« August 2005 | Main | October 2005 »
Of the Regular Folk, More People Understand Happy-Slapping
Posted on September 30, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
Ask a man on the street what blogging is in London, and there's a 72 percent chance he'll reply, "Huh?"
But happy-slapping? Only a 44 percent chance for the "Huh?" reply there.
So while, yes, blogging is still important for many reasons, it's a concept that hasn't permeated all of culture. Yet.
tags: happy slapping | blog research | company blogs
What's a tag?
September 30, 2005 in audio publication, award winning design, award winning newsletter, blog publish, Brand enhancement, Building Customer Community, Building Customer Intuition, CMO, company magazine, company newsletter, Corporate publications, create a newsletter | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sign Me Up!: A BeTuitive Book Club Review of a Marketer's Guide to Creating Email Newsletters
Posted on September 27, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
Sign Me Up!: A Marketer's Guide to Creating Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales
by Matt Blumberg and Michael Mayor with Tami Monahan Forman and Stephanie A. Miller
A book review by Susan Fisher
Permission marketing is just what it says it is. It’s marketing centered around customer consent. You secure permission from your customer and prospective customers to market your products and services to them. Permission is a covenant: As long as you give customers something they want, mainly information they find valuable, they will accept your marketing messages.
The advantages to a system built upon mutuality are obvious. You actually manage to get the ear, and hopefully the mindshare, of customers who are bombarded daily with hundreds of both stealthily subtle and blaringly blatant marketing messages.
The disadvantages are equally obvious: How do you gain consent? How do you get your customers to not only say “Okay, fine,” but to exclaim “Sign me up!”? Once you gain permission, how do you keep it? How do you build a strong relationship through these communications, rather than end up as an annoyance and be perceived as one more interruption in a busy day?
Here’s a simple answer that should be considered the golden rule of e-marketing: “Create Email That People Love to Read.” “Content is king: If recipients don’t read your email, it has no chance of building your business, and no one will read it unless the content is relevant and interesting to them.”
That’s “Rule #4” in “Sign Me Up!: A Marketer's Guide to Creating Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales.” Written by a team from email services firm Return Path, “Sign Me Up!” addresses those basic e-newsletter development questions in a practical way. It offers a primer on:
1. content strategy (really the basics on how to write and design a newsletter, rather than tie newsletter content into a greater marketing communications or sales strategy)
2. list strategy (how to build a very basic list; there’s not much on list segmentation – which we at BeTuitive Marketing find critical)
3. optimization strategies (how to improve response and measure how the email program is working in a very general way.)
The points are reinforced by examples from Kimberly-Clark, eBay and other companies with well-known brands.
One of the best features of the book is that it clearly states points that should be obvious but, from our experience, unfortunately aren’t. For example, here is advice about email customer service that we also emphasize to our customers.
• “Have a real, live person monitor all incoming mail.”
• “Don’t tell your customers not to reply to the messages you send.”
• “Ask for feedback.”
• “Handle spam complaints the right way.”
Quite frankly, as the editorial director at BeTuitive Marketing -- which creates email newsletters to build relationships and build sales -- I found little new in the book. It did not break any new ground or offer any insight particular to B2B marketing, which is a slightly different animal than B2C communications. Most importantly, experience tells me that a 164-page book can only scratch the surface of the exacting and sometimes grueling – but always rewarding -- effort it takes to get an email newsletter off the ground and to keep it high flying, so customers get what they want to hear along with what you want to tell them.
Nonetheless, the book and its helpful glossary offer a solid introduction for email newsletter novices and a helpful re-introduction to the process for businesses that have tried email newsletter campaigns and ended up with less-than-stellar results. At $6 for a pdf version (and $17.95 for a trade paperback), it’s worth the download or the dollars for the paperback. Plus, the authors promise to donate 10 percent of the purchase price to the nonprofit The Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. So, read the book, and then come to a professional for a deeper level of expertise.
For more on the book, visit www.returnpath.biz/signmeup
tags: Return Path | book club | Susan Fisher
What's a tag?
September 27, 2005 in award winning magazine, award winning newsletter, Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, build credibility, Business editorial, Business newsletter, Business relationships, Corporate newsletter, Corporate publications | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
BeTuitive Book Club Guest Blogger This Afternoon
Posted on September 27, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
The excellent Susan Fisher will be reviewing Sign Me Up!: A Marketer's Guide to Creating Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales this afternoon. Keep an eye out!
September 27, 2005 in award winning design | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
It's Monday, and I'm already off topic
Posted on September 26, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
Most people wait till Friday to swerve off topic, but not me. Nosiree, I'll go off topic when I want, where I want. Yeah.
Anyway, I like words, and so I thought this was excellent (found via Boing Boing). Adam Jacot de Boinod put a collection together of words from around the world that it's unlikely you've heard before, and they're neat-o. How do you say skimming stones in Norweigan? Plimpplampplettere.
tags: word play | Boing Boing | Adam Jacot de Boinod
What's a tag?
