Have Customers Evolve With Your Products Through Web-based Surveys

By: Frank Iacono

As people grow and change occupations, industries, and preferences they look for products that meet their shifting needs. Understanding this evolution and implementing ways to capture and correlate this quantifiable information will prove invaluable to your strategic product planning and marketing.

How to Capture Information?

The easiest way to capture important marketing data from your customers is via web surveys. Web-based surveys are having a profound influence on survey methodology. In fact, many believe that the Internet has truly democratized the survey-taking process. Why? Because web surveys are inexpensive, quick to administer, allow companies to ask specific questions all while gathering important data faster than was ever possible in the past. Your customer’s opinions will yield results and powerful ammunition crucial for your company’s products and services.

Making the Connection

Web-based connections between customers and your company’s products and services place the customer at the core of the product life cycle quickly, easily, and impulsively. Equally as important as automating your marketing process – as opposed to organized focus groups and face-to-face interviews – is reaching your customers and intimately uniting them with your products and future plans. Compared to the more traditional print survey, web-based surveys let individuals respond instinctively and at their leisure.

Advantages of Web-based Surveys

There are many advantages to using web-based surveys over print. In Elaine Zanutto’s book entitled Web & E-mail Surveys she described many of these advantages. Among the advantages cited were:

• Faster response rates
• Easier to send reminders to participants
• Easier to process data, since responses could be downloaded to a spreadsheet, data analysis package, or a database
• Dynamic error checking capability
• Option of putting questions in random order
• The ability to make complex skip pattern questions easier to follow
• The inclusion of pop-up instructions for selected questions
• The use of drop-down boxes

Designing Online Surveys

As previously mentioned, many companies or marketers fail to take advantage of web surveys. In other cases, some have used this method to capture data but have used poorly designed surveys. Here are some quick tips to ensure that your web survey is getting the right results:

• Focus on only the most important questions
• Keep the total number of questions to 15 or fewer
• Limit the number of screens respondents have to navigate through
• Use no more than 10 minutes of each respondent’s time and state the amount of time needed to complete the survey upfront
• Offer an incentive to entice the respondent to take the survey that directly relates to the product you are asking them to evaluate

Survey Companies

• ClassApps
• CreateSurvey
• Formstack
• SurveyGizmo
• SurveyMonkey
• ZapSurvey
• Zommerang

Everybody Wins

Customers who contribute to the development of a company’s product line will more likely remain loyal. Obviously, shortened time-to-market remains the value proposition here, but companies will sharpen their competitive edge if they bring better products to market faster. In fact, inviting customers into your product planning and asking them to share their thoughts and opinions will most likely entice them to buy more of your products that they help build. And why not involve the people who benefit the most from new and improved products? A web-based survey is a great way to do it. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Let’s Go Phishing – Play it Safe Now or Be Sorry Later

By: Frank Iacono

So, What is Phishing?

Phishing is a form of criminal activity where “phishers” attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an e-mail, instant message, or fraudulent Website.

Methods of Phishing

Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception, such as making a link in an e-mail appear to belong to the spoofed organization or financial institution. For example, an attacker may send e-mail seemingly from a reputable credit card company that requests account information, often suggesting that there is a problem. When users respond with the requested information, attackers can use it to gain access to the accounts.

Damage Caused By Phishing

The damage caused by phishing ranges from loss of access to e-mail to substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming more popular, because of the ease with which unsuspecting people often divulge personal information to phishers, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, and mothers’ maiden names.

How Can You Prevent A Phishing Attack

The US Federal Trade Commission offers the following advice to help prevent you from becoming the victim of a phishing attack:

• Don’t reply to e-mail or pop-up messages that ask for personal or financial information, and don’t click on links in the message. Don’t cut and paste a link from the message into your Web browser — phishers can make links look like they go one place, but that actually send you to a different site.
• If you are concerned about your account, contact the organization using a phone number you know to be genuine, or open a new Internet browser session and type in the company’s correct Web address yourself.
• Don’t e-mail personal or financial information.
• Review credit card and bank account statements as soon as you receive them to check for unauthorized charges.
• Be cautious about opening any attachment or downloading any files from e-mails you receive, regardless of who sent them.
• Forward spam that is phishing for information to spam@uce.gov and to the company, bank, or organization impersonated in the phishing e-mail. You also may report phishing e-mail to reportphishing@antiphishing.org The Anti-Phishing Working Group, a consortium of ISPs, security vendors, financial institutions and law enforcement agencies, uses these reports to fight phishing.

