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Always give descriptive supporting text to outbound links. This is handled through the
anchor text (the words between the
<a> tags) and the value of the title attribute. This
content boosts the ranking opportunities of the site benefiting from the link, which in turn
will help the originating source. For example:
<a href=" title="Electronic Radiology Laboratory
investigates digital imaging technologies for radiology departments">
Electronic Radiology Laboratory</a>
External strategies
Once a website’s markup and structure have been cleaned and polished for optimization,
it’s time to pursue the external strategies that will give the domain the support it needs to
help reach the first page of search engine results. Implementing external strategies can
take just as long (if not longer) as internal strategies, and will likely be the focus of the
SEO campaign for a long time, simply because of the iterative cycle of fine-tuning and
measuring.
Grabbing a high ranking does not happen overnight. In fact, for especially competitive
arenas, patience is not a virtue—it’s a requirement.
Building incoming links
Above all else, there is one primary tactic for building search engine karma: incoming links.
Google was revolutionary in the respect that its PageRank system largely based its results
on the popularity of the site, which essentially boiled down to how many links were point-
ing to the domain. Since then, every search engine has copied this model.
Today, the secret ingredient to Google’s ranking system is mired in millions of lines of
highly secure algorithmic code, stored on black boxes in rooms where only the most priv-
ileged employees have access. There is not much the world knows about this secret sauce.
But the one thing experts, pundits, and casual passersby do know is that a website’s rank-
ing is based on more than just the
quantity of incoming links—there is a subset of tests
that determine each external link’s value:
1. The anchor text: This is the text that is contained between the <a> tags. It should be
relevant and descriptive; for example,

<a>staffing for nurses</a> is a lot more
valuable than
<a>click here</a>.
2. The title attribute: The title attribute describes the link in question; it reinforces
the anchor text with a phrase that lets the user know exactly where they are
heading—for instance,
<a href=""
title="Rockstar Healthcare Staffing provides staffing for traveling
nurses">staffing for nurses</a>
.
3. Context of the link: A link sitting within relevant material is seen as more valuable
than one floating out in space. Context also goes beyond surrounding text. For
instance, a link coming from a medical staffing blog or directory is a lot more valu-
able than a link coming from the designer’s portfolio site: the first is pertinent, the
second is peripheral.
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4. The search engine value of the referring site: If the site does not perform well in
search engines, it is not recognized as an influence, and its link is worth less than
that of a high-ranking referrer. This is easiest to qualify in terms of PageRank. A site
with a PageRank of 5 is worth far more than a PageRank of 4, and getting a few
links from sites with PageRank of 6 or more can do wonders.
5. Age of link: Believe it or not, search engines look at not only the age of the site as
an indication of authority, but also the age of the link.
Not every link is going to be perfect. In fact, the chance of meeting all of these criteria is
slim, and there are times when you will have to settle for whatever you can get. A lot of
companies may not have immediate access to highly ranked sites from which to aggregate
incoming links, so they will have to start small, building a referral network through some

footwork. The following subsections give some places to start.
Directories. Directories are a great place to start in an SEO effort. There are many to work
with, they are generally reliable, and the message can be controlled by the submitting
company. Directories are manually edited by a real human, meaning that duplicate or
spammy sites do not get listed, but it also means that the submission process can take
awhile. Some directories are free, while inclusion in others requires payment.
The most well-known directory is Yahoo, and was the company’s founding model until it
became apparent that search was the future. There are a zillion other directories on the
Web,
17
each claiming some type of niche or specialty, and almost all are pining for sub-
missions in an effort to build their own search engine status.
For SEO campaigns, there is one place to start:
dmoz.org, shown in Figure 13-7. This is the
home of the Open Directory Project (ODP), where an army of editors oversees the largest
collection of website listings under one roof. Dmoz is commonly used by major search
engines for descriptions and other information—in Figure 13-5, both MSN and Yahoo
source
www.nhai.com’s description from the ODP, not the description provided in the site’s
metadata.
Press release and article sites. Almost every company produces some volume of content
that is intended for public distribution. This includes articles, press releases, how-to
instructions, and more. Traditionally, this content has been relegated to the corporate site,
waiting for people to stumble upon it through a search. While it is good practice to host
this material, distributing the text via the broader Web helps cast a net of content that not
only builds interest and name recognition in the authoring company, but builds a network
of incoming links as well.
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17. www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html is a good list of directories;

