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This week’s Tip comes straight from the top: our CEO Landon Ray. Landon wanted to share a pretty slick set of features that only a few of our clients are aware of… probably because we never publicly announced them before (even though they’ve been around for years!)

He says:

Do you help other businesses do their marketing? Are you a business consultant, marketing agency or provider of marketing content? Do you recommend OfficeAutopilot to your clients?

If so, then the OfficeAutopilot Asset Transfer System (OATs) may be just the thing for you.

Here’s how it works:

First you create your “assets” in your own OfficeAutopilot account. Assets may include any messages, landing pages, sequences, custom fields, rules and forms.

Then, using OATs, you choose which assets you’d like to transfer to other accounts and ‘package’ them up into an OATs Package. Each OATs Package has a unique OATs Code. If you provide that code to your clients, they can add it to their own OfficeAutopilot account and, like magic, all your content will appear in their account.

Even better, if you add new assets to your OATs Package at a later time, we’ll sync that new content to your OATs clients automagically.

To top it all off, if you want to charge for your content you can add a price to your OATs Packages and we’ll handle the billing, collections and support.

Imagine being able to add monthly newsletters, new promotions and even completely new systems to your clients’ accounts 10, 100, or 1000 at a time!

The details:

We’ll set up OATs in your OfficeAutopilot account for a one-time set up fee of $1,000 and a monthly account management/support fee of $297. If you’re interested, contact our support at support@officeautopilot.com and we’ll put you in touch with our sales team who can give you all the details. There’s no minimum revenue required, you get 25% commission on all referrals via our affiliate program and 80% commission on all content!

This week, our CEO Landon Ray commandeered our Tip to bring you a very important and urgent warning: browsers are no longer allowing cross-domain (3rd party) cookies! Maybe you know what this (and are already cursing the browser industry), maybe you don’t. Either way, this is a must read.

Landon says:

This article is a little technical, but for some of our clients this is important news that is going to affect your online strategy. If you currently run an affiliate program, you’ll especially want to read this.

As a quick background, which will be familiar to most readers, here’s a refresher on how our (and most everyone’s) affiliate system works:

1. A user visits any URL that has an OAP/ONTRAPORT tracking script on it.

2. We set a ‘cookie’ in that user’s browser which records basic tracking data. We also update your tracking stats.

3. The user eventually fills out a smartform (or order form).

4. Our system ‘reads’ that cookie and sets the proper referrer and source information in the new contact record.

5. When a purchase is made, our system reads the referrer fields and credits the proper affiliate.

This is all good, and in most cases will continue to work just fine… with one big caveat.

It seems like the browser industry (the good folks who make Safari, Firefox, IE, and Chrome, among others) have decided that it’s a privacy issue to allow one domain to read the cookies that were set by a different domain. What Safari has already done and Firefox is about to do with their next release is to change the default security setting in their browsers to ‘not allow’ cross-domain (3rd party) cookies. Since we can’t expect users to dig into their security settings and change this, for our purposes cross-domain cookies are toast.

What this means for order forms

The issue for our users is that some of you have setup your situation like this:

1. User visits domain1.com and we set the cookie.

2. User is directed to domain2.com where they’ll fill out a form or make a purchase.

Since we can no longer capture the referring info in the cookie that was set by domain1.com, your referrer info will be lost.

What this means for affiliate sites

Another challenge is that we have been advising clients (correctly) for years that if you have a lot of big mailers as affiliates who may not be as scrupulous as yourself when it comes to their email list management practices (read: they’re spammers), their bad practices will destroy your domain reputation and hurt your own email delivery. To avoid that, we’ve recommended that big affiliates send traffic to a separate domain than your main one.

For example, your main domain is mybusiness.com. You create a site for your affiliates to promote at mybusiness2.com. This way any spammy affiliate won’t affect your own email reputation.

That’s still good advice, but in the future it’s going to be crucial that you collect the lead information on the FIRST domain (mybusiness2.com in this example).

What this means for upsells

If you are going to use our upsell forms in your sales process, you’re going to need to keep the order form and the upsell form on the same domain. All the same reasons apply.

Thank goodness you have ONTRAPORT/OfficeAutopilot

This email was not meant to toot our own horn, but I do have to point out that without an integrated CRM/affiliate/payment system, such as the one you have with OfficeAutopilot, you’d have a bigger problem. Because we record the contact with the email address and referrer info, we can afford to lose cookie tracking between first capture and sale while maintaining the correct referral info. Without that, you’d be permanently bound to one domain for each affiliate program from here on out.

A note about subdomains and 3rd party cookies

It works. That is, we can continue to track cookies between subdomain1.yoursite.com and subdomain2.yoursite.com.

TL;DR?

So, in conclusion… if you run one single domain for all your stuff (affiliates, lead capture, sales, upsells) then you can safely ignore this. If not, this is a significant change that you need to be aware of.

PLEASE direct any questions or discussions about this subject to our forum post on the topic here. That way we can get everyone’s questions answered at once.

The world of software development is dominated by men. It dawned on me recently that we have NO females in our “dev studio.” I was excited to change that fact after Kristy responded to our job posting for Program Manager (managing our development projects). Her technical skills, impressive development resume, and her awesome ability to manage people made her an obvious choice for the role.

I love her inspirational “tip” for our Women in Business email this week. Kristy’s poem is beautiful and meaningful; sometimes we forget the most important thing – to go outside and breathe.

i often find myself suggesting to others that they “breathe”

i want them to go outside, soak in the sun and slow down

sometimes i realize it is me who needs the oxygen

Do you remember to go outside and breathe fresh air throughout the day? Tell us on Facebook.