Phishing Examples and Anti-Phishing Resources

• How to Avoid Phishing Scams
• What To Do If You’ve Given Out Your Personal Financial Information
  
• Bank Safe Online
• The SiteJabber Blog

If you feel like you’ve fallen into a “Phishing” trap, please immediately contact your local authorities, your bank or credit card companies, and report it to the Federal Trade Commission’s at www.consumer.gov/idtheft.

Ask Questions Prior to Purchasing a Content Management System

By: Frank Iacono

A content management system (CMS) is a system that is used to manage the content of a website. Typically, a CMS consists of two primary elements: the content management application (CMA) and the content delivery application (CDA).

A CMS can be either reasonably simple or very complex. There are a wide range of CMS products available, developed by providers such as Oracle and Microsoft, the open source community such as Alfresco and Joomla, and other small development companies. Choosing the right CMS can be a very important decision for you and your organization. Below, please find some questions to ask yourself and the vendor prior to selecting a CMS solution.

Objectives:

• What is the content strategy?
• What goals are currently being met?
• What goals are not currently being met?
• Is licensed software or software-as-a-service (SaaS) best for you?
• How much integration is required with other systems (i.e., back office and ecommerce systems)?
• Which services should be provided through the CMS to interact with the website?
• What is “the vision” from a team-by-team perspective and ultimately the company?

Content Providers:

• Who is creating and/or editing the content?
• What is the frequency of the updates?
• Who plans the content?
• Who approves content?
• How is the content being used?
• How does the system handle authors working on content that may be published simultaneously to different parts of the site?

Content Inputs:

• What is your current content creation processes?
• What are the problems and/or frustrations that you face today in creating content?
• What features would you like to see in an authoring, CMS or publishing tool?
• What tools do you use in authoring today? How effective and ineffective are they?
• What is the format of the content you create? What source is the content dependent on?
• How can you add metadata in the CMS?
• Do you plan on re-using the content elsewhere on the website?
• How do you manage and/or demand content from internal customers?

Content Process Flow:

• How do you handle version control?
• How do you handle the approval process?
• What is the workflow process?
• Who is in charge of editing the content?
• How is the content classified so it can be searched by your external customers and optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
• What relates content within the website?

Content Outputs:

• What format does the content that needs to be inputted need to be in?
• How much of the content should be reusable?
• What site templates are required?
• What are the search requirements?
• What other site functionality is required?

General CMS Questions:

1. Is the CMS intuitive (i.e., is it easy to learn and use from an administrative perspective)?
2. From a page content perspective is it possible to paste in text from MS Word or other similar content-based programs and retain all the formatting?
3. Does the CMS let you preview the page before you publish it?
4. How good is the search facility in the CMS (i.e., meaning does it generate proper URLS that can be searched for in the future)?
5. How easy is it to integrate the CMS into the site design you’ve selected?
6. Does the CMS have a WYSIWYG editor?
7. Does the CMS allow for you to define our own meta-data
8. Can you describe your CMS’ access control?
9. Can you configure the CMS to work with a sandbox from a testing perspective?
10. How does the CMS create and handle dynamic links versus static links?
11. Does the CMS apply performance best practices as related to the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing?
12. How easy is it to incorporate site redesigns into the CMS?
13. What is the subscription and/or upgrade policy (i.e., annual basis)? Do you have to pay for version upgrades?
14. Is it possible to have a copy of all the manuals and training materials regarding the CMS prior to purchase?
15. Will the CMS vendor provide you with references from at least 2-3 existing customers?

The theme of this article is pretty simple. If you are planning to purchase a CMS solution for your company, please make sure to complete your due diligence. This includes talking with existing content providers in your organization, creating your own checklist of necessary functionality and requirements, partaking in product demonstrations, and checking out vendor references.

Take your time, be thorough, and ask a lot of questions. Good luck!

20 Twitter Applications

Written by: Frank Iacono

So, What are Twitter Applications?

Twitter applications can be called by different names. Sometimes they are referred to as “twitter tools” and “twitter add-ons”. No matter what they are called, they are simply websites which have built-in scripts that complement Twitter.