www.best-web-directories.com is also a good source.
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Figure 13-7. The ODP attempts to catalog the Web through a manual editorial process.
Take press releases. Certainly every public company writes and publishes them—they are a
staple of the investment media’s diet. While it’s a good practice to publish press releases
on the website for casual browsers to discover, and while there is a chance a release may
get picked up by an online or printed publication, the wait-and-see model is anything but
efficient. Complement this effort with proactive publishing on external press release web-
sites, such as the following:
PRZOOM (
www.przoom.com)
Free-Press-Release.com (
www.free-press-release.com)
PR Leap (
www.prleap.com)
Press Method (
www.pressmethod.com)
OpenPR (
www.openpr.com)
ClickPress (
www.clickpress.com)
UKPRwire (UK only) (
www.ukprwire.com)
Pressbox (UK only) (
www.pressbox.co.uk)
Some of these require the creation of an account, but almost all will allow a link back to
the corporate homepage. These are positive incoming links. The content is relevant to
your site, and most of these sites rank well in search engines by themselves.
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In addition to press releases, a company might staff writers that regularly produce indus-
try articles, from industry commentary to breaking news to instructional media. Although
this is great content for the host site, there are many third-party websites dedicated to
republishing article content; authors can submit their material to be picked up by other
websites. Full copyright is retained by the original writer, and each article is accompanied
by a link back to the corporate website every time it is republished.
For instance, say you worked for Rockstar Healthcare Staffing, and you wrote an article
offering advice for nurses thinking about signing on with a staffing agency. This is great
content, applicable industry-wide. You publish it on Rockstar’s website, and it attracts a
few visitors from Google. Seeking to take advantage of the content, you submit the mate-
rial to a few article sites like GoArticles
18
and Article Dashboard,
19
and the piece gets
picked up several times, resulting in a pile of links back to your domain.
The math is simple. If an article is submitted to one site and gets republished 25 times,
that’s 25 links back to your site:
(1 article)
✕ (1 site) ✕ (25 reprintings) = 25 links
It does not take much imagination to make that number grow exponentially:
(10 articles)
✕ (10 sites) ✕ (25 reprintings each article) = 2500 links
Considering there are literally hundreds of article websites,
20
this can be a very effective
way to quickly create a network of inbound links.
The industry circle. Few companies operate in isolation. Every industry has its collective of

forums, directories, news boards, media sites, alliances, blogs, and more. Look around at
the sites people look to for expertise—the centers of information—and see if they offer
the opportunity to link to related companies.
The first place to look is within your own industry alliances. Many businesses list their
strategic partners on their website in a centralized directory, as you can see in Figure 13-8.
These listings are almost always free—provided for the benefit of the visiting prospect—
but with the expectation that a reciprocal link will be provided.
When marketing within the industry, always think about ways to publish a link. For
instance, when posting to a forum, add a signature with the corporation’s link. Many
forums are ranked highly because of their cycle of fresh and unique content, and these
small but numerous links can add up over time.
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18. www.goarticles.com
19. www.articledashboard.com
20. www.wilsonweb.com/linking/wilson-article-marketing-1.htm has some of the top article
sites, and www.styopkin.com/article_submission_sites.html has a list of over 500 more.
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Figure 13-8. Many professional companies list their strategic alliances with a link back to the
partner’s website.
Blogs are one of the best mediums from which to receive incoming links, but like tradi-
tional media, there’s no easy way to solicit for these. In order to get the tenuous attention
of bloggers, the company has to do something worth blogging about, either good or
bad—new product releases, viral marketing efforts, and poor customer service can all
elicit commentary. (Try to avoid negative discussion. You do not, after all, want to rank
highly for the term “poor customer service.”)
Links from other sites within a company’s industry count for a lot. No one knows how
much emphasis search engines place on site-wide topicality, but the suspicion—if nothing
else—is that the significance will only grow in the future.
Submitting to search engines

While a lot of effort goes into building incoming links, not much can be done about actu-
ally submitting sites to search engines the old-fashioned way. MSN and Ask do not even
provide the opportunity to manually suggest a URL; they rely on their searchbots to find
and index websites. Because of this, the single best way to get sites listed in
any search
engine is to build the network of incoming links.
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Google and Yahoo, on the other hand, still provide the opportunity to submit a website.
21
There is no guarantee that a site will be picked up from this effort, but it certainly cannot
hurt the process. The key is to follow the directions for each explicitly—the systems are
sensitive to spamming and will mercilessly blacklist a site that even smells of devious tech-
nique. For Google especially, it is a very good idea to also create an XML site map, as
explained in Chapter 4.
Directing search engine traffic
Over time, many websites build certain directories and pages that should not be indexed
by search engines because the content is not for public consumption. For instance, many
hosting packages reserve the folder
cgi-bin for Perl scripts, which is a server-side lan-
guage used for contact forms, forums, and more. Other sites might contain private forums
for members only. Many websites also include a basic statistics page located behind a redi-
rect like
www.company.com/stats. There is reason to shield all of these from search engines.
There are two primary methods to dissuade spiders. For individual page control, the
robots meta tag works best; for directories, the
robots.txt file effectively directs search
engine behavior.

Robots meta tag
Like the other meta tags described earlier in the chapter, the robots meta tag is placed
with the
<head> tag of an HTML document. However, instead of describing a document’s
content, it acts as a traffic signal to search engine spiders, instructing them on two impor-
tant directives:
1. Whether to index the content: This is accomplished using either index or noindex
as values inside the content attribute.
2. Whether to follow links on a page: Similar to indexing, this is accomplished with the
follow or nofollow values inside the content attribute.
Consider the following example:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
In this instance, search engines are told not to index the page and not to follow any links.
The tag also understands other values, such as
all (do everything) or none (do nothing).
The default behavior is to index all content and follow all links, so the robots meta tag is
unnecessary unless you need a search engine to restrain itself. The following example tells
spiders to index the content (the default), but to
not follow links.
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
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21. Google’s can be found at www.google.com/addurl and Yahoo’s at />info/submit.html.
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Google also provides developers with a meta tag specifically targeting the Google search-
bot. Called the Googlebot robots meta tag, it provides a few more options applicable to
just Google’s services. Here is a possible example:
<meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow,noindex,noarchive,nosnippet" />
nofollow
and noindex work the same. noarchive prevents Google from archiving content

