CarbonGraffiti - Email and Online Marketing

As I recently commented on Twitter, the Google Creative lab crew recently posted a shared slideshow showcasing
87 cool things that, from their perspective, was stuff ‘worth knowing about’. (more…)

Argos. Clearly doing well as the UK’s most popular ‘catalogue showroom retailing’ store in the UK. More than 700 stores, 130m customers and £4.3b in sales in 2008 isn’t bad. They also take 26% of their sales online, aided by an Argos catalogue found in 18m households across the country. Not bad for a chain who relies on a strictly ’self-serve’ philosophy that doubles as a business model… but they could do it so much better. (more…)

It’s not social media, or email marketing, or the family of acronyms that includes SEO, PPC, SEM, SMM, CPA, CPC, ATOS, or any others. It’s really quite simple – the most important thing you as a marketer will do in 2009 is analyze.
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Announced yesterday on their official AdWords blogspot that the algorithm used in determining a paid ad’s quality score is changing very soon. TechCrunch covered the same story today.

In a continual push for ‘bettering’ their services (including enhancements made to their content network), Google have said that 3 main components in AdWords are changing, in an effort to provide the advertiser with more complete, real-time information that impacts their quality score, and the ability to make it to the front page easier (at a higher cost, of course). In all cases, changes are clearly ‘win-win’ as advertisers get more flexibility and Google gets more money.
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A quick post to point out some very revealing and interesting data from ‘Think Eyetracking‘. After fitting 30 participants with what I assume to be the crazy Clockwork Orange-style headkit, the searchers viewed a Google SERP for the term ‘Oasis’.

Anyone who works in SEO or SEM… Your job just got harder.

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It’s safe to say that Wordpress is now officially more than your basic blogging platform. Often touted as a basic CMS (content management system), Wordpress offers SMB’s a great opportunity to get a professional-looking website up in minutes – allowing for easy creation, updating and editing of content with little to no technical knowledge.
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I’m not saying it’s bad, but if you (or the marketing department you work in) insist on calling your email marketing campaigns something like ‘e-shots’, ‘mail shots’, ‘mail blasts’ or anything else similar to being expelled by force from a cannon or gun, chances are you’re viewing email marketing the wrong way.
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A bit late on this one, but Google announced on Thursday (Aug 7th) that the content network has (finally) been upgraded to offer a better experience to users, and a better value for us publishers & advertisers.

In summary, Google’s enhancements are as follows:
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Lately I’ve noticed a rise in creative ways to use PPC for personal or corporate gain. Whereas I use PPC daily to market B2B or B2C products the ‘old-fashioned way’ – selecting and bidding on a keyword, using appropriate ad copy, and directing B2C traffic to a tracked landing page – savvy marketers seem to be going one better. Here are some top examples:

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Huge news from Adobe today – they have officially released optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo in an effort to enhance the search engine indexing of SWF files (the output file from a native Flash file, called an FLA – the SWF files are web-optimized and are what you view on a Flash-based website).

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