In a world that turns to social media websites, forums, and blogs to get their news and keep up to date with their favorite companies and celebrities, the E-Newsletter still has its place. In this article, we will explore the pros and cons of using an E-Newsletter to promote your business – and why it may or may not be a great advertising tool for your company.

Pros

Easy to read statistics. While a blog might pull readers in based on the keywords you choose for good search engine optimization (SEO), it’s much more difficult to track the kind of traffic your blog receives. You’ll get some data about your visitors and the pages they are reading, but at best you will know that “someone in Coon Rapids, Minnesota” has visited your site. Most modern day E-Newsletter platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp, however, will give you very detailed statistics about people who engage in your newsletters. You will be able to see exactly who is opening up the email, where they were when they opened the email, and which links they clicked. This information is invaluable as it helps you figure out if the content of your newsletter is reaching your intended audience – and whom you should target in your other marketing efforts.

Directs traffic to your website. E-Newsletters direct your readership to your website, blog, or other social media pages. Since you can specifically mention a new blog post in your newsletter, it’s a great way to cross-market across different venues. Not only that but it helps to keep things like your blog and Twitter or Facebook page active in the minds of your customers. They are now more likely to check out that new blog post because it was mentioned in an email – the post may have gone completely unnoticed if you hadn’t sent it directly to your clients.

Inexpensive. Maintaining an e-mail newsletter list is much easier and less expensive than its traditional postal mailing address counterpart. It costs money to print postcards and letters, as well as to pay for postage to get your message to their mailbox. Research suggests that the return on e-mail marketing is much higher than that of traditional postal mail marketing – and if you are using cost of each to calculate your ROI, E-Newsletters will surpass postal mail every time. E-Newsletters save you both money and time.

Shows your personable side. Having an E-Newsletter makes it easy for the business owner to be more personable. Not only can you give weekly or monthly updates about your business but you can also share thoughts, opinions, or personal stories. People will get a rare look behind the scenes and see that your company is more than just a business. This in turn, will help you to build trust between you and your reader base.

Create your brand. What’s great about E-Newsletters is that you can control the way the formatting looks through the use of HTML emails – especially if you have a professional marketing company design your E-Newsletters. Every time you send something out, the colors, organization, design, and your logo will be standardized. This will help you to establish what your brand is and what people can expect to see. You can then apply similar branding and design techniques to your website and social media pages. This will create continuity and make your company easily recognizable.

Customizable newsletter. Not only can you control the way your newsletter will look but you can also customize your newsletter so that it only goes out to a certain demographic or portion of your e-mail list. For example, people who are interested in hearing about new promotions can receive special incentive coupons over other people who are not. Or if you’re looking to target your message to a certain age group or location you can do that too. This is when having the extra statistical data comes in handy.

Cons

Too much e-mail. People are inundated with e-mail from everyone, everywhere. It’s easy to overlook a couple of e-mail items if they are not a high priority, especially if the recipient has a lot of them. Unfortunately your E-Newsletter might be one of those emails that is overlooked and sometimes lost amidst the other newsletters and company briefs that are all clamoring for attention.

Spam filters. If you’re E-Newsletter isn’t lost in the mix of hundreds of other e-mails then probably it may get sent to the receiver’s Junk Mail folder. While spam filters are great for the average user, they’re a death sentence for online marketing strategies.

Inconsistent updates. An E-Newsletter marketing campaign only works if it is sent on a consistent basis. When a blog or a newsletter becomes inconsistent, not only do readers and potential customers forget about you and your company but they may also think that your inconsistency is a reflection of how your own company does business.

Too much online marketing. In order to stay relevant and reach a variety of different people who are at different levels of technology use, you have to use a mix of different platforms. The quality of the E-Newsletters can get lost when trying to market your business across multiple media channels. For example, you are likely already marketing your business through social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and on YouTube, blogs, and websites. With so many accounts to look after some other areas can suffer. While E-Newsletters are a great way to drive traffic to relevant pages and websites, if not done properly, people will lose interest and stop reading.