in its cache, and
nosnippet prevents it from retrieving a blurb with bolded terms. By
default, all terms are positive, so the tag should not be included unless there is a reason
for Google not to do something.
Robots.txt
Where the robots meta tag is good for directing search engines for individual pages, a
robots.txt file can provide global information for the site, as well as specific directories.
When a search engine first crawls a page, it actively seeks the file
robots.txt (which must
be all lowercase), which is nothing more than a plain-text file. It should only exist in the
root directory; versions found in subdirectories will be ignored.
The file uses two variables:
User-agent (defining which user agents are applicable to the
rules) and
Disallow (defining what directories should be passed over). The following
example enables all search bots to access the entire site:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This is the default behavior, and the same as supplying an empty robots.txt file. Use the
following to prevent all user agents from accessing any part of the site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Note the slash after Disallow; this represents the entire domain. To prevent all user agents
from accessing specific directories, create a unique
Disallow entry for each subdirectory:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /forum/private/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
To prevent a specific search robot from retrieving a directory, simply add its name after

the
User-agent.
22
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
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22. There are many user agents out there. For the curious, a complete list resides with the official
specification at
www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/index.html.
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A robots.txt file should be included with every website, even if it’s blank to indicate total
access. It helps alleviate ambiguity with search engine spiders.
Summary
SEO is critical for every business that wants to compete on any level of the Web. When a
company does not appear at the top of the list for critical search strings, there is a lot of
potential business being left on the table, which is there for the taking for a rival that ranks
higher. However, in order to be successful in organic SEO, a thorough and well-devised
strategy is required, from identifying the best keywords and phrases to conducting regular
review and analysis of the campaign’s performance. The actual tactics of organic SEO are
numerous but incredibly effective. Focus on internal improvements first, especially in
regard to metadata and content, and then build a network of quality incoming links.
Patience and diligence are absolutely required in this field—those expecting instant or
even predictable results will become frustrated quickly.
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14 OUTBOUND MARKETING
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Anyone who has spent more than an hour in Marketing 101 knows that customer reten-
tion is far less expensive than customer acquisition. Over time, the cost of maintaining
profitable relationships with an existing customer base is far less than the buckets of
dollars poured into the marketing cannon aimed at reining in new customers. In fact, the
difference runs anywhere from three to ten times, depending on the study you read.
Once a customer becomes a customer, they can be a gift that keeps on giving. If provided
good products and services at a fair price, most people will have no inclination to switch;
people like what they know, and a company that consistently delivers the goods will get
repeat business. It is amazing to see how many companies, when drawing up their market-
ing plans, utterly fail to remember this.
The worst offenders are business-to-business (B2B) marketers. Consumer industries like
retail and travel have mastered the art of customer retention, from buy-one-get-one-free
coupons to elaborate direct response campaigns. But despite huge investments in direct
marketing,
1
many companies still struggle to leverage the massive business opportunity
sitting within their own customer base. This is not for lack of will or capital. Rather, it’s a
lack of understanding of how the world at large perceives marketing attempts by a com-
pany with whom they have already conducted business.
Customer marketing takes several forms. Some, like working with an inside sales team,
have little to do with the online world; others, like outbound marketing, rely completely
on the Internet as the delivery medium.
The Web has opened a lot of opportunities to direct marketers. Outbound marketing
avenues like e-mail and RSS are relatively new platforms for reaching people, and if used
correctly, can reap tremendous returns down the road. Unfortunately, a medium like
e-mail is so littered with government regulation and so abused by irresponsible, maverick
spammers that it’s often difficult to sift through the reams of advice to find true best
practices.
This chapter will clarify what constitutes good outbound marketing, with a spotlight on
e-mail and RSS. There is much to be said (and much that has been said) about these means

of communication—enough for an entire book, easily—but we’ll focus on corporate B2B
marketers.
E-mail newsletters
When e-mail started to garner widespread adoption, it was not long before the world real-
ized its capabilities as a mass media delivery platform. A moderate amount of computer
equipment could blast hundreds of thousands of messages in minutes, which was a virtual
miracle compared to the expensive and comparatively glacial speed of traditional printed
direct mail. In one head-to-head test with direct mail and e-mail advertising, the actual
cost of the e-mail campaign was a quarter of the printed version, but a higher number of
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316
1. According to the Direct Marketing Association, B2B spending on direct marketing advertising
was $77.4 billion in 2005.
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generated leads from e-mail pushed the cost per lead for the digital medium to a fraction
(about 1 percent) of the cost per lead of the printed medium.
2
Today, the thrust toward e-mail marketing continues to drive marketing campaigns. A
study by Datran Media saw 83.2 percent of marketers cite e-mail marketing as the most
important advertising tactic, and 78 percent of B2B marketers claim e-mail marketing is
increasing.
3
These results are not isolated. Study after study shows companies of all sizes
and markets turning to e-mail as the favored marketing device.
E-mail marketing offers users convenience and a personal connection to the publisher.
Instead of visiting a website, they are receiving content in their inbox that they can con-
sume and explore at their leisure. Many people subscribe to multiple newsletters, and
according to a Nielsen Norman Group study, 69 percent of people look forward to receiv-
ing at least one.
4

In fact, the same study reports people’s general unwillingness to unsub-
scribe because of emotional ties they form with the newsletter.
As the medium matures, best practices come to light. For businesses, e-mail can serve two
very important goals: advertising and keeping in touch with the customer base. Both fields
have been mercilessly studied and dissected. E-mail is an easy thing to measure—because
of the precise metrics and powerful tools available to marketers, it is easy to refine cam-
paigns to a finely honed point.
This chapter’s primary focus is staying in touch with customers—typically through e-mail
newsletters—and how this marketing channel can be a cornerstone of the overall promo-
tional effort if executed well.
Newsletter content
Traditionally, newsletters have been used for a myriad of purposes. Their content can be
anything from brief blurbs of general interest to in-depth articles, with a focus on cus-
tomers, prospects, investors, and more. Some newsletters are sent to everyone for any
reason; others are reserved for an exclusive audience. Typically, content revolves around a
few key themes:
Corporate updates: This can be anything from new hiring announcements to
photos of the company picnic to important financial updates.
Industry news: Certain companies are very dependent on their industries, and fluc-
tuations and trends within the market are important to monitor and analyze. A
company that brokers commercial power, for instance, has to keep a close eye on
gas prices and electricity indices.
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14
2. Heidi Anderson, “Email Versus Direct Mail: A Head-to-Head Test,” ClickZ, September 19, 2002
(
www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=1465331).
3. MarketingSherpa Email Benchmark Survey, November 2006.
4. Nielsen Norman Group, “Email Newsletter Usability” (

www.nngroup.com/reports/newsletters/
summary.html).
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Product and service announcements: Newsletters are a great avenue for announc-
ing new product releases or service offerings, especially when used in combination
with other media and traditional advertising.
Regular features: Newsletters published on a schedule might have tips and tricks,
employee profiles, interviews, or other content that appears within a regular
column.
In-depth article teasers: Rarely are full articles published within a newsletter; the
format simply does not support the extended text. Instead, article excerpts are pro-
vided, along with a link to the complete version hosted on a website.
Advertisements: These can be for internal products or third-party products. A hard
drive manufacturer, for instance, might allow a non-competing partner company—
such as a cable manufacturer—to advertise within its newsletter.
Every company will tailor its newsletter content to fit the interests of its readership.
Consider the regular e-mail newsletter published by Clovis, featured in Figure 14-1. The
company, a staffing and recruiting firm, sends out a monthly newsletter to candidates on
its mailing list. The material is relatively simple; the left contains current job opportunities,
the middle is used to address the readership, and the right contains special announce-
ments, such as a referral program and relevant articles hosted on other sites.
Strong subject lines
An effective subject line for the e-mail newsletter can dramatically increase the open rate
among recipients, just as a poorly phrased one can ensure the message receives the
prompt attention of the Delete key. Because the software used to deliver e-mail can track
many metrics about the messages, this area has been combed over many times by mar-
keters, statisticians, and developers.
After the From field, the subject line is the most important factor in deciding whether an
e-mail gets opened. Unfortunately, writers are working within very claustrophobic param-
eters: with only about 30 to 40 characters and a few seconds to make an impression, the

subject line has to be short and compelling. There’s little room for messing around.
The best tactics are sincerity and transparency. Do not obfuscate, exaggerate, or compose
flowery haikus, because they simply won’t work. Direct and factual text is best. The fol-
lowing subject line will get a good open rate:
Servers R Us – Newsletter for August 2007
By contrast, the following subject line will practically guarantee a low open rate:
Crazy data center guys talk about recent happenings!!!
The company name is critical, and works best when it’s placed in front. E-mail newsletters
are “soft” selling devices; they’re focused on building and maintaining relationships, so
mucking up the reader’s inbox with a bunch of heavy-handed marketing language is not a
good policy. That being said, if users subscribe to an e-mail newsletter designed for pro-
moting sales, discounts, or special offers, then people will expect this type of subject line.
The key is
meeting expectations of the recipient.
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Figure 14-1. This e-mail newsletter contains basic but topical and useful content.
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Writing style
Copywriting for e-mail newsletters is a bit different than printed media. The infinite verti-
cal space of e-mail does not limit the content length; if the author wants to type in the
unabridged version of
War and Peace, the medium would support it. Despite this flexibil-
ity, the paradox of e-mail is the importance of keeping content short. (The printed
medium is the opposite—the readability facilitates longer, denser passages, but the physi-
cal restrictions of paper keep content length in check.)

When authoring e-mail content, brevity is the name of the game. As sad as it is, few make
time to read elegant, descriptive prose. The sound-bite world of interactive media
demands content be composed in small, chewy chunks that are easy for a distracted brain
on the go to digest. Think newspaper meets PowerPoint meets blogging, and consider the
following when writing newsletters:
Short, punchy paragraphs: Newspaper writers excel at crafting brief but hard-
hitting paragraphs that drive a point home and then move on. Sometimes they are
only one sentence. They rarely extend more than four or five lines, and then never
try to force fit more than one idea.
Bullets: Indented, bulleted text grabs the eye and reinforces the importance of the
content. People respond well to lists as the bullets and numbers focus their atten-
tion on the juicy bits.
Typographic emphasis: Bolded, italicized, and highlighted text works well to
emphasize inline concepts
just like this, as long as the treatment is employed judi-
ciously. Too much and the text will look like graffiti on a New York subway car. (And
never underline text unless it’s a link.)
Headers: Long, unbroken passages of text simply do not read well on the Web.
Headers are used to break up copy into mentally manageable portions. These do
not have to be particularly bold, but they have to be styled differently enough to
help wandering eyes find the next section.
These ideas might look familiar since the concepts also apply to most general websites, but
e-mail takes the idea of abbreviated content further by reducing text into a tighter space.
For instance, newsletters do not usually contain full articles, but rather short, teasing
excerpts that offer a link to the full text somewhere on the main corporate website. The
advantage is twofold. The newsletters are kept short and manageable, and the number of
links pointing to the primary domain is increased.
Link excessively
Ideally, a corporate newsletter serves a marketing purpose. Instead of assigning a writer to
churn out content with no end rationale, companies should always be thinking about how

