We’ll be performing scheduled maintenance and upgrades this Sunday evening (the 21st March), and this means that for a time, Sign-Up.to accounts will be unavailable.

The maintenance window will be from 6pm until midnight on Sunday 21st March.

We have chosen this time because historically our systems are very quiet on Sunday evenings, and it gives us the night to apply finishing touches before the week kicks off on Monday morning.

We really hope any unavailability doesn’t cause too much inconvenience. Accounts will be affected in groups, and we don’t expect any one account to be unavailable for more than 2 hours. Please do relay this information to any colleagues or clients of yours who have access to Sign-Up.to or any of our associated products. We will keep everyone informed of progress from our twitter account so stay tuned to that for updates as the evening progresses. Any questions – please use the comments form below!

A bit of a heads up! We noticed late morning that we were queuing emails into hotmail.com and associated domains (e.g. hotmail.co.uk, live.com etc.). Further investigation revealed that the Hotmail servers are refusing inbound mail connections for everyone – more and more reports are cropping up on the internet. Rest assured we’re monitoring the situation and will queue all of your mail to be delivered as soon as the situation is resolved. For those who do, you can keep up to date with this and other Sign-Up.to news by following us on Twitter: @signupto

Update 16:20, 18/03/2010

Hotmail are now accepting inbound mail, but at a reduced rate. Our queue size is steadily dropping; we’ll deliver your mail as soon as we can.

After much deliberation, coding, coffee consumption and several late nights we’re pleased to unveil our newly updated campaign analysis tools. These are available in all accounts right now, so log in, take a look and let us know what you think!

To get you started we’ve put together a quick guide and an introductory video which you can check out here.

Last week, I mentioned the 3 different types of skills you need to master to be able to build a really successful PPC campaign. These skills; Creative, Trading and Technical all combine together to make the PPC process an effective and profitable one.

Now there are a number of different techniques and ways to build and manage your campaigns, but they all ultimately boil down to these 7 steps:

1. Market Research – Each market is different, and by now you probably know a good deal about yours; who your competitors are, how the business operates and so forth. You may already have done most of the work that this stage requires.
2. Keyword Research – Find out which keywords and keyword themes drive traffic in your marketplace, what your competitors are bidding on and what language your audience is using.
3. Build Your Campaigns – Once you have done your research, it is time to get building. Organise your keyword themes into relevant campaigns, write your ads and decide on budgets and click bids.
4. Construct Landing Pages – A landing page is the first page people see after they have clicked on your PPC ad. This should be laid out to maximize the number of people signing up to your email mailing list.
5. Reporting and Tracking – This is essential! Just as you should be keeping a close eye on your email statistics, Open Rates, Bounce Rates, Click Through Rates and so forth, you need to be monitoring your PPC traffic as well. Statistics we will look at will include: Click Through Rates, Conversion Rates and landing page engagement stats.
6. Optimisation – Once you have good data on your campaigns, you can start optimising them to improve your Click Through Rates, your Conversion Rates, and ultimately your Return on Investment (ROI). In other words, you will make your campaign more and more efficient, and pay less and less per sign up to your email list.
7. Rinse and Repeat – This is an ongoing process. There are always more improvements to be made to your campaigns, more campaigns to be built and tested, and more opportunities to build your email list and your business!

So now that we have gone through the basics of the PPC process, you should have a greater understanding of why you need the core skills I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

In the next post, we will start to go through each stage in greater detail to give you the tools you need to try PPC for yourself, starting with Market Research.

If you have any questions on what we have gone through so far, please do comment below. I will be monitoring comments, and will try to respond as soon as I can.

Mike Theodoulou is a Senior Consultant at 1upSearch.co.uk
Read Mike’s Blog
Follow Mike On Twitter

At Sign-Up.to we believe the social media platforms are a pivotal tool for any growing business. In today’s business world, platforms such as Facebook cannot be ignored. Recently, we reported that Facebook now has 400 million users, and Twitter users send 50 million tweets a day. These pages are still growing, so now’s the time to get your business online and see what social media can do for you. The question is, how do you grow your social media presence?

The first method is to use your existing customer base. If you have a database of subscribers within your Sign-Up.to account, why not send them an email advertising your social media pages? You can also include Facebook and Twitter links on your website and any promotional materials you may have. By alerting existing customers, you’re likely to have their loyalty already – which they can show to you online. The great thing about Facebook is that once a user becomes a fan of something, that fan page is placed on their friends’ homepage as a suggestion – which really shows how viral social media can be.

