Approachs to increase the value of your email messages Part 1 Emotional value

Subscribers give you an address, attention and access to the inner sanctum that is their inbox. And they expect something in return. Some kind of value from your emails. This value ensures you don't outstay your welcome in that inbox and drives responses, whether direct (e.g. sales) or indirect (e.g. awareness). No surprise, then, to find email marketing experts regularly admonishing senders to increase the value of their messages. It's one of the ways I highlighted to ensure email success in 2011.

Your options for increasing value?

For many experts, the answer lies in using technology to increase the functional "transactional" value of an email. Which largely means better targeting through integration of web analytics, customer databases and email systems...supporting segmentation, personalized offers/content, one-to-one trigger messages etc. That's quite a mouthful and quite a challenge for those without the resources. But it's not…

No keyword searches to build a strategy off? No problem! Or an opportunity at least

Value: [rating=5] Our commentary: A recent blog post from Rand @ SEOMOZ really caught my attention this week. In many markets for natural search there is data & tools that can help you plot a strategy and get rough ideas of potential results (in terms of traffic). See Dan Barker's post on keyphrase gap analysis. But for the remainder where a service or product is new, so there is low awareness, or the audience is not yet online SEO may appear to not offer an opportunity to generate awareness about your new products. This case where there is little or no data specifically about it, is more interesting / exciting to me and forces people in the search industry to think a lot more…

A list of services to use for DIY press-release submission for small businesses

While many large companies use a PR agency to manage their press-releases, it's now easy to do-it-yourself and go direct to an online service for distribution. There are also some free options available which can give some SEO benefits with backlinks and through featuring in Google News. Don't expect lots of journalists to pick up on your press release though if you use these services, a more personal approach once you have identified a specialist through a tool like Vocus will work better here. There are a growing number of websites where news and press releases can be submitted online. The main business model is to offer a free, but upgradable service.  There are limitations as the sites vary in terms of layout and "how to" submit, there are issues when adding images (some are free, but very small) and…

How Cisco approach reactivating their inactive subscribers

Value: [rating=3] Our commentary : We're alerting you to this Marketing Sherpa post reviewing a Cisco.com campaign since it's got a specific process you could follow for a common problem in B2B or B2C marketing. It's also got some example subject line or creative to inspire! [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="652" caption="Source: Marketing Sherpa"][/caption] Marketing implications My summary of the process followed is: 1. Select a segment of database to test 2. Review segments in terms of potential value 3. Brainstorm and select the right segment for the audience (in this case based on position) 4. Send creative - example subject lines and creative are shown Recommended link: Marketing Sherpa B2B Cisco Email case study…

Ideas on techniques for sharing great content

Everyone knows that having great content is the secret to success with content marketing, but if you stop there, that's only half the battle or you're missing half the opportunity. If you just rely on Google to find and display your content then that will only get you so far, even if you can compete in SEO which is far from easy. The power or maybe the necessity of making your content shareable is shown by the stats below.

First we see how some companies have been successful in driving more visits from social networks through sharing content and engaging with their audiences on social networks.

Next we see the trend of the growing importance of social networks compared to search engines. Interesting and challenging stuff! …

An update on Facebook statistics at the start of 2011

Here's an interesting graphic I thought I'd share, though I know we a probably not needing reminder of the beast that is Facebook - and our obsession with it. The infographic itself is also a simple example of shareable marketing for onlineschools.org at the same time. Cool! If you ever need to check out the latest statistics on Facebook for a presentation, then there's Facebook's own statistics page.  Three we think are important as a sign of marketing tactics as we go into 11 are: Community - the average Facebook user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events Mobile - 200 million active Facebook users who are twice as active as non-mobile users Widgets - 2 million websites have integrated Facebook, growing at 10,000 day and 250 million people per month engage with Facebook through external websites

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A tool to compare marketing automation systems

Value: [rating=3] A marketing automation research tool, courtesy of Software Advice. Our commentary : If you're selecting a provider for a marketing automation, CRM or other Ebusiness system then you may find these Software Advice sites useful for an overview of the options. They have a series of usable step-by-step guides and this widget which is shareable to other sites - a nice example of viral marketing. Marketing implications : Take care with using this widget though since it has a strong US focus and some of the well-known marketing suppliers such as Eloqua or Marketo are missing. They do have a slightly broader list of Marketing Automation suppliers but again a US focus. Remember that many email service provider solutions can now provide marketing automation or integration with existing customer management systems and they'll often be more capable as email broadcast platforms. To see a…

My review and recommendations on the best article sites for SEO

This is quite a tricky question to answer since the best article sites do change depending on the industry & audience you're targeting. So to start on any new sector a trial and error approach has to be used where you trial publish and through analysis refine the list to the most effective set for your business. Still, I thought I'd share this list on my views of the top article publishing websites with some core metrics as well as my experience with each of them. A selection of these sites can often be used as a tactic in your traffic acquisition / seo strategy. Please add to / comment on the list in the comments area at the bottom of the post. Each score is out of 10.  10 equals excellent.

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Introduction

Following on from my two previous posts on link building techniques I want to take the time to look at the use of article marketing as a tool to help generate inbound links. Article marketing is quite an intensive tactic though as with my previous post on forum marketing it can impact various KPIs such as brand searches, referral traffic as well as generating links.

Benefits

Aids becoming a thought leader in your industry (great for your brand) Generates new traffic sources Builds new pages / content for engagement on your own website Starts conversations with…

A reference of major updates we think marketers involved in SEO, Pay Per Click or Social media need to know about

Each day Google makes many changes and updates to its different tools and it does a great job of announcing them through all its feeds, but it can be difficult to keep on top of what matters and what doesn't. So on this page we'll be selective and update you on algorithm updates, new tools, policies and changes to Google Analytics we think anyone working in digital marketing or marketing needs to know about, even if they're not a search specialist. Hopefully SEO or Adwords specialists will find it useful too and can let us know what we're missing!

Significant January 2011 updates from Google

Google Keyword Tool now includes mobile volumes (12/10/11)

Importance: [rating=3] Category: Search behaviour and Adwords targeting (more…)…