Mix it up: Trends and fads in email marketing
– Melanie Attia is the product marketing manager for Campaigner email marketing. The views expressed are her own. –
In business, there are fads and there are trends. While fads help pay the bills in the short-term, a good small business understands the longer-term viability of its products and services that will be for sale in the seasons to come.
The same holds true for marketing. It’s essential for growth and these days marketing trends continue to shift from offline to online programs.
According to the “2010 Lead Generation Optimization Key Trends Analysis” from CSO Insights, budgets for direct mail declined 29 percent, while 54 percent of businesses increased budgets for email marketing.
Campaigner, an email marketing company that works with small businesses, recently surveyed its customers and found similar results. Thirty-three percent responded they were going to continue with their email programs in 2011 and 61 percent responded that plans were underway to increase the use of email in their marketing efforts.
That said, there are trends small businesses should consider when devising best practices for their email programs. In addition, there are fads that are fun tactics to add some flavor to individual email marketing campaigns.
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5 reasons your website isn’t attracting leads
- Lisa Barone is co-founder and chief branding officer at Outspoken Media and a contributor to Small Business Trends. The opinions expressed are her own. -
So, what are your big Internet marketing plans for the New Year? Will you be investing more in social media? Will you start blogging? Will you take a more proactive stance with self-promotion? Whatever your online marketing plans, the end goal is likely to attract more people to your website in the hopes that the influx of new eyes will translate into new customers, new leads and new opportunities for your business. However, you won’t be able to do any of that if your Web site is turning people off, instead of turning them on.
Below are some very common reasons small and medium-sized business (SMB) websites fail to attract customers and how to avoid falling prey to them.
1. There’s no conversion path in place.
One criticism of many SMB sites is that they don’t include a clear conversion path for their customers. If you want customers to take a certain action, you need to create a funnel intended to guide them to do that. Simply stringing together a number of content pages won’t necessarily put someone on the path to buy. Your conversion path may be as simple as a solitary landing page paired with a call to action, or as complex as an entire microsite. Either way, you are in charge of designing the flow of your website. Creating a clear conversion path not only helps customers feel more comfortable on your site, it also gives you clear data to track so that you can see where people are abandoning, where they’re engaging, etc. The more data you have to act on, the better you can design your site to attract new customers.
2. There’s no sign of life.
Customers are discriminating. You can bet that when they land on your website they’re going to kick the tires a little to see if they can trust you. They’re going to check your copyright date to see if it lists 2011 or 2006. They’re going to look for old statistics or other signs you haven’t taken the time to update your content. They’re going to check your company blog to see how often it’s updated, if you reply to commenters, if people are talking back, etc. They’re going to look for signs that you’ve created a dynamic website, instead of one lying around in stagnant water. Before your customers get there, take a look around yourself. Would you hang out with you?
This is a great article, like many others I’ve read. The biggest problem I, as a small business owner, have is the amount of time this all takes. I’ve participated in seminars to learn more, and have implemented a lot, but there is still so much to do! Time is my biggest barrier, other than the high cost of hiring someone to do it for me. Thanks, though. Every little bit helps.
Top 10 tech investing trends for 2011
– Dave McClure is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the founder of Internet seed fund 500Startups. He has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel and Microsoft. The views expressed are his own. –
Over the holidays Silicon Valley is a ghost town while most geeks and venture capitalists are busy hitting the slopes at Tahoe or playing Angry Birds Holiday Edition.
If you haven’t had enough football or eggnog yet, stop reading this blather and go watch some grown men beat the snot out of each other while drinking yourself into yuletide stupor. If that doesn’t sound more appealing then you’ll just have to settle for my crazy tech predictions for this year.
With no further ado, I bring you the top 10 tech trends for 2011:
1. (Way too many) Groupons, social games, photo-sharing, and “fart” apps.
Unimaginative VCs — which is to say, all of us — tend to start the new year off throwing good money after bad on last year’s tired and expired ideas. 2011 will be no exception for “innovation imitation” with more group-buying ecommerce plays, more social game startups, and yet even more ways to do photo-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, now new and improved with 37 shades of yellow-gray filters. Bah humbug. My first easy and obvious prediction is that VCs will waste a ton of money chasing hundreds of new “me-too” startup ideas. Nothing new here Kmart shoppers… let’s move along.
2. Commerce and coupons for location-based services (LBS), aka “The $5 check-in”
I think #5 is significant. ICANN ceded governance of the Internet to an international body almost two years ago, mirroring an amazing uptick in non-English speaking sites.
Lachlan Murdoch of the News Corp once remarked that future newsrooms need only be in one of four languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi. I envision a Translation Turing Test where one could have a web experience and not know nor care about the provenance of the website. When English ceases being the lingua franca of international trade, there will be a seismic shift in lobbying for taxes and use fees that will make last year’s kerfuffle between Orbitz and the airlines like like kindergarten.
Top 10 challenges for CEOs in 2011
– Charley Polachi is the co-founder of Boston-based executive recruitment firm Polachi, Inc. The views expressed are his own. –
1. In 2011, CEOs will be challenged with balancing expectations for earnings per share (EPS), which in most cases are already set, and their investors’ growing impatience for top-line growth. To grow, CEOs have to invest again. But if they invest, they could miss EPS estimates. The CEOs who walk this tightrope successfully will pull away from the pack and outperform their peers.
2. Maintaining momentum in the slow growing market. Solution is innovation.
3. European governments and their economies continue to perplex – look at Greece and Ireland. Who’s next? Finding efficient ways to get revenue internationally through distributors and partners instead of employees may be the way to go.
