Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’

Ratings and Reviews

Rating or Review sites are websites that allow you to vote on, rate or provide a review of products, web sites, services, companies, people, etc.

Why are ratings and reviews valuable? The use of ratings and reviews on your business website increases your customers trust in using your website and confidence in your brand. The ratings and reviews feature can help to establish a customer community giving your customers a way to interact with you. Your customer’s interactions and comments can be a reliable feedback mechanism to help you improve your product or service.The use of online ratings and reviews will reveal under-performing products and unexpected stars, thus giving you information and trends to use in your marketing. This is a highly measurable feedback mechanism that engages customers, gives them control, and gives you quantifiable results.

Tips:

• Get your product, service or store rated and reviewed (ratings service) on ratings sites. This also increases search engine rankings.
• Add Ratings and Reviews systems to your website.

Resources: Get rated

• Bazaarvoice – Bazaarvoice captures their opinions, questions, and stories to help organizations like yours gain sales, operational efficiencies, and – ultimately – real cultural change.
• Epinions – read and write reviews on millions of products and services
• BizRate – the BizRate consumer feedback network that collects millions of consumer reviews of stores and products each year.
• Rating System -Add Rating & Review and Q&A Solutions to your website, quickly and easily, without expensive software or custom programming.

Do you ever feel like marketing and entrepreneurship is a leap of faith? Many people think entrepreneurs are risk takers. But today, I’m really feeling like an eternal optimist. The keyword there is eternal. You can plan and plan and research and analyze and in the end, you just have to go for it and enjoy the ride, for better or worse. It’s kinda what I image skydiving to be. Of course, I see no sane reason to jump our of a perfectly good airplane, so I can just imagine the ride. As a skydiver, you plan, you take a course, you get trained, you test your equipment, and in the end, you have to jump. And then you free-fall down for a while and pray that the equipment is going to work, that you land in the correct spot, you don’t hit anything along the way, and oh, yeah, you pray you don’t crash. And some how through all that fear of failure (or praying for success) you enjoy the ecstasy of the moment, the wind blowing through your hair, the beauty of the earth beneath you.

If something goes wrong after the leap, you can sometimes self correct, change your course, or make changes to salvage the trip. However, in Skydiving, if you crash, odds are that you won’t get a chance to get back up again. That’s why I’m an entrepreneurial marketer and an eternal optimist. I take that leap of faith over-and-over-and-over again. And no matter what the results (win or lose), I get back up and do it again. And that’s what I call entrepreneurship.

In 30 minutes, a new internet company will launch to the world. I am grateful to have been in the right place at the right time more than once in my life. And it doesn’t matter whether we crash and burn or rise to the top. Lessons will be learned and it sure will be a wild ride! Actually, it will be a BLAST!

Oh, you can jump with me and enjoy the ride at…

http://my.blastoffnetwork.com/debzimmer

When you use an email marketing company to send out your ezine or newsletter, the company’s email marketing software does some verification to makes sure your ezine complies with the CAN-SPAM laws. But what if you don’t use a paid service? How do you keep your email newsletter compliant?

You can always check the FTC’s Spam site at http://www.ftc.gov/spam/ for the latest updates on legal regulations. If you are sending out email for commercial purposes, these are the main points to follow (excerpt taken from The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business):

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

Surveys

A survey is a means of collecting quantitative information about a group. It can be used to collect opinions or quantitative data. Surveys can be used in several ways.

Tips:

• Ask questions of your customers to engage them and start a dialog.
• Gather information on what your customers want.
• Identify the demographic you want to be talking with.
• Quantify feedback from your customers.
• Collect the opinion of your customer.

Resources: Surveys

• Zoomerang – The Leader in Online Surveys with Over 1 Million Satisfied Customers. Quickly and easily create online surveys to get the insights you need. You can build a survey in minutes with free access to over 100 professionally-designed online survey templates. Then, analyze and share your results by creating customized charts, posting them to your blog or website or just exporting your data to Excel, PowerPoint or a PDF.
• SurveyMonkey – Using just your web browser, create your survey with our intuitive survey editor.  Select from over a dozen types of questions (multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus, and more…).  Powerful options allow you to require answers to any question, control the flow with custom skip logic, and even randomize answer choices to eliminate bias.
• QuestionPro – QuestionPro is web based software for creating and distributing surveys. It consists of an intuitive wizard interface for creating survey questions, tools for distributing your survey via email or your website, and tools for analyzing and viewing your results. You simply build your survey and email it to a list of potential respondents. QuestionPro will take care collecting and recording the responses. Results are available in real time.
• PollDaddy – With your free account from PollDaddy you can create online surveys and polls for your website, blog and social network. Find out what your visitors are thinking today. Create your surveys and polls using our custom templates or create your own. Use our in-depth reporting engine to aggregate, print and export your results.
• Snap Surveys – With 27 years survey experience and thousands of users, Snap Surveys can supply survey software and research services for your specific market sector. Snap 9 is our user-friendly survey software for market research. Snap provides the tools you need to get your research done. Professional IT and research services for survey management and data processing from our in-house SurveyShop division.