vital marketing

If you do nothing else, pay attention to your “From” address and your subject line – these two are the biggest factors in increasing open rates.

The “from” address should include your company or brand name to increase recognition. If appropriate, include an individual’s name if the recipient will recognize the name.
For example:

From: George Washington, The White House.

Your subject line should be short (50 characters or less) and relevant to the content. Choose your words carefully – according to one study 69% of email recipients decide to report email as spam based on the subject line. Avoid words and phrases that read like spam.

Here are a couple free tools that will search your email for “spammy tendencies.”

http://www.gravitymail.com/spamscore.php
http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/

This is just one of 15 tips in the new Vital Marketing report, 15 Tips and Tricks for Marketing on the Web. It’s a free download, so make sure you check out this guide for more helpful hints and reminders.

Are you attracting a lot of SPAM through your Salesforce.com Web2Lead form?   If so, it seems you’re not alone.  Of course any time you are running something as popular as Microsoft Windows or SalesForce.com, the evil-doers will try to invade.

Since there are so many Web2Lead forms easily accessible across the web, hackers write programs to search and harvest Salesforce.com account identifiers from these forms.  And once they have that, they can begin pushing fictitious leads through the Salesforce.com interface which soon arrive as “open leads” in your system.

Here’s how blogger Rick Klau describes the issue:

“The exploit is simple: spammers scrape your lead intake form, capture your Salesforce.com OID number, and then use that to bypass your form and hit the Salesforce.com lead submission script directly. The result? Thousands upon thousands of bogus leads cluttering up our system”

Fortunately Rick offers a solution to this issue in his article “Salesforce spam: fixing web-to-lead.”