While one of the elder statesmen of interactive marketing efforts, email remains a valuable and productive way to engage and inform existing and potential customers.  Maintaining contact with customers and prospects is essential from both a cost and revenue perspective.  On the cost side, according to the Harvard Business Review, it is six to seven times more expensive to gain a customer than to retain a customer.  Email can be a valuable component of customer retention.  On the revenue side, attribution tools indicate that the average customer experiences seven points of contact before converting.  Certainly, targeted email can fill one, if not more, of these points of contact.  Targeted email also allows advertisers to communicate with customers and prospects who have already shown an interest in the product or service. (more…)

A great way to get your company’s message across to its ideal audience is to implement an email marketing campaign. Whether a company wishes to shape their brand or simply increase their customer base, email marketing can be an effective medium to achieve your company’s goals. Companies must be cognizant of tips and best practices for an effective email marketing campaign. Listed below are five email marketing must have’s to consider when creating your company’s campaign: (more…)

At last, there is an easy way to build intricate, professional forms without the hassle of html coding them by hand: Wufoo. The strangely-named html form-builder (named after one of the creator’s two favorite musical groups—Wu-Tang Clan and Foo Fighters) is making form-building more accessible to not only smaller companies—who may operate on tighter budgets—but also the general public for use on personal web pages. (more…)

Lately, we have had a couple of clients come to us who are interested in running deals on Groupon or Google Offers. The trendiness of these coupon deal sites has been growing exponentially as people take advantage of the deal to be had, but the effects of these offers has not been fully examined. (more…)

In the past few months, I have had the opportunity to work with one of our clients on several of their email marketing campaigns. While this is a channel that most of us receive and view on a daily basis, there are many companies out there whose email marketing practices are questionable or ineffective. There is a lot of power in email messaging, if it is sent and received properly. Here are some tips to those email marketers out there based on my own personal experiences. (more…)

For those agencies and marketers with a total focus on ROI, sometimes branding campaigns can be confounding.  How can I measure the effectiveness of my branding campaign to optimize performance?  The answer is something we call a “Brand Metrics Calculator”.  A Brand Metrics Calculator will convert all brand touch points into a common unit, and thus a common financial value.  This way the marketer can determine the effectiveness of multiple brand touch points and shift budget accordingly, as they would say in determining that a paid search campaign generates leads at a lower cost than say a banner campaign.   While this is not by any means an exact science, it allows the marketer to make data-driven decisions on how to invest marketing funds. (more…)

It is no secret that e-mail marketing is an excellent means of directly reaching your target audience. If e-mails are created, segmented and deployed properly, your company can obtain conversions, while generating a high ROI. What many don’t know is how to establish an e-mail marketing strategy that will ensure your efforts are successful. By consistently deploying branded e-mail campaigns to your target audience—be it your internal list of contacts, a third party list or both—you have the opportunity to enhance your customer and/or partner relationships, build your brand and increase leads and revenue. (more…)