Another way to grow your presence is by using social media to talk about your business. You may tell customers about a new offer you’re running, new openings, new products – the list is endless. By telling your fan base what your company is doing, you’re allowing an insight into your brand and creating a personality, which can create brand loyalty. Linked to talking about your business is making announcements exclusively online. This will help your followers and fans feel like they have insider knowledge and keep them as fans, as they expect future announcements and want to be the first to know. Using Twitter, fans can also re-tweet interesting updates to their followers – a great promotional feature for businesses hoping to grow their fan base.

Businesses can also promote themselves online through exclusive offers, a great way of incentivising your fans and acquiring new ones. For example, you can create an event and allow all guests to invite their friends, who in turn will invite their friends. There are applications online which can help you create vouchers, and you can ask people who download your vouchers to become a fan in return.

Why not use Facebook and Twitter in conjunction with each other? Facebook allows you to directly link to Twitter, so that when you post an update, it’ll automatically be posted on Twitter too. This is a great, automatic way of promoting your business on both platforms, as customers may be a fan on Facebook but not Twitter and vice versa. For the majority of businesses, the Facebook and Twitter audience are very much the same in terms of their needs and expectations of your company. However, it’s important to look closely at your audience so you can understand who you’re talking to.

The great thing about the different social media platforms is that there are lots of tools which can help you and your business. Facebook, for example, allows you to advertise your business. These adverts can be targeted to specific audiences and you can decide how much you want to spend and how many impressions and clicks you want to have. Facebook, as well as many Twitter statistic websites, offer insights into your page, for example the level of growth or interaction your page has had. Another great tool is Tweetdeck, which allows you to create search functions, so you can see if someone mentions your company or anything related to you and your business. You can then follow these people, and the likelihood is they will follow you in return.

To conclude, there are many ways you can use social media, so it’s important to know who your audience are and use the tools that will benefit your business. If you have any useful tips that have worked for your business, please get in touch and let us know.

In the first of a series of guest posts, Mike Theodoulou from 1UpSearch.co.uk talks about using PPC as part of your Email Marketing strategy.

So, you’ve been building your mailing list with Sign-Up.to for some time, you’ve got to grips with sending mails, you probably understand your database and how it responds to an email. You may have even tried the new A/B testing tool and figured out what kind of emails work best for response rates.

Maybe you’re selling a product direct, or slowly growing a community who will give you more and more business as their trust grows.

Whatever your situation, there will hopefully come a time when you come to the conclusion that you need a bigger list. More enthusiastic subscribers reading your emails = more revenue, right?

Why PPC?

1. PPC provides instantaneous traffic.
2. It is very transparent and measurable in terms of traffic sources.
3. You can turn the traffic on and off at will.
4. You will be able to accurately measure your Return on Investment.
5. You can learn a great deal about your market, and apply this knowledge to other parts of your business.

Sounds great right? Well, there are a couple of small downsides.

For one, proper PPC is a process that takes time to learn, and while you are learning, you are spending money. Either your company’s money or your own. I hear this kind of thing again and again from people that I meet:

“That PPC stuff doesn’t work. I tried it, spent loads of money and never saw any return.”

How do you prevent this happening to you? Well, there are three different types of skills you need to think about developing to make sure you succeed:

• Creative skills are needed to increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) by writing compelling and focused ad copy that more searchers will click.
• Trading skills are needed to keep costs per click down by managing your bid amounts and bid types.
• Technical skills are needed to effectively organize the keywords you bid on into different ad groups with matching ad copy and landing pages.

Often, big companies will have specialists to do each part of this, with a creative agency taking care of the ad copy and design, a media buyer doing the trading, and the techies producing web pages, video and so on.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at how to get further into PPC with Google Adwords, and how you can develop each of these skills.

This series should help you ease into building your mailing lists up with Pay Per Click advertising, and will hopefully provide some good tips from those of you who are already running campaigns.

Mike Theodoulou is a Senior Consultant at 1upSearch.co.uk (www.1upsearch.co.uk)
Read Mike’s Blog (http://www.1upsearch.co.uk/author/michael-theodoulou)
Follow Mike On Twitter (http://twitter.com/mtheodoulou)

The Telegraph reported today that Twitter users now send 50 million tweets per day, almost 600 every second.

Social media articles are arguably dominated by the growth and strength on Facebook, but it appears Twitter is also growing at a substantial amount. In 2007 5,000 tweets were sent, this jumped to 300,000 in 2008 and 2009 saw 35 million users tweeting everyday. In the last year to now alone we’ve seen a growth of 43% and this growth is expected to continue, especially with influential characters such as Bill Gates joining Twitter.

