What are you Thankful for this Holiday?

 

Now is the perfect time to take a closer look at your business and be
thankful for the successes you’ve made throughout the year. Although
it may have been rough this year, the Thanksgiving Holiday is a time
for thought and reflection on your positive experiences.

This Thanksgiving, be sure to take a moment to give your
thanks  and appreciation to your company’s as well as
personal achievements.

At Gail’s Graphic Designs, we have a lot to be thankful for
and this holiday season, we would like to share our
Thanksgiving Day gratitude with you.

May today and all your tomorrows be blessed
with a rich harvest of prosperity, peace
and happiness.

6 Ways to Spruce-Up Your Brand

1. Press Releases
   Press releases as part of a marketing program can be a powerful lead generator for your business. So announce a product or service. Duct Tape Marketing offers a free online press release creator. Once it produces your nicely formatted press release, you can send it out by using an online press service such as PRWeb.
2. Corporate Website
   A good website designer already knows how to code their website’s HTML so that it will present the same no matter what browser your visitors are using (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Mac or Windows). But search engines like Google don’t care what your website looks like; they care that they can easily sift through your code and images to find the actual searchable text in the content on your website. They also can’t index graphic images or Flash elements, so keep that in mind when designing your website. If you’re home page is just one big Flash graphic, you’re not helping your search results at all.
3. Research
   Know where you are today by conducting quantitative research with your target audience, Benchmark your most important audiences annually and your less important audiences every three years. Put it on your marketing schedule.
4. Marketing Plan
   A marketing plan will assist you in defining your business mission and values, competitors, financial and non-financial goals, as well as provide the opportunity to assess your strengths and weaknesses. A marketing calendar allows you to not only budget for campaigns, but execute and monitor their progress as well.
5. Email Marketing Template
   Excite and thrill your current and potential customers, by sending a professionally designed email message. Display your logo right in the inbox. With a template, your email appears more professional and can draw attention with nicely designed graphics that not only look great, but also promote your business.
6. Postcard
   Update current or former customers about what your business is up to. If you have a new product or service that you are promoting, no one will know about it unless you inform them of your updates. A branded postcard is an excellent way to show off your identity and bring in more business by making sure your clients know of your new ideas. Not only will a postcard enforce your branded identity, it can be an affordable sales and promotional tool.

Good Promotion or Tired Trick?

I saw this on AOL Shopping. 10 weeks of sweepstakes to help you with all your holiday shopping! They are giving away the hottest holiday gifts of the year! There will be a new sweepstakes every Monday from now through January 4, 2010. Readers are urged to come back every week for a chance to win a new prize!

Good ploy to drive sales or unnecessary giveaways to people that shop anyway? Does this type of giveaway have an impact on consumers who are used to ridiculous black Friday deals?

What does your small business do in terms of freebies and giveaways?

Click To Download Images…Arghh!

I met a young executive at a conference last month who had already begun her e-mail marketing initiatives. As she was fine tuning her campaign her team had one question. Below was my response to her. I hope you will find it useful as well. As always, I encourage you to share information with my readers. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment.

Question
Do you find that often when sending HTML e-mail campaigns, depending on the e-mail service provider, that people have to click to download the pictures (red x)?

Answer
Unfortunately you as the sender of the e-mail do not have control of the download issue. That is actually a setting in Outlook. It is activated or deactivated by the individual user. You can however educate your e-mail distribution list on how to activate the auto download of images as most of them do not know how. Read Email Safe Send Instructions>>

Incorporating the tip below can increase your chances of eliminating the red x issue. But as I said before, the recipient is the one who ultimately decides if they want to enable images automatically or not.

Tip: Improperly referencing your images can cause them to appear broken when you send your message—the dreaded red x. To insure the image is referenced correctly it must appear as, img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com….” rather than, img src=”/images/picture.jpg”. Alt tags are another important part of your images. The new security features on almost every e-mail client these days disables images automatically. Having alt tags in place allow your reader to identify the image and determine if it is safe to enable.