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Thursday
February 18, 2010 More Eyes on YOUR MessageFiled under: LogoMall, Marketing, Member Benefits, New Features, Tips and Tricks Email marketing is powerful. No other medium gives you the instant results that an email marketing campaign can produce. You know immediately who is opening your email and what they clicked. However, now your promotions and informational content no longer need to be limited to just the email addresses on your list. With social media added to the mix, you significantly expand your audience exponentially (think: Twitter and Facebook!). RatePoint, ASI’s email marketing member benefit, has just announced a new feature that easily helps you combine email marketing and social media. RatePoint’s social media option will automatically post your email marketing content such as newsletters, coupons, specials and announcements about new or hot products directly to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. With very little effort you can push out content in one location without having to go to each social media site to send your posts. RatePoint easily connects your Twitter and Facebook accounts. You select by campaign if you want to publish your content to social media sites and then create a personalized text status message for Twitter and Facebook that will link back to your email. Social networking sites are increasing the exposure of your marketing campaigns and stretching your marketing dollars. And the audience is not limited to the number of contacts or followers you have. Search engines like Google are quickly indexing social media content such as Twitter posts. By pushing out good messages with valuable content, you enhance how your potential customers will learn about your business and how you can provide promotional product solutions for them. More eyes on your brand, more eyes on your web site, more potential for sales. It’sthat simple. A Free account is now available for up to 125 contacts. When you upgrade to a paid subscription with more email contacts, ASI has negotiated great pricing for you. The new social media tools are free to use with the trial and any paid subscription. Visit www.asicentral.com/ratepoint to sign up for your Free account today.
Thursday
November 5, 2009 Logomall Marketing VideosFiled under: LogoMall, Logomall features, Marketing, New Features, Video At our yearly Halloween party my neighbor yelled over asking if my son, who is 18 months old, knew sign language. I raised a skeptical brow as she claimed he was signing the word “more” while eyeing up the cookies on the table. I politely told her she had enough wine and to put the bottle down. Of course, my husband later confirmed with my son’s school that, yes indeed, they had been teaching sign language. Why? Little tots can’t communicate everything they want and need other ways to get noticed and express themselves. The same holds true in business – especially on the Internet. How else can you speak to your LogoMall visitors, get their attention and communicate the benefits of promotional products? Video marketing A professional, short video can reach out to your audience in a way that words on a page can not. A welcoming message personalizes the visitor’s experience while bringing your web site to life. Brief and concise, a video can quickly express what you do and how you can help visitors. Use video to encourage shopping throughout the LogoMall site and direct them to featured items or themed categories to promote buying. Producing a video on your own could be a daunting and expensive task. To produce quality videos on your own, you need the expertise, the time and the equipment. If you don’t have the resources to write, design and edit a video, hiring a costly production service may be your next step. Great news! LogoMall is now offering “ready to use” marketing videos for your web site. The videos are created by professional designers and actors and can be quickly added and changed. Choose from the various themed backgrounds, select an actor and message from the video library.
We are now featuring our holiday videos targeting shoppers looking for the perfect gift giving idea. Check out an actual LogoMall video. You’ll notice when you go back into the site or refresh the page that a new actor with a new message appears that gives your visitor a new experience each time they come back. LogoMall has bundled the video collection with a subscription to RatePoint, an email marketing service, in an exclusive marketing package. Sign up for more information and to view additional video samples.
Tuesday
September 1, 2009 How will you be promoting this holiday season?Filed under: LogoMall, Marketing, Member Benefits, New Features Spark holiday shopping on your LogoMall site with email marketing. It’s a highly effective way to communicate your creative gift ideas, recognition and award programs. Email is a cost effective vehicle for reaching the right customer, at the right time, with the right product or special offer. Not only is it affordable, but email marketing delivers immediate results. ASI’s newest affiliate, RatePoint, makes it easy for you to create and send your own email marketing campaigns. They offer over 100 ready-to-go designs to create professional email marketing campaigns on your own without a designer. You simply add in your own copy, company logo and sharp product images that you can pull directly from LogoMall. Or, your designer can create an html email and upload it. RatePoint helps you to build and manage your email contact lists including requests to unsubscribe which is a mandatory process to abide by Can Spam. Once your email campaign is sent you can monitor the activity using their at-a-glance report. You’ll know how many prospects opened your email and exactly who clicked links to your web site. In addition to an easy to use email marketing tool, RatePoint also helps you to build your online business credibility by collecting and publishing feedback from your customers. You can easily post this valuable content on your LogoMall site to help turn prospects into customers. Powerful customer testimonials establish your online business reputation and build confidence in your online visitors. RatePoint is offering a 30 day FREE trial. Try it out for yourself at www.asicentral.com/ratepoint. You don’t even need a credit card number for the trial period. As an ASI member, you get great pricing on their subscription service. It’s less the $10 a month, to send unlimited email marketing campaigns to a list size of 500 or less. So…how will you be promoting this holiday season?