Too much information. Since there are a variety of ways to get information out to your audience, it is crucial that E-Newsletters have high quality content. However, it is easy to overstep that boundary and provide too much information. Most people are crunched for time and wading through emails is something that is quickly done in an off-moment. Not everybody has the time of day to carefully go through his or her email and read every single one. If your E-Newsletter has too much information, you are risking the content simply being skimmed and then quickly deleted. Try and keep it light.

Unsubscribe buttons. Just as it is easy for subscribers to sign-up to receive your E-Newsletter, it’s just as easy for them to unsubscribe from it. If your E-Newsletter fails to deliver high quality content, people will begin to see an email from you as annoying and will quickly hit the unsubscribe link at the end of your email.

Accessibility for everyone. A good portion of your target audience may be receiving your E-Newsletters on their smartphone or tablet. Often times the professional formatting on your HTML e-mail newsletter doesn’t look so pretty when viewed from an email app or phone web browser. Most out-of-the-box E-Newsletter templates don’t have the responsive design technique built in – so you may want to enlist the help of a professional e-newsletter designer to deliver a responsive HTML template that will be accessible on every device.

Thinking about starting an E-Newsletter?

Overall, the E-Newsletter is a great tool that you can use to add another layer of effectiveness to your company’s online marketing campaigns. E-Newsletters do have their drawbacks and limitations, but for the most part the benefits of E-Newsetter marketing outweigh the cons.

Are you thinking about starting a weekly or monthly E-Newsletter? Iceberg Web Design now offers full-service online marketing, including e-mail newsletter design and campaign management. We can even help connect you with a professional content writer to generate the content for your newsletter! Contact us today for more information and to get started.

The post The Pros and Cons of Creating an E-Newsletter for your Clients appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

A few weeks ago we published this article explaining what you can do to help prevent your WordPress Website from being hacked. The article outlines a number of WordPress Plugins and hosting security measures that we use to ensure that our customers’ websites remain free of malware.

But beware – your website isn’t the only password-protected service that can be subject to hacking. Hackers are always on the lookout for a way to break into e-mail accounts, and unfortunately e-mail hacking is something that we see happen from time to our own customers.

You’re minding your own business, going about your every day e-mailing, when suddenly you start receiving hundreds of “Failure Notice” e-mail messages from MAILER_DAEMON, indicating that an e-mail message you tried to send has failed.

It is possible that your e-mail address has simply been spoofed – but another possibility is that your e-mail security has been compromised, and you need to take action to stop the attack. If your e-mail service is through Iceberg, let us know and we can check the server logs to see which is most likely the case, and recommend a plan of action to you.

The big question: WHY? 

Krebs on Security posted an article last summer that explains the value of a typical e-mail account to a hacker.

Many hackers will compromise an account to send out spam messages – either as a way to try to make money, or a way to distribute viruses and malware, which they can use to in turn break into more e-mail accounts.

But your e-mail account gives hackers access to much more than just a means to send messages. Your address book contains a list of contacts with real, working e-mail addresses: more people to add to their mailing list. E-mails from all of your online accounts: Facebook, UPS, Amazon, and your banks, are delivered to you. Your e-mail address is the login you use for Facebook, Google, YouTube – and if you use the same passwords across the web, your hacker now has the key to your personal information here.

Use strong passwords

We cannot stress enough the importance of using a strong password on your e-mail – and all – online accounts. Don’t use your mother’s maiden name. Don’t use your dog’s name. Don’t use sequential numbers, and don’t use the word “password”.

The most common passwords used in 2013 were: “123456”, “password”, “12345678”, and “qwerty”.

These passwords may be easy for you to remember – but they are also very easy for any person to guess, and even more easy for a password cracker to guess when trying 200 login attempts per minute on your account.

