Before the super fast days of the Internet, marketing plans had to incorporate a few set tools and techniques. An organization or business owner could place ads in newspapers, on radio, television, or even on billboards. They could do large direct mailings and they could use the telephone to connect with potential customers. All of this cost a lot of money and if no system for tracking results was in place, it could also be a huge waste of funds as well.
Today however there are many tools available for effective marketing, and also many ways to track results. One of the most potent and immediate approaches to a wide pool of potential customers is through eMail Marketing. It costs very little to create, provides instant results and can be targeted to an established group of confirmed customers or interested parties as well as broadcast to a purchased list of addresses.
Unfortunately, unscrupulous businesses and organizations have abused email marketing to the point that many people try to filter it out of their email boxes. This can be overcome by using a few different approaches, and one of the best is through a dedicated email marketing service. The best companies are able to deliver their messages to the vast majority of ISPs in the world because they are not formatted to the same low standards as the traditional “spam” that is undesirable.
What is an email marketing service? They are companies that provide the professional tools to help groups and businesses craft the strongest, most effective email marketing campaigns possible. They do this by supplying their clients with easy to use templates that require only “point and click” skills and a bit of typing. What these templates create are highly professional emails that look like the product of a major marketing or advertising firm and not something from a significantly smaller venue or business.
Additionally they increase their incredible value to a marketing campaign by providing the capability of inserting surveys and high-quality custom images into the email marketing materials. This can directly connect a company to their clients or potential clients by allowing for feedback and response. Many email marketing services also provide tracking and reporting which can help to keep email lists clean and free of uninterested or nonexistent names.
How do I select an email marketing service? The features to look for are ease of use, which means templates and no HTML, coding, graphic design or other skills needed for the user to create their materials. The service should be able to provide statistics about their success rate with the ISPs on the Internet, which means they should be able to provide the percentage of emails the customer can anticipate reaching email addresses. Affordability is key to the choice and this means that the service should ask for only a monthly rate with no additional fees tacked on top of it.
There are many reliable agencies offering support for email marketing and it is a proven approach to reliable and immediate results.
Jana Torres
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/connect-with-email-marketing-751522.html
How to best leverage Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect?
Right now we have a make-shift ‘MySpace’ on our site so that we can capture user information, such as emails, create profiles, add friends, etc (it was made like four years ago so very outdated).
One of the biggest problems is that people don’t like creating profiles and with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, this is supposed to help solve that. However, I am confused about the proper implementation.
I do want to simplify registering for profiles/accounts on my site but I still need to capture name and email information, because we need the emails for newsletter marketing (i.e. sending newsletters about our events, etc).
With the Facebook and Google options, will I still be able to capture that information somehow? If not, how would I be able to push email messages or newsletter content to my "members" from Facebook and Google if I do not have their email addresses (or even for simpler cases, if I needed to contact them)?
It may be a good idea to read up on Facebook Connect and try to install the sample site that they provide, its somethink about walking or something…
You will need to read up on it and make sure that your website will be compatible, you may find that PHP is outdated or something and it requires the latest version.
I know a little about it but not a great deal so my advise is to read and give it a go: http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php
References :
http://freephpscripts.co.uk