What’s the *#@! is inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

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In those kind words, it was still a good question someone asked upon me the other day. I’ll let the infographic describes it best (see below). Inbound and outbound marketing, their buzzy words the last few years yet everyone seems to have a slightly different response to it.

In my view, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that a user or customer dominates or controls.  It  focuses on a specific and targeted group rather than the masses, yet its fair to say the masses can still be funneled through it (ex. websites and search).  Inbound marketing is essentially an online based marketing tool that has shown strong and effective results. Read more

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Gmail Breaking Email Templates? The Fix

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Gmail logoTypically I don’t like to post on ‘technical’ topics relating to Internet marketing, but after a long day of the team doing trial and error, researching the web and a few head bangs and random curse words shout-outs, I felt this quick-win technical fix will save a number of developers who build email templates frustrations and sensitivity to their co-workers ears.

A few months Gmail made some changes to how its Gmail accounts render HTML email templates. The result, frustration among many email developers trying to understand how and why their email templates are breaking when building the template layouts using tables. These changes by Googles Gmail team adversely affected how images are displaying in browsers, and how the clients browser renders table rows and column spans (HTML geek talk). And its not just Gmail who did this…Hotmail as well (though Live and MSN is unconfirmed). Read more

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I Just Saved Your Job – Undo Your Email Send

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bad email send. I wish I could unsend that email to the bossWe all have on the top of our wish list a magic button we can use to retrieve an email we sent prematurely. Believe it or not, its now possible, and if you’re reading this, I may have just saved your job. Thank you Google!
You received an email from your boss, friend or friend and quickly responded out of passion and click send, then shortly after realized your should have given yourself a grace period before sending. Within minutes, you get a reply demanding that you explain your response. Sound familiar? More and more this happens where people don’t take the time to wait to collect their thoughts before sending…or perhaps drafted the email but accidentally hit the send button.

Google has finally launched a ‘band-aid’ solution to this. Launched in beta back in March 2009, Google’s gmail launched a new feature to allow its users to defer the send of emails. Enabling this will give you the time you should need to retract the email you fired off.

We live in a fast paced world where email was supposed to cut down our work load and time. Conversely, the email technology has tripled our work load and time and now fully consumes us in the office, at home and on the go through our cell phones, black berries and iPhones. With the abundance of email we receive and respond to every day, and our demands to respond immediately, there has never been a need more than now for a tool such as this.

Even on the legal front, a tool to undo your email send can be a lifesaver. For example, an office worker who works for Patrick Fitzgerald, a U.S. Attorney in Chicago, sent an e-mail to the media that contained the names of 24 confidential witnesses involved in a federal probe. Read more

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Customer Lifecycle Email Marketing – The Neglected Child of Web Marketing

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IMHO one of the more exciting areas of Internet marketing is an area that is often neglected and rarely talked about within most small to medium sized companies. Much emphasis and water cooler talk in Internet marketing is often focussed on Search, Social Media and how to involve Facebook into the marketing strategy. All are good and great channels and mediums for the lead generation, acquisition, branding, market intelligence and immediate distribution of marketing messaging. So while these are all great for investing marketing budgets, why is it the 80/20 rule (80% of your business/revenue comes from 20% of customers) so often overlooked and neglected? For marketers its not as sexy as the latter as their campaign strategies are focussed primarily on acquisition marketing channels for new customers, and lack of accountability for showing revenue, profits, and sustainability from existing customers.

So how does this relate to online marketing? Whether 80/20 rule strategies are sought to increase revenue from the 20% of customers through up-sell, cross-sell or direct sell tactics, the 80/20 rule impacts all web marketing channels – including Search, and especially Email. Read more

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Landing Pages Testing – Worth it?