the content serves the greater promotional principle. For most businesses, that means
guiding people back to the mothership website.
Well-designed and well-written newsletters link profusely. Sometimes this means article
excerpts point people to the full text, as discussed in the preceding section. Other times
it’s a starburst or similarly eye-catching graphic that links to a contest, promotion, or sale.
Still other times the link drives people to a third-party website because the company pub-
lishing the newsletter thought it was valuable enough to share.
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Link everything. Sometimes people will find themselves on a regular page of the website,
sometime they’ll arrive on a custom-designed landing page. No matter what, always open
links in a new window using the
target attribute, like so:
<a href=" ➥
target="_blank">Learn more</a>
You always want your website viewed in a proper web browser, not the recipient’s e-mail
client.
Legalize it
Even the most benign newsletters have to follow the law. Because of the rampant abuse of
e-mail by both malicious spammers and over-enthusiastic marketers, the CAN-SPAM Act
of 2003 requires publishers to include several pieces of key information.
5
The most perti-
nent are a functioning opt-out mechanism and the company’s mailing address.
Subscription management
The most well-designed and well-written newsletter means nothing without readers. The
most successful e-mail campaigns are based in permission marketing, where users volun-
teer their e-mail address (and possibly name or more) because of a direct interest in the
content. Subscribing people who are not expecting to be subscribed, either through buy-

ing a list or opting-in contacts without their permission, is not a good way to build a recep-
tive readership. The key to an influential newsletter is organic growth.
Thankfully, the subscription process is binary; people are either subscribed or not.
Managing this simple transaction does require some planning, with particular focus given
to usability and speed.
Subscribing
The single best place to aggregate subscribers is the homepage of the corporate website.
Since this page receives the bulk of both new and returning traffic, it makes sense to pro-
mote the newsletter in the spot most likely to reel in the most e-mail addresses. Figure 14-2
shows an example of the subscription opportunity in a prime corner of the site.
The Nielsen Norman Group study on e-mail newsletters, mentioned in the previous sec-
tion, states that usability success for these processes is fairly high: 81 percent for subscrib-
ing and 91 percent for unsubscribing. While this is strong, it could be better.
Providing a direct input field and submit button on the homepage is most effective. It
underlines the simplicity of the process, and encourages impromptu subscriptions—users
do not have to leave the page or scour the rest of the site, which will happen if only a link
in the main menu (such as
Subscribe to Our Newsletter) is provided. Do not add any other
fields to the subscription form—asking people for their name, phone number, place of
birth, and most embarrassing childhood memory only complicates the process and freaks
out would-be subscribers.
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5. www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm
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Figure 14-2. This company uses the prime real estate of the homepage to collect subscribers.
Many companies employ double opt-in functionality. When a person enters their
e-mail address, they are sent a confirmation e-mail, usually containing a link back to
the corporate website that confirms their interest in receiving the newsletter. Double

opt-in provides two key benefits. First, the process prevents people from subscribing
others’ e-mail addresses. Second, it confirms the e-mail address that was entered is
correct and active. When purchasing lists (covered in Chapter 15), marketers will pay
a premium for addresses that were gathered through a double opt-in process.
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Although the homepage is the most visible place, and usually the most successful in col-
lecting subscribers, the opportunity should be offered in as many places as possible, such
as the contact page, a dedicated subscription management page, or within a persistent
construct like the footer or navigation.
Managing the subscription
For many companies, simply harvesting e-mail addresses and blasting a newsletter is not
enough. They offer users a subscription management feature, which is a committed area
of the website that allows people to edit newsletter preferences. This section might
include any or all of the following options:
Change e-mail address: Users should be able to change their e-mail address at any
time. Newsletters administered with basic functionality often require a person to
unsubscribe with their old e-mail address and then resubscribe with their new one,
but this is inefficient.
Invite a friend: A simple field allows someone to send an acquaintance an invitation
to subscribe to the newsletter. It’s important to note that this should not subscribe
the recipient, only
invite them.
Add additional contact information: For people wanting to create a profile for per-
sonalization and additional benefits, provide input fields for login password, name,
phone, title, and whatever else your organization would like.
Change format of e-mail: Commonly, newsletters are sent in either plain text or
HTML. Some e-mail readers do not support (or do not correctly render) HTML-
based e-mail, and some people simply prefer plain text. If you provide both, allow

