Online Advertising with Email Marketing: Free and Low Cost Solutions
Part of any marketer’s online advertising toolkit, email marketing can be a great way to target niche audiences and understand one’s return on investment (ROI). In an article today in the Wall Street Journal, “Selling Software” by Jeanette Borzo, Ms. Borzo offers tips on a few companies doing it “right” for small business owners. This list includes:
- Market2Lead, Inc. - Geoff Rego, Vikash Chauhan and Sundeep Parsa have created a strong set of tools including Market2Lead Bronze Edition for small business.
- VTrenz, Inc. - Vtrenz offers ‘iMarketing Automation’ to small business. William Schnabel and Brian Gramer’s North Dakota-based company also provides instructive white papers - such library of white papers available on Information Week.
- Icenetra, Inc. - The four member executive team of Craig Nelson, Craig Dembeck, Michael Wilkes and Mark Tassel bring ‘Icentera Enterprise Edition’.
- Genius.com, Inc. - David Thomson and Robert Seidel’s company has created ‘SalesGenius‘ which recalls the integration of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SFA (Sales Force Automation) provided by industry leader Salesforce.com.
- Eloqua Corp. -Founded in part by Steven Woods, their current CTO, this Toronto company makes a product called “Eloqua Express” targeting small business with functionality as well as efficient pricing.
Still, even these products can be too expensive for the small publisher looking to expand beyond the lists they are able to generate on their own. What to do? You may want to try these three, free resources:
- Marketing Sherpa is a good place to start for email marketing advice. Their recent Email Marketing Summit in Miami this month produced a great summary on the latest trends and - if you missed it - you can still read detailed coverage on the conference from Christian Busch’s blog and Datran Media’s blog.For email marketing tips, web publishers would be advised to sign up for Marketing Sherpa’s monthly newsletter which often contains email case studies from companies such as TicketsNow.com. Mark Hodes, SVP, Customer Marketing at TicketsNow.com gives an insightful look at his recent campaigns this month.
- Adotas is another great resource for small business online marketers. Their recent article entitled “Email Marketing Edicts” by Kai MacMahon, Online Marketing Director of Digitaria. Ironically, Adotas is another place to sign up for an email newsletter to receive helpful information on email marketing tactics and trends.
- Finally, MediaPost is another hub for email articles such as Keith McCracken’s recent “Bland Email A Cop Out.” Daily updates come ‘pouring’ out of MediaPost so make sure to sign up for their email subscriptions on online marketing, too.
The tips you can harvest from these resources may add up to enough email marketing knowledge to bring the necessary ROI you should demand for any campaign - which fits well with small business owners who are looking to make every dollar count.
-- Tiffany Sumner
Sphere It