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Landing page testing and optimizationEnhancing a campaigns performance in the Search channels such as a paid search campaign, or even in an email program, if done properly can reap those conversion rewards, or whatever your defined KPI’s (key performance indicators) may be. Though when traveling down this path of designing, building and executing landing pages, the necessity to test is critical. Just as with a paid search campaign, email promotional or lifecycle campaigns, eStore check out sales funnel and your run of the mill homepage, the need to test to optimize is integral to maximize your online the outcome you’re seeking…whether it be increased signs ups, conversions, sales, opt-ins, opens, click thru’s etc.

Understanding what’s worth testing is that “ah-ha” many marketers face and tend to pull random ideas out of the hat. The issue I’ve found with marketers is not necessarily deciding if they should test…but rather understanding what variables they should test. While almost any variable on the landing page could be tested – raised CTA (call to action), key messaging above the fold, dynamic keyword population, localization to the visitors geographic city or region, larger images/buttons/text, content layout stemming from heat map reports, etc., the list can go on and on.

So what is worth testing? Here are my guidelines on what’s worth testing. Read more

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Email Best Practices – What’s New?

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The funny thing with email over all other web marketing channels is you only get to get it right once. Once you click “send”, that email campaign is out the door to tens or hundreds of thousands of potential customers. Ensuring strong procedural protocal and best practice hygiene is maintained within your organization is essential to maintaining 100% accuracy with your campaigns. Ok…at least +98% accuracy 😉

email marketingMany people have written a lot about email best practices. I commend Jeanniey Mullen of Click Z for leading the way. She’s written a number of important issues pertaining to email marketing.

Best practices in email marketing comes in a variety of packages. They range from a best practice approach to list hygiene and subscriber management, to email template design and development, to copy writing for marketing promotions versus newsletters.  Even best practices on usability for email campaigns is out there. I recal a few A/B multi variant email conversion campaigns we tested for a national TV direct response commercial and the outcome was surprising to some. Good thing we tested as our client assumptions, even ours, were off until we tested and saw the resuls.

So what’s new today in email best practices? Well aside from digging into the details of email accreditation and authentication considerations, lets touch on a few some of you email marketers may not have thought of. Read more

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Holistic Email Direct Marketing: The Framework Recipe

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Email channel, one of the most cost-effective e-marketing channels available today for both BtoB and BtoC, though many companies lack the understanding on how to harness it’s true potential and to streamline the integration of strategy, delivery and business intelligence.

In this overview, I’ll provide you a holistic snapshot of what a full organizational email plan (or CRM plan) requires to streamline all efforts different business units and processes within the organization. This email marketing framework can work within a centralized head office, or an organization with global offices and marketing efforts. Though for the later, system and process integration is integral – but user empowerment is decentralized to all locations. To digress….

Over the last +3 years, email marketing has change dramatically. As email marketing proliferates over 2008 and 2009 in the marketing mix of companies plans (or maybe it’s the CRM guys driving it), individuals discover the intricacies of how to properly get the performance out of the medium. Read more

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Top Ten Success Secrets of Email Marketing

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Many would claim there are X secrets behind each web marketing channel – SEO, Affiliates, Email, etc. that will catipulate your business among the rest online today. While using the keyword of “secret” to attract your attention (ok, I’m also guilty of doing that in this post), the point taken is that there really are not any secrets (privately kept formulas / ingredients / methodologies, etc.) that marketers employ in their marketing, and especially email marketing. It’s simply a foundation of experience and knowledge that differentiates the marketer – or in this case the email marketers. Read more

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Email Marketing – The Essentials

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One of the hottest marketing channels, if not THE hottest marketing channel, being discussed in the Internet Marketing industry these days is the email marketing (email marketing services in Vancouver) channel.

Why? Considering the majorities are plugged in to using email to communicate – whether from their home computer, cell phone, crackberry (errr, blackberry, palm, trio), or at work, consumers and business worldwide utilize the email channel to communicate day-to-day. This channel has by far the greatest direct response (data supports 80% visibility – open rates – within the first 48 hours), is extremely cost-effective (when used properly) and is complimented with real-time data to gauge reach, visibility and response rate. Why wouldn’t more businesses and marketers be leveraging this channel? Read more

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