Archive for the Category ◊ Internet Marketing ◊

To borrow a phrase from Lisa Barone; I’d rather stick a pen in my eye than read another story about some company doing a good job of customer service on Twitter.  Ever since Comcast went viral with “Frank’s” ability to solve problems the people on the phones couldn’t, it seems every company under the sun has been getting their support teams on Twitter and attempting to solve problems that way.  A Google search for “customer service twitter” returns only about 150 million results.

I’d say that horse is dead, can we stop beating it now?  Customer support reps are SUPPOSED to provide great service…it’s like, their job, right?

Who should we be talking about?  The people who earn their living doing something else, but still step up and try to help when they sense frustration directed at or about the company they work for.  I recently had such an experience (Guess you figured that was coming) more…

42% of e-marketers are leaving money on the table

If you’ve been here before you know how much I dislike lazy, uniformed e-marketers.  Relax, this is not going to be another rant.  I want to help you get better results, and maybe reduce the “junk” that fills my in-box every night.

Forrester Research reported that the average cost per order from an email marketing campaign was only $6.85.  Compare that to $12.27 and $19.32 for affiliate and paid search campaigns and it’s a no-brainer as to why companies are ramping up their plans to do even more email marketing.  Unfortunately, many companies are leaving money on the table.  The same Forrester study showed that of the companies doing email marketing, only 58% segment their lists based on customers’ purchase history or preferences.  This lack of segmentation not only costs them revenues, it is needlessly filling their customers’ mailboxes with unwanted mail.

If Customer’s don’t want it – It’s SPAM

One of the most difficult things for some e-marketers to understand is that just because someone opts in to their mailing list, that does not mean they want to see every offer under the sun.  It does not take many off-target emails before the customers start to view messages as an intrusion – spam, and not as messages from a trusted merchant.  It won’t be long after that when they start ignoring your messages, unsubscribe, or worse yet – click the “spam” button in their email software. more…

Frames used to be cool

If you’ve been surfing the web for more than a few years, you may remember the days when seemingly every Web site was constructed using frames.  I built more than a few of those myself.  On the surface they seemed to be an ideal solution to many of the problems both coders and marketers had with non-framed sites.  For coders it meant you didn’t need to copy your navigation, headers and footers into every single page – saving you lots of time.  For marketers, it meant that your menus. logos and other branding information was always viewable by your site’s visitors, no matter how much scrolling they did.  In the days of Yahoo and other directory pages, it was a perfect way to build pages.

Then came the next generation of search.  Instead of relying on human provided data to build a huge list of web pages, these new search indexes used “robots”, “spiders” and “crawlers” to automagically navigate the internet.  Following links, they located pages and read their content dynamically.  This is when using Frames become a bad way to build pages.

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I’ll be the first to admit that my writing style is …. I’ll say “unrefined.” I may not be as good as Twain, but as long I’m better than Bodine, I think I’m doing OK. I’ve recently discovered a great checklist that should improve my writing and make it easier for all of you to comprehend just what it is I’m trying to say. I’ll putting this process to use from here out. Well, that’s the plan anyway.
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I’ve had my iPhone for about six months, and I’m always amazed by the wide range of apps available for it.  From the flat-out silly, like “fart machine” to those much more useful like Tweetie and Fandango.  It seems that no matter what your interest is, there’s an app for that.

I spent some time recently scouring the app store looking for tools that might be useful for those who want their sites to rank better on the search engines, for people interested in buying domain names, reviewing web statistics or monitoring the health of their web servers. more…