Nashville-based Raven Internet Marketing Tools, which offers web-based software for online PR, announces two new staff members:

Nate Baker has joined Raven Internet Marketing Tools as a user support specialist. Baker has more than three years of support experience and six years of web design experience. He previously worked as a director of technical support at Sitemason.

Jason West has joined Raven Internet Marketing Tools as a developer. West has more than 16 years of software development experience and previously worked as a managing partner at Fortisworks.

About Raven Internet Marketing Tools

Raven Internet Marketing Tools online software helps customers quickly research, manage, monitor and report on SEO, email, social media and other Internet marketing campaigns. Its collaborative, multi-user features and fast, professional reports make it the software choice of thousands of online marketers worldwide. Raven Internet Marketing Tools, a privately-held Nashville-based company, was founded in 2007. Learn more at http://raventools.com.

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Posted On: Nashville, Tennessee (Vocus/PRWEB) February 21, 2011

Internet marketing is everywhere.  There isn’t one industry, large or small, which cannot benefit from marketing to an increasing and unending global marketplace.  Reaching out to customers and clients, while creating your brand awareness, has never been easier which is why restaurant owners have quickly joined the game.  If you are a restaurant owner, this is the perfect opportunity to increase your sales while building a loyal clientele.

What can Email Marketing do for your Restaurant?
•    Sending emails that tell your customers of new menu items, coupon specials or special events – keeps your restaurant in front of their minds and their stomachs!

•    Customer testimonials help build your business reputation, while creating a valuable viral campaign.

•    Sending out customer feedback forms gives your clients a chance to share their views, comments, and observations.  This is an ideal way to find out what your clients want, which in turn, creates repeat business.

•    Increasing website traffic.  If you have a website, include that in your email marketing campaigns.  Directing your clients to your website, gives you another large area of marketing to your target clients, while increasing a new segment of interested prospects.  Use your website to display your special dishes.  Offer some free recipes.  Everyone but everyone loves a good meal.

Building your Opt-in Email List
As your customers arrive simply ask them to drop off their business cards or email address.  Let them know you want to keep them informed of any specials, promotions, or discounts that you may offer during the week.  When you send out your email marketing campaign, don’t forget to include an unsubscribe option.  Don’t hold them captive if they want to opt-out.  Don’t forget to include a forward in your campaigns.  Using that option, your campaign not only builds a list of loyal clients, but at the same time, your clients will be able to send those campaigns easily to their friends, family and colleagues, as well.

Planning your Email Marketing Campaigns
What are your objectives?  Successful campaigns are built on planning and research.  What type of communications do you want to send to your customers?  What kind of dialogue do you want to begin?  As the restaurant owner, you need to know why you are sending out a campaign and what specific goals you hope to gain.  Are you promoting a new cuisine, announcing the addition of a new chef, creating more repeat business, or advertising a special dinner wine?  Having a set purpose of desired outcomes, helps you obtain the results you need.

How many is too many?  You must determine the frequency of your email marketing campaigns.  Frequency normally will depend on your personal needs and concepts.  Frequency ranges from weekly – to bimonthly.  Savvy marketers let their clients set the frequency range, because frequency is very subjective.

Know your Clients:  Ask for customer feedback.  Stay on the same page with your customers.  Knowing what they want takes out any unnecessary guesswork, while leading to another successful email strategy.

Track your e-campaigns: – Obtain live behavioral stats.  Tracking and analyzing your campaigns is the only way to know how your campaigns are performing. Tracking your data enables you to see if your emails were delivered, opened, and if your clients clicked through to your call to action.  Analyzing these campaigns will teach you about your customers’ habits and patterns.

Adding the Social Media Ingredient to your Email Marketing Recipe

Blog on your Website: – Invite your customers to share their thoughts and opinions on your blog.  Read what they are writing about.  Bring your personality into the discussion.  Social media is growing because people want to know you.

Create your own brand ambassadors:  Restaurants always have “regulars”, those people that come in consistently during the week.  Let them spread the good news via Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.
Sign up with the local restaurant search engines: Yelp.com, Urbanspoon.com, and TripAdvisor.com – Don’t hide – be found.

Email marketers are always open to new and creative ways when looking to grow and diversify their client base.  This is an essential key ingredient for any email campaign.  An email marketing campaign is the perfect vehicle when looking to produce greater sales, while creating an interest and desire in your product or service.  So, would why would anyone invest their time creating a dynamic campaign, if they there were no recipients wanting to read it?  What a rhetorical question.  No one would ever plan to do that, but that is exactly what happens when you don’t build your email database lists based upon permission.

