I was reading through the web news today and I came across an article on new advances in email marketing. Wow, thought I, this is definitely something to dig into and I should probably share it with you.
Apparently, Constant Contact and GoldMail Inc. are doing a dance which will result in more effective email offspring for everyone. Through this union of interests, “GoldMail and Constant Contact small business customers [will be able to] add interactive slideshows easily to their Constant Contact emails and deliver richer email messages”. And the best part folks, it’s free!! Yeah buddy, ’cause you can’t beat that. The rest of the article is located at http://bit.ly/djNc0b and I encourage you to read it if you want to know more.
The questions I have to ask is “Will it really improve the mass email offering or would we still just delete them?” Sure interactive content is cool but do I really want it taking up more room in my inbox or spambox? Imagine the possibilities, not only can you be spammed but now it can be interactive spam (lol). Hopefully this is not what it would be used for but I could see it going south and just causing more issues if misused.
I have a couple clients that use Constant Contact currently and they love it. The service is pretty awesome and they use it with regard for the people receiving the mass emails, so I see light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope the users of this new service still follow the not-official-but-good-to-follow rules of email marketing:
- Keep it short.
- Keep it sweet.
- Keep it relevant.
If so, we should all be safe and the experience of opening up a newsletter email might actually be more enjoyable. :)
Let me know your opinions folks. Yay or Nay on the multi-media mass emails topic and your thoughts about the implications.
Thanks for reading and have a blessed day.
Big Cloud Media
Posted in The Buzz on { February 11th, 2010 } ~ 4 Comments
Tagged with: Big Cloud Media • constant contact • email • email marketing • Information • marketing • mass emailing • mass emails
How many times have you looked at your website and wondered just how effective it is? Have you ever wondered where the people that visit are coming from or what search terms they used to get there? If you have wondered these things, you are reading the right post because we are going to look into the awesome world of website analytics and go over some of the key info you can gather using them.
Why do analytics matter?
Through analyzing website analytics, you can gather info about the activities of your website visitors which you can then compare to your marketing actions, giving you a big picture view of what is going on with your website and how effective it and your marketing is. Combine this info with information that you collect regularly about your clients and you can start to understand why your visitors do what they do when they go to your website, be it buying, calling or leaving. As in any situation, the more you know, the better the decisions you can make.
What can analytics track?
In this post, I will be talking about Google Analytics because that is what I use for me and my clients and that is what I am most familiar with. Using Google Analytics you can track over time:
- Visitor Trends
- # of visits
- Referring websites (where they came from)
- Search terms used to find your site
- Location (down to the city) of visitors
- Visitor operationg systems and browsers
- Visitor connection speeds
- Popular pages
- Visitor time on the site, etc.
The list above is actually only a fraction of the information you collect on your visitors through analytics. The beauty of it is that you can make changes to the site and compare the analytics results to the results before the changes were made, giving you a way to trend your visitor activities and really get a great idea of the effectiveness of those changes.
Where Can I Get Analytics?
Here is the best part of all of this, website analytics are free. Go to Google.com/analytics, and sign up for them. From there, copy and past the tracking code into the bottom of your website pages (right before your ending </body> tag), check your Google Analytics page to make sure it is working and you are good to go. There are a slew of other website analytics companies that you can get your analytics from, so don’t think Google Analytics are the only ones. I am most familiar with Google Analytics so that’s what I wrote on.
Analyzing the Analytics
If you need help analyzing your analytics, contact us right away because that’s one of the things we do and we do it well. Call us at 210-373-7352 with any questions you have and we will be happy to help you.
I hope this has been informative and helpful to you. If you don’t have analytics on your site, get them and start gathering the info. Information is powerful and the more you have, the more effective your site and your company can be.
God bless.
Koji Flowers (Big Cloud Media)
Posted in The Big Cloud on { August 21st, 2009 } ~ 3 Comments
Tagged with: analytics • analyzing • Big Cloud Media • business • companies • effective • effectiveness • Google Analytics • Information • trends • visitor • visitors • website • websites
