Email and Mobile Marketing Blog

Like any other marketer & entrepreneur or should i say like all of you, I love to read blogs, articles, white papers etc.  Today I read an interesting and extremely relevant post ‘1o ways to advertise your business on facebook’ on Econsultancy. Who would not like this, beacause all of us are actively tweeting, posting updates on Facebook pages. Its not wrong to say being active on social network personally or professionally is the ‘IN’ thing.

Read it once then twice then thought of sharing this wonderful article with you all. You must have some of these implemented and add rest in your new social media strategy.

Below are the 10 take aways of the article

1. Create a Facebook Profile Page
2. Promote the page offsite on marketing materials like biz cards, brochures, shopping bags, outdoor etc.
3. Be different. Make your page interesting
4. Know what you want visitors to do.
5. Advertise on facebook paid ads.
6. Invest in a facebook App
7. Get Integrated. free flow of information from blog to facebook to Twitter.
8. Create, join and interact with relevant facebook groups
9. Reward your messenger. exclusive offers to followers and visitors who promote your brand or company
10. Measure. Use facebook analytics to know more about your visitors, page views etc.

Please read the complete article 10 ways to advertise your business on facebook

I’m an avid reader of econsultancy blogs, i like that they write short and relevant blogs pertaining to email marketing and other digital marketing topics. There latest blog is on how an email creative can affect the response rate and conversion rate. The small font size makes it difficult to read and an all image email will have low response rate as lots of email clients like Google / Yahoo block images by default thus a waste of email marketing dollars.

In the article Philip Storey shared email examples from EasyJet and ebuyer to make his point. I thought it will be nice to also share a piece of email creative that follows the email design beat practices like preferred font size 12px and the images are adding value to the email look but if they are blocked, the entire message of the email is still conveyed.  Please feel free to add your examples that are designed as per best practices.

Thanks for reading

Kriti Jaising

I was reading a blog post on econsultancy.com, and it dawned on me that how marketing has completely transformed totally changed in last couple of years from a Philip Kotler book of Marketing Management to 140 characters on a Mobile screen or twitter . I remember how we learnt to create a ‘Brand’, an aspiration for its customer, to be one proud buyer and consumer of that ‘brand’. Those day ‘brands’ use to only talk and communicate. But the rules of the game have changed, really changed. Email marketing came, then mobile and now social. Social media has completely changed the communication process in marketing and even in brand management.

Please read this great article on ‘The Transformation of Brand Management’. Today’s marketing and communication goes beyond offline and one way communication. Today consumers are asking questions and ‘Brands’ are answering them to engage them. Brands want to hear from its consumers, learn, adapt and change as per the requirement of their consumers and its happens in 140 letter count or less. Amazing a million dollar brand is managed on a platform that has zero marketing $ cost.

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mobile web

Was catching up on my Blog reading and found this gem of an article on the secret of marketing on duct tape marketing.   The Blog suggests that the secret to marketing is being there for your audience,  very similar to the character in the movie, who provides comfort to every one he meets.

The lessons we have learnt in online marketing especially in social media and email marketing are nothing far from that.  Both these channels go hand in hand to always “being there” for the customer.   Email is the channel sophisticated marketers leverage to drive the biggest return from their customers.  Now enter social media, which has its roots in crowdsourcing and product and service reviews that retail sites like Amazon.com have made popular over the years.

Both channels strive to engage and inform their audience, share useful content, build trust, and elicit feedback.

Nowadays any time a newsletter or promotional email is sent out, marketers immediately publish the same content or offer in social media channels. In fact most industry experts believe that the two channels are already holding hands and exchanging shy smiles across the dinner table: talk of marriage is in the air.

Yet there are questions that are being put asked about the content that is shared and the benefit that this integration is going to provide to an online marketing campaign.

At EkoBuzz we believe that social media and email marketing are channels very unlike other marketing channels,  the focus is on building relationships, being there for your customers and keeping these relationships for a very long time to come.

In fact in our summer release of our product, we are going to make publishing to both these channels seamless for our users. Stay tuned…

What do you think?

