Email marketing: it’s time to invest!

If you want your email marketing program to succeed, you need to invest in the necessary resources, tools, creativity and time. You remember how, in the old days, we always said that “email marketing was cheap because it required no stamps”?

Well, those were the days that many of us looked at email marketing as the online equivalent of direct marketing. Email often still serves direct marketing purposes, but it has become much more than that. And, yes, email marketing still has a low cost per contact.

But for companies that want to go beyond good old email marketing (and that should be all companies), it’s time to spend that extra bit of time, intelligence, tools and effort.

Read more

Article marketing, content marketing and content buying: an exploration

I’m preparing a report on article marketing, content marketing, syndicated content and content marketplaces. What does this have to do with this blog? Well, first of all, it’s not so much about this blog itself since the report will be published in other media too.

As I wrote before, relevant and share-worthy content is key (as is using and highlighting the content your community produces) and one of the main challenges for (email) marketers will be to create relevant and timely content for their newsletters. So, the report is about the content market but also about the importance of content in social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, well, every form of marketing (including the words in the call to action buttons on your website).

Now, to have great content, sometimes this will require hiring a copywriter, maybe even buying content or syndicating it. Over the last few months, I have been trying out content platforms such as Associated Content, Constant Content and many others. I’ll report on my findings soon but of course the conclusion is clear: a big no.

Read more