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Online Holiday Marketing




Promowear Magazine, November/December 2007.

As the holiday season is approaching once again, now is the time to carefully plan holiday marketing campaigns. The big companies, armed with teams of marketing gurus, spend months planning each years holiday strategies. And although many of us in the imprinted sportswear and promotional product industries are without such a staff and budget, we do have the knowledge of our business, our target audience and the ability to use the Internet as a tool for success.

Enjoy this months column, good luck and Happy Holidays to everyone!

Darts WithThe Spambot




We all hate em'. Those pesky codes you have to enter in order to get an Internet form to go through. Usually they're an image with some distorted letters and numbers you can barely read. These things are in place to stop spambots from automatically sending their crap through the form processor.

I have been the victim of these spambots for quite a while now, and have simply refused to put my customers and web site visitors through the agony of distorted letters and numbers. But this week I finally had it. Filters werent doing the trick and those freakin' spambots were hitting my online forms several hundred times a day.

I was so fed up I considered purchasing all of their male enhancement products for an overdose so I could track them down and beat them within an inch of their lives with my newly acquired tree trunk sized male member.

So in order to calm down and address the problem creatively, the solution I installed randomly tells the user what their score is and asks them which double they need to aim at in order to take it out. Get it wrong and the message wont go through until you get it right!

FREE Holiday Embroidery Design




Happy Holidays to you and yours from Rags To Stitches Productions!

Holiday Embroidery Design

FREE!

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Heart of Texas Embroidery Design




Your heart is in the right place with this Heart of Texas Embroidery Design. Add lettering around the perimeter for customization or merge with other designs to create something original. This design turns out excellent on terry cloth as well!
  • 2.54" High X 2.93" Wide (Scalable +/- 10%)
  • 7,957 Stitches
  • 3 Colors

Heart of Texas Embroidery Design

Only $8.00!

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Texas Lettering Embroidery Design




On Earth As it Is in Texas. This design comes in two sizes for use on a full front or back, non-wearables and caps. Get creative and merge this with other designs to create some great products!

Delivered in two sizes:

  • 3.11" High X 7.34" Wide (Scalable +/- 10%)
  • 1.15" High X 3.20" Wide (Scalable +/- 10%)
  • 14,896 and 5,217 Stitches
  • 2 Colors

Texas Lettering Embroidery Design

Only $8.00!

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San Antonio Embroidery Design




I love San Antonio. In addition to being born there, every visit is full of celebration and the spirit of Texas. And don't even get me started on the glorious Mexican food! This San Antonio design not only runs great flat, but also on caps whether directly on the front or on the sides with a tubular cap frame.
  • 1.74" High X 3.75" Wide (Scalable +/- 10%)
  • 3,554 Stitches
  • 3 Colors

San Antonio Embroidery Design

Only $8.00!

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Texan American Embroidery Design




Proud to be a Texan, proud to be an American. The state in this design offers a blending effect that creates great results when choosing the right thread colors to compliment your substrate.
  • 2.72" High X 3.02" Wide (Scalable +/- 10%)
  • 10,426 Stitches
  • 7 Colors

Texan American Embroidery Design

Only $8.00!

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Fire Department Embroidery Design




The Maltese Cross is used throughout the Fire Service in the United States as a symbol of Honor, Courage, and Dedication. This design runs great on any material and leaves room for customization with your lettering program.

  • 1.98" High X 1.99" Wide (Scalable +/- 10%)
  • 5,909 Stitches
  • 2 Colors

Fire Department Embroidery Design

Only $5.00!

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EMail Marketing Made Easy




If you use email on a regular basis, you're probably already receiving E-Newsletters from some of the companies you do business with. And while there's a tremendous amount of variation out there regarding what constitutes an E-Newsletter (or "electronic newsletter" or "E-zine" or "email newsletter;" they're all the same thing), they do have certain elements in common.

First and foremost, E-Newsletters arrive in your inbox as email messages. The sending company writes the newsletter, drops it into a predetermined email format, and sends it to a list of people who receive it on the other end. There's a fair amount of technology that runs in the background to do this efficiently and effectively, but when you boil it all down, it's just an email sent to many people at once.

To dig a bit deeper, think of an E-Newsletter like an electronic magazine, with three principal pieces:

1. Content. The words themselves - what you write and how you write it.

2. Formatting and Layout. Like a magazine, an E-Newsletter has a consistent look from month to month for organizing and laying out the content. Fonts, graphics, sections, headings, links, etc., all come together to create the design and layout.

