Email Marketing How Best To Manage and Distribut

Email Marketing How Best To Manage and Distribute Your Messages

by: Karen Fegarty

This holiday season 15 percent of consumers in the US plan to buy online, spending an average of $585. That’s 9 percent more revenue for online merchants in comparison to last year’s results.

A recent report estimates that Canadians will spend half a billion dollars online for gifts this holiday season. Even by conservative estimates the total number predicted is double the $282 million predicted for Christmas, 1999.

Whatever way you look at it doing business over the net is growing at incredible rates and email marketing is becoming a ‘given’ element of many marketing campaigns. It should come as no surprise that tools to help us manage our email lists and distribution are becoming increasingly important.

The challenge in incorporating email marketing into a campaign is determining what type of email service best suits your business needs, today and in the longterm.

There are two main choices when establishing and maintaining email marketing programs: A desktop email marketing application or an email campaign submission service.

Let me describe the two options in greater detail

Email Marketing Application Tools such as these allow you to create, manage and distribute your own customized email campaigns. Cost is usually a onetime software purchase. This approach is best suited to those companies with a fairly well defined target market and corresponding email distribution list. This approach can also be used if your target audience is growing and/or change. The software applications available allow the user to build, maintain and change their own email distribution lists, create rich messages and distribute your campaigns.

I would recommend this type of product to those businesses with a preidentified target audience and an ability to access a distribution list to reach this audience. With a desktop application your original investment provides you with the flexibility to manage and define your own email distribution lists this is the type of service for you if you’re interested in owning and maintaining your own list and using this list as part of the intellectual property of your business.

Campaign Submission Service When you use this type of service you are contracting a thirdparty to provide you with the interface to your customers and/or target audience. The agent will distribute your message to one or several optin email lists that have been provided based upon some stated interest on the part of the recipients. These are lists of people who have registered for certain websites, ezines or newsletters or have asked to receive information via email and have stated their interested in certain subjects.

The agent or submission service will work with you to determine the list that best matches your product, service or announcement working together you will use preexisting lists to create a target email audience for your company’s use. The submission service will receive your message and distribute to one or more of the email lists the quality control element in place is that you are sending relevant information to recipients that have already stated an interest in a related subject matter and most likely the message will not be viewed as SPAM. Cost usually runs on an 8 to 30 cent per email sent charge.

The submission service allows you to work with experts in the field of gathering email distribution lists based on subject(s) interest and the application of this technology in receiving information. Each time you want to distribute a message you rely on these service providers for their advice, lists and expertise in distributing your information. If you’re new to the email marketing forum and your business does not yet have a substantial email distribution list this service may be able to fill the gap and get you into the game.

A couple of items to keep in mind the overall cost of your email marketing efforts, campaign tracking reports and the future role of email marketing in your overall direct marketing plans.

There are plenty of choices in the marketplace educate yourself and make the best decision for your organization.

About The Author

Karen Fegarty is with MailWorkZ. MailWorkZ has been instrumental in developing new email technology. MailWorkZกs award winning email marketing tool, is key to reaching your customers in a highly efficient, personalized manner. Reach Karen at [email protected]

This article was posted on January 20, 2002

by Karen Fegarty

The Lessons Walt Disney Learned Still Apply Today

The Lessons Walt Disney Learned Still Apply Today

by: Stephen Schochet

Contrary to popular belief, Walt Disney spent more time as a struggler than a success. Described at a various times as a visionary and a genius there were actually many occasions he could not foresee the results of his ideas, and they nearly brought him to financial ruin. Yet the lessons he learned through the years are useful and timeless.

1) Ownership is key: Early in his career, Walt created a character on behalf of Universal Studios named Oswald the Rabbit. When he tried to negotiate better payments for himself, Walt was informed that Universal had the copyright on the character and he was entitled to no compensation. From then on Walt owned everything he created.

2) Have passion for your product: Walt worked three long years on Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs which was originally budgeted at a $500,000 an extraordinary amount considering the average cartoon in the 1930s cost $10,000. His competitors, his wife and his brother all predicted Disney would be ruined. During the filming, Walt was plagued with both health and financial problems as Snow White ran way over budget. Needing an additional half million to complete the picture, he acted out the story in front of a toughminded banker and got the loan he needed. The result was a classic that made $8,000,000 at a time when movie tickets cost 25 cents for adults and a dime for kids.

