The Basics of Email Marketing

Ok...taking a light moment from heavy topics and just re-visiting some very rudimentary tacts for those that are trying to leverage the power of email marketing--without making a nuisance of yourselves.

Click on the link and take some sage and practice advice from Janine Popick..she's the CEO and founder of VerticalResponse. Profitable and 20,000 customers strong, VerticalResponse is a leading self-service direct marketing provider to businesses of any size...and a platform that I use on behalf of several tier 1 clients

Marketing Made Smart-Advertising on Blogs

I've been preaching about the power of blogs for more than three years, and even though I pressed clients to embrace blogging as a key ingredient to viral marketing, 80% pooh-poohed the notion. Until recently. .

(The funniest part is, the technology-centric clients didn't think it would be a smart way to chatter up their offerings--- "too secret to talk about"...which otherwise means : "don't want to get egg on our face and don't feel secure enough about about our product".....if you're targeting a mass audience, you must be advertising in some shape manner or form. If nothing else, you have a website, so your competitors are going to find out about you anyway... so, hesitating to beat your chest, opine, inform or solicit comment via a blog for fear of competitors learning about what you are doing is a critical mistake...and thinking that your secret sauce will be discovered via your blog posting only means that you aren't operating in the real world.

OK, with that said...the link to MarketingProf's provides a great insight --and points to the fact that everyone is blogging now (or at least those that have the time)---and the interesting blogs are attracting exactly the audience you want to reach....which makes it obvious that these are the best channels to advertise on...its a combination of viral marketing blended with demographic zoning.....and its a fraction of the cost of any other advertising application... So why wouldn't you try it? Duh.

BetOnSports Exec Arrested: Feds Running Out of Things To Do:

If I didn't confirm the front page story on the NY Times by visiting the Wall St. Journal and several other papers, I wouldn't have believed it.

Bombs are literally flying across every inch of the Middle East, Israel is under attack, we're facing the biggest international crisis since the Bay of Pigs...and the morons at the Justice Department can't think of any better use of their resources than to sit and wait at the Dallas airport so they could arrest the UK ceo of BetOnSports, a publicly traded internet gambling company that was backed by Goldman Sachs and Fidelity. The charge??? Racketeering conspiracy for participating in an illegal enterprise.

Do I care that the company's shareholders lost their CEO to the wunderkinds at the FBI? And that all of the other execs of this UK, publicly traded company with thousands of shareholders can expect the FBI to wake them up at the crack of dawn and cart them off? After all, didn't these guys learn from Jay Cohen's experience? How stupid could these guys be to believe that its safe to set foot in this country when Congress just voted in favor of cracking down on internet gambling?? After all, the FBI and Justice Department don't have anything else to do...they killed off Ken Lay (he deserved it)...they've upended Martha Stewart (she deserved it too).....so now its Internet Gambling...--perhaps the most vile crime in the world...certainly worse than distributing child porn...after all...it takes NBC news to track down child porn promoters and abusers...the FBI is too busy chasing CEO's of internet gambling companies!

Hey George---loved your use of the word "shit" when the microphones picked up your chatting with Tony...what kind of shit is going on inside our own borders....and by the way...why hasn't the CEO of Goldman Sachs (now the Treasury Secretary been arrested on the internet gambling case---after all, they floated the stock on the UK exchange---isn't that aiding and abetting?..and how about arresting the portfolio managers from Fidelity---they bought a bunch of it in the IPO and still own it?...Isn't that aiding and abetting???
Can anyone spell P-R-I-O-R-I-T-Y ????

Fair and Unbalanced Business Week?

I'm on the receiving end of a newsletter published by Leadership IQ--a very intriguing boutique that occupies the leadership training sector. Not your typical 'talking head'--the firm's principal is a guy named Mike Murphy--solid background for being a hired gun in the "turn-around management" world, and now provides seminars, training sessions etc for a formidable list of Fortune clients. I've attended one of his seminars--and this isn't jibber jabber stuff...Its tood bad his firm was launched after I was CEO of a public company...I could have used his insight on a number of challenges.

Murphy polls his subscribers every once in a while i.e. interesting topics of the day--the May canvass created lots of stir "What do you think of George Bush's leadership talents"...Forbes and WSJ reported on those results..... Anyway--Murphy polled us on Wed in the aftermath of Ken Lay's death...We all know who Ken Lay was.. Per the link on the title of this posting, it seems that Business Week reporter Jon Fine took exception to the poll thinking it was in poor taste. No big deal. Apparently a few of the receipients of the poll thought the same.. Murphy did a follow up and said he got two death threats...

