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PPC Tools
Well, we saw a link to a Firefox plug-in called PPC Web Spy, it’s not a bad application, but it isn’t great either. The “free” version only gives you 10 keywords and going through the process to download the program is painful… with multiple “are you sure you only want the free version” pages before actually giving you the download. If you’re patient, and looking for new PPC tools, however, it’s worth the install. The link above takes you to the site for more information.
Very Interesting Email Statistics
Posting over at ClickZ recently, Jeanniey Mullen shared the following statistics as part of a post about permissions databases:
- Every year an average of 30 percent of the people who signed up for your e-mail marketing list will not get your e-mails because their ISP will incorrectly block them.
- 85 percent of the people on your e-mail list will stop reading your e-mails (without unsubscribing) after the third message your company sends to them (yes, company, not just your group inside the company).
- 25 percent of the people on your list who receive your e-mails and never open them will be among the top 10 percent of your best customers.
- An average of 39 percent of your current year subscribers will either unsubscribe, or stop reading/engaging with your e-mails by the end of the year.
- Over 10 percent of people who initially read your e-mail on their handheld device will file it away, intending to take action, but never doing so.
- About 15 percent of your list will read your e-mails and look to a social network like Facebook or Twitter to see if others are buzzing about the message or offer before taking action.
- Over 49 percent of people who are happy with their recent purchase from your company will open future e-mails seven times faster than those who have not made a purchase in over three months.
Read the rest of her post here…
Collecting Email Addresses For Your Business
Are you having problems building a legitimate email list? That is one of the biggest challenges for email marketers. With the CAN-SPAM laws and email providers restrictions it is essential that marketers have “clean” email lists. How can you do it?
Well, Vertical Response, our email partner, has a nice post on some good ways that a marketer can solicit email addresses and be in compliance with CAN-SPAM. It’s well worth the read, and, for implementation, we are happy to consult, design, and implement both simple and multi-touch email marketing campaigns, just contact us.
Here are their top 10:
- Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
- Tradeshows – Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
- Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
- Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
- Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
- Host your own event – Art galleries, software companies (one here has a party every quarter and invites the neighboring businesses), retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
- Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
- Incentivize your employees – Give them $ for collecting VALID email addresses.
- Giving something for free like a PDF? Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
- Referrals – Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you’ll give them a discount.
Social Networking Survey Results & More
Well, we promised you the results from the Social Networking Survey, and, we’ll give them to you… but, first, I want to talk about how doing something as simple as publishing a survey, and then doing some network marketing about that survey drove substantial results.
Let me set-up the situation, we have been discussing some of the problems with Social Network Marketing here internally and wanted to start doing some data gathering, independent of big research firms. We wanted anecdotal evidence for our clients. We didn’t have a big budget to run ads, send email solicitations, etc. What we did have, however, is a good survey tool (provided by Survs.com), and the social networks themselves. We built a quick survey, (to get some initial findings, more short surveys will follow), and then posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, our Facebook page, and a couple of local business sites (like OCMetro). Within five minutes of posting about the survey we were beginning to get results.
This illustrates the point that when you’re talking to people that are engaged in your subject matter, and don’t ask them too many questions, you’ll get good results. The same thing can be done with product owners, VIP club members, etc. Even without an incentive to take the survey we got a 97% completion rate!
Not only did we get a successful survey, but, overall site traffic and awareness went up as shown by these stats:
Unique Site Visits (vs. prior week): +107%
Absolute Unique Visitors (vs. prior week): +92%
Pageviews (vs. prior week): +86%
Increase in Twitter followers (vs. prior week): +350%
In addition, traffic came from completely different sources than normal:
Search (organic & paid): -70.46% (vs. prior week))
Referral: +141.67% (vs. prior week)
If the referral traffic it came from the expected sources based on our efforts:
Facebook: 16.67%
Our Blog: 13.33%
Twitter: 8.33%
LinkedIn: 1.67%
Other: 1.67%
Now, enough about the positive effect of the survey, let’s look at the survey results:
How Many Social Networks Are You Using?
Most respondents (>80%) are using between 1 and 6 social networks. There were no respondents that were unaware of social networking, or un-connected; this isn’t surprising, however, given our solicitation methods.
