AJR & Partners Public Relations Launches Boardroom Productions for Event Management and Sports Marketing
AJR & Partners, a Miami-based public relations and marketing agency, announces the launch of Boardroom Productions, an event management and sports marketing firm. Boardroom Productions is located in Miami, Florida.
Marketing Operations Elevates Public Relations and Communications Professionals
Is your marketing department taking advantage of MOM and MRM? Do you have
BAM and DAM systems in place? Do you know how to measure NPV? Do you even
know what I'm talking about?If so, you may not be a "Quant" (a marketing scientist or specialist in marketing
analytics) but you're certainly ready to seize a leadership role and spur your
company into the new world of Marketing Operations.Marketing Operations (AKA MOM or Marketing Operations Management) seeks to
improve performance and measure ROI through sustainable processes, best
practices and clearly-defined metrics.
R&J Public Relations Hires V.P. to Drive Client Communications Strategies
Ken Hunter joins the R&J team.
CAI Communications Wins Ten Design of Excellence Awards in Graphic Design USA Competition
CAI Communications of Raleigh, NC wins 10 awards in the 2008 Graphic Design USA Competition for work in Web site design, logo design, print design, and rich text electronic communications. This is the third year in the row that the firm has won multiple awards. Samples can be found at (www.caicommunications.com).
Rubenstein Public Relations To Represent Guernsey's Auction House in Sale of Rosa Parks Archive
Thousands of Historic Items Are a Part of the Rosa Parks Archive.
SEO Hosting Adds Twelve Free Search Engine Optimization Scripts
Scripts make Host Gator's SEO Hosting the most comprehensive hosting service for helping customers maximize search engine placement.
Graphic SEO Launches a Free SEO Website Evaluation For Website Owners
Graphic SEO has been taking SEO to a new level with back to back successful marketing campaigns. Now with the release of their new free SEO evaluation, they are looking to set new benchmarks in SEO
Vocus to Present at Upcoming Public Relations Conference on Digital Communications
Company to Lead Discussion on Measuring the Impact of New Media on PR Campaigns
Rubenstein Public Relations To Provide Corporate Communications for StoneCastle Partners LLC
One of the Largest Investors in Community Banks.
Dahlia Web Designs LLC Selects Vocus Small Business Edition for Public Relations and Online Marketing
Vocus' On-Demand Press Release Distribution System Enables Company to Raise Online Visibility, Drive Website Traffic and Increase Sales for its Great Kids Corner Website
If Gutenberg were alive today he would be in publishing heaven! Forget the printing press, the web has fast-forwarded self-publishing in ways that are evolving so rapidly it's becoming difficult to integrate technology and process to leverage the opportunities. Any company, regardless of their size and marketing resources should be publishing an opt-in e-mail newsletter - it's a very low cost way to build community with customers, keep suppliers/partners/other informed and generate new business.
How do you get started? You must decide up front if you have the marketing expertise to develop your "newsletter creative" in-house and how you want to manage the distribution of your newsletters. Many companies turn to agencies/marketing services firms to help them develop the actual newsletter creative and also outsource part of the process to ASP (Application Service Providers), who handle all facets of the list distribution, signup and ongoing management.
Content format can be critical to the effectiveness of your newsletter - we typically don't recommend HTML (text with images/graphics embedded) format unless our client's product or service is very consumer-focused Plain old text is not as glamorous as HTML but it's a lot more effective in most cases - people want information, not fancy eye candy that's appealing to marketing geeks - keep your message, simple, to the point and with customer success stories or references when/where you can to drive credibility.
It's relatively simple to use a Word processor with a mail merge program to integrate the addresses (depending on the volume) with your message and then send out via your ISP. But, doing it in house can be very time consuming - you have to deal with inbound requests for people who want to be added to your list, "unsubscribes" (people who want to be deleted) and integrate your web site into the process, so people can automatically sign up with a back end auto-responder (automatic message) that confirms their sign up.
Most companies utilize an Application Service Provider ("ASP") to outsource the list hosting, signup and unsubscribe management processes and web site integration - typical costs are under $50. per month based upon your number of subscribers (on average up to 10-30K), frequency of your newsletter mailing (rule of thumb would be 2-4 times per month) and other specialized features, such as bounce back deletions (deleting any e-mails that have a "bad address") and making the HTML code available with a graphic to sign up people directly from your web site. Be forewarned, most list hosting providers tell you up front they reserve the right to delete your account if they catch you spamming thousands of people whose e-mail addresses were not "opted in" (given to you with permission to market to them).
What do you want to look for in an ASP List Hosting Provider? You want great customer service, an online interface that enables you to easily manage the process, the ability to easily to cut and paste your text (newsletter copy), instant distribution of your newsletter and the ability to know at a glance how many subscribers you have on an ongoing basis and the number of new subscribers and unsubscribers.
There are lots of list hosting companies out there - I'd recommend including two on your short list. One of the oldest, most well established companies that has consistently won rave reviews for excellence in customer service is Sling Shot Media, LLC www.listhost.net - they've been hosting since 1998 (ancient in web time) and offer a wide range of consulting services related to all aspects of newsletter marketing. The other company to check out would be Microsoft's bCentral Services www.bcentral.com which offers list hosting as one of its services. I can't give them rave reviews for customer service, as they make you pay extra for anything more than e-mail support which can be a hassle at times. But, their list hosting interface is easy to use, works well most of the time and they are price competitive.
Finally, one of the biggest marketing challenges facing many small to medium sized companies is generating a newsletter subscriber list. I don't have sufficient space in this column to address this challenge - but, it's a classic go/no go situation; the longer you put it off the harder it becomes, so get started, the upside rewards are too significant to delay!
About The Author
Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies. Lee@intelective.com