All the buzz about social media has made some business owners question the value of email marketing. The fact is that email remains a powerful marketing tool—but like any marketing tool, it must be done well to produce results. Email is the workhorse that can drive other campaigns. For some great stats on why you [...]
Should your business have a Facebook page? That's a question you have to decide based on the type of business and your particular market. Most companies can benefit from a Facebook page, but you need to set it up right. A Facebook basic: Your profile is you as an individual; your page is your company. [...]
Some customers are loyal; others will leave you on a whim. What can you do to keep those customers who are buying from you because it’s convenient but would switch to a competitor for a slightly lower price or because you have service failure? Consider making it so hard for them to leave that [...]
This morning I called Go Daddy tech support and had to wait for a few minutes before someone was available to help me. When the phone system gave me my estimated wait time, it then offered me this option to press 1 if I didn’t want to listen to music while I was on hold. [...]
How many times have you received a voice mail message that rambled on, left out important information, or just didn’t make much sense? And on the other side of that, how many times have you place a call, reached someone’s voice mail, and left a message that you knew made you sound (let’s be gentle [...]
A substantial portion of my communication is done electronically through e-mail, texts, blogs, Twitter, websites, etc. It’s fast, convenient, efficient—but you know all that. Even so, since I was a small child, I have loved getting real mail: envelopes and packages delivered to me by the USPS. In the last year, the volume of [...]
One of the first questions I ask when beginning a new project is: Who is the reader? That's often the hardest question for the client to answer, but it’s essential if the product – whether it’s a book, an article, web copy, or whatever – is going to be effective. James Chartrand has put [...]
If your company hasn’t made a serious commitment to blogging, here’s a great reason why you should: Journalists are using blogs for research and story development. If you’re not blogging, you could be missing out on some valuable media exposure. How did I find this out? From a blog, of course.
Like everybody, I hate spam. It annoys me that these low-lifes get to waste my time just because I have an e-mail address. Most of it I can spot and delete without reading, but every so often, I get tricked into opening one of those messages. What tricks me? Usually a good subject line. And [...]
How do you find information online? I do keyword searches, then quickly scan the results for websites that appear to have what I want. And I’m absolutely delighted when a site offers me a chance to receive more information in the form of a free special report, fact sheet, briefing—or white paper. The term “white [...]
