Our client Steve Spangler is quite the renaissance man. In addition to being the CEO of a catalog company, he is also a toy inventor, an Emmy award winning television personality, a magician, an educator and a certified professional speaker. Just the sort of person you’d want blogging and podcasting.
The audio podcasts featured on Steve’s blog are targeted towards science teachers and include interviews with leading educators and monologues from Steve with helpful teaching tips. The video podcasts, targeted towards both teachers and parents, are some of the most amazing experiments you have ever seen. From exploding pumpkins to flying potatoes and erupting soda bottles, each episode is a hoot!
Functionality on the blog includes email subscriptions to posts and comments, buttons for readers to submit the post to Digg or del.icio.us, tag clouds and tag pages, RSS feeds, a audio podcast player built right into the blog, and more. Read the case study to learn more about this project and some of the results, including the fact that over 13% of their online sales can be attributed to Steve’s blog. The company’s products, which include science toys and experiment kits, are worked into the blog in a very soft sell way, so the blog doesn’t seem like a shill for the ecommerce shop.
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Visit The Site: Steve Spangler Science
For Further Reading: Testimonial, Case Study and Steve Spangler Portfolio
Spam filters tend to be the bane of the email marketer’s existence. Getting past them is a serious challenge, and it is becoming increasingly harder. How can an email marketer consistently bypass those spam filters?
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« Read the whole series: 1,2 »
Left to its own devices, email marketing is unlikely to survive. However, if email marketers take responsibility for developing great strategy and execution, we are likely to bring on its evolution.
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« Read the whole series: 1,2 »
In this teleseminar, Netconcepts’ founder Stephan Spencer moderates a panel of email marketing experts, including Chris Baggot, Rok Hrastnik, Eric Kirby, Jim Sterne, and Shar VanBoskirk. The output of which is an insight into email marketing’s true power and potential. Produced by MarketingProfs.com.
Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2
Download the Transcript: PDF (300 K)
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ShopperANSWERS offers a retail marketing and measurement solution that helps retailers keep informed of shopper behavior at the moment of purchase across a wide variety of retail outlets. Their corporate website gives an insight into the minds of shoppers. The site isn’t just marketing fluff; it educates the visitor on such topics as observational research and intercept interviews.
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Visit The Site: ShoppersAnswers
Geneva Health is a recruitment company specializing in the health sector, including nursing, medical, clinical support and allied health professionals. Geneva Health has three websites targeting their three primary markets — the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Each is a functionally-rich job site with supporting helpful articles, including such things as CV guidelines, making an overseas move, registration requirements and more. Job applicants can of course apply online. The site is built with search engines in mind, and includes spider friendly URLs along with optimized HTML and content.
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Visit The Site: Geneva Health
A brand microsite for Freudenberg. Freudenberg manufactures cabin air filters that help remove dust, pollutants and odors from a vehicle’s passenger compartment, enhancing driving comfort and improving air quality. With this site, built by Netconcepts, microAir are able to offer their customers easy access to product information and the ability to purchase products online with no hassle. With the touch of a button the site can add, edit and remove products, view orders and process online credit card payments.
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Visit The Site: micronAir
Here’s a startling bit of research, done by EmailLabs and written up in MarketingSherpa, for all of you folks responsible for crafting email campaigns and newsletters:
This [past] fall tens of millions of emails from permission mailers were tested for a brand new metric: actual read time.
Turns out 15-20 seconds was the average. Consider the last email campaign or newsletter you sent. Could a typical reader skim the entire thing, digest the graphics, and decide to click on the best item for them in just 15-20 seconds?
Yes, people. You read that right. The read time of your precious prose is, on average, a lousy 15 seconds… 20 seconds, tops!
You labor so hard over that e-newsletter: spending countless hours writing it, then perfecting it, then testing it, then further refining it… and to what end? The bloody inconsiderate recipient spends a mere 15 seconds absorbing it! How rude!
So, what to do? Email marketers must become masters of the 15-second soundbite. The conventional wisdom in email marketing of short sentences, short paragraphs, placing the call-to-action so it appears above-the-fold in the preview pane, etc. etc. just won’t come close to cutting it any more.
Based on this study, I’ve been totally rethinking how we’re doing our regular “communiques” to our clients & partners. Perhaps we should ditch our current approach of a roughly-monthly, short-and-sharp 400-word e-newsletter? I think we’ll test another approach: where I strive to deliver a single idea or tip that offers real value to the recipient and coaxes that person into engaging in a dialogue with me — within a mere 80 words! (This paragraph, including this parenthetical note, is 80 words.)
Bite-sized chunks of relevant advice, personalized to that individual client’s situation, sent on more regular intervals than our current “communique”… Sound like a plan? (Actually it sounds like an extranet blog, but done less frequently and delivered via email instead of RSS.)
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This ecommerce site offers a range of items from cabinet hardware to telephone booths and from rubber duckies to magnificent clawfoot bathtubs. AntiqueHardware.com offers original restored antiques as well as flawless replica pieces perfect for any home or office. Visitors are greeted with their own account pages and an easily navigated shopping cart experience.
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Visit The Site: Antique Hardware
A LEM USA site, Lemcellguard.com promotes LEM’s battery monitoring technology in a search engine friendly and easily navigated site. Information rich, this site was built to serve LEM’s customers with extensive insight into LEM battery monitoring sensors. Content that would then transalte into search engine visibility because search engine optimal linking and code.
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Visit The Site: LEMcellguard.com
HEADQUARTERS
2820 Walton Commons West, Suite 123
Madison, WI 53718 USA
Phone: (608) 285-6600
Toll-free: 888 207-1109
REGIONAL OFFICE
36 Anzac Rd., Browns Bay
Auckland, New Zealand
Phone: (+64) 9 476-4601
infodesk@netconcepts.com