According to the latest report released on Adweek, Permission based Email Marketing is identified as the best digital channel both in terms of  performance and targeting the customer. The study was conducted in December’ 2009 in conjunction with the Direct Marketing Association E-mail Experience Council “and other media partners,” Some excerpts from the survey are :-

• E-mail and search regarded as the best digital channels that worked last year.
• 39% respondents rated permission based Email as the “strongest performed channel in 2009″
• “Reaching a target audience” was the main objective for the online efforts followed by “generating high-quality leads.
• “Clicks” is the prime action desired by most companies for their online efforts
• “Leveraging the  online video ” was the preferred experimental tool

Please read the complete survey on Adweek

I’ll look forward to sharing the latest industry surveys and studies with you all

Thanks

Dear readers, recently I was working on EkoBuzz marketing plan and was budgeting for the marketing conferences and exhibitions we want to participate and promote EkoBuzz in the calendar year 2010. I started looking and realized that there is no place or website that provides us this information, so I spent couple of hours on the web and researched some of the best and most sought after events in the field of marketing.  To make it convenient and save time of other marketers, below is the list I created. Hope to see you soon.

Kellogg’s Marketing Conference, Chicago

AD Age Digital Conference, New York

The Power Of eMarketing, San Fransisco

Interactive Marketing For  Small Business,  Chicago

Mobile Marketing Forum, New York

Social Media Conference, Los Angeles

Affiliate Summit  East  2010, New York

DMA 2010, San Fransisco

Internet Marketing Conference, New york

ADTECH, New York

Lets grow this list together

Thanks for reading

Add new tag, mobile marketing association, mobile marketing campaigns

Probably due to my endless wanderings in jbpm 4.3, I’ve ran into what seems to be a limitation that I haven’t encountered in jbpm 3.2.

I’ve described it in detail in jboss forum and tried to give a few attempts to answer it.

However, I don’t like any of my answers there:

• Dropping a constrain on a table is outright wrong
• Fudging jbpm code won’t survive any updates
• Providing my own implementation would’ve been an elegant attempt except for the fact that it was wrong - PVM was persistent in its preferences and insisted on talking to ExecutionImpl directly ignoring my subclass

It did seem that the problem would’ve been eliminated by doing a few minor changes to the ExecutionImpl class: that would’ve avoided the db constrain problem and eliminated an additional update issued against the table.

So I ended up by bringing ExecutionImpl.java into my project and doing the following:

• in #initializeProcessInstance method, removed a call to composeIds()
• in #save(), added a cal to composeIds() before dbSession.save()

The downside to it is composeId() being called twice for createExecution(), but I’ll worry about this later.

When I found out that jboss is on its way to BPMN as was announced in http://processdevelopments.blogspot.com/2010/01/jbpm-43-includes-bpmn-20.html, my first reaction was: “I’ve been contemplating about upgrading from 3.2 to 4.0 for the past few months. Now there’s a BPMN-compliant 4.3 release. Have to take my chance now or lose it forever.”

The ultimate goal was to port our existing jBPM 3.2-based code base to jBPM 4.0 and convert all process definitions from JPDL to BPMN.

But I had to start with something less ambitious. For example, setting up the sandbox: jbpm 4.3 libraries and examples, eclipse jbpm 4.3 plugin, signavio, and of course jbpm console.

To start, I patiently turned to 2 manuals: developer’s guide and user’s guide

Source and binary downloads later followed by failed ant and maven builds followed by futile local tunings. I had realized that there should be some pattern to this madness. It meant to acknowledge to myself that I was a mere novice of jBPM, put the developer’s guide aside, and focus on the user’s guide as a single source of truth.

That was one of the wisest technical decisions I made.

I didn’t mind another Eclipse and another instance of jBoss since those that I had were configured and tuned for the existing jBPM 3.2  and jdk 1.5-based code base. I also decided that I will address the requirement of installing jBPM schema in DB2 database a little later.

Downloading binaries from http://sourceforge.net/projects/jbpm/files/ and confirming that I do have required supporting software, I happily proceeded to

cd  ${jbpm.home}/install 

ant demo.setup.jboss

to only watch ant miserably fail to download jboss installation archive.

