Contact details on Company websites

The European Court of Justice has ruled that Companies must provide a means of contact on their websites in addition to their postal and email addresses. A phone number or a contact form which is answered within 60 minutes, were deemed acceptable.

Building Email lists

Many people are put off doing B2B email lead generation campaigns because they don't know how to get the data. Here's a quick summary of your options:

1. Use your website to encourage visitors to sign up to receive your newsletters. Make sure that it’s easy to sign up and don’t ask for too much information. If you analyse your web stats using something like Webtrends it might be worth testing and fine-tuning the design of the sign-up process.

2. Buy a mailing list and then use a telemarketing team, temp or internal admin staff to phone up and ask for email addresses. I would advise recording the date you asked permission so that you can refer back if necessary.

3. Purchase/licence a B2B email list. The quality is very hit and miss but there are a few good suppliers out there. Check that you are getting the actual persons email address rather than a sales@, info@ etc., and also the licence conditions (it may range from single use to 12 months use etc). Don't be tempted by special offers on large lists. A small targeted campaign will achieve the best results. Ask how the list was compiled. Is the company credible - try doing a company background check or see if they are registered with the Direct Marketing Association. Expect a bounce rate of up to 20%

4. Whilst you’re talking to prospects or customers ask them if they’d like to receive a newsletter from yourselves. Explain they can opt-out at any time. Most people will say yes.

Online Business and Social Networking

Today I received an email from ecademy “Ecademy is 10 Years Old - your account has been upgraded!" I haven’t been a power user of ecademy since around 2004 and not sure if I can really be bothered to take advantage of the free upgrade.

It got me thinking. Why is it that we get bored of networking sites?

Friends Reunited, ecademy, bebo, myspace, LinkedIn, facebook…will we soon remember years by the social networking tool of the moment – “2007 – the summer of facebook love”.

Is it just the time it takes? We have a certain amount of work and personal “leisure” time. We like spending it on new shiny, cool, zeitgeisty things. Initially it is fun collecting contacts and exchanging news. Facebook has the right idea with constantly launching apps to keep us interested. But there’s a lot of rubbish spammy apps. And after 6 months even I am now finding scrabulous less fabulous.

From a business point of view, I spend more time these days reading good news sites and blogs and occasionally doing a bit of online learning/training. I’ve found LinkedIn great for keeping business contacts but I wouldn’t call it networking. I think I found ecademy great when I first went self employed and had time on my hands

…and then I got busy working.

Maybe we’re too busy whining about life in bloggs?

Technology for Marketing

Just got back from the Technology for Marketing 2008 show. I like to go each year and check out the latest technologies, trends and developments.

I had a good demo of huddle which is an online space for managing and sharing work with your teams. I quite often use googledocs and wiki's to share projects with my clients - not particularly secure and without any workflow features built in. In the next few weeks I'm going to have a huddle instead and see how I go...

I also reaquainted myself with webtrends as it has been a few years since I've taken a look. The reporting has improved with interactive dashboards.

I went to a Chartered Institute of Marketing session by Nick Baggott entitled Digital marketing- unleash your potential which was mostly about user behaviour and user generated content. I also watched the keynote session from Danny Meadows-Klue of Digital Strategy Consulting about relationship marketing for the Facebook generation. Lots to think about, especially how this translates to the B2B world.