Below, please find a listing of 20 Twitter Applications that I have encountered:

1. TwitPic – TwitPic is allows users to share photos on Twitter. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, through TwitPic’s API, or through the site itself.
2. TweetDeck – TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application, currently in public beta that looks to capture the abundance of social media and display it in a unique columned user interface.
3. TwitterCounter – TwitterCounter allows users to see the progress of their twitter account on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis by showing statistic on a graph form. It also shows status details of the Twitter account such as number of followers, joining date, and etc.
4. TwitterFeed – TwitterFeed allows you to feed your blog into Twitter. You provide the URL of a blog’s RSS feed and how often you want posts to Twitter, and TwitterFeed does the rest.
5. TwtFAQ – TwtFAQ is a customer support Twitter application that helps answer questions in more than 140 characters.
6. Twitterholic – Twitterholic provides a list of the 100 best Twitters based on their followers, the people they follow and the number of their updates.
7. Twhirl – Twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.
8. SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) – SocialOomph is a Twitter automation tool and its primary purpose and main selling point is that you can schedule tweets to post at specific points in the future, and to repeat post.
9. TwitVid – TwitVid is a simple video sharing option for your tweets.
10. Twitturly – Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter
11. Twtpoll – Twtpoll is a feedback tool that helps you to conduct polls/surveys on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media site.
12. Retweetist – Retweet is a type of message posted (or tweeted) on micro blogging sevice, Twitter, that repeats some information previously tweeted by another user. The person making the Retweet is a Retweeter or a Retweetist.
13. Tweepler – Tweepler Is an easy, more enjoyable way of processing your New Twitter Followers. View a list of New Followers and classify them in one of two “Buckets” Follow (meaning you wish to follow them back) and Ignore (meaning you don’t wish to follow them and want to archive them out of the way, reducing clutter).
14. HelloTxt – HelloTxt is a simple way to read, update, and organize your life on multiple social networks and web services. You can
15. Twitdom – Twitdom is a Twitter Applications Database with over 530+ Twitter Applications, categorized and tagged for easy reference.
16. Tweet Scan – Tweet Scan is also a quick and easy way to find other users with similar interests.
17. Tweetburner – Tweetburner allows you to track the website links you post on Twitter and find out how many times people clicked on the link.
18. Tweetvisor – Tweetvisor is a new addition to that wide family of tools and applications, and it can be termed an activity-displayer which also lets you reply to any tweet you have received on the spot.
19. Twittervision – Twittervision is a web mashup combining Twitter with Google Maps to create a real time display of tweets across a map.
20. Twibes – Twibe is a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic.

The History of the Internet

Written by Frank Iacono

The history of the Internet is interesting. If for nothing else than it’s fascinating to see how far we’ve come in a relatively short period of time. Read this short history of the Internet and then review the Internet history timeline for important dates for technological advancement.

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s that saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in the scientific and military fields.

J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT, and later UCLA, developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. In 1965, Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer over dial-up telephone lines. This was significant as it showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line’s circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock’s packet switching theory was confirmed. In 1966, Roberts moved over to DARPA and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries listed here and many others not mentioned are truly the founding founders of the Internet.

