According to Merriam-Webster, motive is a noun defined as “something (as a need or desire) that causes a person to act.” Everything—and I mean everything—we do in life is dictated by motive, from dragging our butts out of bed in the morning to putting that pint of Ben & Jerry’s back in the freezer without polishing it off. And while the need or desire behind any action may differ between individuals, one thing remains the same: without it, we’d do nothing.

What’s the difference between an ultra-marathoner and a man who spends his weekends on the couch? The answer is motive. The first wants to test his limits, pushing his endurance to the breaking point and then beyond. The latter does not. How about a CEO and a long-term mid-level manager? Again, motive is the answer. You don’t become a Chief Executive Officer without the desire to do what it takes to make it to the top. Long-term mid-level managers, on the other hand, are often satisfied with the status quo.

Motive dictates your business marketing approach—or lack thereof—as well. If you want to reach as many prospects as possible and increase sales, you may choose to use a variety of tools to do so, from email marketing to Google Adwords to social media. If your desire is to coast along, doing little until sales dry up, then find yourself without any money in your pocket and wonder why, I would venture to say you had no motivation to ensure you had enough money in your pocket and dictated your own future. In the first case, your motive dictates actions that will lead you to success—and in the second, to your eventual downfall.

Let’s assume you fall into the first group. The fact that you’re reading our blog, leads me to believe you have at least some interest in exploring new ways to reach prospects and customers. Email is certainly an effective one. According to one recent survey, 66 percent of respondents reported that their email campaigns deliver an “excellent” or “good” return on investment. Eight percent of their businesses earn more than half their sales through email marketing channels.

More sales is an excellent motive for adding email to your marketing mix. Use that desire as fuel for the following actions:

1. Start collecting email addresses. Add an email newsletter sign-up to your website. Ask customers to opt in to communications when they make a purchase. Put those addresses in a database, whether that means customer relationship management software or a good old-fashioned spreadsheet. It sounds like work, but it’s worth the effort. Check out Calculating the Value of Your Customer Database if you don’t believe me. Without this information, your email marketing efforts are dead in the water.

2. Get to know your customers. If you don’t know the people who buy from you now, how can you expect to identify those who will purchase your product or service in the future? Now that you have their email addresses, consider surveying your current clients to gather pertinent information. Include questions that will assist you in identifying specific criteria to enable you to target them with custom tailored content. Make sure you store all of this information with your customers data record.

3. Enlist a managed email marketing service.  Planning, creating, broadcasting and tracking email campaigns is time consuming work that requires expertise for maximum success. Find a reputable managed email marketing company who can help you with everything from strategy to email validation to conversion studies. Once you provide them with your database, they can help you determine the types of email content that will best resonate with the customers who make up your list.

4. Broaden your scope. Now that you’ve perfected your approach on your current clients, you can expand your efforts to include prospects. A professional third party email marketing company can use your current customer demographics to help you select the proper email list rental of prospects who will also likely be interested in your products or services. Reach out to them regularly and watch your business grow.

What will your motive dictate today? Will you do something beneficial for your business or nothing at all? Success, failure, excellence, mediocrity—the choice is ultimately up to you.

There are some companies who claim to be able to fix or correct an invalid email address. In this article I am going to discuss why this is a terrible idea and why you should NEVER have a company try and correct an invalid or undeliverable email address.

If you have an email list of customers or individuals who have signed up on your website and you haven’t mailed to them in a while, you should have the email list cleaned and validated. This should be your first step and the best insurance you have that you are sending your email campaign to a list of valid and deliverable email addresses.

The problem with companies who claim to be able to correct, fix or update an invalid or undeliverable email address is you cannot be 100% sure that the correction will be valid or accurate. This will cause you more problems, because now you could be sending to a person who did not optin to your email list. Email correction is no more than a guessing game.

Let’s look at some examples:

If joe@gmial.com is not valid and an undeliverable email address, you could assume that the correct email address is joe@gmail.com, but this causes a host of other possible issues. The first problem is that gmial.com is a valid domain. Just because you think that it should be gmail.com does not mean it is gmail.com.

If you get a signup and the email address is sam@mesothelioma.co. You might think it should be sam@mesothelioma.com but in fact, Mesothelioma.co is an actual domain and it sold in September 2010 for $76,000.