Permission Based Email Works

Permission based email marketing is a best practice that enables companies to take advantage of a solid, cost-effective proven marketing strategy, when looking to building a larger market segment while building and sustaining consumer trust.  The payback is well worth it.  In a report posted by Forrester Research, consumers open two-thirds of the email messages they have opted into.

When used properly, email marketing can be an exceptionally compelling and persuasive marketing method.  It’s a channel that makes it possible for a buyer and seller to openly and freely correspond with one another, building a sound and steady relationship founded on relevance, value, and trust. When handled incorrectly, email marketing can be damaging to your brand identity.  Sending unsolicited email can cause you to be identified as a spammer, causing loss of recipients, your reputation, and possibly your ISP provider.  A company’s reputation once lost is not easily won back.

What is Permission Based (Opt-In) Email?

Permission-based email marketing is the exact opposite of a spammer. The significant difference, of course, is that the emails sent have been requested.  Sending permission based emails increase sales, helping to strengthen the relationships you have already nurtured and developed with your clients and subscribers.  Permission based email turn curiosity into clients, and clients into repeat buyers.

•    Using email marketing software will automatically guide your email campaign in the right direction.  With permission based email marketing software, create flawless newsletters and email campaigns.  Our software will automatically manage: subscribes, unsubscribes, and bounces.

•    With autoresponders, you can control the type and frequency of every email campaign you are planning to send as well as thanking your prospects and clients for signing up, automatically.

•     How are your campaigns doing?  You cannot manage what you cannot track.  Tracking real-time behavioral patterns is essential.  Building successful campaigns rely solely on accurate and dependable tracking reports. With advanced tracking reports, you can adapt and adjust your offers, tactics and strategies, automatically boosting sales and profitability.

•    Creating a call to action that leads your recipients to a sign up page on your website or specific squeeze page, is a great way to increase your permission based opt-in list.  Make your form simple, clear, and easy to read.

•    Be Real – Be Relevant.  Nothing but nothing takes the place of relevant content.  Quality is always greater than quantity.  Your message should get to the point quickly.  Whether sending out announcements, promotions, sales, and testimonials, make sure you are not overwhelming them with graphics and unnecessary hype-filled chatter.

By: Email Campaigns
Posted: Oct 18, 2010

Do you dream big when it comes to business? Then you might as well try affiliate marketing techniques. This internet marketing technique helps you expand your business and maximize your clientele. The internet has become a heaven for people who are in search of affiliate marketing tips. There are many websites and portals on the internet where you can find information on affiliate marketing. All you need to do is identify the target audience of your website. Affiliate marketing is that aspect of marketing where you invest minimum capital and earn maximum profit online. As internet is a flexible forum, many people have started their micro business startups. Many have even started work from home businesses where they are able to chat with their clients and sell their products to online customers.

Affiliate marketing sometimes overlaps with internet marketing techniques such as Search engine marketing, Display advertising. An affiliate is actually business which represents and sells and promotes another companies products. For example if famous fast food Restaurant A wants to sell its products to a different region where in they do not have any market then it may approach other restaurants such as restaurant B and restaurant C in that region to sell its branded products on its behalf. Hence the affiliates here play a key role in bringing customers for the parent company.

The world’s biggest fast food chains and established retail chains have been able to reach worldwide mostly due to these cost effective marketing techniques. On the internet, these affiliates are mostly in the form of websites. These affiliate websites help in promoting the brand or product of a company and helps in pushing maximum number of web visitors to the company’s website. Hence it benefits both the brand owners as well as the affiliates involved in promoting that brand. Affiliate marketing through websites mostly done with the help of SEM and SEO techniques. Here they create suitable contact on affiliate websites in order to promote the brand of companies as well as its products and services.

Affiliate marketing content helps one website generate traffic for another website. This in turn helps the concerned company to convey its message indirectly to a larger target audience and maximize sale.

The beginner affiliate tips is a very cost effective method, and with the rise of internet users in the digital age, the need for business website has become even more eminent. This internet marketing technique is best way of expanding your business online. It is also not as time consuming as other marketing strategies. With this marketing technique, you will be able grow your business in record time and still rake in huge revenues for your company and business without investing much on your marketing campaigns. If you feel that this type of the marketing strategies will boost sales and popularity of your brand in the market, then you try surfing the internet to start affiliate marketing.

By: Affiliate Marketing
Posted: Feb 24, 2011

Online affiliate marketing began as a natural outgrowth of the popularity of “linking” to other sites. To put it simply, online affiliate marketing is a time tested strategy for making money online. It it is a network of online partners who refer business to your website.

It does not matter whether you have a website that sells a product or a website that has nothing to sell. But by adding online affiliate programs, you can not only add value to your website, but also maximize potential revenue.

