Marketing Virgin

I’m headed out of town today, but before I go, I thought I’d link you to a good article on the benefits of corporate blogging.  See you soon!

Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool -The New York Times

Top 100 words NOT to use in your subject lines:

1. 100% free
2. 50% off
3. act now
4. all words that relate to sex or pornography
5. all words that related to cures or medication
6. amazing
7. anything that looks like you are YELLING
8. apply now
9. as seen
10. as seen on Oprah Read the rest of this entry »

    

Best time to follow up with a sales prospect:

• Follow up within 24 hours of a form submission, site visit, etc
• Schedule calls for 3-6PM
• After 5PM is a good time to schedule a followup call with a contact or leave a message
• Fridays have the best contact rates (they slowly improve from Monday through Friday)

Courtesy of MarketingSherpa

How do you feel about reaching out to your prospects and customers via a mobile device?

Quiksilver used Access 360 Media to create a mobile application for the annual Big Wave surfing competition on the north shore of Hawaii. Mobile users opted into an alert system that would provide information on wave heights, the surfers, what the contest conditions were, who was winning, and other types of interesting information.

Twitter allows users to receive updates via text message. Your friends on Twitter can send you updates through this free service. We use Twitter to send updates to our customers on the planning of our 2008 Customer Symposium. They can select to receive updates via e-mail or text message.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interested in creating a buzz for your company? It doesn’t take much! Check out the holiday lights map we made at NetQoS. We used Google Maps to highlight the best places to find Christmas lights in Austin, TX. It’s a catchy way to generate traffic from a local market to your site.

http://www.netqos.com/holiday/

TEAM MARCOM

Left to Right:

Jenny (Sales Operations), Andrea (Marketing Programs Specialist), Jeff (Webmaster), Tina (Graphic Artist/Illustrator), David (Advertising), Ginger (Graphic Designer), Scott (Marketing Programs Specialist), Alina (Future Marketing Guru), Pam (Sr. Director of Marcom), Zara (Future Marketing Guru) 

Oh Christmas sweater, how I love thee.
Your snowflakes, your bells, your green Christmas tree.
You keep me warm on a cold winter’s day,
“What a great sweater!” the others will say.

You jingle, you sparkle, you set hearts aglow,
I’ll wear you proudly everywhere I go.
On the 26th I must pack you away,
Oh Christmas sweater, that will be such a sad day!

Read the rest of this entry »

Word of the Day:

Widget = Embeddable chunks of code, reusable code. Also known as a module or plug-in.

Widgets are used on many social networking sites - wikis, blogs, etc. They make it easy for less-technical folks to work on sites without having to be an HTML expert. WordPress and MovableType provide widget management.

Here are 11 tips to improve your e-mail reputation — and thus your inbox delivery rate:

1. Send only relevant content. Send only e-mails that will build a positive reputation with your subscribers. Anything that they will view as irrelevant will hurt your reputation, so stay targeted.
2. Don’t send more e-mails than necessary. When subscribers receive too many e-mails from you, they may not unsubscribe, but they will no longer open most of them. Since ISPs such as Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, and AOL can track both open rates and click-through rates, your ISP reputation will suffer — fewer e-mails will be delivered — and your recipient reputation is degraded, fewer e-mails opened.
3. Set up feedback loops with major ISPs, such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, etc. so you can immediately unsubscribe recipients that tag your e-mail as spam — and so they don’t receive another e-mail and hit the spam button again.
4. Remove recipients with excessive bounces from your list. If you keep sending to bad e-mail addresses, it hurts your reputation with the ISPs.
5. Find ways to woo back subscribers with special offers in the subject lines for those who no longer open or click-through on your e-mails. Opens and click-throughs can be tracked with many e-mail marketing services. Inactive subscribers are much more likely to tag your e-mail as spam than those who regularly open and click-through on your links.
   Read the rest of this entry »

   

Word of the day: Womenomics

A phrase initially coined by The Economist, womenomics refers to the amplified purchasing power of women on the economic and cultural front.

Ask any marketer what the 4 P’s of marketing are and you will get the same answer - product, price, place, and promotion.

When we talk about women, there are 4 NEW P’s - Pearls, Pumps, Purses, and Power.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quick tip of the day…

Hello and welcome to my lovely headline, which might impress you tremendously except for the fact that it’s centered, so no one can read it.

Can you read this typeface? The average person over 40 won’t have an easy time in the real world. Yet it’s still one of the most popular font/size combinations online - Verdana 10pt.

Oh and by the way, if your type is colored anything but black (and blue for hotlinks) people will have a harder time reading it. This is Verdana 12 bigger than that used on most sites, in a dark gray. Very popular in the blog world.

Courtesy of MarketingSherpa