Internet Marketing

July 19 is your chance to get access to my expertise for a donation to a charity I’m supporting.

First in first served. Either grab an hour or the morning or afternoon.

Whether you are local or overseas it will work out through the wonders of paypal.

I will publish the amount raised.

Options on offer could be: -

A review of your email marketing efforts
Some solid ideas to improve your lead generation capability
Maybe a new landing page??
Or perhaps a fast track audit of your email stats

The monies will be going to the North Shore Hospice

Book in the time by contacting me on chris@permission.co.nz

I picked this up from the recent Email Labs newsletter where they shared all and told of a recent mistake they made with their own email marketing.

Good on them for admitting the mess and then helping the rest of us learn from their errors. It seems that taking time to sit back and review the campaign BEFORE It was sent could have saved the day.

Last week I heard of two email marketing errors others had made that make this one pale into insignificance but I can’t say too much until the dust has settled.

Take your time with your next send.

Check your list, have someone else check your message and double check that the message is worth sending in the first place.

My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins is probably one of the best books on Internet advertising I have seen in a long time and it was written way before the Internet started its life.

Its one of the books I’m working through at the moment and it’s a compelling read when you start to translate into words and pictures what your product does to what your prospects actually need.

For those wanting to entice more anonymous web site browsers into known leads then this is worth a ponder. (I noticed a copy in Auck City Borders) here is the a link to what Amazon has on offer.

For the last 6 weeks I have received the same email message from the same company selling the same product.

What’s more it arrives on the same day of the week each time.

It’s a bit like Ground Hog Day for email.

It must be working on an auto responder that has gone horribly wrong and someone just hasn’t made the effort to tell them to turn it off.

And the irony is one of the products on offer is email marketing.

I can hardly wait for this Friday for my next thrilling installment

(Update: I didnt have to wait that long. This morning I noticed the same advertising has moved into print. The New Zealand Herald (NZ’s largest daily) is carrying a printed and slightly revised version of the email in the business section.)

A bit more on Sender ID, this time from Microsoft.

Add “Sender ID” to your lexicon of email technical terms.

In the fight against spam knowing that the message came from who it should can be quite helpful.

This short PDF from Exact Target is a start to finding out more.

The blog needs some work.

Not much.

Just a few tweaks here and there.

Contact me at wordpresshelp@permission.co.nz if you are able to lend a hand.

Thanks

Chris

Now it doesn’t involve little pieces of paper being transformed into small swans.

It’s all about testing.

Here’s some notes from Vertster in their latest newsletter on the Taguchi method for multi-variate landing page testing.

Due to its size NZ suffers from small internet traffic levels so anything that can help us set up multiple tests with low traffic levels sounds like a plan.

Frequently I stumble across people whose perspective I find interesting. It’s fun as we chat away and I find out more about what they think and why.

Well – I’ve decided to package a few up and offer them out for discussion.

The first is on Tourism Marketing and how ten simple steps can improve your efforts.

Chris Adams (formerly the Group Manager Marketing at Jasons Travel Media) offers the first perspective.

Go here to register

I’m working my way through my latest Amazon purchase, Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results, pondering ways to further increase conversion rates for my customers.

It’s a good read.

Not a fast one though.

You need a cup of something hot and some real quiet to get the most out of the pages.

One concept they discuss is that of your web site being a digital sales person.

In a past life I managed sales people for a living.

There were the stars that drove everyone crazy, the plodders that achieved plan (but only just) and then the rest that soaked most of your time.

It is amusing to think that the web throws this time allocation theory on its head.

I pick the star web sites as taking the most time (finally true reward for all that work), the plodding sites that just perform and the dross that you leave alone to turn sour on you.

Even making small improvements to your landing page conversion rates can have a dramatic affect on your campaign success.

Here’s a Permission ready reckoner to help you see how a one percent change in landing page conversion is well worth the time and effort.

Have a play with your own details and see where your conversion stats fit in. And contact me here if you would like an appriasal of your own forms.

Last month I worked with the team at Marketingprofs and Paul Broni (Inbox Interactive) to produce a handbook to guide marketers through the process of successfully choosing the ideal ESP (email service provider) to partner with.

In addition to this text there is an online database of answers that vendors provided to a previous capabilities survey that removes some of the hard work of finding out what each supplier can offer. (See below)

It was fun putting the content together.

Check more of it out here.