Affiliate Programs, they say are the ideal way to make your website profitable.

Online affiliate programs began in the mid-1990,s and are currently a popular way to earn money online. In fact, research shows that affiliate marketing is the most cost-effective way to generate online sales. The concept of revenue sharing paying commission for referred business, predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.

The simplest way is to just introduce your visitors to the business opportunities, products and services that they need, and, “make money online” based on commissions from these sales. In fact, online affiliate marketing is a great work from home business available to anyone with a computer and a desire to run their own affiliate business.

However, there is a catch to “affiliate-marketing”. That is to say over 80% of affiliates never get a check over 0, the 15% get the occasional check and it is the remaining 5% who really get monthly checks of any real size from affiliate programs.

To get started in affiliate marketing, you must know the fundamentals. For which you’re going to need an “affiliate marketing guide” to teach you the basics. Once you’ve studied the basics and grasped the “idea”, I don’t think there is any looking back.

Now, there are dozens of books advertised on various websites, making claims of massive earnings that can be achieved easily. Most of these guides are resell rights of other peoples’ ideas which are marketed under the marketers’ name. Now, there will be a time you may be doing the same thing what they are doing now. This is a natural phase most people go through and isn’t that what affiliate marketing is all about!

I am not saying those books are bad. But there are better ones out there. There is The Affiliate Marketers Handbook and the Super Affiliate Handbook. Recently, another book that is drawing much attention, purely because of the number of sales it has generated in such a short time is the Rich Jerk. The name justifies his character. But his ideas seem to work and the book seems to be on top of the charts. Now what more can you say, but to commend on his niche idea.

You can also look for more such good product(s) and which are in high demand from the ClickBank Mall. Just type “affiliate marketing” or affilate marketing guides and you would get instant access to loads to such products. Provide them your credit card details and voila! you can instantly download the book of your choice.

Although most aaffiliate marketing books are good in their own way, what boils down is to how you implement the knowhow you gained from it PRACTICALLY. Although this may take up some some time, it is to be noted that no books nor any marketing courses can come anywhere close to pure practical experience. Some good affiliate guides are given below in the resources section.

Learning to market on the internet as an affiliate is only step one. If you’re serious about online affiliate marketing, then you have to plan and set up a basic affiliate campaign. This is a start to finish campaign to getting started in affiliate marketing. It explains keyword research, finding profitable partners and markets, information on affiliate networks, guides and resources to making money online.

There is relatively an easy way to make a parallel income during the early stages of your online afiliate marketing home business. It can also help you avoid the common mistakes most of us make during that period. I am quoting this from personal experience.

Try and get hold of a FREE Web Page, containing a few successful affiliate programs. You can use it and learn how to run an affiliate campaign, at the same time learning the ropes of affiliate marketing. If you market this well, the chances are you will make money. Your main and only job would be to advertise your FREE website, by submitting it to search engines, e-mail it to friends, colleagues and others. Within a month or so, you shall see some income trickling in.

You also get familiar with search engine marketing, affiliate networks and affiliate directories, and other areas of online affiliate marketing.

By: The Marketing Affiliater
Posted: Jan 18, 2009

EmailLabs (http://www.emaillabs.com), an email marketing solution from J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY), today introduced, “The R’s of Email Marketing Success,” a way of organizing and encompassing the full spectrum of email marketing best practices – so marketers can actually put them to use to improve ROI.

Like the three R’s (reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic) that revolutionized basic education, the R’s of Email Marketing Success represent necessary areas of mastery in email marketing. Each R – requested, relationships, reputation, received, rendering, relevance, reporting and resources – is important in its own right and subsumes several best practices.

EmailLabs launched the framework by publishing a white paper that focuses on the Relationships R and by introducing a suite of consulting services to help marketers learn and leverage best practices.

“Because email is such a high-ROI channel, many marketers don’t fully understand that poorly executed campaigns leave money on the table or damage their brands,” said Lena Waters, EmailLabs director of marketing. “We developed the R’s of Email Marketing Success to make them aware of these challenges, and more importantly, to help them be more efficient and competitive in the future.”

Despite email’s ubiquity, many marketers remain ill-informed of or ill-equipped to implement even the most widely disseminated tools of the trade. For example, a recent survey by the Email Experience Council revealed that fewer than 50 percent of marketers create emails that render appropriately.