If you have an invalid email address of johnsmit@aol.com, you might assume the person forgot the “h” in Smith. Again, how would you know the person’s name is not John Smit versus John Smith.

There are also the companies who claim that they can correct an old email address and provide you an updated and new email for the person who changed it. Now if every single person who ever changed their personal email address went to a central database and updated it with their old and new email addresses, I could see this working, but that is not the case. After giving this a great deal of thought, I am not even sure how a company could make a claim to be able to update an old email address to a new email address that replaced the old one. Considering most people change their personal email address due to too much spam, trying to get away from someone who is annoying them or they want to start fresh. Therefore it is logical to assume that these people would not consider publishing this information, because it would defeat the purpose of changing their email address as well as becoming a haven for spammers to get fresh email addresses and follow them.

So now that we have discussed all of the reasons why you should never try and guess what someone’s new email address is, by using a company who claims to be able to do this for you, let’s look at how you can better collect emails on your website and ensure they are formatted correctly. You have a few options when it comes to this. The simplest option would be to add some code to ensure the syntax and format of the email address is correct.

Below is the basic explanation of validating that the email address format is correct.

joe @ aol .com – You would validate that the email address has all of the components and they are formatted correctly to be compliant.  Here is how it breaks down. The local part of an address (before the @ sign), the domain part (after the @ sign). You would also check to confirm that there aren’t any invalid characters and the email address is RFC Compliant.

Other options would be to require the person signing up to enter their email address twice or use a double optin process to send the person signing up an email to confirm that their email is valid and that they actually signed up on your website.

If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you’re a business owner. And if you haven’t spent the past two decades under a rock, you may even have a website. But what has it done for you lately? If you answered “Nothing,” then it’s time to focus on fixing your website and marketing it better. Choose not to and you’ll miss out on some of the 273,785,413 North American internet users (according to Internet World Stats) online today. The majority of these users are probably not finding your website and most likely never will. All you need is a tiny percentage of these online users to find your website, and you’ll be golden. Once they do, you better be sure that your site is going to keep them there until they find what they came looking for, sign up as a lead or make a purchase. Of course, to do this successfully, time and time again, will require a common sense approach.

Evaluate Your Design

Is your website ugly as sin? Is it full of wonky code, poorly formatted text and blurry or skewed images? Does it take forever to load? If your site does more to drive visitors away than draw them in, you have a problem. No matter how well you implement and execute a marketing plan, it is bound to fail. Don’t invest in something that’s not working—take the time and fix it.

The best websites have layouts that are intuitive, making it easy for customers to find what they need. They incorporate colors and imagery that enhance the company’s brand. And the code—what’s going on behind the scenes—is clean, pristine and functional. While we’re at it, the design should be responsive as well. This means you’ve had it developed to interface with desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and mobile phones. According to a 2012 TechCrunch survey, mobile devices are now the dominant Internet platform.

Move on to Content

Your website may rival the Sistine Chapel in beauty, but if the content isn’t there, it’s still worthless. Consider the reasons customers surf and end up on your site. Some want to learn more about your business, while others are interested in making a purchase or enlisting your services. Still others are searching for information only you can provide. If they don’t find what they need, you’re in trouble—they’ll leave without saying a word.

Common sense dictates investing in quality content, not filler or gobbledygook. This means writing copy that is unique, relevant, informative, useful and easy to read. If this isn’t your strong suit, hire a professional. And while you should include a few keywords—those little gems Google uses to index your website in the search results—don’t overdo it. We’ll cover that later.

Play in Traffic

We’re not talking about cars in the street but about website visitors. There are several approaches you can take to attract them now that your design and content is up to snuff. A blog is one of the best ways to add the metaphorical meat today’s info-hungry consumers love. But don’t publish crap. Every post needs to be unique, informative, insightful and if possible, entertaining—better yet, all three. If you wouldn’t want to read it, your customers won’t either.

Social media is another approach you can take—and one that is almost essential in this day and age. After all, your clients may be spending a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter. Americans spend 27 percent of their total time online on social networking sites and social media produces double the marketing leads of pay per click campaigns, direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows.

Don’t forget email marketing. It’s still a tried and true tool for connecting with prospects and retaining customers. Again, content is key, and you must avoid the common errors that kill an email campaign.