How does my password get stolen?

There are a number of ways your e-mail password could be compromised. Here are a few:

• It was easy to guess: If you aren’t using a strong password, then it is very possibly for your friends or associates to be able to break into your account just by guessing. A hacker may also try to break into your e-mail account using a dozen or so very common passwords – and if you’re using a password like “password1” they are very likely to succeed!

• Brute-force attacks: A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack) brute-force attack happens when a hacker (usually using an automated script) tries to log into your e-mail account systematically entering all possible combinations of keyboard characters until the correct one is found. This type of attack can slow a server to a halt, given the sheer amount of traffic that is accessing the email login page. Fortunately, Iceberg Web Design’s hosting servers are constantly checking for this type of attack, and are able to respond quickly by blocking the IP address that the attack is coming from if a brute force attack is suspected.

• Computer viruses: Some computer viruses and malware scripts have the ability to capture your password, or monitor your keyboard strokes to determine what username/password combinations you are using. We strongly recommend having an up-to-date virus scanning program on all computers you use, and running them on a regular basis.

• Password crackers: If a hacker is able to get an encrypted version of your password, either through a virus or another security breach, they can run a password cracker script to nail down a match.

How do password crackers work?

Your username and an encrypted copy of your password is stolen from your computer – either directly by a hacker, or through a virus or malware script. The password cracker then runs a program in their computer against a dictionary, and uses some basic human behavior knowledge to continually create passwords until they find a match between the encrypted value they took from you, and the value they generated in their random password file.

So, imagine you used one of the most common passwords out there: your dog’s name with your birth date and a punctuation mark tacked on the end for “extra security”: Bailey79!

A password cracker is going to generate hundreds of millions – if not more – passwords. Since ‘Bailey’ is a fairly common pet name, and people are notorious for combining simple words with numbers and punctuation marks, the cracker will start generating passwords like this:

• bailey
• Bailey
• bailey1
• Bailey1
• bailey1!
• Bailey1!
• etc…
• bailey78!
• Bailey78!

And for a cracker that can generate millions of passwords in a few seconds, it isn’t going to take long at all for them to find a match.

What happens next?

Your password has been compromised. A real person – or a computer – now has access to your e-mail account. So what’s next?

If your e-mail has been hacked, then the hacker will likely start using your address to send out massive amounts of SPAM e-mails. One indication that this has happened could be a massive amount of MAILER DAEMON / returned undeliverable e-mails starting to fill up your mailbox. Since the hacker is sending out massive amounts of spam using your account, chances are they are going to be sending junk to messages that either reject the spam, or that don’t exist – and unfortunately you are the one who is going to receive all of the returned error messages.

Note: a large amount of returned e-mail messages could also be an indication of e-mail spoofing –  which is not an indication that your e-mail account has been hacked.

Hosting Server Security:

If we notice that your e-mail address has been compromised, we will temporarily suspend the outgoing mail service to immediately stop the problem. This is one of the security features of our e-mail hosting service. We closely monitor our server logs, and will contact you after we are certain that your account has been compromised.

Reset your password:

If we determine that your e-mail password has indeed been compromised, you will be asked to reset your e-mail password (in some cases, we may reset it for you if we believe that there is a risk to your identity from the hacking). We also recommend having every e-mail password at your domain reset as well, just as a security precaution.

Run a virus scan:

Since it is very possible that your password was compromised from a virus or malware, we suggest that you immediately run virus and malware scans on all computers in your office, and at home, that you have used to access your e-mail account from.

Monitor the mail server:

Once we have determined that the account is no longer compromised, we will re-enable your outgoing mail server. We will monitor the mail server logs closely for a while to ensure that the account does not become compromised again.

Questions? Drop us a line!

If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Iceberg Web Design! We take internet security very seriously, and are happy to answer any questions or concerns you have about your website hosting or e-mail service.

The post Brute Force Attacks on your E-mail Account appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.