people to switch to one or the other.
Unsubscribe: This is the most important feature, and is covered in the following
section.
Building an e-mail newsletter management center requires a fair amount of programming,
but for businesses whose newsletter comprises a significant amount of their marketing
effort, it’s a worthy investment. A percentage of subscribers will, admittedly, never touch
it. But for those who do, providing them explicit control over their profile and subscription
options will only build loyalty to the newsletter and company.
Unsubscribing
Enable users to unsubscribe from the newsletter as easily as they subscribed. Remember
that people who wish to unsubscribe might not be leaving forever; as we discussed in the
preceding section, many will unsubscribe only to resubscribe with a different e-mail
address. Because of this, focus on building the unsubscribe process with simplicity, usabil-
ity, and speed to avoid leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.
Typically, unsubscribing occurs in two media: the website and the e-mail itself. On the web-
site, if there is any central subscription administration page devoted to the e-mail news-
letter, it should have a field for entering an e-mail address to remove from the list. Using
e-mail, a person should be able to reply to the message with a word such as
remove in the
subject line to remove them from the list. This latter example is sometimes referred to as
the reply/remove technique.
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The footer of every e-mail should have explicit directions for unsubscribing. Ideally, it
should offer three methods:
Reply/remove: This is the most important and by far the easiest for recipients.
A link to an unsubscribe area of the website: This could be a generic unsubscribe
page, a subscription management page, or a custom link with the e-mail address

encoded in the URL that automatically processes the unsubscribe request and then
displays a confirmation like the one in Figure 14-3. Sometimes hyperlinks within
the e-mail do not function, so make sure the actual link is displayed for people to
copy and paste into a browser address bar if needed.
A physical mailing address to send unsubscribe requests: This is not likely to hap-
pen, but people can ask to be removed from the mailing list through physical mail,
phone, or fax, and the company is legally bound by the CAN-SPAM Act to honor
the request within ten days.
Figure 14-3. Users should always receive a notice when
their unsubscribe attempt is successful.
As the person moves through the process of removing their name, always be sure to
remind them of what e-mail address they are about to unsubscribe. Some newsletters
actually publish this in the footer (“This e-mail has been sent to
”),
but it should be reiterated before the reader commits. In addition, a confirmation e-mail
should be sent to the unsubscriber; this verifies the address was successfully removed, and
ensures it was the right person removing the address.
Newsletter design
E-mail newsletters fall into one of two categories. They are either created as plain text or
they are built with HTML. If plain text, the design parameter is simple: keep lines of text to
less than 60 characters and you’re good to go. For HTML-based e-mail, the design process
gets quite complicated, and at times, outright bewildering.
An e-mail removed from a mailing list cannot ever be used again until that person
opts back into the list. It also cannot be used for any other e-mail published by the
company. The removal is permanent. In fact, if you buy a list of e-mail addresses, the
purchased list must be cross-checked against your own suppression list to ensure that
no one who has opted out of your previous mailings will be hit again. Monitoring your
suppression list is critical to maintaining CAN-SPAM compliance.
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Modern web browsers are fairly predictable. Most are built around a few common ren-
dering engines, and companies like the Mozilla Foundation, Apple, Opera, and even
Microsoft make a concerted effort to keep their software up to date with web standards.
When a website displays correctly in Firefox, for instance, there’s a reasonably good
chance it will display correctly in any other browser.
One would think that this modern era of standards compliance would enable designers to
craft lean, beautiful, interactive, CSS-based e-mail designs that render perfectly in all mail
clients. Unfortunately, that is anything but the truth. The disparate, meager, and inconsis-
tent rendering capabilities of contemporary clients will drive any developer to bang their
head against the wall.
The reality is that e-mail clients have always lagged behind their browser brethren—their
interpretation of HTML is, by any standard, outright primitive. Even more amazingly, some
newer clients like Gmail and Outlook 2007 actually perform worse than their predecessors
by
removing support for CSS. Mix in the fact that there are dozens of clients spanning a
maddening difference of age—none of which follow any common standard—and the
golden road of e-mail design suddenly crumbles into a twisting, poorly lit alley replete with
potholes and menacing characters.
Where does that leave designers? In a nutshell, mired in development practices that went
the way of the dodo more than five years ago. Non-standard, table-laden code is the
norm. CSS is scarce and inefficient. Images have to be approached carefully, and kept to a
minimum.
Despite this adversity, intrepid designers have pushed the medium forward, leaving behind
a trail of best practices culled from their endless tests.
Structure
Believe it or not, table-based layouts are back in a big way. Just when progressive, standards-
loving designers thought it was safe to float a
div, along comes an army of e-mail clients
dragging along rendering engines that make Netscape 4 look cutting edge. Not only must

designers use tables, but the tables must be simple, without heavy nesting. Figure 14-4
shows a common two-column design, and how those tables are divided up.
As you can see, the structure begins with a wrapping table (set in gray) that has one cell
set to 100 percent width. Because many e-mail clients ignore background colors set to the
<body> element, the background color should be set in this table.
Within the wrapping table, another table houses the three primary areas of the e-mail: the
header, body, and footer. All of these tables and cells should be set to a fixed size in pixels.
E-mail readers afford far less room to view content, so the optimal width is 500 to 600
pixels—much narrower than a typical web page.
Notice the layout only uses three actual tables. This slim markup reduces load time. While
web pages can afford to be built with complex, layered tables, e-mail is best kept to simple
structures, especially when they need to have hard-coded display information like width,
cell padding, and cell spacing. Using CSS to define widths will have unpredictable results,
and CSS positioning is absolutely out of the question, unless of course you enjoy the sound
of Lotus Notes laughing at you.
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Figure 14-4. A common two-column design for an e-mail newsletter
Images
One of the primary reasons people want to use HTML for e-mail is the ability to add
images to the content. Thankfully, e-mail clients do not put up too much of a fight when
running across an
<img> tag. They do, of course, pursue their own unique idiosyncrasies,
which, if nothing else, will make your life more interesting as you test designs. Here are
some common ground rules when adding images:
Use absolute paths: Host the images on a web server and reference them with a
full, absolute URI in the HTML, like
<img src=" />images/email/header.jpg" alt="company logo" />

