Print, Marketing Communications, Sales and Marketing Automation by Captum Technologies

Print, Marketing Communications, Sales and Marketing Automation by Captum Technologies Tube. Duration : 6.60 Mins.

Captum Technologies is a leading provider of print solutions, sales automation solutions, marketing automation solutions and marketing communications development and execution for areas including custom print, direct mail, email marketing, retail storefronts, inventory replenishment, fulfillment, reporting, variable print, social media, internet marketing, website development, content management, design services and more.

Tags: custom print, stationary, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, direct mail, email services, sales automation, marketing automation, office products, promotional items, inventory replenishment, retail storefront, catalogs, variable print, variable data, spend management, shipping, reporting, cost center report, production management, e-commerce, website development, design services, marketing communications, marketing, strategy development

Marketing your web site - Part 3 - Using Email, e-books, letterhead and magazines

Marketing your web site - Part 3 - Using Email, e-books, letterhead and magazines Tube. Duration : 8.45 Mins.

View more details at earncashonlineblueprint.info

Tags: web site marketing, email, ebooks, e-book, letterhead design, magazines

How Much Does Marketing Cost?

Many small enterprise owners disregard marketing because they feel it is too expensive or it is only for large companies. Marketing consists of a lot of dissimilar elements some of minuscule or no costs and some with some vast costs. If you use your resources and creativity, you can apply a few key marketing activities, reduce costs, and be extremely successful.

Below is a list of varied marketing items and the range of costs associated with each. Following the table is more facts about some key marketing items that are Required for any business.

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Marketing activity - Cost Range

Newspaper Ads - - ,000

Magazine Ads - 0 - ,000

Newsletter Ads - - ,500

Direct Mail - $.05 - .00 (per piece)

Radio Ads - - ,000 (per ad)

Tv Ads - - ,000

Sponsorships - 0 - ,000

Seminars - - ,000

Conferences - ,000 - 0,000

Tradeshows - 0 - ,000

Web Ads - $.05 - ,000

The list above is just a short list of some of the ways you can spend your marketing budget, and as a small enterprise owner, I know that some of these look too expensive and out of reach. In fact, some of these I advise small businesses never together with in their marketing mix, but every enterprise must have the basic construction blocks of marketing.

Every enterprise must have identity collateral, and these pieces need to look professional, polished, and appropriate. The basic construction blocks of small enterprise marketing are logo, enterprise card, letterhead, brochure, and website.

There are many associates that use just these five items to deal with their marketing. They rely heavily on a sales force and these five items are all that they need. These five items are also the things your customers will see every time they interact with you. When you meet a possible client, you give them a enterprise card, which also has your logo on it. When you mail an invoice, your logo is included. If you mail any type of sales letter, it will be on your letterhead. When a buyer asks for more information, you will give them a brochure. Finally, 66% of consumers go to the web before making any type of purchase, so you will have a website with your logo and facts available for searching.

Just about every active enterprise has these things, but most don't have consistent professional pieces. More times than not, small enterprise owners originate each of these construction blocks themselves and only as they need them. In between the other daily tasks of the business, these owners lose sight of consistency with their marketing materials.

These five basic materials are part of what marketing costs, because they are affordable, sometimes free, to create. If they are created professionally, they establish and demonstrate your brand and image, and they foster a great feeling in your customers towards your company. Although you can spend a critical estimate of money of varied marketing activities, which are critical for many small businesses, the logo, enterprise card, letterhead, brochure, and website are required. together with these five items in your enterprise plan is not a hard thing to do should be determined early in planning.

How Much Does Marketing Cost?

Creating a Marketing Presentation Kit

A good marketing kit can get your foot in the door with a new client, or can help your company get some attentiveness through the press. Here are a few tips to help you get going.

Determining The Purpose:

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Before you jump headlong into creating your presentation kit, you will want to put some belief into what the purpose of your kit will be. Who, for instance will be the intended audience? What is the goal, and how do you intend to use it? If you can, have a conversation with those citizen in your company (most likely your sales force) who are down there on the front lines every day and will be using the kit more than whatever else. Get as much of their input as you can, taking care to find out what it is that they believe will help them do their job better, carry more information more easily, and to get more sales. Then make sure that you contain or make these materials as need be.

Assembling the Material:

The types of material that you will want to contain are: a cover letter, a press release, a background and biographical page, a page of testimonials (from satisfied customers or clients), and any marketing collateral such as brochures, that you have already developed. Depending on the purpose of your kit, you may also want to contain price lists, fliers, extra promotions, press clippings, and awards as well as a high resolution company logo..

Make sure that the material you contain is fascinating to the eye, indeed readable, and contains plenty of graphics and photographs. If the purpose of your kit it to get press, photographs will make the jobs of the media outlets a lot easier. If the kit is to show to potential clients, photographs of the product in use or thumbnail sized head shots help the client to visualize the product in ask or to play up the human angle in your business.

Your press publish should read like a news story and contain quotes and touch information. There are lots of free tutorials online that will show you how to make a great press release, so check them out.

The background/bio page should consist of a brief company history and perhaps a list of noted clients or customers. You should also contain touch information for the major players at your company, and the cover letter should be personally signed by your top ranking officer.

You should also, of course, contain a company card. If the kit is going out to a hope or a current client, the salesperson's company card should be included. If the kit is going out to members of the press, the card should be that of your Pr man or company.

Printing and Binding:

All pages should be printed on high-quality company letterhead, and photos should be in color. As far as binding, there are many options including spiral coil, or you can simply place the pages inside an fascinating log folder. Binding machines, however, can give you a terminated product with a more pro appearance and permanent feel. They are cheap and easy to use, so you can tailor your kits to a definite audience and have them ready to go out the door at a moment's notice.

