Stellar Blue Announces: Stellar Shopping Cart
Market and sell your products online quickly and easily! Stellar Blue's Shopping Cart module lets you build a fully-featured online store with little or no programming knowledge.
Our shopping cart is a complete e-commerce storefront solution for your new or existing web site. Easily build, edit, and maintain your online shop, and collect orders with the easy-to-use web interface!
Visit the Stellar Blue website to view a demo of the shopping cart.
Interested in learning more? Call 920.905.0290 today for a free consultation and quote!
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Using social media, or becoming social media-optimized, to grow your business
Social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook are quickly becoming a preferred marketing channel for many companies wanting to interact with their customers.
Not only do these sites save on your marketing dollars, the benefits include: increased exposure for your business, improved traffic to your website, customer email list growth, increased search engine rankings, and even new partnerships.
Before we discuss the future of social media, we need to take a step back and understand the search engines and how Google gained the largest share of the market.
In the beginning, AOL and Yahoo! were the early leaders. However, Google quickly came onto the scene and won the game.
How? When companies and people realized early search engines were looking at keywords and content, they began stuffing websites full of keywords that any prospect with a smidge of interest might be looking for. This was great for the websites, but for the consumer these results weren't very accurate.
Google entered the market with a different approach: Instead of keywords, it focused on inbound links to sort its search results. Since it's far more difficult to game the system with inbound links than with keywords, Google's system resulted in a more accurate search engine. The more accurate the results, the more consumers used the service, and the further ahead of the competition they surged. Today Google is so popular, and so far ahead of its competition that it's a verb.
So how does this relate to social media?
Linkedin is becoming more than just a business/social network -- it's quickly becoming a search engine. Imagine a search engine that could bring back results to the consumer based upon where the company does business, where they reside, where the owners went to college, who their colleagues are, and who they have in their network that have used the product/services they are looking for.
It turns out there's a search engine that's almost there. It's not Google, it's LinkedIn. If accuracy has won the game for Google, social/business connections may win the game for LinkedIn.
Imagine a prospect is in their buying research phase and they search for "Inbound Marketing" and the search results are delivered based upon the company in which people from their network have used or submitted to as a group member. Now the consumer can take these results and ask the person in their network, who might have been a business colleague or friend they have long since spoken with, and ask for a reference.
They can ask for the referral by sending a message or instant message all from the same platform and without having to know the person's updated contact info. Not only are the results exceedingly accurate and convenient, but now your business can grow via viral word of mouth without constraints of space and time.
I'm not suggesting this is where LinkedIn is today, but if this is the direction social media is moving, the company who starts their business network now will be far ahead of the game. The companies with the larger networks will have a far greater reach in the search results.
The sooner a company starts their social media optimization (SMO), the harder it will be for their competitors to catch their reach.
Social Media is here to stay, so get your company LinkedIn or lose the game.
Not sure where to start? Steller Blue can help get your social media marketing off the ground. Call 920.905.0290 for more information on our services.
Jim Dobinski - Marketing Director
Stellar Blue Web Design, LLC
Visit Jim's LinkedIn profile
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Email Deliverability Guide 101
Making sure emails get delivered to recipients' inboxes instead of their spam folders is the biggest challenge for email marketers. What should you do to monitor and help correct the problem?
We've come up with a list of guidelines you can follow to help improve the odds of your emails safely reaching user inboxes and being opened.
Frequency and subscription:
- Never send an email to someone that won't be expecting to get an email from you.
- Regularly (7 or 8 days after every send to allow for delivery attempts to non existent domains) remove emails from your list that are bouncing or you may end up sending to spam traps
- Always include an unsubscribe link in your emails.
- Test and make sure the unsubscribe link actually works. If the unsubscribe returns an error they may just mark you as junk instead of letting you know it's broken.
- Never try to hide who the email is coming from.
- Make sure the From address lists who the subscriber expects it to be coming from.
- Make the unsubscribe process easier than the subscribe process.
Email content and design:
- A pretty email is nice to look at but the most important thing is getting your information to your subscriber. Many design elements get stripped out by mail clients and Outlook 2007 will display hardly any of them.
- Don't use spam-like words and phrases in your email.
- Don't include too many images in your email or some filters will flag it.
- Make sure your text is readable. Don't use a similar color for both the text and background (e.g. medium gray text on light gray background). Some filters will see that as trying to hide text.
- Don't use images or send attachments that are too large. 300Kb should be the absolute max size of the email so be sure to make sure the total for images and attachments comes in well under that (adding a file to an email will increase the size by about 30% just to encode it).
- Make sure the content of the email is what the subscriber signed up to receive. Don't send them emails about sprockets if they only wanted to know about cogs.
- Don't include a single large image in your email since this is how most spam seems to operate nowadays.
Some mail services, such as Gmail, publish guidelines that should be adhered to as well.
Dustin White - Technology Director
Stellar Blue Web Design, LLC |
