Archive for February, 2010

Even More E-Newsletter Stats

In 2008, 60.8% of US businesses surveyed said that sending an email newsletter was a component of future marketing plans.

…and has this number gone up since then?

What day of the week is most popular to send your publication? Percent of newsletters being sent by customers weekly:

Monday  17.1%
Tuesday  17.0%
Thursday  16.2%
Wednesday  15.8%
Friday  14.5%
Saturday  10.3%
Sunday  9.0%

49% of email marketers said their E-newsletter routinely justified itself. Only 10% said their newsletters were not being justified at all by revenue.

Packaged food giant ConAgra found that consumers who subscribed to their email newsletter generated 34.25% more product sales overall.

30% of small businesses execs say they had an improved image of a vendor from the (email) newsletter they received.

No surprise there…

44% of marketers surveyed believe the biggest challenge in email is providing ongoing, relevant content.

Luckily, we’re here to help!

Content Should Come With a "Born On" Date

It is important to remember that being relevant online is not the result of an “event” or singular campaign, but a continual, ongoing effort.

Your site may be listed as one of the top search results right now, but that’s no guarantee it will stay there.

If your website isn’t being continually updated with new, fresh content, (eventually) the search engines will simply move on to sites with newer information. Ideally, this means you’ll have new content on your site every time the search engine crawler (an automated program used by search engine companies to review websites) visits.

This can be as simple as quickly updating an old post or page. Just make sure something is different. This shows that your site is being actively monitored and managed, which is obviously a good thing.

This ensures that the crawler will have fresh content to index and new links to explore. Thus, it will never see your site as stale and decide to drop it from the rankings.

You Don't Need a Fortune to Compete Online

I was kinda disappointed by the ads on the Super Bowl this year. The game itself was at least competitive and fairly entertaining (for a hockey fan), but nothing really stood out as a “great” commercial. I’ve always been amazed that companies can spend so many millions of dollars on just 30 seconds of airtime. Yes, lots of people are watching. (Are they paying attention…or drinking & eating? Well, the TV is on at least.) But I questioned if there were better ways to spend the dough.

Most of the companies that buy ad time during the big game are huge consumer goods-type companies, the kind that can afford to do all sorts of “real” promotion during the year…and then tack on a big SB ad for good measure. For the other 99% of businesses, there are far more effective options for spending a million advertising dollars.

The great news is that you don’t need a huge advertising budget to spend on marketing or PR to share your ideas or your offerings anymore. The Internet has leveled the playing field for most. With great content, some well placed SEO dollars, a great viral video or some effective email list and/or social network building, small companies can compete with much larger ones.

Of course, writing the content takes both your time and expertise, or hiring a competent writer to help out. But many of the ways that content is shared online these days are completely free, like most social networks or blogging platforms.

And sure, email marketing isn’t free… but the marginal costs to reach additional people once a campaign has been created are almost nothing. So who wins or loses depends more on having a good online communications strategy, and less on having the biggest checkbook. For someone who likes rooting for the underdog, I like that.

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