• 1945: Vennevar Bush publishes a paper on memex machine. Vennevar Bush, one of the pioneers in radar, was also the originator of an idea that would later evolve into the World Wide Web.
• 1958: The United States Department of Defense formed a small agency called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop military science and technology.
• 1961-1965: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started to research sharing information in small, phone-linked networks. ARPA is one of their main sponsors.
• 1966: The first ARPANET plan is unveiled by Lawrence Roberts of MIT. Packet – switching technology is getting off the ground, and small university networks are beginning to be developed.
• 1968: ARPA mails out 140 Requests for Proposals to prospective contractors to build the first four Interface Message Processors (IMPs).
• 1969: The Department of Defense commissions the fledgling ARPANET for network research. The first official network nodes were UCLA, Standford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah. The first node-to-node message was sent from UCLA to SRI.
• 1971: More nodes join the network, bringing the total to 15. These new nodes include Harvard and NASA.
• 1973: ARPANET goes global when the University College of London and Norway’s Royal Radar Establishment join up.
• 1974: Network intercommunication is becoming more sophisticated; data is now transmitted more quickly and efficiently with the design of TCP (Transmission Control Program).
• 1976: Unix is developed at AT&T; Queen Elizabeth sends out her first e-mail message.
• 1979: USENET, the mother of all networked discussion groups, is developed.
• 1982: Internet technology protocols are developed, commonly known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol). This leads to one of the first definitions of an “internet” being a connected set of networks.
• 1984: Number of hosts is now up to 1,000, with more being added every day.
• 1985: The first registered domain is Symbolics.com.
• 1987: Number of hosts breaks the 10,000 mark.
• 1988: First large-scale Internet worm is unleashed by Robert Morris and it affects about 6,000 computers.
• 1990: Archie is considered to be the first search engine.
• 1991: Tim Berners-Lee develops the World Wide Web.
• 1993: The World Wide Web’s annual growth is now at a staggering 341,634%.
• 1994: ARPAnet celebrates 25th anniversary.
• 1995: Yahoo launched in March and Amazon.com launched in July.
• 1996:Macromedia Flash 1.0 launches to add interactive animation to web pages. Early adopters included Disney and MSN. The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in Finland.
• 1995-1997: RealAudio introduces Internet streaming technology, dial-up systems emerge (America Online, Compuserve), the Internet backbone continues to be strengthened with the addition of MCI, Microsoft and Netscape fight for WWW browser supremacy, and there are now more than 70,000 mailing lists.
• 1998: Google was founded in September.
• 1999: Napster launched in June.
• 2000: There are an estimated 20 million websites on the Internet.  The dotcom bubble officially burst on March 10, 2000. After several years of venture capitalists throwing money at proposals with ‘internet’ on the cover, it all starts unraveling as many of these businesses fail to find a market and others realize they don’t have a business plan.
• 2001: Wikipedia was launched in January.  About 9.8 billion electronic messages are sent daily.  Record labels were so furious at Napster and by July 2001, they effectively stopped Napster from operating.
• 2002: As of January, 58.5% of the U.S. population (164.14 million people) uses the Internet.
• 2003: MySpace launched in August. LinkedIn launched in May.
• 2004: Facebook launched in February. An Internet Worm, called MyDoom or Novarg, spreads through Internet servers. About 1 in 12 email messages are infected. Online spending reaches a record high—$117 billion in 2004, a 26% increase over 2003.
• 2005: YouTube.com launched in February. Google then acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion despite owning its own video site.
• 2006: Twitter is created. In stark contrast to the proliferation of lengthy blog posts online, Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters.  There are an estimated 92 million websites on the Internet.
• 2007: According to Internet World Stats, approximately 1.114 billion people use the Internet.  The biggest innovation of 2007 was almost certainly the iPhone, which was almost wholly responsible for renewed interest in mobile web applications and design.
• 2008: Google’s crawler reaches 1 trillion pages, although only a fraction are indexed by the search engine. For comparison, Google’s original index had 26 million pages in 1998, and reached 1 billion in 2000.
• 2009: There are 234 million websites as of December 2009. There are 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of September 2009.
• 2010: In February, Facebook announces it has 400 million active members. That’s larger than the population of the US and UK combined.  According to Internet World Stats, approximately 2 billion people use the Internet.

Is Your Organization Employing Best Practices for Online Donation?

Written by: Frank Iacono

While every non-profit organization has a different mission and approach to fundraising, those who achieve the greatest amount of success from their web-based donation programs typically employ best practices.

Below, please find the top 6 best practices that all non-profit organizations should utilize when creating an online donation form:

1. Maintain Consistent Branding. To provide a higher level of confidence in the donor clearly brand all forms with your organization’s specific web look and feel.
2. Remove Extraneous Navigation. To lower abandonment rates and increase web form donations remove all unnecessary links.
3. Create a Clear and Concise Form. To help donors complete the web form as quickly and easily as possible provide both clear and meaningful labels for all fields, making obvious which fields are required and which are optional.
4. Pre-populate Form Fields. To increase the speed of form completion and reduce the chances of typographical errors pre-populate the web form fields with information when the donor is already in your database.
5. Provide Pre-set Dollar Amounts. To encourage higher giving levels suggest donation amounts and provide multiple ways for donors to support your organization.
6. Add Email Auto-Responders. To reinforce the donor’s affinity with your organization send out an immediate email follow-up once the donation has been completed.

In order to be successful with your online donation program, you will need to conduct some upfront research and analysis to determine what works best with your audience.  Depending upon what your marketing strategy is and/or becomes this may or may not be a huge undertaking for your organization but it will truly demand that you truly understand online fundraising principles.

