Archive for April, 2008

System47: My Inner Geek Could Not Say No

I don’t usually pay much attention to screensavers. Mine has been custom for years: after 15 minutes, my desktop starts saying “Get Back to Work”. Still, when a jewel drops into your lap, you have to be grateful.

System47 is THE Star Trek screensaver. If you ever dreamed of being Geordi, Worf, or Capt. Picard then you’ll want to download this. It has the different displays from ship (targeting, engineering, long-range scan, etc) and the sounds too.

I finally have a good reason to let my desktop go idle (as if I needed a reason).

Email Marketing: Start Small, Be Smart

Email Marketing is the Granddaddy of online marketing. Before blogs, SEO, or social anything, we had industrious business owners sending out emails to their contact lists and tracking bounces on a spreadsheet.

As the years have passed, email has become a respected industry with a lot of players: list sellers, tracking partners, designers, copywriters…and you the website owner. If you are starting out with email then you should know you have a lot of options: html or text, buy or build a list (usually you end up with a combination), how to segment the list, when to send it, how often to send emails, and, of course, what the content should be.

I have dinner plans, so I won’t be answering all these questions tonight. Instead, I’m going to point you to a great article from Digital Web Magazine, “10 Tips for your first email campaign“.

Note: No, I am not being lazy. I really liked the article and wanted people to get a look. I will put together a nice post on email marketing later this week. I promise. 

To show how helpful I can be, here are a few tips to wet your appetite:

  1. We use CampaignMonitor to make the process as simple as possible
  2. Subscription forms are important to build traffic, make them visible and short
  3. Unsubscribe options should be plentiful…losing a subscriber is better than pissing one off
  4. Study the clicks you get: if you know that certain recipients always click on a particular area, then you have the start of list segmenting.