The cause and solution were obvious: I had to tune ant to drill through a firewall mounted between me and the free internet world. Following ant instructions and getting the values from my firefox’s proxy settings

 set ANT_OPTS -Dhttp.proxyHost=[host] -Dhttp.proxyPort=[port]
 ant demo.setup.jboss

began to look promising.   But not for long…

Once again, ant had miserably failed. This time the successfully installed jboss,  failed to start due to the jnp socket error - port 1098 is in use.   Running netstat -ao didn’t reveal any ports remotely resembling the culprit 1098.   Killing all java processes running on my box didn’t make any difference.   I decided to do it hard way and change the port

from %jboss-home%, executed
          findstr /s /m /c:"1098" *.xml

it brought me a few files back including

%jboss-home%\server\default\conf\bootstrap.bindings.xml

Since that was the only file under “default” server, changing the port there from 1098 to 1298 made a trick. There was no need to run the entire setup again, so once again,

ant install.jbpm.into.jboss

began to look promising. And once again, not for long… This time, the jboss failed with

java.sql.SQLException: socket creation error

The old trail of tweaking jboss config looked stale. Feeling like my brain wheels are squeaking with effort, I turned to the HyperSQL DB documentation. Luckily, it stroke me relatively quickly that on the contrary from the ancient jboss 4.2 that I’ve been using for the project, jboss 5.0, or at least that distribution that was brought and installed by ant, doesn’t seem to start HSQL server as part of its startup. Found and started

hsqldb-server\start-hsqldb-manager.bat
ant create.jbpm.schema

Finally, ant behaved as advertised.

Choosing not to use packaged ant tasks to stop/start jboss,

cd %jboss_home%\bin
run.cmd

And voila! jBoss was up and running. I was able to access the jBPM console and Signavio web editor.

After diligently following instructions on setting up the graphical designer for eclipse, the sandbox was complete.

The time was to figure out

1. Change jBoss config to start HSQL along with jBoss startup
2. Use of Signavio, just for fun
3. Migrate old-style JPDL to new-stlye JPDL to BPMN
4. Deploy process definitions
5. Use admin console
6. Move the schema to DB2
7. Extract java-implemented rools into drools and plugging them into process definitions

To be continued…

db2, jboss, jbpm, jpdl, setup, workflow

‘Give them the power to decide’. Yes we are talking about customers. Since social media marketing has gained momentum relationships, feedbacks, communities, forums have become the buzzwords to acquire customers, retain them and to build relationships with them.

The power is shifting from marketers to customers. Customers are looking out and searching for products and services they want and they are analyzing the offering, comparing and making an effort to decide what’s best for them. Therefore marketers role has been redefined, besides creating and selling products and services also put out all the relevant information at the relevant places where prospects are reaching for them.  Marketing is ‘CONVERSATIONS’ today. 

Some companies are actively repackaging their offerings / services to be there and better serve their customers. For example EkoBuzz, the email and mobile marketing company has upgraded their solution functionality.  Here are EkoBuzz’s latest enhancements for this week.  EkoBuzz also plans to release several other improvements this month. 

1.     Enhanced Email template editor and Image browser

2.     Ability to save emails as templates for use in future campaigns

3.     Full support for bounced multipart mime emails

4.     The “from”

  field can be set globally for all campaigns or updated for each campaign before campaign launch.

5.     Ability to choose EkoBuzz email templates as well as user created templates

6.     Several improvements to the user interface

This is a perfect example of conversations, talking to customers, listening and making changes / improvements to better serve them.

EkoBuzz is offering a free trial. visit www.ekobuzz.com for more details. Try the self service email and mobile marketing platform and provide your valuable feedback.

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email benchmark survey 2009, email marketing, mobile marketing, mobile marketing campaigns

Half year of 2009 has gone by. Market conditions are almost same as 2008, employment rate is at an all time high but the good news is small businesses are propagating. The simple logic is unemployed people turning into entrepreneurs and therefore the small businesses are growing.

We all agree small businesses presently have low or no marketing budgets, i have put together a list of the must do online marketing tactics that are high time and low cost intensive. These tactics will empower you to promote your business, create awareness, drive traffic to your website, generate lead and build credibility.       

The must do online tactics for 2009 are

1.   Blogging

2.   Microblogging (Twitter) 

3.   Search engine optimization 

4.   Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) 

5.   Email Marketing 

6.   Social media monitoring & outreach 

7.   Pay per click 

8.   Blogger relations 

9.   Video marketing 

10.  Social media advertising 

Integrate these must do online marketing tactics in your marketing plan to achieve your marketing goals and get most out of your marketing dollars

Please feel free to add more tactics to the list. 

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