Discover Social Media Marketing

Written by: Frank Iacono

Embracing Social Media

In today’s marketplace, with the advent of social media, the fundamental principles of how business is conducted have changed. Social media initiatives present companies with many new ways to engage with their target audiences. However, with these new opportunities come a variety of challenges around understanding and utilizing various platforms and formulating workable marketing strategies.

So what exactly is social media? Social media is best described as a group of new kinds of online media, which share most or all of the following characteristics:

• Participation
• Openness
• Conversational
• Community Building
• Connectedness

Types of Social Networking Sites

There are many different types of social networking sites but here are a few to consider:

Blogging-based Sites

• Blogger
• Technorati
• WordPress

Content-based Sites

• HubPages
• Scibd
• Squidoo
• StumbleUpon
• Yelp

General Sites

• FaceBook
• MySpace
• Tagged
• Twitter
• Wikipedia

News-based Sites

• Digg
• NewsCloud
• Newsvine
• Propeller
• Reddit
• ShoutWire

Professional Networking-based Sites

• LinkedIn
• Naymz
• Plaxo

Photo and Video-based Sites

• 1Cast or Onecast
• Flickr
• TubeMogul
• YouTube

Next Steps…

In order to be successful on the social networking sites listed above, you will need to conduct some upfront research and analysis to determine which sites work best for your company.  

Good Luck!

Give Them Something to Talk About

Written by: Frank Iacono

In today’s current economic climate, most companies are operating under intense pressure and heightened scrutiny to increase revenue and grow profitability, in many cases with a reduced staff. What if there were a proven marketing strategy they could deploy to build their business, year in and year out, regardless of financial instability or competitor pressure? Well, there is, and it’s called word-of-mouth marketing

So, exactly what is word-of-mouth marketing? By definition, this term is used in the advertising and marketing industry to describe activities that companies undertake to generate personal recommendations and referrals for products and services as well as brand names. Essentially, it’s about giving real people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. In other words, think of it as business-to-consumer-to-consumer marketing.

Word of mouth has been described as the world’s best-known marketing secret. Wait a minute! Okay, how can word-of-mouth marketing be both the best known and a secret at the same time? Simply put, practically every businessperson knows how important word-of-mouth marketing can be to his or her bottom line, yet so many businesses do not know how it works or how it can be used to meet their specific marketing objectives.

If word of mouth has been around forever, than why has it suddenly become the fastest-growing form of marketing? Up until a few years ago word of mouth was something that just happened, but now it is something that can be influenced — making it actionable, trackable, and planable. Today it is considered the most cost-effective means of attracting new customers. To illustrate, the market research firm GfK NOP reports that 92% of consumers today cite word of mouth as one of the best sources for ideas about new products, up from 67% a generation ago. Perhaps the largest benefit of word-of-mouth marketing is the fact that it requires a very small budget and works without us even knowing it. We as marketers simply need to give people something to talk about.

Why is word-of-mouth marketing so powerful? Over the years there have been many reasons given to explain its amazing success. With the emergence of the

Internet, consumers now have more product choices and information about these choices than ever before at their disposal. The ease and instant gratification of seeing their words on such consumer review sites like Amazon.com, blogs, messageboards, discussion groups, chat rooms, and other forms of social media such as MySpace.com at the push of a button has sparked consumers’ expressive urge to communicate and spread the word.

So, how can you create a positive buzz about your product or service? As Andy Sernovitz, the CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, points out in his book entitled Word of Mouth Marketing, there are four essential rules to running an effective campaign:

1. Be interesting and generate enthusiasm.
2. Make people happy and get them talking.
3. Earn trust and respect.
4. Make the message easy – simple and portable message, make it easy to grasp, accept and pass along to others.

Mr. Sernovitz also notes that people generally love to talk and share their opinions with other people. However, in order for companies to warrant good word of mouth they must first understand what motivates people to start talking about their products and services. Additionally, he outlines three basic motivations that drive good/positive word-of-mouth conversations:

1. People genuinely like you and your products or services.
2. People genuinely like to feel good about your product or service.
3. People feel connected to the brand family.

A real-world example of word-of-mouth marketing involves Google’s Gmail service. When Google launched their Gmail service they did not market nor did they spend any money advertising. Instead they created scarcity by giving out Gmail accounts to only a handful of what they called “power users.” Other users who aspired to be like these special users yearned for a Gmail account, and this generated a bidding war for Gmail invites on eBay. Google created demand by offering a limited supply of e-mail accounts and the privilege of having a Gmail account caused word of mouth, rather than any marketing activities executed by the company.