4. 2012 presidential election season starts in Q1 2011, how will Republicans and Democrats deal with the economy? What happens to capital gains treatment will definitely impact investors in the venture capital and private equity worlds. This will cause CEOs to look at alternative sources of financing, so hoarding cash will be even more important.
5. The next generation of workers don’t care. They’ve seen what happened to mom and dad in the last two years. who can they count on/trust? CEOs will need to work extra hard to attract and retain Millennials who tend to want to move up quickly or move on.
6. Housing market will continue to be a problem, people can’t sell their houses and relocate to where there are jobs. So CEOs will need to be flexible, allow more telecommuting – let technology work. Video, Skype, unified communication platforms, etc. will become common.
Hot healthcare investing trends for 2011
– Dr. David J. Brailer is the chairman for San Francisco-based venture firm Health Evolution Partners and served as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology under President George W. Bush. The views expressed are his own. –
2011 will be a chaotic and unpredictable year for investors.
We will see the first big changes of health reform play through – regardless of what the incoming Congress does. No one can predict what health reform means, particularly alongside the dwindling of the financial crisis and the ongoing jobs bust. The only sure thing is that 2011 won’t be a replay of the last two years where safe deals got done and a lot of companies traded from investor to investor.
Here are a few trends – and a few pitfalls – to pay attention to:
1. Please, no more meaningful use. Health information technology has been hyped into the stratosphere, and every entrepreneur is trying to raise capital while they can. Many are spinning their wheels because they mistake the investment bubble for their own shrewdness. The market will figure out in 2011 that federal subsidies will happen far slower than planned or that they may be cut back by a deficit-hawk Congress. Once the bubble pops and people get their feet back on Earth, deals will start to happen again. There are some very good health information technology companies coming to market in 2011 and they are going to rock healthcare in the coming years.
2. Life science is still alive – barely. The venture pullback and a draconian FDA have thankfully euthanized many me-too bio-therapeutic and device companies. But a lot of promising new treatments got killed in the onslaught as well. Disease hasn’t stopped trying to eradicate the human race, so the unmet demand for new treatments is still growing. And, regardless of what else is happening, Americans won’t tolerate being sick when there are treatments that may help them. Look for a crop of new life-sciences companies – therapeutics and devices in particular – to get traction. They will be different from their predecessors – way more cash-efficient and more attentive to demonstrable clinical value (i.e., if it needs a statistician to prove that it works, it probably doesn’t). Look for the shakeout of biomarkers to continue. The ones that a clinician would really want to use will get funded and others will fall apart.
3. Accountable care wannabes. Investors are searching the globe now for physician groups and other health providers who will be recognized as Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Not to matter that the Government hasn’t told us what ACOs are yet, or that some real group of physicians could actually do it. And, let’s remember that many people had the great privilege of losing their fortunes the last time investors funded physician management companies in the 1990s. A sub-trend here is the search for the next generation primary care network. Everyone is on the lookout for the doctor-meets-retail iteration of basic medical services now that more Americans will have health insurance.
Good stuff. Technology that adds value with true ROI will stick. ACOs look good on paper, but until incentives are aligned between hospitals and MDs, and both win, it will be a struggle. Key word search. . . yep, ACO better be in the release. Could true technology enabled integration move forward quickly? That would be great. As long as employer paid disease care has been free, no real incentives to get healthy. Thank goodness for the shift in priorities.
Access trumps ownership in 2011
– Lisa Gansky is the author of “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing” and the Mesh Directory live. The opinions expressed are her own. –
Disturbed by the sight of dead Christmas trees lying on the curb after the holiday, Los Angeles-based landscaper Scott Martin had an idea. Why not rent people living Christmas trees?
He set up a website and offered different types of live trees in a variety of sizes. Customers specified which tree, what size and on which day it would be delivered and where. Scott and his team also offered decorations for the trees they rented. After the holiday, each customer selected a day for the tree to be picked-up and Scott and his team even recycled the gift wrap and packaging. The trees were either returned to the nursery to be cared for and sold later or donated. An all around joyful holiday win for the customers, Scott and team, the community and the environment.
Like Scott’s company, many will increasingly focus on sharing as a core part of their offering in the New Year. So here are some to watch out for in 2011:
1. Propel peer-to-peer. Our peers are our customers and our purveyors. The mobile Web, location-based services, inexpensive and pervasive mobile apps, and new sorts of opportunities to access cars, bikes, tools, talent, and more from our neighbors and colleagues will propel peer-to-peer access services into market. I expect we’ll see many new offerings from popup general stores to car-, bike- and home-sharing services. These peer-to-peer structures will inevitably challenge the ‘fleet’ ownership structure of companies like ZipCar and Bcycle. Will they hedge their bets or massage their offerings?
2. Greasing the wheels. Insurance and funding traditionally drive capital investment. But in a world based on access, not ownership, the duration, value, cost and extent of financial services is distinctly different. RelayRides and WhipCar, AirBnB, Roomorama and One Fine Stay are all stellar examples of how new, access-based offers entice and provoke insurance companies and banks to re-think risk, value, customers and deal terms. Stay tuned: 2011 is going to be a year of early winners here.
3. Big brands. Brands with global audiences will get meshy in 2011. We have already seen Daimler, Hertz, Patagonia, Citroen, Virgin, and more enter their markets with access-based offerings.
There are several new peer to peer companies that I found in North America:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-pee r_car_rental
One in particular really focuses on security & trust, JustShareIt. I have shared my car with a friend or tools with neighbors but not to a stranger. They have a good idea with a camera & car sharing within a trusted group.
There’s no doubt that email marketing works. In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research. Wrapmail is available for free at http://www.wrapmail.com