. Be careful not to use any
relative paths, since the images will not be found.
Always use the alt attribute: When designing web pages, using the alt attribute in
an image tag is important because if the image fails to load—or if the user has
images turned off—then they will at least see a small bit of text describing the
image. For e-mail, it’s even more imperative, because images are
routinely turned
off (some clients even do this by default).
Do not house important text in images: Following the thought process from the
previous bullet, since so many clients have images turned off or have problems
downloading images to begin with, make sure that important content like head-
lines and body copy are not locked behind graphics.
Define the height and width: Use the height and width attributes in the image tag
so the e-mail client sizes the space correctly even if the image is not loaded. This
ensures the integrity of the layout is retained.
Never use spacer images: These single-pixel buggers have long been the ally of
table-based layouts. However, many spammers use single-pixel images to track
information, so clients might flag an e-mail containing one as spam.
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Overall, it’s best to keep images to a minimum. Use only what you need for the actual
design of the piece, such as graphics illustrating the text (charts, screenshots, portraits) or
important structural images (like the headers). As much as possible, design the newsletter
with HTML and CSS using background colors, type treatments, and more—in other words,
design for images being turned off.
Styling
One of the greatest insults in the modern e-mail era is the disastrous lack of CSS support.
What could be a playground for designers has become an abattoir for newsletter design,
with e-mail readers mangling elements, ignoring styles, stripping chunks of markup, and

forcing the HTML into a nonstandard, bug-prone, lowest common denominator of markup.
This is not to say using CSS is out of the question. The tools are limited, and the imple-
mentation is hacky at best, heretical at worst. The problems are not discriminating,
although web-based clients seem to lag further behind their desktop counterparts.
Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail all interpret code differently. Desktop e-mail clients are
more stable, but even some popular ones, like Lotus Notes, remain years behind the curve.
To start, many applications completely disregard the contents of the
<head> tag, so any
metadata, titles, JavaScript, and CSS appearing there will be unapologetically ignored. This
means the
<link> tag is out of the question. Internal styles can also appear inside the <body>
tag, which, under normal circumstances, would invalidate a page and be dismissed as cate-
gorically ludicrous. But in the upside-down world of designing for the inbox, anything goes,
and developers often have to whip out MacGyver-like skills to get something to work.
Thankfully, just about every client supports inline styles. The overall support for specific
styles is a bit sticky, however; Eudora on the Mac supports nothing, and Outlook 2007 and
Lotus Notes support very little. Others, like the web-based Yahoo Mail and desktop-based
Thunderbird (from Mozilla) and Mail (from Apple), have excellent support.
Inline styles are the most reliable, but they require an inordinate amount of redundancy,
and echo a darker time of tedious
<font> tags. To add insult to injury, the style definitions
are most reliable when spelled out individually instead of condensed with CSS shorthand.
As a comparison, a web page might use the following bit of CSS:
h3 {
font: bold 15px/1.1em Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;
}
This is efficient. It collapses four properties (font-weight, font-size, line-height, and
font-family) into one definition. When crafting CSS for e-mail, it works best to separate
and spell out those definitions in the inline styles. For instance, Figure 14-5 shows an
e-mail newsletter from TradeMark Media. The design relies on a lot of CSS, but the code is

peppered with repeating font definitions like the following:
<h3 style="font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,serif;margin:0;➥
padding:0;font-size:15px;font-weight:bold;color:#444;➥
line-height:1.1em;">
<a href=" />target="_blank">Don't Underestimate the Power of Online Networking,
Get LinkedIn!</a></h3>
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Figure 14-5. This well-designed newsletter from TradeMark Media uses many inline
CSS definitions.
To further complicate the matter, exactly which CSS properties are recognized by any
given e-mail client is a complete crapshoot. David Greiner of Campaign Monitor compiled
information about this exact matter. His results were not encouraging. Very few e-mail
clients offer complete CSS support; most piddle around with arbitrarily selecting what to
support and what to ignore, and new versions of Microsoft’s Outlook and Live Mail actu-
ally support
less than their predecessors.
6
What we can establish, at least, is some common ground. Most clients are consistent with
a base minimum of presentational CSS, and designers can confidently employ the follow-
ing properties:
Typography definitions like
font-weight, font-variant, font-size, line-height,
text-align, text-decoration, and font-family
The color property
Basic layout definitions like
border, margin, padding, and white-space
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6. David Greiner, “A Guide to CSS Support in Email: 2007 Edition,” Campaign Monitor, April 19, 2007
(www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/04/a_guide_to_css_support_in_emai_2.html).
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Clearly, e-mail newsletters are not ready for CSS positioning. Several major clients like
Gmail and Outlook 2007 do not understand
float, position, z-index, and other proper-
ties. For now, all structural design must be done with tables, with CSS driving the finer
details inside the cells.
As a final piece of contingency design, it is a very smart idea to store a proper version of
the newsletter on your website, and add a link from the e-mail version to the alternate
version. This does not have to be large or particularly lengthy, but it should be at the top
of the message, as shown in Figure 14-5.
Layout
Once a designer has a grasp on the technical limitations of the medium, it’s time to actu-
ally design the newsletter. The process is not unlike a website homepage—there is a finite
amount of space and time to make an impression strong enough to convince the person
to keep reading. With their finger hovering over the Delete key, high-impact content
coupled with clean, functional design is required to earn the newsletter a glance.
Following are some tips for making this happen.
Beware the two-dimensional fold. When designing a website’s homepage, information
architects often refer to
the fold, which is the invisible line delineating content visible
within the browser window when first opening the page and content only visible if the per-
son scrolls down. In an average browser window, this might be 400 pixels or so; not much,
but certainly enough to house a compelling design.
On the Web, the fold runs in one dimension: horizontal. That is largely true for web-based
e-mail clients as well, since they generally only have one “screen” in which to display mes-
sages. But for desktop clients, the fold is two-dimensional. The preview pane in a client like
Outlook or Lotus Notes is completely arbitrary: it might be horizontal or vertical, it might