3. Delivery and List Management. Once the newsletter is assembled (content + layout), there needs to be a "machine" for sending it out to a predetermined list of people (your subscribers). The machine takes care of the logistics behind delivery. In addition to sending the newsletter out, that includes things like adding/removing names; managing bounced emails; sending automated messages to readers as they come on the list or make changes to their personal information; and collecting and reporting on data regarding reader behavior and preferences.

Taken together, these three elements make up an E-Newsletter.

Why publish an E-Newsletter?

"The cost of acquiring a new customer can be as much as 5 times the cost of keeping an old one." (source: Peppers and Rogers).

"A 5% increase in retention yields profit increases of 25 to 100 percent" (source: Bain and Co.)

"Permission e-mail campaigns are ten times more effective than direct mail campaigns." (source: IMT Strategies)

The results of this research and dozens of other studies add up to a simple conclusion: It's a lot more cost effective and profitable to grow your business by increasing revenue and referrals from existing customers, than it is to keep chasing strangers. If you've got a "house list" of business relationships, you've got an extremely valuable asset. An asset that a quality E-Newsletter is perfectly suited to take advantage of.

Specifically...

An E-Newsletter Increases Lead Generation And Cross Selling. As your newsletter arrives month after month, it keeps you top of mind with customers, prospects, partners and others, and provides an ongoing, low-key mechanism for highlighting your full range of products and services.

An E-Newsletter Increases Customer Lifetime Value. Competitors can buy their way into your market by matching your pricing, matching your products and even matching the look and feel of your company. What they can't buy are your relationships. Every newsletter that you send serves to solidify the connection between your company and your customers.

An E-Newsletter Provides A Low Cost, Instantaneous Channel For Sending Messages. Your database of email addresses gives you instant access to your customers and prospects. Once the machine is set up, in addition to sending an E-Newsletter, you can send alerts, advisories and messages as frequently as you wish.

An E-Newsletter Opens Up A Two-Way Dialogue With Customers And Prospects. E-Newsletters allow recipients to easily and immediately interact with you. Comments are made, information is requested, an exchange of ideas between you and your customers flows easily in both directions.

An E-Newsletter Hypercharges Your Existing Marketing Efforts. Your E-Newsletter doesn't compete with your web site, print newsletter or existing marketing materials. It leverages them. It creates a steady pulse and focus that ties your other marketing efforts together.

An E-Newsletter Provides Instant, Measurable Results. Advertising, sponsorships, and many other traditional marketing tactics offer few options for measuring the return on your investment. E-based tactics on the other hand, are instantly trackable. With each E-Newsletter you send, you'll know how many people opened it; how many links were clicked on; who clicked on which links; and more. Fact-based, real time metrics.

If you already send printed materials out to your contact list - whether as a print newsletter or in some other fashion - the most immediate and measurable benefit of switching to an electronic format is a savings in time, printing and mailing costs. With a variable cost per newsletter of nearly zero, you will never again have to weigh the benefits of printing more materials or agonize over whether or not person X is "worthy" of the cost of sending information.

What About SPAM and Privacy Concerns?

The hottest topic in email marketing today is SPAM. As corporations and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) work to control the amount of unsolicited email entering their systems, they may inadvertently filter out legitimate emails, including some E-Newsletters. In industry lingo, this type of error is known as a "false positive," and the result is that some emails sent to people who have requested them don't ever reach their destination.

But, let's put that into perspective. Even with SPAM's impact, a good E-Newsletter sent to your house list will still be opened by over 40% of the people it's sent to. Given typical response rates to traditional marketing tactics, that's as much as 40 times better than the percentage of people who read your newspaper ads; respond to your direct mail; or return your unsolicited phone calls.

The fact is, for the small business owner, an E-Newsletter represents the first time in history that we've ever been able to cost effectively communicate with our entire customer and prospect base over and over and over again. Not only that, but thanks to the inherently democratic nature of email (i.e. the big boys don't get any more space in the email inbox than the rest of us), an E-Newsletter gives us the opportunity to not just compete with, but outperform our much larger competitors for the attention of readers.

And so, while SPAM has certainly reduced some of the effectiveness of E-Newsletters in recent months, this remarkable tool is by no means past its prime.


How Much Time And Money Does It Require?

I hope that by now you're convinced of the value of an E-Newsletter for your business. The next logical question, of course, is how much does it cost in time and dollars?

The answer depends on a few things.