3) Make timeless products: Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi all failed in their first releases. World War II cut off international distribution. The national mood turned away from public sentiment. Disney plunged four million into debt and it looked like Bank Of America would cut off his line of credit. In a dramatic meeting, the founder of the bank, A.P. Giannini stood up and told the board members that Disney made great movies and that the war would not last forever. They voted unanimously to keep Disney afloat after the old manกs speech. He was proven right years later when all three films became profitable classics.

4) Test market: Walt could not get distribution on his first nature film Seal Island. After several frustrating months watching it sit on the shelf, he found one movie theater in Pasadena willing to show it. Seal Island, achieved full distribution, won the academy award for best short subject and led to a series of highly popular nature films.

5) Sometimes you need to pull the plug: Walt was determined to have a circus at Disneyland despite his staffกs advice not to. The idea failed. A pretty trapeze artist lost her top while performing in front of the kiddies helpless to prevent it. The camels kept spitting into the crowd. The llamas got loose and ran down Main Street scattering customers every which way. More than one performance of this poorly attended venture ended with Walt burying his face in his hands. He decided to kill it.

By learning lessons from each of his entrepreneurial attempts, Walt always moved forward, which is a timeless business model.

About The Author

Stephen Schochet is the author and narrator of the audiobooks Fascinating Walt Disney and Tales Of Hollywood. The Saint Louis Post Dispatch says,ก these two elaborate productions are exceptionally entertaining.ก Hear realaudio samples of these great, unique gifts at www.hollywoodstories.com.

[email protected]

This article was posted on October 23, 2003

by Stephen Schochet

The Successful Use Of Free Articles

The Successful Use Of Free Articles

by: C.E. David

One of the best ways to increase your site’s visibility and traffic is by authoring articles and then offering them for free at a variety of locations. Each article contains your URL, thus creating a link back to you every time it appears on the internet.

The power of links with respect to search engine placement is tremendous, and having your name spread across cyberspace increases your credibility and reputation. A successful article creation and distribution campaign can pay huge dividends.

However, it is easy to turn this potential bonanza into a disaster! An unsuccessfully operated campaign can lead to negative publicity and poor performance. It also risks wasting the considerable time and energy required to conduct an article campaign. Those considering using content as a promotional tool need to make sure both the production and distribution components of the strategy are enacted flawlessly.

Poor content is a very common error. Excited at the prospect of building an extensive backlink library, the site owner quickly authors a series of haphazard articles and submits them to various locations.

Although acting quickly does help increase your exposure quickly, poor content leads to very poor results.

Many sites that welcome submissions may refuse to use the article. The power of articles is wellknown and many sites are flooded with free submissions. As a result, they are becoming more selective and may decide not to accept a lessthanstellar piece.

A poorly worded or uninformative article, even if accepted at an article clearinghouse, is unlikely to be picked up by other webmasters. One of the chief advantages of an article campaign is its potential for exponential growth. An article appears in one location, leading three others to use it. Those three sites lead to use by others, ad infinitum.

If the actual content is of lowquality, that growth potential is nipped in the bud even if the article is accepted by an initial target.

Inferior copy also reflects poorly on the author and his or her site. Although a primary goal of an article campaign may be increasing backlinks, one must also realize that people may actually read the article—and that it has the author’s name and URL attached!

Instead of promoting the business, a poorlywritten article can actually advertise inadequacy—potentially driving business away and reducing the supplying site’s credibility.

Using free articles as a promotional tool requires wellwritten and welledited content that provides readers with valuable information.

It is not only important to write good articles, it is important to distribute them correctly. Shooting your article off to a halforganized list of potential targets can seriously undermine your campaign’s effectiveness.

A successfully articlebased advertising campaign requires a wellresearched and comprehensive list of submission targets. When one considers the effort required to produce effective content, it makes no sense to follow through with a lessthanoptimal distribution plan.

Distribution should be targeted to sites that are likely to accept the submission and are visited by others similarly interested in your content and using it. Additionally, article authors should make sure the sites to which they submit allow clickable URLs in resource boxes and must be sure to take advantage of those locations providing an opportunity to use anchor text in their links.

Appropriately distributing an article can be tedious work. The sites that accept submissions often require completing a membership process prior to presenting the article. They may require an eventual confirmation after an email is sent to the author before publishing. They use different submission forms, making automation extremely difficult.

