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Marketing Savvy Hello Everybody, Mother Nature showed the East Coast that they can't completely control the flow of information on a global basis. Hit with severe thunderstorms, the power outages were long. This was okay for a 9-5 business, but for those of us that run the 24/7/365 businesses, we were not able to connect to the Internet for approximately 6 hours. That's okay, we needed the sleep. :-) Now...on to the news. ********************************************************************************
Thanks to Mary Jackson, http://www.airshows.org, and Debra Steitz, http://www.dstravelgroup.com for bringing up the topic of email this past week. Obviously, we all get spam and we simply delete it. However, have you ever received an email that has been forwarded to a billion people before it arrived in your inbox? Then you have to scroll through all those addresses or open the email a whole bunch of times before you actually get to the content. Yuck! We've all spent time doing this and sometimes the content wasn't even worth it. Little do people know, there is an "Email Etiquette". One of the rules is that if you forward a joke, umm....I mean valuable email, to your whole address book, you have a responsibility to delete all the previous email addresses (also known as header information) BEFORE you send it out again. For this and more email help, Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com, has created several articles for the email user that might not know the "rules". So, if you want to impress your friends and colleagues, take a glance at these articles. You'll be making Miss Manners and all your friends happy. http://email.about.com/internet/email/msub10.htm ******************************************************
I bank online, but am not the norm. Apparently, only 10% of the customers of the largest banks, use the service - even though 80% of the banks offer the capability. However, 2 regional banks have doubled that rate of usage. What are Wachovia and Provident Financial Group doing that other banks aren't? They help customers fill out the applications when they are in teller lines. Why aren't more banks promoting their online product? Here's a good one. It appears that online banking isn't profitable for banks. That's because it's FREE to the customer. If you want bill paying, you'll have to pay an additional monthly fee, but to use the online banking to check accounts and transfer balances, you don't have to pay a dime. http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO47169,00.html?pm ********************************************************
Two travel sites made it in near the bottom, but the rest were search engines, informational sites and community sites. Ecommerce sites are suffering the summer slow down - except for eBay. People still love to auction things. Yahoo still tops the list with AOL's public site coming in second. http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/traffic_patterns/article/0, ********************************************************
Microsoft will start providing this service to ASP's at the end of this month. Meaning that you'll contact an Application Service Provider (ASP) and you'll sign a contract to use Windows 2000, Word, or some other combination of software products. As you rent the software, you'll always have the latest version. Right now, Microsoft loses dollars on corporate customers that don't upgrade right away or even skip a whole version of a product. By renting the software, there won't be any "skipping" of versions - thereby balancing out their revenue stream. Supposedly, it's cheaper for the consumer. I'm not sure that this is the case, however. Imagine that if I buy Office 2000 for $800, which is what I did. I use the product every single day. I use Word, Excel, Access constantly. I use the other applications weekly. If I pay per usage, how long will it take me to exceed the total cost of the product. Image this same situation with the operating system. Obviously we use that on a daily basis. Is this good or bad? Read the full article for other opinions on the topic. http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO47149,00.html?am ********************************************************
Banner Ads get a bad rap because no one clicks on them. I've often recommended that my clients go with selling "sponsorship space" on their web sites instead of trying to sell generic banner ad space. I've found that this is simply more successful and brings in more revenue than banner ads. While this type of advertising is on the rise, banner ads still rule the Internet advertising world - just barely. http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/marketing/2000/07/11/13955 ********************************************************
Dr. Wilson answers questions on improving t-shirt sales, how much marketing money should be budgeted for a web site and slim profits. There's some valuable information here and it's all geared toward small businesses. One of his tips hits home with my clients. I'm often asked to put sound files on web sites. One of the problems, that he says decreases the sales on the t-shirt site, is the time it takes to download and hear the sound file. His comments back up market research and the advise that I have been giving clients for years. While you can get away with this on a back page, it simply isn't right to force a visitor to listen to a sound file that takes too much time to download - especially when they didn't ask to hear the music. In addition, you don't know if the visitor's tastes match yours. They might find the music unappealing and leave the site for that reason. If you want and/or need sound on your site - always give the visitor the chance to make the choice to hear the music. Don't force them to hear it without giving them the option. http://www.doctorebiz.com/v1/000712.htm ************************************************************************ “Behold the turtle. He
makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” --James Conant ************************************************************************ ©1997-2000 CreativeWriting.com, LLC |
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