Email Marketing Results – How to Track Them with Announcer Pro

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

Want to grow your business or keep your current customer base engaged with email marketing? Then read on.

Several months ago, we posted about how to create and send your first marketing emails with Announcer Pro, an easy-to-use tool that’s built into the EarthLink Web Hosting Control panel.

Announcer Pro is included with all our EarthLink web hosting, ecommerce hosting, and professional website design and hosting plans. (The maximum number of contacts you can use, however, does vary by plan.)

After you’ve sent your first marketing email (using the 5 steps outlined in our previous post), you should get ready to monitor the results.

Today we’ll show you just what results and stats you can track with Announcer Pro.

How to View Your Email Marketing Results

Sign in to your EarthLink Web Hosting Control Panel at control.earthlink.net.
Click on the Email tab and then the icon for Announcer Pro.
On the Main Menu screen, you’ll see some results in the Activity section as well as the Latest Email Statistics section.
Click on the View Results tab at the top of the page to go to the Delivery Results page.

Your Delivery Results Page

The Announcer Pro delivery results page is an easy-to-read overview of your marketing email. Here’s what you’ll see on the main part of the page:

A large pie chart showing the percentage of opened, unopened and bounced emails
Percentage of your emails that were successfully sent
Click rate percentage for your emails
Percentage of recipients that unsubscribed
Percentage of emails that were flagged as spam
Twitter click percentage
Facebook click percentage

In the left-side column, you’ll see an Email Summary with the email name, subject line, reply-to-email address, and date sent. You’ll also get links that allow you to dig deeper into the results of your email.

Click, for example, on Clicks: 40% (that was my click-rate on my last email test; so this number will vary by campaign) and you’ll see the URL or URLs that were clicked on in your email, and a list of names and email addresses of the recipients who clicked on your email.

At the bottom of the left column, you’ll have the option to download a detailed report as an HTML, CSV, or PDF file.

Good luck with your email marketing efforts. Let us know how you’re doing in the comments section below.

Mobile Websites: Do I Really Need One?

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

If you’ve got a business of any size (even if it’s just you at home), I probably don’t have to convince you that you need to build a business website at your own domain name.

Your customers expect you to have a website to consider you a legitimate business.

That’s why we started offering our web hosting services way back in 1995. But a lot has changed in those 18 years. Just having a website isn’t enough for many businesses.

Most businesses also need a mobile website.

If you’re wondering why, remember the immortal (if apocryphal) words of the notorious bank robber Willie Sutton. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton is said to have responded, “Because that’s where the money is.”

That’s a pretty concise summary of why you need mobile site for your business. More and more, mobile is where your customers are. And if that’s where your customers are, that’s where your money is.

Consider these stats from a 2012, Google-sponsored study of smartphone usage called Our Mobile Planet (PDF):

96% of smartphone users have researched a product or service on their device
94% of smartphone users look for local information on their phone
90% purchase, contact the business or take another action after local research
66% access the Internet every day on their smartphone
57% search on their smartphones every day
37% have researched on their smartphone and then purchased on a computer
35% have made a purchase on their phone
32% have researched on their smartphone and then purchased the product offline

That’s a lot of money to leave on the table.

Also consider that smartphone penetration is still growing and 31% of smartphone users expect to make even more mobile purchases in the future.

That’s why most of our web hosting plans and all of our ecommerce hosting plans include a mobile website with click-to-map and click-to-call functionality. Because we don’t want you to miss out on the ever-growing mobile market of smartphone and tablet users.

These are the EarthLink Web Hosting plans that include a mobile-optimized website:

Business Website Plus web hosting service
eCommerce Website Plus ecommerce hosting service
Standard Design & Marketing Website – professional web design and web hosting service
Premium Design & Marketing Website – professional web design and web hosting service
eCommerce Design & Marketing Website – professional web design and ecommerce hosting service

SEO Basics: How to Use EasySiteOptimizer for SEO

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

A couple of weeks ago we posted SEO Basics: How to Use Keywords for Website SEO to you get started with SEO.

This week’s web hosting post is a follow-up to show our web hosting and ecommerce hosting customers how to use EasySiteOptimizer Pro (free for EarthLink customers) to implement the keyword suggestions we offered.

Here’s how easy it is to get started with SEO:

Sign into your Web Hosting Control Center at with your EarthLink Web Hosting domain name, username, and password.
On the Build tab, click the EasySiteOptimizer button (shown above); a new window will open.
Click the Manage Keywords link.
Click the arrow next to the page you want to add keyword keywords to; it’s best to start at the homepage, which will often be listed under Choose pages as index.html or index.htm. Then click the Continue to Keyword Selection button.
If you don’t yet have any keywords yet, an alert message will pop up to let you know that. Simply click OK.
Enter the Title you want for this webpage (remember, anything over 70 characters won’t be displayed in search results). See our previous SEO Basics post about Title tags for additional guidance.
Enter the Description you want for this webpage. The description isn’t used for SEO rankings, but it is important. It’s the text that is typically shown in Google search results for your site (keep it under 155 characters, including spaces).
Under Active Keywords List, click the + Add Keyword link.
Add keywords one at a time for your webpage. When you’ve finished, click the Apply button to save your Title, Description, and Keyword changes to your website.
If you are just working on one page of your website, that’s all you need to do. If you want to optimize other pages, simply repeat the process, selecting a different page as you did above in step 4.

Remember to check our SEO Basics post about keywords if you need help choosing the best keywords for your website.

Professional Website Design on a Budget

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Tom Sullivan

Some people would always rather do it themselves.

So, when they are ready to get a website for their business, they really want to build their own website too.

Other people prefer to rely on experts.

They’d rather have a professional web designer create a website for them to make sure everything is done right.

The problem comes when then they look into how much a professionally designed website can cost – $600, $700, $1,000, even $5,000 depending on the type of site – and they realize they can’t afford the steep upfront cost of a professionally designed website.

EarthLink Web Hosting has a solution for all those people that would rather have a professional web designer take care of everything for them: designing and completely setting up the website, and even providing ongoing website maintenance and updates.

It’s our suite of affordable Design & Marketing Websites.

With all of our website design plans (Standard, Premium & Ecommerce), you would start with a one-on-one consultation with one of our top-flight web designers who would then create your business website or ecommerce web store based on your specific needs.

But instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars upfront for the professional website design and then having your regular web hosting service charges on top of that, EarthLink Web Hosting simply charges a little more per month for your web hosting for the first year. After your first year of web hosting, your monthly hosting fee goes down dramatically.

That’s right – with EarthLink there’s zero upfront cost to have one of our web design pros design and build your website.

This makes it easy for most people to afford a professionally designed website.

Learn more about our professional website design plans and then give us a call at 1-800-201-8615 (8:00AM to 1:00AM ET).

You’ll be able to speak with a consultant who can walk you through the process of getting started with our Professional Website Design & Marketing web hosting plans.