Friday
July 24, 2009 Paper or Silicon? How savvy distributors turn catalogs into LogoMall leadsFiled under: LogoMall, Marketing, Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized Contributor: Jack Flohr, Director of Marketing, Membership Services One of the best drivers of Web traffic is the tried and true paper catalog. From LL Bean to Victoria’s Secret to the Counselor Top 40, businesses continue to rely on catalogs. In fact, “50 -70% of online sales are driven by catalogs,” said George Hague, senior marketing strategist at J. Schmid & Assoc. Inc., a catalog consulting company in Mission, Kansas. As a distributor with a LogoMall site, you can easily and immediately drive customers to your site using imprinted catalogs that are personalized with your Website. When followed up with an email that links to your site and a personal call, this integrated program has proven to increase sales. Kayla Tollen, of Kayla Advertising asi/239482 has seen real world results using integrated campaigns, “I’ve been using catalogs for 24 years. One or two orders cover the cost of my investment. ASI’s fulfillment service is an added bonus and creates additional savings in time and money.” The challenge of course is finding the time to market your business effectively doing all of the things you already know you are supposed to do. One suggestion is to block out a ‘Marketing morning’ once every two weeks and dedicated at least 6-8 hours/month to marketing efforts. You can also use ASI services directly. Not only does ASI do all of the work for you, often times it saves money due to our leverage and position. Services include catalog fulfillment, prospect lists, email marketing, self promotions, and telemarketing. If you’re looking for a great program to drive traffic and sales from your site you should consider 4th quarter gift giving. Start by featuring gifts on your LogoMall site and doing a fulfillment program with ASI’s Gift Book catalog. There’s no better time than now as nearly 40% of annual sales are made in the gift dominant 4th quarter. Will you be ready? Get help today, get leads tomorrow, and grow your business now. Call Dan Brown, ASI Catalogs Manager, today to learn more at 800-546-1392. P.S. In these challenging times history proves that those who advertise not only make money right away, they wind up with significantly more sales as things improve. This is your chance to win big! Jack joined ASI in 2005 and is the Director of Marketing for Membership Services at ASI. He is a direct marketing veteran with over 25 years of diverse sales & marketing experience in international business. Jack’s previous experience includes owning a marketing consulting firm with clients that included firms such as NutriSystem and SmartBargains.com. Prior to that he was in charge of the catalog division at The Franklin Mint, and has held numerous positions in operations, purchasing and finance. Today, Jack specializes in multi-channel marketing and is adept at creating vision, strategy and execution across multiple mediums.
Thursday
April 23, 2009 Getting Started with SEO: Can Your Customers and Prospects Find You?Filed under: Marketing Contributor: Dale Denham, Senior Vice President at ASI It’s amazing to me how many people I can’t find on the Internet when I’m looking specifically for them. When all they would need to do is a very small amount of work to optimize their website. Yet, because people are intimidated by terms like SEO, they don’t do anything. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is one of THE most incredible options for distributors to increase exposure on the web. In fact, 80% of users click results on the first page of Google only. Thus, if you aren’t on the first page, you only have a 20% chance of getting clicked. SEO can be free when you do it yourself or cost thousands of dollars per year for a professional to do it with/for you. But don’t go and spend thousands of dollars to optimize your website just yet. There are quite a few things you can do on your own using the new ASISecure.com and free tools on the Internet that can let you optimize your site yourself. Start by identifying the most important keywords that you want people to find you with. Don’t use Promotional Products or other industry jargon, go with the basics. Your company name, the name of your salespeople and words like "marketing" or "trade shows" combined with your local town (such as "marketing ideas Trevose PA"). Once you’ve identified your basic keywords, work them into copy on your LogoMall website several times and do so professionally (Remember, people read these pages). I’ll share more tips on how to optimize your site to gain additional customers in the upcoming weeks. (side note: SEO is often confused with SEM which is Search Engine Marketing which involves a paid component such as Pay Per Click (PPC). Pay Per Click campaigns can be very costly so I recommend that distributors start with the basics of SEO to start gaining additional business using their LogoMall website.) I recently conducted a web marketing seminar at the ASI Show. You can listen to the entire seminar FREE as a special offer to our LogoMall customers by clicking HERE. Join me for my full seminar "Web Site Marketing: Simple Strategies That Work" at the ASI Show Chicago July 21st. Or, send me your SEO questions to dale.denham@asicentral.com andI’ll respond promptly with information including the handout I share at the session. Dale Denham is a Senior Vice President at the Advertising Specialty Institute(ASI). Dale joined ASI in 2000 and is responsible for ASI’s information, technology and business development, including strategic relationships with key partners UPS and OfficeMax.