Do You Read All Of Your “Friends” Updates?
In an unsurprising outcome, more than 60% of our respondents do not read all of their friend’s updates, stay tuned for our next survey where we ask the question, “Why Not?”
Tell Us About Those Updates
The last question was interesting, it asked what people thought of the updates from their friends. Over half (>54%) of those surveyed said that the updates kept them perfectly informed, or, lead to interesting places or information online. Only 18% said that they were too much information, and another 27% replied with “Other.” Of those “other” responses, here is one that was intriguing, “Updates can be interesting but many are worthless attempts at attention.” Most of the “other” responses were a combination of the other answers.
We would like to thank you for your participation in the survey, and remind you to stay tuned for more.
Social Networking, Is It Overwhelming?
Are you overwhelmed by social networking? We’re conducting a quick survey on the topic, please participate before Friday. We’ll be releasing the results and discussing them on the 17th.
DMIdeas Is Proud To Announce the DM2 Toolkit
DM2 = Exponentially Better
Times are tough, so DMIdeas has your back!
Are you already paying for postcards or other mailers? What if we could do your direct mail, PLUS our exponentially better email marketing program as well – for the SAME PRICE you’re paying now?
Interested?
Stay tuned, our new toolkit, DM2 for marketers will be launching in July 2009!
* required
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Join Us At The West OC Legislative Committee Mixer
Come out and join us at a five city mixer in Seal Beach on Thursday. We’ll be there talking about online marketing, SEM, SEO, PPC, Email marketing, and some new cool tools that we’ve developed to help out our friends on the Direct Marketing side of life.
The festivities begin at 6:00 PM at Old Ranch Country Club, 3901 Lampson Ave., Seal Beach, CA.
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Microsoft Bing’s Continued Growth ‘Rattles’ Google
MarketingVOX is reporting that MSFT’s Bing search engine is beginning to “rattle” GOOG’s share of the market. No surprise there, updates to IE8 and the MSN toolbar have been “tweaked” to use Bing as the default search engine.
There is nothing really better about Bing, if you’ve used it, you’ll know that it’s a bit on the frustrating side, IMHO. Although, I can’t complain about being #1 when searching for “digital marketing ideas” (we’re #6 on Google). When searching more geo-centric, however, by searching “digital marketing orange county,” we’re #8 on Bing and #4 on Google. There is no PERFECT algorithm. The important thing, for marketers, is to look at where you’re ranking and then make sure you’re doing all that you can, on the SEO front, to rank where you want to rank.
Bing’s Continued Growth ‘Rattles’ Google – MarketingVOX.
New York Times Loss Widens as Ads Shrink
The WSJ ran a story (subscription required) on the 22nd about this issue. This problem is hitting all print publications:
Ad dollars are leaving print… and fast!
Their Q1 losses for 2009 were worse than expected, around a 27% loss in advertising revenue. This outpaced their efforts to cut costs (not surprising, good journalism is expensive).
Seth Godin, on his blog, is predicting that by 2012 there will be, “no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US.”
WOW! and entire vertical market will be gone, or almost gone in less than three years!
These are both interesting reads and worth the effort to see what’s coming for online advertising.
We have seen with with our clients, and in our past, efforts to cut “traditional” media spending and emphasize online strategies. We’re helping our client get better results through email and PPC marketing; things that are measurable and quickly executable.
Small Businesses Seek Solutions Online
Small business is flocking to the online marketing space, why? It’s cheap, it’s easy to measure, and, well, let’s face it, print is dead.
What are local advertisers to do, though? They don’t have the large budgets to go to a “big agency,” they don’t have the technical knowledge (in many cases) to prevent being taken advantage of by small agencies, there are too many options for free or almost free web based services, etc…
They have to do research and they have to trust their network. What do successful small agencies have to do, then?
They have to be good at working with small businesses, they have to treat each of their customers well, they have to be successful, because small businesses can’t afford the expense of a failed marketing effort, no matter how small.
Email campaigns and PPC campaigns are the best entry into online marketing for most small businesses, after getting themselves a quality web site. However, they should definitely use a someone to help them, they do not want to upset their targets with violations of CAN-SPAM, or just over communication.
Read the whole article Small Businesses Seek Solutions Online – eMarketer.