However, great distribution is at the heart of a successful article campaign.

Using free articles to increase your exposure and linkbase is effective. That effectiveness, however, is contingent upon great execution in both production and distribution.

About The Author

C.E. David

Article Staff offers customproduced content and contentrelated services including editing and article distribution. http://www.articlestaff.netfirms.com/. Article Staff blogs at http://articlestaff.blogspot.com/.

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 10

by C.E. David

Internet Distribution: The Future of Entertainment

Internet Distribution: The Future of Entertainment

by: Daniel Punch

A friend and I were having a discussion recently. I asked him what he thought the next method of distribution for films and music would be. My thoughts were that we would have to come up with some new method that was convenient, sturdy and didn’t involve compression (as CDs and DVDs do, thereby limiting the picture and sound quality, although not very much). He simply said that it wasn’t going to happen; in the future itกs all going to be distributed on the Internet.

Iกve heard this argument before. My grade ten IT teacher assured us that within five years (and this was four years ago) we would no longer be purchasing CDs. With the advent of broadband we were going to see purchases of music and movies online, streamed to the computer or another device. Iกve always thought this was relatively unlikely. I may be in the minority, but I really like the CD and DVD cases. Thereกs something a bit more tangible to them, more of a feeling of value for money. Plus they look kind of good lined up on a shelf like some newage library.

Having thought about it for a while now I have no doubt that the Internet is set to become a major distributor of media. When you think about it, it makes sense. Low to no production and distribution costs; you just provide a download location when people send you money. Cutting out the กmiddle manก has always been an effective way to save money, and in this case you’re cutting out the shop owners, couriers and manufacturers. This should lead to substantial drops in prices (and loss of jobs… but… I have no defence for that. You’re just going to have to find yourselves a new career. Sorry. On the positive side your entertainment costs will go down, so you won’t need the job quite as much…).

Purchasing movies or CDs can be quite expensive. When you’re a bit unsure about whether or not you really want a particular title, the full price is often more than you’re willing to pay. This leads to trawling the second hand shops looking for a cheaper copy or simply pirating the product. Digital distribution opens up whole new areas for the marketers. Different quality streams could be provided at increasing prices. If you’re just interested to see what a filmกs like then pay a little and get a low quality version. If the distributor were to offer an upgrade option that takes into account the amount of money already spent on a film, it could become a very attractive offer. This could also reduce the amount of piracy around. Finding and downloading movies is time consuming and irritating. It often takes around twenty hours to download a film, due to varying connection speeds and quality. If the movies were easy to access, cheap to purchase and the servers fast enough for the user to get the movie in around the time it would have taken to go and hire a film, then many of the reasons for pirating would be lost. In terms of hiring films, providing temporary access to online streams of movies for very low cost would work nicely.

Global distribution becomes a lot easier this way. As a big fan of foreign films, I often have to hope that the movies I want to see pop up on EBay, or wait for one of my infrequent trips to a larger city than I live in to visit their markets and/or Chinatown in order to purchase movies. Iกd love the option of buying the movies with greater ease online.

There are already a few sites out there offering the purchase of movie downloads, although Iกm not sure how the legality and licensing of these ventures works. The content available from the sites is often quite limited (and we’re talking really quite limited here, the most recent flick I found on one site was from 1980), but the right idea is there. Music is also being sold online through such places as the Apple Music Store and the MSN Music Store. These offer songs for download at about $0.99 a song, which is cheap, easy, quick, legal and more likely to get your money to the artists as opposed to the big corporations manufacturing CDs.

So, Iกve come around to the idea of online distribution and its beneficial application to movies, music, software and even books. I still like my colourful boxes and cases but there are some movies that I own simply because I wanted to see them. The local video rental shop didn’t have a copy, so resorting to buying them is an expensive way to see what a film is like. I guess my hopes for a completely uncompressed format are all but lost (not that it really matters any more with the ever increasing quality of technology). If the distributors will just get onto this idea as soon as possible they can solve many of their problems and ours within a very short period of time.

About The Author

Daniel Punch

M6.Net Web Helpers

http://www.m6.net

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 17

by Daniel Punch

StarForce Protection Solutions at Games Convention

StarForce Protection Solutions at Games Convention 2004

by: Ksenia Zakharova

A famous Russian expert in the field of copy protection and software licensing presents its brand news technologies at Games Convention 2004, Leipzig.