Sunday
October 26, 2008 10 Steps to Creating Successful Email CampaignsFiled under: Marketing Love it or hate it, email is now one of the most prolific and accepted forms of business communication. It is also a great way to drive prospects, looking to buy to your LogoMall site. If you’ve been debating on sending emails to your customers that are beyond simple messages from Outlook or Entourage, but are wondering how to get started, you’re not alone! Based on a class I have been teaching at ASI Show events, here are my 10 first steps to creating a successful email campaign. Step 1 – Visit www.campaigner.com or www.constantcontact.com and set up free trials of these easy to learn programs. Spend 30 minutes playing with the program and familiarizing yourself with the tools. They are great for design, analytics, managing lists and SPAM. Step 2 – Update and fill out your contact database. Be sure you have all first name, company name, and email address fields filled out correctly! Export your database as a .CSV file. Step 3 – Follow the instructions on the site to upload your list to the email company of your choice (see Step 1) Step 4 – Develop three compelling reasons to email your customers that will drive leads. For example, you could make a special offer on golf products and link to the Golf Gear niche catalog on your LogoMall site. Step 5 – Pick the best of the three reasons in Step 4 and develop two different subject lines for your email. Make sure the subject line is personalized by first name. Step 6 – Draft the copy for your email using these rules: Step 7 – Using the email company software, or an HTML Web professional, design an email using the following rules: Step 8 – Upload your email, set a distribution date and time, split your list in half by the subject lines, take a deep breath and blast them out Step 9 – Track your results. Note click throughs that called or requested information from your LogoMall site. These are your ‘hard leads’. Those that clicked through but did not request more information are solid ’soft leads’ that you may want to follow-up with in the coming days. Step 10 – Evaluate, learn, and repeat! If you have any questions or feedback on my top 10 list please let me know. You can reach me at dmennig@asicentral.com. Warm regards, Don Mennig, is a 15 year marketing communications veteran and the Executive Director of Marketing at ASI. Before joining ASI, Don ran his own advertising agency and directed the marketing functions for several high technology firms. He has produced branding and advertising campaigns for companies such as Agilent, McDonalds and Unisys and has helped over 50 small businesses gain traction and find success in both B2B and B2C endeavors.
Saturday
August 9, 2008 Keeping a Consistent Marketing ImageFiled under: Marketing What is one of the biggest marketing challenges you face as a distributor? Now, a lot of things may come to mind, but one thing that we here at ASI have been hearing more and more frequently is the struggle to keep a consistent marketing image. Establishing a uniform brand and message across multiple channels is a battle every business faces. In the highly competitive world of promotional products it can be the difference between closing the sale and losing it to the other guy. Recently, ASI Catalogs introduced the brand new Digital Spectrum. This new sales tools allows you to tie together your offline and online marketing efforts. Now here’s the cool part…Digital Spectrum is an online virtual catalog that is available directly from your LogoMall website, coinciding with your print Spectrum catalogs. The multichannel consumer has shown to be the most valuable segment of buyers. A multichannel buyer is a buyer that uses multiple ways to complete a purchase. Catalog, Internet, phone, etc … An effective multichannel distributor is able to provide their customers with a seamless shopping and buying experience across a variety of channels. Spectrum is the most proven and successful catalog in the industry and now you can make it available 24/7 using your industry leading online solution, LogoMall. The combination of these 2 power tools is something that has never before been available and something you should definitely take advantage of. Why rip your hair out with the constant effort of multichannel branding? Let us handle it for you. Give Dan Brown, ASI Catalogs Manager, a call for the details at 800-546-1392. Colin Graf
Monday
February 25, 2008 Monthly $1000 DrawingFiled under: Marketing We are often asked if the monthly $1000 drawing of promotional products on LogoMall is real. It’s absolutely real (I sign off on the bills) and you should be taking advantage of it. The $1000 drawing is an incentive you can use to attract visitors to your site. Not only does it entice visitors, it will help you to build your marketing prospect list. The best news for you is that it won’t cost you a thing…ASI pays for it. Here’s how it works. Your LogoMall site comes equipped with a link to an entry form where visitors fill in their contact information. Whenever someone enters the drawing on your site, you will get an email notification. We also store all drawing leads in your Resources section of ASIsecure.com. Once a month, the LogoMall team selects a winner from the pool of all entries submitted across the LogoMall network. If your visitor is selected, the LogoMall team will contact you, then you contact your customer. This is where you get to play Ed McMahon. You get to tell them they won $1000 worth of promotional products from your LogoMall site. You’ll guide your winner through the product selection and then send us the invoices from the LogoMall suppliers you purchased from. ASI will reimburse you $1000. Promote your site and the $1000 drawing with promotional products today! It ties in what your company does and shows how your company can help with their next promotion. |