The R’s of Email Marketing Success

Everything a marketing organization needs to improve the performance of its email marketing program is summed up in the R’s of Email Marketing Success:

•     Requested: a successful email program starts with a list of subscribers who requested to hear from the company.
•     Relationships: email marketing is about building long-term relationships with customers and prospects.
•     Reputation: ISPs use a company’s reputation to determine whether to deliver its messages to the inbox, the junk folder or not at all.
•     Received: if an email is not delivered to and received in the inbox, the chances of it being read are slim.
•     Rendering: those who design messages that render correctly avoid sending emails that many recipients can’t actually see.
•     Relevance: sending personalized and relevant content – at the right time and frequency – meets recipients’ needs and gives them a reason to read your emails.
•     Reporting: CEOs expect marketers to measure performance against business goals and report how email contributes to the success of the marketing mix.
•     Resources: marketing organizations often lack email-marketing resources, and need help building the right team or leveraging outside experts.

White Paper Covers Ins and Outs of “Relationships”

EmailLabs’ new white paper, “Relationships: A Guide to Acquiring & Retaining Email Subscribers,” (http://www.emaillabs.com/lp/email-marketing-relationships.html) is an in-depth look at how and why marketers should use the email channel to foster long-term connections. It is free to any marketer who signs up for a demo of EmailLabs’ email marketing software.

The white paper features practical articles on how to get permission, implement best-practice opt-in and opt-out processes, build and grow lists online and offline, and optimize existing lists.

As part of the R’s of Email Marketing Success, EmailLabs also developed 11 discrete, task-oriented consulting services to help marketers launch, manage and improve email marketing programs. Email Marketing Services range in scope from an over-the-phone evaluation of an existing program’s strengths and weaknesses, to in-person best-practices training sessions.

About EmailLabs

EmailLabs is a leading provider of high-performance email marketing solutions to agencies, publishers and marketing departments of middle-market and Global 2000 companies. The EmailLabs email marketing platform is provided as an ASP (Web-based) service, and is easily integrated with a company’s Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs’ application programming interface (API). For the fourth consecutive year, EmailLabs has been recognized by http://www.ASPnews.com as one of the Top 50 ASPs worldwide and as a Top 25 Service Provider for the Software-as-a Service (SaaS) and Business Service Provider category. The company provides email marketing solutions to more than 550 companies, including Nokia, Agilent, PalmSource and Jupitermedia. Headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., EmailLabs was founded in 1999 and is a marketing technology solution of J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY). For more information, visit http://www.EmailLabs.com.

Media Contacts:

Ken Greenberg

Edge Communications, Inc.

818.990.5001

Lena Waters

Director of Marketing, EmailLabs

650.388.3544

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Posted On: Menlo Park, Calif. July 17, 2007

Email Data Source (http://www.emaildatasource.com) the leading provider of email competitive analysis, released its study ranking the Email Brand Equity Index™ of marketers in the Automobile Manufacturing sector based on the quality and effectiveness of their email marketing efforts as well as the representation of their brands in third party emails.

Email Data Source monitors the email marketing campaigns of over 36,000 companies in 230 market sectors, providing data and analysis through its core product, Email Analyst ™.

The Email Brand Equity Index™ is determined by compiling historical data on email marketing messages and measuring a combination of factors including the emails’ perceived effectiveness in driving website traffic and the quality of the delivered email.

Email Brand Equity Rankings- Automobile Manufacturing Sector

1) Dodge dodge.com

2) Infiniti infiniti.com

3) Ford fordvehicles.com

4) Saab saabusa.com

5) Land Rover landroverusa.com

6) Porsche porsche.com

7) Mini Cooper miniusa.com

Volvo volvocars.com

9) Scion scion.com

10)Audi audiusa.com

“We are pleased to provide marketers a way of measuring their brand equity across all email marketing channels which reflects how the typical consumer may perceive that brand in their inbox. Understanding how consumers see them as a whole–through in house marketing, as well as 3rd party newsletter sponsorships and affiliate marketing efforts–can help marketers improve their brand equity and their ROI. It has been shown that consumers respond more favorably to email marketing efforts based on positive past email experience. The Email Brand Equity Index™ is the first score that reflects a 360 degree view of email marketing,” said Bill McCloskey, Email Data Source, Co-Founder and Chairman.

About Email Data Source, Inc.

Based in New York City, Email Data Source collects, analyzes, organizes and archives millions of marketing messages, providing competitive intelligence and analytics to the email marketing community. The company has provided email marketing data as well as actionable insights and the intelligence behind them since 2003. Email Analyst™ , the company’s core product, monitors the world of email marketing for advertising agencies, brand marketers, direct marketers and their affiliates and vendors. For more information please visit: http://www.emaildatasource.com

Contact:     

Michelle Hayden

(646) 403-3387

michelle(at)emaildatasource.com

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Posted On: New York January 10, 2008