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marketingThe notion that social media is the next big thing in sales seems to have fallen flat on its face. Virtually every study conducted has shown that Facebook and Twitter campaigns only increase brand awareness. As far as driving traffic to your website and converting visitors into customers, email is still king.
A recent study of companies that used a dedicated email marketing client, good newsletter content and personalisation for each reader reported open rates of over 30%, with similar click-through rates – leading to above average conversions. This kicks Facebook’s ass.
Now, the guys behind the industry favourite ‘Mail Chimp’ have been working hard on a new product. It’s called Mandrill and solves many of the nagging issues of traditional email marketing. They claim it trumps the competition by a long-shot. Let’s take a look.
Usually, I stumble upon a cool app, play with it for a few days and then write the review. In this case, it’s a bit different. I have been following Brightpod right from the start (which I guess is little over a year ago) for two main reasons.
First, it’s from the team of DeskAway, a fairly successful project management app that has been around for a long time now. Personally, I consider it to be a real project management solution in a sea of stripped down task management apps. So, I was looking forward to see how they execute their new venture in the Web 2.0 era.
And second, the app targets a niche – marketers – which is a strange thing for a SaaS app. Usually, the goal is to shoot for the stars and go about fighting a ton of competitors, and end up grabbing a negligible piece of the pie. However, Brightpod from many angles appears to cannibalize the potential customer pool of their flagship product. So, it makes for an interesting case study if you are a cloud business enthusiast like me.
Alright, the story time is over and now we are off to the fun part – taking Brightpod for a spin!
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The downfall of many new business and products is that the creators loved their idea too much. A quick search for failed tech products will reveal thousands of cool gadgets and gizmos that while awesome, clever and unique, never made enough sales to break even. The inventors loved their pride and joy so much that they assumed the rest of the world would care. But products can be like first-time parents showing off a snotty, crying bundle of burden.
Google has developed Google Consumer Surveys to help anyone decide whether or not to go ahead with an idea. By simply asking their target market “Hey, what do you think of this?”, business and individuals can act on information instead of blind ambition.
The name, however, makes Google Surveys seem like a half baked web app already replicated a hundred times over around the web. Maybe it’s something cooked up on an off-day at the Googleplex in California?
When you’re launching a new product/service or announcing a new offer, it’s important to give customers the information they need to close the loop – and it doesn’t hurt to look good while doing so. That’s where landing pages come in – by definition, they’re attractive, concise, to the point and present customers with a way to opt in to whatever it you’re selling. So how do you create an absolute deal-clincher of a landing page?
Lander might be a good place to start. The app allows you to build landing pages using a simple interface with powerful features, publish them and analyze your conversions as they happen. Could this be the new secret weapon in your arsenal of marketing tools? Let’s put a page together and find out. (more…)
In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting SpyderMate SEO Tools. The developer describes SpyderMate SEO Tools as a suite of unique and powerful SEO tools structured to make managing multiple SEO campaigns easy. The Scorecard tells you how your web site is currently performing from an SEO perspective and tracks progress over time. The Auditor tells you what you need to fix by thoroughly crawling and analyzing any web site. The Low Hanging Fruit report helps you find keywords for which you could.
Read on for more information and screenshots!
Launching a new product or service via the web is no easy task in today’s fast-paced market. There’s plenty of competition and many variables involved in determining whether yours will be a success or failure. One of the metrics marketers use to determine how well their promotional web pages are doing is called bounce rate – the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which a user left your site from the landing page (the higher the rate, the less effective your page is).
Unbounce is an app built to tackle these challenges and then some. With Unbounce, you can create great-looking landing pages with ease, test them for effectiveness in lead generation and publish them to kickstart your business too. There are a lot of great ideas behind this app and they’re well-implemented too – but will they help you turn out a winner of a landing page? Let’s build one ourselves and find out.