By Guest Blogger, on August 23rd, 2010
[Elysabeth Teeko likes to dabble in all kinds of blogging. She especially loves to stalk new tech and internet marketing news, as well as study interior decorating and other home-esque subjects. You can find her on twitter; @Elysateek.]
Email blasts- the right (and not annoying) way to do them
Email blasts, the epicenter of the direct electronic marketing world, are a popular tool that many businesses use. Because of the misuse of this tactic by a large number of companies, the approach has gained an unseemly reputation. Most people will simply discard emails that look like they originated from an email blast, and even the ones that are opened only rarely prompt the reader to act. So, how can you use the email blast technique correctly and effectively?
Continue reading Email blasts – the right (and not annoying) way to do them
By Guest Blogger, on July 6th, 2010
Running a hyper-local website about daily specials can be quite grueling. In order to keep readers, you need to update at least once a day, or people will stop visiting your site. Raleigh Specials Tonight averages about 600-800 hits per week and 50% of that traffic is returning. I have very loyal readers and I am grateful for that, but I know I need to keep coming with the content if I want it to stay that way.
Where do I find daily content for my site every day? When I first started the site about a year ago, it was tough. I had to seek the information myself by going to individual restaurant websites. I still do that occasionally, but here are some tools I use to keep up with my community so I always have fresh content:
By Damian Davila, on July 2nd, 2010
Through LinkedIn (find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/damiandavilarojas) and Twitter (@idaconcpts), I receive a lot of questions about marketing and web analytics.
By far, most business owners and marketing consultants have questions regarding how to get started with their email newsletter campaigns.
Often I direct them to these 4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing. Once email marketing practitioners have a solid foundation and have mastered the basics, then we can start talking about content creation.
Here are 4 tips on content creation for a succesful email newsletter and how 4 companies (Facebook, Shutterfly, Bing and Evernote) implement these tips.
Continue reading 4 Tips for a Successful Email Newsletter
By Zachary Zawarski, on June 28th, 2010
[This is a guest post from Zachary Zawarski of Zadling, a Google Apps Consultant]
Two email newsletters that I signed up for were Mike Michalowicz and Brian Tracy’s newsletters. Most of you probably know Brian Tracy, a self-help author who mostly helps salespeople. Mike Michalowicz, who might be slightly less known than Brian Tracy, but still immensely popular as you may have seen him on MSNBC or CNBC, is the man behind The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur myself, I set out to gain some resources that would help me increase my own sales, so I subscribed to each of their newsletters.
Like I discussed in my last guest blog, email marketing is all about constantly providing your subscribers with value and not constantly bombarding them with your sales message because they’ll quickly unsubscribe if all they’re seeing is sales copy rehashed week after week.
Both Mike and Brian have very different email styles. Brian Tracy has a template design. The email is formatted nicely with various images and colors and with a footer full of resources such as links to his website and links to his Facebook and Twitter pages. Mike, on the other hand, uses no images or color at all — just plain text.
So who do you think has a better and more effective email marketing campaign?
By Roko Nastic, on May 14th, 2010
An online business will not make a sale every time a visitor lands on their website. Should they just accept that and allow the visitor to leave, hoping that they may return at a later date and make a purchase? No. The business should be doing everything they can to persuade every visitor to submit contact details.
Why Are Contact Details Important?
A visitor that leaves a site without purchasing may return at a later date – or so the business hopes. There is no guarantee that this will occur and leaving things to chance is not good business strategy.
Persuading a visitor to leave contact details now, allows the business to treat the visitor as a potential sales target, almost as they had already made a sale and may be interested in future purchases.
Leaving contact details shows a mild interest. The visitor has stated that they wish to be contacted – this is a golden opportunity to gain their trust and gently persuade them to become a paying customer. Contact details provide a source for the business to keep customers up-to-date with new products and promotions.
Continue reading Turning Visitors into Customers: How to Persuade People to Submit Their Contact Details
By Zachary Zawarski, on May 3rd, 2010
[This is a guest contribution by Zachary Zawarski of Zadling]
I don’t subcribe to many e-mail newsletters, but if I do choose to opt into your e-mail list, you better make sure that you’re doing one thing: providing me with value.
We all know that e-mail marketing is a great way to produce sales for your website, but many business owners make the mistake of using mailing lists purely to push their products and services. That is the wrong way to conduct e-mail marketing.
Continue reading e-Mail Marketing the Right Way: Provide Value
By Damian Davila, on April 28th, 2010
Given that E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!, at idaconcpts, we’ve discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.
After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need some email marketing benchmarks by industry to be able to properly evaluate the performance of your campaigns.
On July 2009, eMarketer provided a list of e-mail marketing open and click-through rates worldwide by industry and list size. Here’s an important update to these e-mail stats via Mailchimp.
Continue reading Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry
On July 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that “Gen Y lacks confidence about making financial decisions”. Despite stepping up their marketing efforts, investment companies claim that they cannot get the attention of Gen Y.
[This is a guest post from Amy G. Howard, Founder of 
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