September 26, 2005 in award winning blog, award winning design, Award winning publications, Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, Brand enhancement, Building Customer Community, Building Customer Intuition, company newsletter sample, Company newsletters, create a newsletter | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Fears Confirmed
Posted on September 23, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
Um, yikes:
"Men and women can do the same thing, but if they both act assertive, women are rated less effective because we expect men to do that," Cummings noted. Moreover, research shows that of the people who emerge as leaders in a laboratory setting -- where men and women come together without knowing one another -- male leaders are judged more effective than women leaders. "That's the scary part: Men and women can exhibit the same results and accomplishments and the perception of their effectiveness is different."
tags: leadership | women and men | Wharton
What's a tag?
September 23, 2005 in award winning magazine, award winning newsletter, Award winning publications, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Building Customer Intuition, Business publications, company newsletter, company newsletter sample, Company newsletters, Company publication, create a newsletter | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Just Delete It.
Posted on September 22, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
Happily, when I came in this morning, the receiving end of my email was back in business. So how do I cope with everything that came in then and everything that comes in today?
Despite the title, I'm not deleting Everything. Just everything that's not important. I've tried to use email messages left in my inbox as a reminder of something that is still in process, but it just doesn't work.
Scott Reeves agrees with me, as you'll see in this article he wrote for Forbes.
tags: Scott Reeves | Forbes | email efficiency
What's a tag?
September 22, 2005 in Award winning publications | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Standby: Technological Difficulties
Posted on September 21, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
Goodness me, but I'm dependent on my email for communication, even with people who are within earshot. Witness this exchange I had with a co-worker when we discovered that there's some testing happening that prohibits us from being able to reliably receive email messages at our regular accounts this morning:
"We can use our private accounts, our Yahoo! accounts and stuff to talk to each other."
"Yes...or we could just talk to each other with words that come from our mouths."
The funny thing is that, for the most part, we're using our private accounts rather than our mouths to talk to each other. Not because of anti-social tendencies, but because it's habit. It's easier. It doesn't disrupt the other person's flow.
p>tags: technical difficulties | internal communicationWhat's a tag?
September 21, 2005 in audio publication, award winning blog, award winning newsletter, Award winning publications, blog publish, Blogging Tools, Brand enhancement, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Intuition, company newsletter sample, Company publication, create a newsletter | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Book smart, street smart, Internet smart
Posted on September 20, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
All of our little technological helpers--are they making us smarter or dumber?
My co-worker often jokes that she has no short-term memory; instead, she has her Outlook calendar. One could argue that, because she isn't spending all of her time thinking about what she has to do because the reminders tell her, she can spend her time more effectively, doing higher-level thinking.
Another example I can recall--really not too long ago in the grand scheme of things, before the Internet was all-pervasive in my places of business--has me saying things like: "Hey, I have a really good idea for this article, and I know something similar happened a while ago that I can lead in with, but...I can't remember when or what exactly." Now I ask the Internet.
So does that me smarter? It makes me more efficient, that's for darn sure.
Check out this CNET article, which debates both sides of the issue.
tags: Internet intelligence | CNET
What's a tag?
September 20, 2005 in audio publication, award winning blog, award winning design, award winning magazine, Award winning publications, blog publish, Blogging Tools, Brand enhancement, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Intuition, business credibility, Business editorial, business magazine, Business Marketing, company blog, company newsletter, Company newsletters, Company publication, corporate magazine, Corporate newsletter, create a newsletter | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Combine Efforts for More Return
Posted on September 19, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
Brian Carroll of the B2B Lead Generation Blog wrote a super-duper article for RainToday.com.
The crux of it can be found in this paragraph (although it's well worth reading the entire article):
Targeted email combined with outbound calling is the ideal 1-2 punch for increasing leads, sales activity and revenue. It has long been accepted that combining outbound calling with direct mail marketing dramatically increases results in B2B programs.
Also, brother blog BeConnected's author Peter Davidson contributes an interesting quote.
tags: Brian Carroll | B2B Lead Generation Blog | Peter Davidson | cold calling | email marketing
What's a tag?
September 19, 2005 in audio publication, award winning design, award winning magazine, award winning newsletter, Award winning publications, Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, Blogs, Building B2B Relationships, Business publications, company blog, company magazine, company newsletter, company newsletter sample, Company publication, corporate magazine, create a newsletter | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Google Desktop is awesome.
Posted on September 16, 2005 by Sarah Eaton.
I downloaded it (Google Desktop) over night and have had the occasion to use it three times this morning already. Holy time-saver.
I recommended it to my co-workers today, and here is what Kevin the Intern had to say:
yes, you're right. this thing kicks a**.
So there you have it.
tags: Google | Google Desktop | Kevin the Intern
What's a tag?
September 16, 2005 in audio publication, award winning blog, award winning design, award winning magazine, award winning newsletter, Award winning publications, Blogging Tools, Brand enhancement, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Building Customer Intuition, company blog, company newsletter, company newsletter sample, Company publication, create a newsletter | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack