Analysts cite a number of factors that predict low performance, including its emphasis on relying on old standards like email rather than pushing out Web 2.0 products like Flickr. There’s also deep concern about the company’s leadership – an issue that probably won’t begin to go away until the company’s August shareholders’ meeting.

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First, you can invite email feedback about your company’s communication efforts. If you’re providing information via an e-newsletter, you can ask recipients to drop you a note and let you know if they find the information useful, and what you can do to improve. Although you can’t incorporate every suggestion a person sends in, there’s a good chance you will see some trends. When you do, it’s time to refine your message.

The second approach is to ask them to participate in an online survey. You can gather a goldmine of information by asking about their perception of your company and – most importantly – gathering demographic information. When you can match an email address with a given set of responses, you’ll easily be able to segment your email marketing list and develop a sound strategy that is sure to generate results.

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So how does pinging work? I’m glad you asked. Well, a ping service regularly scans blogs for updates. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, it is reported back to the pinging service’s site. You can sort of think of ping services as being just like search engine spiders—both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back to their specific site. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog posts. Doesn’t it feel good to learn?

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The first, Yahoo! HotJobs Smart Ads, is a platform that transforms job listings into highly relevant display ads that are tailored to active and passive job seekers across the Yahoo! Network, and the second, Premium Company Profiles, showcases company employment brands using rich media and company-specific content from the Yahoo! Network.

“For employers to remain cost effective and competitive in the evolving recruitment marketplace, they need solutions that leverage technology to efficiently connect them with the most relevant candidates,” said Jeff Kinder, senior vice president and general manager, Yahoo! HotJobs.

Leveraging Yahoo!’s leading display advertising technologies, users are identified and targeted by both the information they have supplied and their online behaviors.

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If you post a long boring rant, there are those people who probably won’t want to trackback that sort of stuff. But if you post a decent sized rant that is entertaining (and that people are likely to agree with), you just might get trackbacked.

The number of trackbacks you get totally depends on the number of visitors your blog receives and how frequently you are able to make quality posts. If you’ve got a good amount of visitors and write good blog posts, you’ll get trackbacks.

Trackbacks are a wonderful thing for every blog. You are able to know when your blog posting has been posted about at another blog, plus you potentially of increased web traffic. It’s a win-win situation for you and you!

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Let’s say that you own an online clothing store for women, and are intent upon sending email marketing blasts to as many women as humanly possible. What kind of email message could you develop that would get the kind of response rate you desire? It would have to be a message that would appeal to twenty-somethings, to Baby Boomers, and to seniors. It would have to speak to those who identify with the music scene and to those who are entrenched in corporate America. In other words, it couldn’t say much of anything at all. When you can’t hit those hot buttons that make potential customers want to click and buy, your email marketing efforts will most likely end up in the trash.

Instead of an all-encompassing, massive list, consider dividing your list into niches and sending a highly tailored message to each niche. It takes work to split a huge list into subgroups, so if you’re just starting out, try keeping your lists separate. If you already have a huge list, start by weeding out those who don’t open your emails, and pare your list down to those who do. Perhaps you could send out an email to the women who don’t open your emails, asking them if they’d like to remain on your list. As for those who do open your emails, it’s time to figure out exactly who they are, and what their triggers are. We’ll discuss how to learn more about the people on your email marketing list tomorrow. In the meantime, start thinking about how you can wrestle an unwieldy list into nimble segments that will bring you better returns.

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Although Gates announced his retirement two years ago, many are speculating about the future of the behemoth. Gates will retain his role as Chairman, while CEO Steve Ballmer will head the daily operations of the company along with Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

While the future of Internet marketing isn’t at stake in the transition, it will be interesting to see if the new team will take the company in new directions.

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The first rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t simply divide your list in half and send one half Offer A and the other half Offer B. If you find that Offer A has a 20 percent better response rate than Offer B, you will have wasted half your list on an underperforming email.

It’s much better to send your split test to a portion of your list, gauge the results, and then send out the better performing email to the remainder of your list. The question then becomes, how many names should you include in your test?

There’s no magic number, but it has to be enough to overcome any potential flukes. Using our example from yesterday, if scientists were testing the effectiveness of a drug and only had two patients in each group, they wouldn’t have enough data to know if the patients in Group A got better because the drug worked, or because of an unrelated factor. Generally speaking, an email test can be effective if you have between 50 and 100 names in each test group.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the names you select must be random and must come from the same list. If you send Offer A to people who made purchases within the past 30 days, and send Offer B to people who made purchases over 60 days ago, you won’t know whether the results came about as a result of the email variable or as a result of their buying behavior.

Once you send out your split test, you should know within a day or two which email is driving the desired results. Once you have that information, you can send that email to the rest of your list and know that you’re sending an offer with proven results.

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If you’re an old pro at email marketing, you probably already do testing. But if you’re new to the game, the prospect of testing can seem daunting. It doesn’t have to be if you know the key: Test one variable at a time.

This is exactly what researchers do when they’re trying to determine causal relationships. Scientists call it a controlled study. In other words, they randomly divide research subjects into two groups that are exactly the same except for one variable. If they’re testing the effectiveness of a new drug, people in Group A would get the drug, while the people in Group B would get a sugar pill. Scientists can be fairly certain that the drug works if the people in Group A get better and the people in Group B don’t.

The same principle applies to email marketing. Split testing means keeping all but one element the same, and then finding out which elicits a better response. For example, you might split your email campaign so that half the emails have one subject line and half the emails have another subject line. You can track which subject line generates the most click-throughs, the most sales, or whatever other measure you want to use.

Similarly, you might want to split test two different offers. For example, does a free giveaway encourage more people to buy, or does free shipping do the trick? Or, does sending out an email on Tuesday work better than sending out an email on Thursday?

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how to split lists, but for now, remember to think like a scientist and only change one aspect of your email in order to test it.

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