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Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on May 20, 2009
I recently worked on a client's e-newsletter that made a point that stuck me right in the gut. He was writing about the printing business, but his point applies to all businesses. He writes: If sales are about relationships, I’ve never understood why I see so many [your industry]'s websites that lack any type of personal feel. They contain no mention of a person’s name, no pictures other than stock art or pictures of their [equipment], and for the contact info, they either have a form they expect you to fill out (big mistake) or generic links such as sales@abcprint.com....Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 29, 2009
One of the points I keep hammering home in these columns is the need to make use of the data you most likely already have. Use it to better communicate with your customers. Improve customer retention. Marketing more effectively. "Green" your print marketing program. I was just alerted to a free Webinar from 1 to 1 Media on this very topic. Titled, "Keep Your Most Profitable Customers: Leverage Your Data Assets to Determine Which Are the Right Customers to Retain and Grow," to be held Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 12:00 PM Eastern. To register, click here.
I attend a lot of these Webinars, and what's great about them is that the are recorded, so ...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 27, 2009
I recently listened to a Webinar called "Dumbest Mistakes Email Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them," from Silverpop. At the conclusion, I had an immediate date with my Web sites and my email marketing program. I'll chronicle my mistakes and my fixes in hopes that they help you, too. Today, I fixed Dumbest Email Mistake #1: hiding or not including your email opt-in link. Many marketers send out terrific newsletters, but there is no opt-in link for people who might receive the newsletter or email as a forward from someone else. If they want to subscribe, how do they do that? You need to make it easy for them to do that. You want to make it easy for people visiting your website to sign up for email alerts and newsletters, as well. I had newsletter sign-ups pro...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 23, 2009
Have you ever wondered why subscribers to your newsletters and email lists unsubscribe? According to research done by Silverpop, a provider of software for deploying multi-channel marketing programs, there are six primary reasons that all marketers ought to pay attention to. 1. When the offers / types of content do not interest me — 53%What does this list tell you? It tells you that, if you offer email sign-ups, you will minimize unsubsc...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 17, 2009
It's all about customer loyalty these days, right? Why always be replacing customers if you can keep the ones you've got? One way to do that is to improve the way your business manages its interactions with customers. The more positive their interactions with your company, the more likely they are to stay customers. In the free white paper, "The Six Laws of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths That Define How Organizations Treat Customers," Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research describes the way customers interact with marketing organizations. There are some neat nuggets in here that might help you tweak and improve the way you interact with your own customer base. Here is a condensed version of his white paper in my own words. It's worth the time to download and read the white paper for yourself. ...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 11, 2009
One of the most powerful marketing trends these days is to target market by a customer's ethnicity. It reflects the diverse lifestyles, needs, and perspectives that can have a powerful influence on purchasing decisions. It can affect the types of products your customers or prospects buy. It can affect the timing of promotions. It can affect the language used in marketing materials, and much more. When you are gathering data, if you aren't gathering information on ethnicity, you should start. If you are not currently collecting information on ethnicity, is all lost for your existing data? Not at all. There are companies that specialize in helping you "backwards integrate" ethnicity into your database. It's a basic appending process much like appending household income, age, and home ownership. One such company, Specialists Marketi...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on April 5, 2009
When marketers think about alternative media to print, they think online advertising. But is the bloom a bit off the rose? According to a revised estimate from eMarketer, the U.S. online ad spend this year will grow by 4.5% to $24.5 billion, over 2008. This is down slightly from the research firm's November forecast, which called for $25.7 billion in Web ad spending for 2009. ...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on March 28, 2009
In this column, I’ve written about the use of personalized URLs many times. They may have piqued your interest, but you thought, if only I could test it to see if it works before I make a major investment in a campaign. Now you can. OnDialog is one of the few personalized URL solutions that not only allows the creation of personalized URLs and landing pages, but enables you to personalize elements beyond the person’s name in the campaign, as well. It enables you to create simple personalized URL campaigns or use full Boolean rules-driven personalization to personalize the landing pages to the same extent that you can personalized direct mail or other print documents. This makes this a terrific way...Read More
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on March 20, 2009
In an earlier post, I talked about switching to HTML format for subscribers to my publishing company e-newsletter. The first month, I used a generic subject line: "Strong Tower Publishing February E-Newsletter." This is an opt-in newsletter, so the response rate was high—41%. Still, I was curious whether a more detailed subject line would boost response. For the March newsletter, I pulled a teaser from one of the articles and included it in the subject line. The response rate jumped—to 48%. But was it really a jump? I went back to the February newsletter and realized that, because it was the first blast from my old list, there were a lot of bounces in there that I hadn't taken into consideration. When I removed the bounced emails and checked the response rate on an ap...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing
Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on March 16, 2009
On April 1, April Fool's Day, join me and many other marketers in the Webinar, "April Fools: Dumbest Mistakes Email Marketers Make–and How to Avoid Them." I get a lot of out industry Webinars, and if I do, I hope that you will, too. If you're not taking advantage of all the free Webinars provided by publications, vendors, and other information suppliers, you're missing a terrific free resource. Sure, marketers are trying to sell products, but there can be invaluable free information in these Webinars, as well. Another benefit is that, if you can't make the live Webinar, you'll generally be sent a link to access the Webinar archive. You...Read More Industries: Sales and Marketing 
Posted by Richard Romano on March 13, 2009
Speaking of reading book-length content on a screen, one of the extracurricular projects that has occupied much of my free time for the past year or so has been the writing of a novel called It Might Have Been that tells the story of the staff of a popular computer magazine during the height of the dot-com boom years (1999-2000). It's largely a social satire of those years, as well as a David vs. Goliath story of the publishing industry (easily translatable to any other industry you care to name). One of the things I have taken away from various writing workshops I have attended in the past couple of years is that one strategy that successful authors have started using is "workshopping" books-in-progress online, and that by driving substantial site t...Read More
Posted by Richard Romano on March 12, 2009
I don't know if this will catch on or not, but one Ad Age writer has just written about the so-called "Middle Web." What is the Middle Web you may ask? It's the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge..oh, wait, that was the Twilight Zone. The Middle Web is perhaps best embodied by the Amazon Kindle, the updated version of which is getting no end of pixels plotted either to extol its virtues or to lament its failures. How is it emblematic of the "Middle Web"? What makes this new Kindle truly important isn't what it does today but what it represents for tomorrow. First, let's look at the form factor of the Kindle: the size, the thickne...Read More
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