But, reporter Fine, purportedly an accredited news hound thought it was so distasteful when Murphy's PR firm suggested BW write an article about the poll--he retalitated and sent an email to gawker suggesting that they should write a piece profiling Murphy as a grave dancer. (The front page of BW carried a story by Mark Morrison that pounced on Ken Lay's grave..so it seems that Jon Fine has some internal editorial issues that he can only vent through third party platforms)

Who cares? Probably nobody.. just a reminder for anyone that reads Business Week (and of course the NY Times)...and the hundreds of other "objective news channels" ..to be wary of the slant..and that we can really only expect 'fair and balanced' reporting from pre-schoolers (From the mouths of babes...)

NYSE's Thain To Circumvent Wall St.

NY Times ran interesting update i.e. John Thain's plan to invite institutional investors to trade directly into the NYSE--and bypass the Wall Street firms that have traditionally facilitated order execution. Not that many don't already do this via electronic trading platforms, but Thain is clearly suggesting to alter the entire landscape of the secuities industry---and cut out the middle men... wow

I said this 3 months ago! Wall Street & Casinos

Excerpt from Institutional Investor...Proud to say that I made this observation months ago...read the whole article.....No doubt fodder for George W. and wannabe's like E. Spitzer to distract everyone from real problems in society.

Led by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Fidelity, big-name financial firms have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the shares of online casinos, even though the practice is considered illegal according to U.S. law. Most of these companies trade on the London Stock Exchange and are licensed in remote locations like Malta and Antigua that are more than friendly to Internet gambling. But, most of the users are Americans. There are fees to be made, however, and that apparently trumps the other concerns.

Incentivizing Your Sales Force

Brick & Click, Brick and Mortar, B2B; B2C--its always about Sales. Always.
With that said, resident guru Jay Berkman opines " the biggest challenge every enterprise has is keeping their salespeople incentivized and inspired. The commission carrot only works so far--and if someone else is dangling a more tasty carrot in front of your sales force, you're at risk of losing a valuable foot solider."

Today's WSJ profiled Snowfly--an interesting company that provides a game-based platform to help motivate anyone whose job is based on meeting regular goals or quotas. Visit the link--but here's some advice: don't let your employees access the game platform during normal working hours--let them use it at pre-defined times (you can create the platform so that its only accessible at certain hours of the day/night)

Web 2.0 Permission-Based Marketing

Every day I talk with at least five global brand marketers; in the course of a week, I exchange emails with dozens, and in the course of a month, upwards of 300 of the most senior marketing gurus in America and their new media agency reps are telling me what their needs/goals are. This group represents a wide cross-section of industries, products and services; telecom; entertainment; financial services; media/publications.

As a result, I've become a clearinghouse of information..That's why people like to hear from me and talk with me. Everyone likes to know what their peers are thinking about or plotting.

And if you take 30 seconds to keep reading, you might think that I'm on to something..and will want to forward this to the people on your team that are overseeing Internet-related marketing/advertising.

The theme is the same; each one is looking for the 'holy grail" application---

• entertains and informs in a place and time that the recipient is most receptive
• a completely captive, but non-intrusive application
• that delivers rich media content
• incorporates a call to action that can be acted upon
• one that can deliver subliminal third-party advertising
• track-able; easy to gauge recall, performance, and ROI
• proven; other major brands have employed it, and have used it successfully. Yes, references are available--see attached.
• but most importantly--an application that the consumer has asked to receive.

On-line advertising, opt-in email newsletters, and more recently, blogs are the most favored tools that "on-line" marketers employ to drive their audience to their cash registers or info centers, whether in a real world store, or on-line.

Woo. Woo. as my 20-yr old daughter would say. Virtually all of these apps still depend on a customer drilling down to locate the specific promotion; the hot item that I'm interested in knowing about--the one that is today's most popular.

Few of those applications are customized based on demographic profile, and fewer still are delivering entertaining and informative content tailored to the recipient. Yes, many of my friends are spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on email-centric strategies that incorporate very sophisticated, quant-based programs that are purportedly sending tailored messages based on the customer profile. Keep laughing.

Now you can stop laughing--and think about this--an application that meets all of the criteria described above, and costs a rounding point* of what you are spending to implement and deploy:

• a 'top listing' in a Google Adwords campaign
• implementing and managing an email-marketing campaign
• direct mail
• OOH mediums (from billboards to in-store, to direct mail to the wide selection of guerilla strategies)

* Rounding point means that for those spending six, seven or eight figures annually for a dedicated Internet strategy that targets tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions---this is a barely five-figure enhancement that could prove to not only complement those efforts, but can be more effective, more durable, and more long-lasting than anything you are spending on today.