be opened nearly full-screen or just a sliver, or it might not even be turned on at all.
This unpredictability is enough to send most designers reaching for the nearest bottle of
whiskey. Instead of a basic metric to reference (“Let’s see, 80 percent of my website visi-
tors are running 1024
✕786, so I will design for that.”), designers have nothing but a hunch
and a prayer. The best they can do is optimize the top-left corner. This is where the mast-
head should lie—bold, clear, and persuasive, and immediately branding the newsletter. A
few hundred pixels may be the only thing the user sees before sending the message to the
trash.
Just a column or two. The most successful e-mail newsletters are simple. A clean design is
always compelling, and a large part of that simplicity is derived from the basic structure of
the newsletter itself. Since designers must work within the narrow confines of a client’s
window, that 500- to 600-pixel width only allows for two or, at most, three columns.
The column containing the primary body text should be clearly dominant in width; the
secondary content should fall into the outside columns that are about half (or less) of
the width of the larger container. See Figure 14-6 for sample proportions.
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Figure 14-6. Sample widths for two- and three-column layouts
There is rarely a reason to go to three columns. In the interest of brevity and clarity, two
are ideal, and three quickly begin to add clutter to the visual hierarchy. In Figure 14-1, the
content of the far left column is clearly separate from the rest of the newsletter, but suc-
ceeds in not adding too much noise. However, the two-column layout in Figure 14-5 is
much easier to read—the eye knows exactly where to travel, and the most important ele-
ments in the page are given clear visual authority.
The table of contents. A common tactic among newsletter designers is to add a contextual
table of contents to the newsletter itself. This usually appears in the secondary column at
the top of the page. It’s not much more than a list of the articles present in the newsletter,

with a link referencing each of them.
This is especially valuable for long newsletters, particularly ones publishing entire articles.
It saves the user the time of scrolling up and down the document, especially when the end
of each article contains a complementary link that sends the reader back to the table of
contents.
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Publishing
With a legion of patiently waiting subscribers, the technical hurdles out of the way, some
mind-blowing content written, and a design worthy of the Museum of Modern Art, it’s
time to unveil the newsletter to the world. At this point, the finer details of publishing
need to be ironed out, and the company needs to choose a platform for launching the
messages.
Publication schedule
Almost by definition, a newsletter is a regularly published document, meaning it follows a
consistent schedule of production and broadcasting. This reliability and uniformity, com-
bined with truly useful content, is what separates a newsletter from common spam.
However,
picking a schedule is the easy part—it’s up to the company to adhere to that
schedule and make an effort to send out a newsletter on the anticipated date. If the con-
tent truly is useful, subscribers will look forward to each issue, and they will notice when
issues begin to slip off the publishing timeline.
For companies, defining the schedule requires several things, including the following:
Frequency: How often will the newsletter ship? Every two weeks? Monthly?
Quarterly? Semiannually?
Date of publication: In reference to the frequency, this is when the issue will actu-
ally drop. For instance, one might be published on the first Monday of every
month, or the first day of each season, or every other Friday.
Archiving format: Traditional magazines adhere to an archiving format, like

Volume 10, Number 4. A good newsletter will do the same. This may or may not
reflect the frequency. For instance, a monthly newsletter could be chronological
like
June 2006 (see Figure 14-1), or consecutive like Number 17 (see Figure 14-5).
Newsletter archive
Almost as important as developing new content for forthcoming newsletters is ensuring
the old content is available to those who were not subscribed from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, many companies fail to publicly store previous issues and miss out on the
powerful marketing potential of their older content.
The newsletter archive is not a complex beast; like the archive of blog entries or press
releases, older content is listed in reverse chronological order, as shown in Figure 14-7.
Storing older newsletters has many benefits. First and foremost, if current subscribers have
problems viewing the design within their software, they can fall back on a stable alterna-
tive. This is very important as the subscriber base grows, because an increased number of
recipients means an increased number of uncooperative e-mail clients.
Secondly, keeping the content on a website makes for great search engine fodder. Typical
newsletter content like company news, articles, tutorials, and reviews are exactly what
people want to find on your site and in search results. Keeping this stuff out there for pub-
lic consumption only increases the chance of attracting more people to the website.
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