Another classic word-of-mouth example focuses on TiVo. TiVo is not known for their marketing and advertising. In fact, TiVo has hardly advertised at all. But most people have heard of and know what TiVo is and what it does. TiVo owners have been described as fanatics. They absolutely love the product and can’t stop talking about it. Their love of TiVo has turned them into passionate word-of-mouth advocates.

As Mr. Sernovitz mentioned in his book, word-of-mouth marketing is the most profitable marketing that any company can do. The net impact of conducting word-of-mouth marketing leads to more business, higher return on investment, and lower costs. And, word-of-mouth marketing does more than just make money on new sales, as it makes all of your sales and marketing initiatives more effective.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most natural method of communication and it should become an integral part of your marketing plan. Traditional marketing methods are becoming gradually less and less effective for more and more companies. So the bottom line for companies in today’s marketplace is to open their eyes to new ways of doing business.

Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing Manifesto:

1. Happy customers are your best advertising. Make people happy.
2. Marketing is easy: Earn the respect and recommendation of your customers. They will do your marketing for you, for free.
3. Ethics and good service come first.
4. UR the UE: You are the user experience (not what your ads say you are).
5. Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.
6. People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.
7. Be interesting or be invisible.
8. If it’s not worth talking about, it’s not worth doing.
9. Make the story of your company a good one.
10. It is more fun to work at a company that people want to talk about.
11. Use the power of word of mouth to make business treat people better.
12. Honest marketing makes more money.

What’s the Interactive Buzz in Today’s Marketplace?

Written by: Frank Iacono

The history of the Internet is interesting. If nothing else, it’s fascinating to see how far we’ve come in such a short period of time. It was back in 1945 that Vennevar Bush, one of the pioneers in radar, published a paper on his theoretical memex machine. The ideas referenced in that paper would later evolve into what we call the World Wide Web.

Today, we as marketers see the impact the Internet has had on the way buyers buy and sellers sell. In fact, a recent DMA study revealed that one out of three direct mail recipients prefer to respond online, so capturing responders who go online is critical. More importantly, we are continuously challenged to discover the best ways to integrate the power of direct marketing with the capabilities of the Internet to generate higher lead volumes, improve agent and field force efficiency, enhance customer retention, and streamline customer service for our clients.

With that said, there are 10 interactive strategies you should engage your clients about on a daily basis:

Search Marketing

Search marketing has been described as pull marketing or reverse direct marketing. Meaning, end-users are actively conducting search queries on Google or Yahoo! looking for your product or service. There are three main categories of search marketing: Paid Inclusion Content Feeds, Paid Listing Management, and Natural Search Optimization. Conducting search-marketing initiatives can increase qualified traffic to a Website, landing page, and/or microsite within a short period of time. This type of marketing can provide marketers with immediate visibility for short-lived programs, such as donor programs, contests, events, seminars, and promotions. Search marketing can be highly cost-effective and can deliver quantifiable results.

E-mail Marketing Campaigns

Even with spam, phishing, deliverability issues, and declining open rates, e-mail is still one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. When e-mail is added to the marketing communication mix, companies will actually expend less time, less money, and fewer resources than with more traditional marketing vehicles (e.g. direct mail, print advertising). E-mail marketing allows companies to quickly disseminate time-sensitive information in minutes, not days or weeks – and they can quickly see the results of the campaign efforts instantly, and make any necessary adjustments in real-time.

E-newsletter Campaigns

E-newsletters are a great way to disseminate relevant and timely information on a regular basis. E newsletters can aid in driving education, prospecting and retention efforts, promoting events, announcing new products, and keeping agents, brokers, and members informed. E-newsletters allow companies to remain top of mind with your audience and encourage two-way communication – ultimately building stronger, longer-lasting relationships.

Landing Pages and Microsites

For any high-visibility e-marketing, direct mail, or DRTV campaign, landing pages and microsites can serve as vital tools. Landing pages and microsites allow for the development of specific time-based, product-focused marketing in a flexible, dynamic manner. If these Web pages are designed, programmed, and implemented effectively the campaign stands to have a higher conversion rate and could yield a greater return on investment. Landing pages and microsites should be synergistic with the creative used in e-mail, DRTV, postcards, FSIs, and direct mail campaigns that drove the end-user to this destination in the first place.