In other Twitter news, Mashable today reported  some new Twitter statistics from the research company, Neilsen. According to their recent research, 7% of Twitter users are what they call heavy users (i.e. they spend over 60 minutes on the service every month) and account for 79% of time spent on Twitter. In comparison, 52% of Facebook’s users are heavy users and they account for 98% of the total UK time spent on the website. Whilst there is a large gap between the two platforms, Facebook offers a richer variety of features and functions, so users are likely to spend more time on the website.

2010 could be the year to watch Twitter, they’ve already launched the trending topic by location function and their usage growth is impressive. Furthermore, the Telegraph reported last month that Twitter is the 38th most visited website in the UK.

Here at Sign-Up.to, we’re looking forward to seeing how Twitter continues to evolve. What do you think?

The dashboard is the first page you’ll see when you first log into your Sign-Up.to account, and provides you and your business with a wide range of information. Therefore, it’s important to remember how useful the dashboard is for your permission marketing journey.

The first feature to highlight is the industry functionality. By setting your industry you can quickly compare your email statistics (in the average email statistics box) with other businesses that are in your industry. Therefore, if you’re below the average statistics this allows you to rethink your emailing strategy and work more closely to boost the figures.

On the dashboard, we’ve provided a tool so you can quickly see if there are any new Sign-Up.to blog posts. Our blog section allows you to learn about new features we’ve added, company news and interesting news articles.

Two of the most useful functions on the dashboard are the ‘your data’ and ‘usage’ sections. These boxes are perfect if you want some quick statistics about your account. It allows you to view the total number of subscribers and suspended subscribers as well as providing information about how many emails and SMS messages were sent during the past month.

The subscriber’s box, as well as showing important data, also provides you with a visual of the growth of your subscriber base over the past 30 days. The quick statistics functionality provides you with data on how many new subscribers you’ve gained in the past day, week and month.

If you’re using your Sign-Up.to account to send SMS messages to your customers, the SMS box will show you with how many SMS credits you have, as well as providing you with a link to buy more. You can also see and change your SMS keyword and see how many SMS messages you’ve received from your subscribers today.

Under the scheduled campaigns you can see the emails you’ve planned to send as well as any imports or exports in progress. Once you’ve exported your data, you can save the information on your computer. Also, this section allows you to see an overview of your recent campaigns, so you can see how many it was sent to as well as the open and click through rate.

To summarise, the dashboard is a pivotal part of your Sign-Up.to experience and provides you with a quick snapshot of your account. It’s a good way of assessing how your account is performing and can provide your business with lots of useful information.

Today, we’ve added a further 9 videos to our video section. The videos cover subjects such as how to schedule a campaign, how to send an SMS message and how to change your password. To go to the video tutorials please click here.

There are now 46 videos online and each guide gives you step by step instructions on how to complete the chosen task. Each video has been built to ensure our customers are able to use our system and enjoy email marketing and the tools it provides.

Here at Sign-Up.to we believe video guides will be useful to all of our customers and we will continue to grow the section in the coming months, so watch this space! If you have any feedback or any specific video tutorials you would like to see published, please get in contact and let us know.

As a rapidly growing tech company we have a number of ways that we measure our progress – there’s the typical revenue, profit and customer numbers but today I identified a new one – coffee consumption.

Towards the end of 2009 I finally got fed up with the inability of anyone in our office to make a decent cup of coffee – or to be more precise, to make me a decent cup of coffee (even after many, many hints). So, I took the lazy option and ordered a Nespresso machine to sit alongside our drinks fridge and fruit bowl.

I had my doubts about capsule based coffee machines, I’m now a convert. They’re quick, mess-free and now that Nespresso collect the old capsules for recycling my major issue with them has been resolved. Most importantly they give a superb coffee every time.

The major downside is that you have to order the capsules for delivery, so you need to plan ahead a little. It does make it easy to keep track of consumption though. Back in September this wasn’t too much trouble. The coffee drinkers in the office numbered precisely 2 (I don’t count those who like instant ‘coffee’ – but that’s a whole separate issue). Over the last few months though our numbers have grown and the aroma of fresh coffee has caused a few tea drinkers to swap sides and diverted many of our development team from their favoured caffeine source (diet coke).

Our first 100 capsules lasted 2 months, the next 100 lasted 6 weeks, then 4 weeks, then 3. Our latest order arrived today, I decided to bulk up – 400 capsules. As we’re adding another 3 members to the team this month I suspect these won’t last long!

In case you’re wondering, the red boxes are decaf – no-one will touch them. Unless we’ve run out of everything else like we did at the start of the week.