I recently saw email marketing videos – “Email Promos Exposed” by Michael Rasmussen. They’re really good for newbies and well done. I loved that they were cut into small chunks so I didn’t have to wait decades for it to load…

Anyway, one thing that I’d like to point out here is - personalization. I believe many rookies, have done this mistake. I did it when starting out.

What some people do when they realize the “coolness” of personalization is, they use prospect’s name over and over again in the email. I have submitted prospect’s name like 4 or 6 times in the email…

Problem is that this brings the negative effect. Newbie marketers think that the more they’ll use the name, the more personal an email will be. However, it’s not true. Especially, when people type in their full name.

Think about it… Seeing your first and last name 5 times in the 400 word email looks odd and distracting…

“Hey John Doe,

How are You. Today I’d like to tell you some unbelievably awesome web marketing secret that will blow your sock off. Ready John Doe? Ok, here it is…

And by the way John Doe, these tactics are so powerful that Your competitors will shut their businesses down…”

You get the idea right…

And don’t take this writing as an example. I’ve exaggerated the talk of some so called “gurus” that’s all. So my point is to use personalization carefully. Yes, it’s cool to be able to include someone else’s name into an email, but what’s too much is unhealthy…

So whenever you use personalized emails, always remember that there are people who’ll put their full name in the “name” box. Use a subscriber’s name 2 to 3 times maximum for longer emails.

Hi,

Today I’d like to give you a tip when designing your website. I’ll use my site as an example here.

If you’re not a PHP geek or you don’t use some CMS (content management system), then you may have a pretty flexible website even with CSS (cascading style sheets). That’s what I basically use for my website design.

If you look at the picture below, you’ll see that the layout of the site is broken into 3 chunks – left, center and right sides.

Each of these is just a table with CSS assigned to it. Now, if you use HTML formatting on every single page, there’s no way you can change the layout of all the pages at once. However, if you use external CSS on every page, you can change almost any layout detail and have it updated on all the pages.

For instance, the sidebar (image on the left) has a CSS class assigned to the table and also CSS class assigned to links. Those borders around links are just CSS. Now I can open the main CSS file any time and remove those, change the color, size, font, width or height of the whole table. At the moment the sidebar is 200px in width. But with CSS, I can change it to 150px or 300px if I want to.

I can actually change the main table (centered table) width or background color, as well as sub navigation menu layout.

So, talking about CSS layout, it’s really easy to use and update. If you’re using just a simple HTML for your pages (not ASP or PHP scripting), I suggest using CSS for all your website elements (tables, cells, H1 or H2 tags, links, etc.). This will really save you time if you decide to change the layout of your site.

I think these days almost every (at least decent) web development software has the option to use external CSS for your website layout. I like to use Adobe Golive for editing websites. You may use FrontPage or Dreamweaver. They’re also quite powerful tools.