What is it?

• Its an application that automatically launches on your customer's desk top--when he/she has asked to receive it--or simply launched via a desktop icon.
• It occupies 75% of the user's screen, and can be closed by one click of a mouse.
• It can be easily customized (by you or by Synovativ's programmers) to look like a mini-website, a digital billboard, a static billboard, or a condensed newsletter. It can be multi-paneled, or single paneled. It can even incorporate a pre-downloaded video app--which means that the user doesn't have to launch the darn thing, wait for it to load, and than view on his/her PC etc.
• It can be updated with fresh content and automatically display once a day, twice a day, three times a day--whatever. However frequently you want to update content--and however frequently your user wants to see--he/she will set his timer accordingly. Or, the user can launch it via the desktop icon.
• Installing it takes 30 seconds. Your customers will appreciate that it won't impact any on the computer, and more importantly--he/she is assured that there are no cookies, no adware, no spyware--no gremlins running around in the background. They don't need to provide any personal information, email address in order to download it.
• Its as clean as a newborn baby's tushy.

On your side--its plug and play; uploading content is a cut and paste process. The admin module tracks viewership data, and performance links to your existing transactional platforms.

Licensing/Delivery: Customized to your needs. 6 or 12 month site licenses; capped flat rate, or based on per user. You can have a turnkey service, where the vendor takes care of everything--we drive the entire program, and you sit back and watch the viewers come to your cash register--you just upload the content. Full reporting module included.

Or you can have a self-administered agreement where you get the keys to the car and let your IT team own the entire platform. The user manual is less than 4 pages long.

This link http://www.addiem.com/download.html will allow you to download a demo application, just to get a feel for how it would work for your clients/customers.

I'm happy to facilitate a conversation to talk about how you would incorporate this.

Almost Too Good; Template TV commercials

I'm a sponge for business periodicals, whether its Forbes or Fortune, and most especially Inc.com. There's an element to print magazines that the 'Net isn't going to replace. I absorb print articles while having coffee on the deck, and when digesting a favorite bottle of wine and watching the sun set. These are quiet times that my laptop isn't designed for, and for me, never will be.

With that said, the latest edition of Inc.com includes a great profile by Darren Dahl of Spot Runner, a company that has been getting lots of traction and deserved buzz for the past year. They've built a brilliant app that any half-witted brick and mortar retailer should embrace---pre-constructed TV commercials AND a menu for media placement in local, regional and national channels, network and cable. Its the idiot's version of Register.com---and is the perfect solution for anyone that aspires to advertise their business via television. And by way---TV advertising is far from dead. TV viewership remains intact, and its going to stay that way, albeit in different structures. So, advertising on TV makes good sense. Do I need to repeat myself? NO. Am I going out on a limb and making this statement, which will be forever memoralized in the world of digital information. NO.

Run the newstand to purchase the June edition, or you can wait until the 20th to access the article on line. If you wait until the 20th, read the article by simply clicking on the link. But don't wait.

If you run a small business, brick and mortar, brick and click, or even just click..this will fit right into your marketing program. If you don't have a marketing program, this is a good way to start!..

By the way, if you get INC.com's latest edition, Norm Brodsky's commentary is inspirational.

Pay Per Call Outranks Pay Per Click on AOL

Absolutely. The internet bubble imploded back at the turn of the century simply because 999 out of the 1000 'ground breaking' companies had no idea of how important the concept of 'customer service' is.
Arguably, too many of those operating e-businesses still don't 'get it' i.e. the importance of having a means where customers can actually speak to a human being, and even more importantly, a human being that is properly trained and capable of providing that personal connection and addressing the needs of the customer ON THE PHONE.

As archaic as this idea might sound, anyone operating a business via the internet MUST build a customer service component into the business model. OK..it costs more...OK...lots of people are getting the hang of shopping carts, click to buy...yadayadayada...and just as many people are being reluctant to do exactly that because of internet security concerns. And don't discount those concerns..for every story you ready about identity theft, there are thousands..yes thousands more that go unpublished.. After all, which website or credit card company wants to publicize the fact that ID theft is a big big problem?? ...Anyway, getting back to pay per call...duh!...I'd much rather pay $1, or even $5, or depending on the price of what I am selling, $10 or $20, for the opportunity to get a trained salesperson on the phone with a customer and close the deal...as opposed to paying .25 or .50 cents to lead someone to my website and hope to God they actually make a purchase.