 

With love,

Lena Requist

As a small business owner or entrepreneur, email marketing can be your bread and butter. Sure, social media marketing is flashy and trendy right now. But good old-fashioned email is THE most effective online marketing technique. The Direct Marketing Association reported that in 2012, email marketing had an ROI of $40 for each $1 spent.

“Yeah, yeah,” you say, “email marketing is great, but there are two huge challenges… building a list of prospects and figuring out what to say all the time!”

And you’re right, building a great prospect list isn’t always easy, but here are eight quick tips to take the edge off (and we’ll get to the content issue in a future newsletter).

Be eye-catching
This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many signup forms are waaaay down at the bottom of the page with no striking graphics or clear call to action. Get your form up at the top of the page (so people don’t have to scroll down to see it) and make it distinguishable!

Be persistent
Remember that guy who bugged you enough that you finally went out with him? Take something valuable away from that experience: persistence and repetition pays off! Don’t just put a trigger on one page, put it on every page. Put it on your blog, put it on your “About You” page, put it on your shopping page and your checkout page and… you get the point.

Throw Contests
From Powerball to Bingo to throwing business cards in a fishbowl for a free lunch, people love contests! Offer a prize for anyone who signs up for your email list. It doesn’t even have to be something big – people just like the possibility of winning.

Create Incentives
Instead of just awarding one contest winner a prize, EVERYONE GETS A CAR. Well, maybe not a car, but 10% off a product or a free widget or ebook will do nicely.

Ask for forwards
If you’ve been sending out quality content, and you ask very, very nicely for people to send your emails on to their friends and family, chances are they will. You could even explain that there will be an incentive when they pass it on to their network. Everyone likes sharing a good deal with their friends.

Be on Facebook
Put your signup form on your Facebook business Page. If you’re engaging with your customer base on Facebook (and you should be!), encourage shares (nicely). Other good networks: Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Keep it simple
Don’t make them give you their mother’s maiden name, social and date of their first kiss; potential contacts will quit signing up midway through the form. Just ask for first/last and email. You can get the rest later.

Let them preview past newsletters
Put your past email newsletters on your website – it will assure people that they won’t get self-indulgent, overtly promotional crap from you. They’re getting email gold! This also gives potential subscribers a chance to preview and be tantalized by the awesome content you’re about to lay on them.

OAP User of the Week – Cindy Laverty

Cindy Laverty left a lucrative career in marketing to nurse her dying father-in-law. She used that unique experience to begin a business coaching family caretakers. In the beginning, she had a “crappy website,” no online products and a tiny email list. Within a year, she had an awesome website (full disclosure: designed by our Concierge Services Department), ebooks and a membership site. AND she grew her email list 1000%. Now that’s smart marketing.

ONTRApeep of the Week – Sam Flegal

Concierge Services Manager Sam makes sure clients are 100% taken care of during their full-service account building and management experience. In this video, one of ONTRAPORT’s first employees shares what he loves about ONTRAPORT, what he’s excited about for the future… and that he has a gigantic head. Literally (and maybe metaphorically, too).

Tell us: what techniques have you found effective to build your email list? Email us at news@ontraport.com, find us on Facebook or tweet @Ontraport.

A few weeks ago, we sent you an email about Email Delivery 101, or everything you needed to know to avoid looking like a spammer. And last week, postmaster Brendan Dubbels warned you that you could look like an email spammer by using “swipe copy” in your marketing emails.

But we forgot a pretty important piece. Some would say the most important piece of the email: the subject line. It doesn’t matter if you write the most perfect, non-spammy looking email; you’ll still get junked if your subject line looks bad.

And then, even if your email does make it past the spam filters and into the inbox, your potential reader’s first impression is of your subject line. If they groan, “another one of these junk emails?” you’re in trouble.

Either way, your awesome marketing content isn’t making it to your clients’ and prospects’ eyes.

DO

• Get to the point – you have 6-10 words to make an impression. And studies show the shorter the better.

• Intrigue them. If you don’t give them a reason to open NOW, they’ll probably put off opening it. Even if they have the best intentions of opening it, it’ll be lost in the abyss of their inbox.

• Ask a question. See above.

• Tell the truth. Intrigue them, but maintain a reputation of honesty. Don’t outright lie; don’t even exaggerate unless it’s clearly obvious you’re being facetious.

• Test, test, test different subject lines.

DON’T

• !!!!!!!!!!!! or  !?!?!?!?!? or ????????? Over-punctuation puts you straight into Nigerian prince territory.

• Get creative with numbers/characters in place of letters, like: H3LL0! V1AGRA! etc.

• WRITE ANYTHING IN ALL CAPS

• Use these “trigger” words:

  • free

  • miracle

  • guarantee

  • #1

  • 100% free

  • Join millions

  • earn $$

  • work from home

  • fast cash

  • fast money

  • mortgage

  • save up to

  • win

  • degree

  • gift

  • deal

  • sign-up

  • survey

• Use any of these “nos”:

  • no questions asked

  • no hidden costs

  • no obligation

  • no catch

  • no middleman

  • no purchase necessary

  • no gimmick

  • no experience necessary

• Beg for attention ie, use “URGENT, PLEASE READ, TAKE ACTION NOW, etc.”

It may seem like we’re being harsh. You may want to use the words or capitalization we told you not to. Do so at your own risk… SPAM filters are no joke; not only will your email not make it to your readers’ eyes, you could start getting blacklisted, which means no one gets to read your emails!

Here’s a good rule of thumb: if it would sound perfectly natural coming out of the mouth of a used car salesman hawking his goods on late night TV, you should probably not use it for your first email impression. Just sayin’…

What are some of your tips to catch your reader’s attention with your subject lines?

Tell us on Facebook or email us at news@ontraport.com. If you have a tip or trick you’d like to share with the OfficeAutopilot community, if you’d like to learn something new or if you want to view past Tips of the Week, visit our Forum.