Science is key to email marketing success
In the past few years the travel industry has formed such a close relationship with the internet that travel web sites became the equivalent to operators shop fronts.
They achieved this by keeping pace with the high speed world of e-commerce and offering customers the possibility of booking their travel with just a click of their mouse. The industry adapted to the internet business model very quickly and is now reaping the returns from this.
Travel site nets £5.7m from VCs
Fast growing social travel site WAYN has raised £5.7m in a funding round led by Esprit Capital Partners.
The move has also seen co-founder of Lastminute.com Brent Hoberman, one of the investors, becoming the site's non-executive chairman.
Winning the Bidding War on Google Adwords
You can win a short-term bidding battle on paid search networks like Google Adwords by being smarter than your competitor. But you may not be able to win the longer-term war – that may be out of your control.
Quality-based bidding systems help with bidding wars since there is less transparency on prices bid and they give alternative ways for you to win.
So for quality-based networks, your position will be boosted if you follow any or all of the following techniques...
New paid search guide for client teams and agencies
We've just published our mega-comprehensive Paid Search Marketing (PPC) Best Practice Guide, which is going to help a lot of you to finesse your PPC strategies.
Understanding different types of keyphrases for PPC success
The majority of search queries consist of more than word - over the past decade searchers have gradually increased the amount of words per query, from 1.2 in 1998 to 3.3 in 2006.
Partly, this is because there is more noise to cut through on search engines like Google and Yahoo. But it is also about savvier searchers, finessing their query to return the most relevant results.
If you are running paid search marketing campaigns you need to understand how search queries indicate propensity to convert, and customer value.
Figuring this out can make a big difference to your return on investment from PPC campaigns...
Email Q&A's From The Floor At ECMOD
Last week, I moderated an interactive seminar on email marketing at ECMOD, the home shopping and catalogue event. At the end of each session, we discussed the presentations and the attendees asked any questions they had on email marketing.
Accessibility - are 'trustmarks' the answer?
Accessibility group Segala’s recently-launched partner programme has been adopted by a number of agencies in recent weeks, which can now award ‘trustmarks’ to accessible websites.
Opinion - Search paths to success
By Andrew Hood, Lynchpin Managing Director
The concept of keyword success is hardly new. The growth of search marketing has, arguably, been fuelled by the ability to track the sales delivered by individual clicks, conversion rates and keyword return on investment.
Tips on B2B email newsletter content
Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports has published some useful tips on creating quality content for B2B email newsletters.
Mark has eight years' experience in writing various newsletters and his article contains 31 tips in total: 10 on managing your content, plus another 21 to give you ideas for your newsletter’s content.
Video-sharing website Travelistic launches for travellers
Internet startup Travelistic.com - which aims to be the YouTube for travellers - launched yesterday, headed up by one-time CEO and president of MTVi.
Travelistic combines user-generated video with professionally produced programming, some of which is exclusive. The self-funded company itself plans to move into content creation, with a travel-themed 'video podcast' in the offing.
Diversion Media built the website using Ruby on Rails, harnessing the Google Maps API in the process to make it easy for users to browse videos by location, in a visual way. Users can also search for videos by tags.
All in all it looks pretty good. We spoke to CEO Nicholas Butterworth to find out a bit more...
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