StarForce to introduce its latest software protection and licensing technologies at Games Convention 2004 (Leipzig, 2004, Aug. 19th 22nd). A new version of famous StarForce protection includes advanced antipiracy technologies to withstand industrial software piracy as well as casual copying and license agreement violations by end users. StarForce 3.04 features a set of brand new options for license and distribution management and supports both CD/DVD copy protection and innovative PC binding technologies based on the unique serial number activation mechanism.

StarForce license and distribution management mechanism provides software developers and publishers with a tool to define and control expiry date settings of a granted demo or sales license, combine discbased licenses with product upgrades sold via online shops, protect and control distribution of the product test, demo, promotional and prerelease versions. StarForce software protection solutions are known around the world for their ability to withstand industrial software piracy as well as casual copying and license agreement violations by end users.

Having protected more than a million copies of software within the six years of its existence, StarForce has become an expert in the matters of secure software distribution and license management. Company’s specialists are always ready to share their professional advice with business software and game developers looking for a reliable tool to secure their bright ideas and innovational technological approaches from theft and illegal use. All clients, partners and other individuals interested in the latest antipiracy technologies are welcomed to schedule an appointment with a StarForce representative in Leipzig and can send their requests directly to [email protected].

About The Author

StarForce (www.starforce.com) is a leading provider of software protection solutions designed to fight piracy and assist software developers and publishers to effectively protect their intellectual property and safeguard their revenues. The company is wellknown among industry professionals for its state of the art softwareandhardwarelevel encryption technologies. StarForce Technologies provides a broad range of highquality and costeffective protection and licensing solutions for business, educational, and entertainment applications.

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 12, 2004

by Ksenia Zakharova

Invasion of the Amazons

Invasion of the Amazons

by: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

The last few months have witnessed a bloodbath in tech stocks coupled with a frantic redefinition of the web and of every player in it (as far as content is concerned).

This effort is three pronged:

Some companies are gambling on content distribution and the possession of the attendant digital infrastructure. MightyWords, for example, stealthily transformed itself from a กfreeforalleveryonewelcomeก epublisher to a distribution channel of choice works (mainly by midlist authors). It now aims to feed its content to contentstarved web sites. In the process, it shed thousands of unfortunate authors who did not meet its (never stated) sales criteria.

Others bet the farm on content creation and packaging. Bn.com invaded the digital publishing and POD (Print on Demand) businesses in a series of lightning purchases. It is now the largest ebook store by a wide margin.

But Amazon seemed to have got it right once more. The webกs own virtual mall and the former darling of Wall Street has diversified into micropayments.

The Internet started as a free medium for free spirits. Ecommerce was once considered a dirty word. Web surfers became used to free content. Hence the (very low) glass ceiling on the price of content made available through the web and the need to charge customers less than 1 US dollars to a few dollars per transaction (กmicropaymentsก). Various service providers (such as PayPal) emerged, none became sufficiently dominant and allpervasive to constitute a standard. Web merchantsก ability to accept micropayments is crucial. Ecommerce (let alone mcommerce) will never take off without it.

Enter Amazon. Its กHonour Systemก is licensed to third party web sites (such as Bartleby.com and SatireWire). It allows people to donate money or effect micropayments, apparently through its patented oneclick system. As far as the web sites are concerned, there are two major drawbacks: all donations and payments are refundable within 30 days and Amazon charges them 15 cents per transaction plus 15(!) percent. By far the worst deal in town.

So, why the fuss?

Because of Amazonกs customer list. This development emphasizes the growing realization that oneกs list of customers properly data mined is the greatest asset, greater even than original content and more important than distribution channels and digital right management or asset management applications. Merchants are willing to pay for access to this ever expanding virtual neighbourhood (even if they are not made privy to the customer information collected by Amazon).

The Honour System looks suspiciously similar to the payment system designed by Amazon for Stephen Kingกs serialized enovel, ‘the Plantก. Interesting to note how the needs of authors and publishers are now in the driverกs seat, helping to spur along innovations in business methods.

About The Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of กMalignant Self Love Narcissism Revisitedก and กAfter the Rain How the West Lost the Eastก. He is a columnist in กCentral Europe Reviewก, United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com

This article was posted on February 2, 2002

by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.