1. First of all, there's the content. The more you write by yourself from scratch - as opposed to compiling from other sources, or farming out to other writers - the more time it will take. Although it's less expensive to write original content, you'll want to assess whether you've got the resources in-house to put it all together each month.

2. Next, you'll want to consider design. For maximum effectiveness, your E-Newsletter should reflect your unique brand and style. While you can customize a standard template, your best results will be obtained by creating a look and feel that's just for you (i.e. using a professional designer).

3. Finally, there's monthly production: formatting the content and getting it out the door on a regular basis. Here too, you'll want to weigh the benefits of doing it yourself (less expensive) vs. hiring a firm such as mine to manage the details for you (less worry and error).

As a rule of thumb, if you do the work yourself, you should figure on two full days of work per newsletter - one day to develop the content; one day to manage the layout and delivery logistics. You should also count on the first newsletter taking an additional two or three days to develop the format and style.

Conclusion

Pound for pound, an E-Newsletter offers the small business owner an opportunity to reach out to customers and prospects in ways that were simply not possible just a few short years ago. Whether you do it yourself, farm out the entire process, or strike a balance in-between, this new tool is well worth adding to your repertoire.

Please check out Constant Contact to see how it can help you get started with an E-Newsletter. I have been using it and recommending it to anyone and everyone with an email marketing campaign.

The 30 Minute SEO Workout




Promowear Magazine, September 2007.

Many businesses without the benefit of an employee or staff to constantly monitor their web site, and the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tasks that go with it, tend to fall a bit behind in the race for online visibility. The Internet and search engines themselves are always moving and changing, and changing with them can be time consuming.

This months column introduces readers to a scheduled web site maintenance routine. Spending as little as thirty minutes each week, you too can stay on top of your web sites SEO.

Free Guide: OPTIMIZE ONLINE - How To Build Your Page Rank

This guide will teach you how to partner with reputable websites to bring up your page rank, find keywords to reach your market, and why blogging is important to double or triple your traffic in just weeks. Your website is only a few clicks away from mass exposure on the world wide web. Free!

Get Stumblin'




Promowear Magazine, July/August 2007.

This months column sheds light on the web site StumbleUpon, which allows users to discover and share websites of interest. As a result other web surfers with interests to similar topics will no doubt StumbleUpon the shared web sites and reviews.

Enjoy this months column and visit StumbleUpon to begin stumbling the sites - and your sites - that can capture the attention of your target market.

MySpace: The Final Frontier




Promowear Magazine, May/June 2007.

"Space... The final frontier..." To continue following up on my January/February column Opportunities For The New Year, welcome aboard the good ship Niche Marketing on its maiden voyage into MySpace.

Feel free to have a look at my Profile despite my Internet Marketing efforts being channeled through other areas of MySpace.

My Dart Shirts - Apparel for Dart Players




My Dart Shirts was born out of necessity in a way. I had recently started playing darts more often than just a casual game at home. Playing in a league and attending local tournaments, I had started looking for some casual dart shirts to wear to darts events. An Internet search left me little to choose from, and when discussing it with a friend he laughed and reminded me I've been in imprinted sportswear since 1996. "Make them yourself!".

Although my major role in imprinted sportswear had been embroidery, as a graphic artist since 1984 and having been introduced to all forms of apparel design over the years, taking advantage of the newer garment printing technologies was easy. My Dart Shirts enjoys top listings in the search engines and has grown to become one of the most popular sites for dart players to find shirts, gifts and more.

YouTube and You




Promowear Magazine, March/April 2007.

What if I told you web sites such as YouTube and Google Video receive 20 million visitors or more monthly, watching 100 million or more video clips a day? Well, it’s true, and by exploring these sites one could establish a comparison of sorts to channel surfing, or how much time Americans are spending online vs listening to radio or watching TV.

This months column takes a look into Internet Video and the marketing opportunities it provides.

Below I have embedded a playlist from my YouTube Channel. These simple clips generate a steady stream of dart players to my dart shirts web site from YouTube on a regular basis.

Opportunities For The New Year




Promowear Magazine, January/February 2007.

Once again a new year has arrived and the usual new marketing strategies, resolutions and goals that come with it are tasks at hand. For those entertaining the idea of starting an online presence this means having a clean slate to work with from the ground up. For those who already have a web site and existing online presence, it means looking for ways to improve its capabilities and expand to new levels of success.

They say hind sight is 20/20, so while last year seems like yesterday this months column takes a look at what 2006 brought to the table for online marketing ideas.