yourself a nice pay increase just by changing the keyword themes of your pages that display AdSense ads by creating new content pages around those keywords. And the real opportunists out there are creating pages about mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer caused by asbestos that lawyers are bidding on. That keyword is worth an order of magnitude more than "home improvement." But that would be sooo dirty! Thankfully I don't know anyone THAT dirty!

MarketingSherpa's 2005-2006 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide offers some important insights for anyone involved in SEO on what to expect in the year to come.

Three key trends emerge:

• Trend #1 sees Search Engines as TV Networks Jockeying for Audience."Using engines is the third most popular activity online, just behind using email and surfing. However despite the fact that more than 127 million Americans routinely use search engines, the overwhelming majority of search activity occurs on just a handful of search engines."

  MarketingSherpa's latest stats reveal Google's share at 36.5%, up from 36% last year. Yahoo! holds 30.5%, up from 30% in 2004, while MSN dropped from 16% to 15.5%, and AOL from 13% to 9.9%. Ask Jeeves has risen from 2% to 6.1%.

• Trend #2 indicates SEO is still a tiny portion of total search marketing spend. A May 2005 study revealed just 13% of the Fortune 100 had "effective SEO". When asked why more marketers don't invest in SEO, 28% said they "don't understand SEO, overall complexity".
• Search Marketing is a new application for Press Releases (Trend #3), with SEO firms, PR firms and marketers now seizing on optimized search marketing as a low cost but very effective tactic.

Download the Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa.com here. Buy the full report here.

The excellent MarketingSherpa website and enewsletter is having its 2nd Annual Reader's Choice Blog Awards. Vote here. Voting ends Wednesday June 8th.

This little ol' blog of mine is a nominee, so if you choose to vote for me, I'll be forever grateful!

Here’s a startling bit of research, done by EmailLabs and written up in MarketingSherpa, for all of you folks responsible for crafting email campaigns and newsletters:

This [past] fall tens of millions of emails from permission mailers were tested for a brand new metric: actual read time.
Turns out 15-20 seconds was the average. Consider the last email campaign or newsletter you sent. Could a typical reader skim the entire thing, digest the graphics, and decide to click on the best item for them in just 15-20 seconds?

Yes, people. You read that right. The read time of your precious prose is, on average, a lousy 15 seconds... 20 seconds, tops!

You labor so hard over that e-newsletter: spending countless hours writing it, then perfecting it, then testing it, then further refining it... and to what end? The bloody inconsiderate recipient spends a mere 15 seconds absorbing it! How rude!

So, what to do? Email marketers must become masters of the 15-second soundbite. The conventional wisdom in email marketing of short sentences, short paragraphs, placing the call-to-action so it appears above-the-fold in the preview pane, etc. etc. — just won't come close to cutting it any more.

Based on this study, I've been totally rethinking how we're doing our regular "communiques" to our clients & partners. Perhaps we should ditch our current approach of a roughly-monthly, short-and-sharp 400-word e-newsletter? I think we'll test another approach: where I strive to deliver a single idea or tip that offers real value to the recipient and coaxes that person into engaging in a dialogue with me — within a mere 80 words! (This paragraph, including this parenthetical note, is 80 words.)

Bite-sized chunks of relevant advice, personalized to that individual client's situation, sent on more regular intervals than our current "communique"... Sound like a plan? (Actually it sounds like an extranet blog, but done less frequently and delivered via email instead of RSS.)