Creating a Marketing Presentation Kit

Successful HTML Email Marketing Campaigns and Lotus Notes Issues

As the online world changed in the nineties from informational to commercial and highly competitive, marketers embraced the new technology and the need has arisen to send graphically appealing newsletters and marketing messages. You have only seconds to capture attention, and the right picture will grab quicker than the right copy, as they say, "a picture can be worth a thousand words". Just ask your clients if they would use plain white paper, rather than letterhead, to send an offline message to prospects and customers.

Today, the vast majority of all email clients can render (that is, display) HTML emails fairly well. Notable exceptions are older versions of Lotus Notes and pre AOL pre version 6.0. So whereas a few years ago the answer to the question was rather complex, today it really comes down to message purpose, subscriber preference and multipart messaging. Studies show that roughly 95 percent of commercial messages sent today are sent as Multi-Part MIME.

Multi-part MIME is an older protocol that allows you to send both text and HTML versions of an e-mail in a single package, kind of like a sandwich. The recipient's e-mail program then displays the HTML version, if it is capable of reading that, or the text version, if it is not.

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and is an internet standard for the format of e-mail. Virtually all human written Internet e-mail and a fairly large proportion of automated e-mail is transmitted via SMTP MIME format. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and if nothing else, you'll learn a few more acronyms if you stick around. Internet e-mail is so closely associated with the SMTP and MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME e-mail.

Folks, while nobody can really agree on numbers and stats, we all agree on this: HTML Email Doesn't Work Properly for Millions of Recipients.

HTML email breaks in a wide variety of email inboxes. This isn't due to your creative abilities or lack of HTML knowledge - it's due to the fact that the email client your recipient views your email in routinely breaks your message.

I feel like this is worth defining, as I know a lot of people get very scared when we talk about clients and servers, but will not admit it. An email client (some "big picture" folks also call it Mail User Agent) is nothing but a computer program that is used to read and send e-mail, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, etc. A mail server (also called a Mail Transfer Agent or MTA, or a mail exchange server) is a computer program that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another. Most of the time, since nobody has time to learn all the acronyms and terminology coined by those "big picture" people, we are used to know a mail server as the entire contraption (wires and all) that runs the program.

Depending on the email system, your HTML images may be blocked so recipients see a blank white box and/or your live hotlinks may not work properly. AOL 9.0, Outlook 2003, and Gmail are most infamous for blocking and/or breaking HTML, "for security reasons".

Another big offender for not letting HTML through is Mel, the guy that works in the corporate IT department. Many corporations have IT departments who can't wait for the day when all attachments and all HTML emails are eradicated. That is because in their world, anything that is not pure text is spam, virii, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, pure evil(ware) that makes mailboxes grow and users growl. As a consequence, most of those cubicle inhabitants - the end users - who have to sign a hundred page policy before they start getting busy on those corporate e-memos, are unable to view and/or send HTML messages, whether the feature is turned off at a server level, or on their computers.

Everything else aside, there is no bigger offender here on Earth than Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is notorious for its refusal to handle Multi-Part MIME the same way the rest of the civilized world does.

For your amusement, here is a definition of Lotus Notes that was created by one of those "big picture" executives: "Lotus Notes is a commercial workflow and groupware software package that also provides application developers an environment for quickly creating cross- platform client/server applications". Still with me? Don't be scared. For the purposes of this article, Lotus Notes is an email client. Ok?

If you work for a company that uses Lotus Notes as the email system, don't even think about sending newsletters other than in text form from it. Besides the fact that as a general rule, I always recommend to marketers the use of a professional permission based email marketing service, in the Lotus Notes case you just have to.

If you communicate to the B2B market, particularly large professional services firms, large lawfirms, many Global 2000 companies, HTML email compatibility will be a thorn in your side, as a lot of these companies use Lotus Notes.

The issues include:

- Older versions of Lotus Notes (under R5) convert HTML emails to a Lotus Notes Rich Text format. Lotus Notes versions under R5 also do not recognize Multi-Part MIME messages (HTML and text combined in a single email).

- Some companies may be deploying later versions of the Lotus Notes client, i.e., R6, but using an older version of Lotus Notes/Domino server such as 4.6. In this example, the recipient's email client would also render an HTML message incorrectly.

So for a recipient to view a properly rendered HTML email, a company must use both the Lotus Notes client and server of R5 and above.

Here are some quick tips you can take if you have a significant Lotus Notes subscriber base:

1. Include a link at the top of HTML emails named "View Web Version" or something similar. The link sends recipients to a web hosted HTML version of the email (either on the email technology provider's server or the sender's server).

2. Also include an "Update Preferences" link and provide a web site update form that then enables recipients to choose to receive Text rather than HTML.

3. Create complete Text versions for those who prefer not to receive HTML or cannot view HTML.

4. On opt-in forms, include an option to receive a Text version and potentially list tips (i.e., "If you are using Lotus Notes versions below R5, select Text").

In conclusion, I will say it again: Folks, don't try this at home. Instead, always outsource email marketing to one of the many professional services. Advantages are: No blacklists and established relations with the major ISPs, ensuring maximum deliverability (plus, you don't want to be called a spammer and banned from everywhere). They also make it easy to create, send, and track permission-based email, have advanced reporting, message scheduling, the ability to create unlimited lists, bounce back handling (extremely important), subscription management, newsletter templates and many other major industry-standard features. The service I use for my company can be tried free for 15 days, here: [http://www.bsleek.com/emailmarketing/]