Multichannel Marketing for B2B Marketers

There’s one problem with numbered advice lists (as in “Ten Ways to Maximize Your ROI”). Each item suggests another ten, and you can end up with hundreds.

Take the recent article on how to improve your email marketing campaigns. One of the five steps was: “Use the right lists.”

We have no argument with that. But doesn’t the subject deserve more than a single bullet point?

The author should have noted that good email marketing lists are found on the rental market, and that it pays to enhance and profile your own list. continue reading…

They’d better be. For that’s where your email may well be read.

U.S. consumers spend 41.6% of their mobile Internet time on email, according to a new study from Nielsen. That’s up from 37.4% last year. And the percentage must be even greater for on-the-go business professionals, who conduct serious communications via their mobile devices.

In general, nothing else even comes close. Web portals get an 11.6% share of time. And social networks barely make it into the double digits with 10.5%. Yet those are in the top three. continue reading…

Want to lose money on the Internet?

There are many ways to go about it. You can use the wrong email marketing lists or the wrong ecommerce platform. Or, you can make fundamental marketing errors. Here are five surefire revenue killers, as described by Janet Attard:

1. Your ads and your website don’t use the same terms customers do. Want to build traffic and get noticed by the search engines? Speak your customer’s language. Know the keywords that bring people to your site, determine the terms they use, and incorporate them into title tags and text, Attard advises. That’s especially important if you offer content.

2. Your online ads send customers to your homepage, not to specific product pages. That’s a surefire way to drive people away. Create dedicated landing pages or micro sites, and make sure your brand stands out on each one. And do the same for newsletter stories and other features that bring people to your site. As Attard writes, “The web visitor who found the page to order fluffy slippers may never see your home page.” Offer content and related products. And include links to other parts of your site. continue reading…

It must have been a more polite age. In 1923, Beacon Adjustment Co. (“Collections Everywhere”) offered a series of posterettes, poster-style stickers, for use in collecting on invoices.

One pictured a man with binoculars. The copy? “Have been looking for your payment quite a while.”

The posterettes, ten in all, were written by the “nationally famous” direct mail copywriter Louis Victor Eytinge. They came in three colors, and were bound in booklet form. continue reading…

There’s only one thing to do: Let them go.

This isn’t a guideline—it’s the law of the land. Can-Spam requires that you post an opt-out message and mechanism in a visible place, and quickly honor requests.

That said, you can improve your email performance—and build trust—by following these suggestions: continue reading…