Personalized URLs

Personalized URLs (PURLS) are unique Web pages that incorporate end-users’ personal information (found in a back-end database on a campaign-hosted Web server) so that the offer reflects a high degree of one-to-one communication and customization. Naturally, the more the page “relates” to the recipient, the greater the probability of conversion. PURLs can help increase overall conversion rates up to 20%. PURLs can be utilized with most marketing-driven campaigns such as direct mail, e-mail, postcards, and interactive surveys.

Blogging

Short for Web log, blogs are frequently updated public journals. “Blogging” is the action of posting to a blog; the poster is called a “blogger.” Some sources estimate there are more than 100 million blogs on the Internet today. Blogs can help organizations stay on top and in touch with their audience. Blogs can provide news and updates to customers and investors. Blogs can give a company or a Website a more personable look and creates a dialogue. Search engine optimization experts recommend using blogs to boost site rankings, as search engine robots and spiders often visit blogs more frequently than static Web pages.

Podcasting

Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files (such as audio or video programs) over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. A Pew Internet study states, “More than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players and 29% of them have downloaded podcasts. That amounts to more than six million adults who have tried this new feature that allows Internet ‘broadcasts’ to be downloaded onto their portable listening device.” (Please note: Apple’s iPod is not required to play back podcasts; any portable MP3 player or personal computer with the right software can view and listen.)

RSS Feeds

RSS, or Rich Site Syndication (a.k.a. Really Simple Syndication), is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite Websites and receive free news and/or other content as published. These feeds contain headlines, summaries, and links to the actual full page on the Web. Using RSS, Webmasters can put their content into a standardized format that can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software or automatically conveyed as new content on another Website.

Mobile Marketing and Text Messaging

Mobile marketing refers to direct marketing to mobile phones, PDAs, or (rarely) laptop computers. Technologies such as SMS, Bluetooth, WLAN, and Infrared (IRDA) are being used to distribute commercials onto mobile phones. With the still-growing popularity of mobile phones, mobile marketing could establish itself as one of the fastest-growing and most targetable marketing methods. Text messaging is where e-mail was 15 years ago, or where voice marketing was five years ago. But the beauty of mobile marketing is that consumer participation is 100% opt-in – and 83% of text messages are read within one hour of receipt.

Social Networks

Despite their origin as online destinations to assemble one’s friends and make new personal acquaintances, social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube have evolved to become nothing less than a core navigation paradigm for the Internet. Today, social networking functionality has become an important component of many, many Websites, not just those dedicated to making friends and dating. This same functionality sits alongside keyword searches or Google’s page rank algorithm as an important new way to search for people and discover valuable media and content on the Internet.

Top 5 Business Strategy Tips for Twitter

Written by: Frank Iacono

In 2006, Twitter was initially inspired by the concept of an “away-message” merged with the freedom and mobility of short message service (SMS) technologies. Today, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover, and share ideas with others. Twitter allows individuals the ability to compose and read messages up to 140 characters in real-time. These messages are controlled by the composer and recipient and are exchangeable anywhere through varied platforms.

So What Can Twitter Do for Businesses?

Twitter has evolved into a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected with their customers. From small local stores to big brands and from traditional brick-and-mortar to internet-based companies, people are finding great value in the connections they are making with businesses on Twitter.

Businesses are using Twitter to quickly share information with people interested in their company and its products and services, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, prospects, partners, and vendors.

Below, please find the Top 5 Business Strategy Tips for Twitter:

1. Monitor What’s Being Said – To better understand the current conversations about your brand, competing brands, and customer concerns in your marketplace I suggest taking a listen first approach.
2. Determine Who is Doing the Tweeting – To keep the conversation genuine and give a face to the brand I suggest tweeting yourself versus outsourcing to a PR company.
3. Post Tweets NOT Just About Your Company –To keep your audience interested and engaged I suggest posting unique tweets about what you can offer your customers versus tweets simply about your company.
4. Link Creatively to Your Website – To provide your audience with additional information about your tweet I suggest finding unique ways to link them into your website.
5. Integrate with Other Channels – To create a synergy with other promotional campaigns you are running I suggest integrating Twitter with other marketing-based initiatives.

Are You Ready to use Twitter?

Learn how by watching the Video Presentation of Twitter in Plain English: