CarbonGraffiti - Email and Online Marketing

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…)

With the increased fragmentation and proliferation of markets thanks to the Web2 explosion, knowing who and where your audience is has become a lot harder. So what can you do to better target your potential customers?
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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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For many of us, answering the question ‘What are you doing’ is analogous to checking our email – we do it several times a day and it’s become second nature.  But for every new social network we jump on, there are friends, families, and colleagues who will ask us ‘Why are you doing it?’

They’re questioning what drives and motivates us to open up our daily lives to anyone and everyone, when it’s possible that no one’s listening.   They can’t imagine opening a Twitter account and talking to an empty room, so why do we bother? (more…)

Ever notice how certain things you do at your day job seem to integrate themselves into your everday life? A perfect example is the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80-20 rule, the Longtail, the Zipf law or the Power Law. Whatever you know it as, it has become very well known to the internet industry due to the www’s ability to offer greater choice and inventory than previously possible in a brick and mortar store. For the sake of this article, I’ll be referring to the Pareto principle as the Longtail rule.
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Although website design is (in my opinion) one of the most hotly-contested environments on the web right now, most of the beautiful websites you see on various CSS galleries are single-service, offering either web design or web design/development by use of a graphical portfolio. Here I’ve rounded up the other folk – the SMBs or one-man teams offering multiple services centered around web marketing, including such ninja-like disciplines as PPC, SEO, email marketing, and of course effective web design.

So here are the top 25 websites that combine beautiful design with various web marketing services (not just web design).

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This is the third and final article in a series of three articles on Twitter.

So you’ve read about Twitter & Tipping points, what it’s for and who uses it… so now’s the time to start using Twitter to effectively market and promote your offering. The sky’s the limit for how you can integrate Twitter into your marketing, but here are few ideas of how to use Twitter and in what capacity:
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This is the second in a series of three articles on Twitter.

In the spirit of this marketing blog, this article will explore what Twitter is, what and who it’s for, and why you should start to use it as part of your ever-growing marketing mix.
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This is the first in a series of three articles on Twitter.

How do Twitter and Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point’ come together? If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that a tipping point is established when the momentum of a service, product or idea becomes so great that it reaches a type of critical mass, ultimately becoming a part of a mainstream society for any period of time.
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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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