blog

 

Posting on behalf of a friend :)

MarketPlanB Email Marketing is a complete, one-stop solution for campaign planning, creative development and delivery of email promotions and newsletters.

Although all services are available a la carte, the primary benefit of MarketPlanB is to eliminate the burden of orchestrating the multiple skill sets required for effective email marketing campaigns. The efficiency allows for a quick turn-over and very competitive pricing.

The primary package of services at MarketPlanB include:

* Campaign Planning
* Design (portfolio)
* Writing
* List Management
* Delivery
* In-Depth Reporting

Most businesses require additional capabilities, so MarketPlanB also works with proven technology partners to deliver advanced services such as complex personalization and behavioral targeting. I can also work with your technology partners to quickly implement new programs.

If you could take a moment to forward this message to business associates, it would be greatly appreciated. For more information, references and pricing contact:
Tom Lindmeier:
tomlindmeier@marketplanb.com
612-749-0321

Before joining Elastic Path Software I worked with Image X Media, an awesome team of web designers and web developers at a little Drupal shop in Vancouver.

I'm really excited that they just launched a redesign of their site and a new web design and development blog for which I lent a helping hand to get started.

Tonight I threw up a little love letter to Image X Media over at my social media blog, highlighting some of the gorgeous social networks that Image X has recently developed and designed for clients. I was also involved in the design and usability planning of a handful of them, but I'll let you guess which ones.



Of Image X I have this to say:

I know first hand how honest, hard-working, funny, creative and talented the Image X team is. I can’t recommend them enough. And they’ve now got a full-time usability consultant on deck so you know your information architecture is going to be solid. They’re truly a full-service design firm.

Honesty and integrity is difficult to gage just from looking at a home page. But I worked with these folks for 18 months. These guys have it. I hope you consider Image X next time you need custom web design or programming with a solid and powerful CMS (Drupal).

And don't forget to subscribe to their blog :)

Here's installment 1 of "Begging for Links - The Series"

Hello,

I recently came across some pages on your interesting website, and I
noticed you linked to fashion related sites. I am responsible for linking
to interesting websites like yours, http://www.getelastic.com, from the
website
www.snippedURL.com.

I figured since you already link with a website that is somewhat similar
to SnippedURL.com, you wouldn’t mind if I linked to your site. Please
let me know if this is ok with you so that I can put up your link into
SnippedURL.com as soon as possible. If you have particular information
for your link, please do send me the details. Also, do you mind linking
back to SnippedURL.com? If you can, that would be very much appreciated
and I will gladly send you the information for our website. Thanks for
your time.

Sender

I checked out this ecommerce site and it's quite attractive and looks like a site I'd like to buy from, nevertheless, it's 2008 and this is pathetic link exchange sweet-talk that makes me lose respect for the company, even if the site owner is likely outsourcing to a clueless SEO.

Well, can't blame someone for trying, but my name is plastered all over our company blog, Hello Linda would have been a start. I didn't get the feel that this person had read anything on our blog, if they did they'd know that we don't just link off to fashion sites. There is no fashion category, and if I link to Couture Candy or Karmaloop it's because they are doing something super cool and our readers might want to look at their sites.

Nevertheless, I was in a good mood today.  This was my response:

Hi Sender

Thanks for your email. I'm not sure if you understand the nature of GetElastic, but I link to fashion sites only as part of our informative blog posts geared towards helping online retailers improve their marketing programs. I don't sell text links or participate in link exchange.

It's fine if you want to link to us, but we don't do link exchange. However, your site is very well done.

Here's how in the future you can earn a link from Get Elastic:

1. Do something unique in terms of usability, web 2.0, email marketing, social media marketing or mobile marketing.
2. Share information with us on a campaign that was a success or failure, something that would benefit the ecommerce marketing community.
3. Send that information to me and if it's blog-worthy content, we'll put it up there with a link to your site.

Otherwise we're not interested in link exchange.

Best,
Linda Bustos
Emerging Media Analyst
Elastic Path Software

I'm getting so many bad PR pitches and desperate PR requests that I've decided to post them here on my Gooruze blog (names and companies removed - I'm still a nice gal).

This is for your entertainment and maybe to commiserate. If you like the posts, perhaps we can get a group going - a pool of awful link exchange requests!

Despite fears of an economic recession and a reduction in ad spending, marketers plan to shift spending to social media marketing efforts according to a study by Forrester Research, described in Adweek.
 
Under the social media marketing umbrella are word of mouth, blogging and social networking.  These are fairly low-cost methods of promotion BUT they really are long term strategies. It's harder to tie ROI to these efforts within a certain time frame.

Excerpts from the Adweek article:
 
"Last time around, there was a lot of mindless investment in online," said Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff. "People were dong it because their competition was doing it or because it looked cool. Those are good reasons to stop doing it when money tight."
 
"Procter & Gamble's BeingGirl.com, an online community for adolescent girls, is four times as effective as a similarly priced marketing program in traditional media. Initiatives like BeingGirl.com require a long-term commitment, Bernoff pointed out."
 
Wouldn't it make sense to put more $ into improving conversion rates for traffic you drive organically and from word-of-mouth?  Companies should be concerned with maximizing ROI over the long term, rather than buying traffic through expensive, traditional advertising. 

A great way to do this is through landing page optimization.  Web Design for ROI is a handy book on site optimization and conversion rate optimization that will run you about $26 and give you a lot of tips on how to tweak what you've already got.

Another avenue I think ecommerce retailers should invest in is affiliate marketing programs - which is incentivized word-of-mouth. You pay for performance.  You get immediate sales results (as opposed to a whatever/whenever return with social media) that are also measurable.

Just my thoughts on the matter.  Social media marketing is great to experiment with - but if your budget is tight, stick with something that has a shorter payoff time.

The overall click fraud rate for the pay-per-click (PPC) industry averaged 16.6% in the fourth quarter of 2007, and the rate of click fraud for all of 2007 was up 15% over 2006 levels, according to Click Forensics, which cited data from the Click Fraud Index.

Key findings from data reported for the fourth quarter:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6% for 4Q07. That’s up from the 14.2% click fraud rate in the fourth quarter of 2006 and 16.2% in 3Q07.

• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks (such as Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, but also smaller players) was 28.3% in Q4. That’s up from the 19.2% average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1% for 3Q07.

• Q4click fraud traffic from botnets was 15% higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q3.
• In Q4, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from India (4.3%) Germany (3.9%) and South Korea (3.7%).

Via: Marketing Charts

Is there anything one can do to protect themselves or minimize click fraud? Do you believe these stats are accurate?