Don’t Give into the Dark Side

Sure, SEO is important. Some estimate search engines generate 40 percent of online traffic, but it’s not the end-all-be-all of website marketing. The tools outlined above can actually add a great deal to your bottom line. In fact, you should really check out this article from our blog, “Unmasking the BIG Secrets of SEO,” before you even begin to obsess about ranking techniques. Unfortunately, many of you won’t—and the resulting penalties will hurt your business in the process.

What are some of the things you shouldn’t do if you elect to focus on Search Engine Optimization? First, don’t stuff keywords into your content—including title tags and meta descriptions. Not only will you render it virtually unreadable and piss off website visitors, but you’ll also enrage the search engine gods.

Don’t try to hide text. While visitors won’t see that white on white copy at the bottom of your site, you can bet the search engines will—and it won’t make them happy. You should also avoid copying content from other websites. In this case, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. It is plagiarism, and Google will penalize you for it, even if the law does not.

Finally, don’t pay for links to your website.  Search engines hate this “black hat” practice. While Google looks at the number of links to your pages when determining rank, it also considers their quality. Link and article directories are always poor quality—the links they provide are as well. Don’t waste your time trying to be sneaky and think you’ll get one past the search engines, because you won’t and it will only hurt you in the long run.

Voltaire, the witty French philosopher and writer, once said, “Common sense is not so common.”

Spend just ten minutes examining the websites and marketing tactics of your not-so-good competitors and you’ll see he was correct in his assessment. Fortunately, you now know better—and your approach should prove it.

Putting on a zebra suit with your buddy and entering an area with freely roaming lions might be considered a bad idea. The decisions people make, in everyday life, can have more of an effect than you can sometimes imagine. You might not truly notice this in every day life, until you make one of those really bad decisions, where after you have fully committed, there is no way to pull out or change the inevitable. Making good decisions, especially when it comes to your business, takes time when considering all of the possible outcomes, scenarios and ramifications. Always take the time to fully vet your ideas and have a well thought out and planned directive.

Bad pizza may be better than no pizza at all, but we cannot say the same about email marketing. Use this marketing platform incorrectly and the consequences will be worse than a bad case of heartburn—it will do irreparable damage to your company’s reputation. Some poor practices will get you blacklisted; others may have you labeled a spammer. At best—and that’s a figurative best—you’ll piss off your customers. They won’t stop at unsubscribe; they’ll write your business off altogether. You’d be better off not marketing at all.

If you’re going to reach out to customers and prospects with email marketing, it’s essential to do it right. Consider these best practices that will keep you on the good side of your customer base, Internet service providers, email service providers, and the law.

Don’t Over Sell

Most businesses need to stop advertising and start listening to their customers’ wants and needs. While 20 percent discounts are nice, the people who buy from you also want to be entertained and enlightened. Consider sending them interesting and topical information, tips for getting the most out of your product, and life improving tidbits in addition to deals and special offers. A mix of communications keeps your marketing fresh—it also keeps your customers interested in your brand.

Don’t Over Send

Edge Research recently conducted a survey of small and mid-sized business marketing managers. They discovered that only 6 percent email their customer list daily. That’s a good thing—those yahoos are likely irritating their client base and losing sales as a result. Thirty-nine percent take a smarter approach, emailing their list at least once per week. At Email Answers, our clients, on average send email marketing newsletters, promotions and specials four to eight times per month. They may send a weekly newsletter followed up with a weekly special or promotion. Remember, too much of anything is not a good thing.

Avoid the Filter

According to Return Path, 10 to 20 percent of sent emails never make it to their destination. Spam filters are the biggest culprit, grabbing communications before they reach your customer’s inbox. To keep your emails out of the junk folder, experts suggest avoiding using “spammy” words and phrases. You should also SAY NO TO ALL CAPS, and don’t over use exclamation points!!! Additionally, spam filters often consider red and green copy, single HTML images and sloppy HTML code to be spam indicators.

Always Get Permission

It’s sad but true. Sometimes customers will report legitimate businesses for spam abuse. However, that’s often the fault of the businesses themselves because they fail to ask permission first. If you want to stay off the blacklist, never email promotions to customers without first asking permission. Never email promotions to prospects you meet at a trade show without having them opt-in to your list. To be on the safe side, never email promotions to your mother without first getting permission.

Keep Your List Fresh

Many people change email addresses regularly. A hard bounce indicates that an email address is bad, dead and no longer in service. Every email you send to a bad email address is time and money wasted. Whether you’re mailing to your own customer base or a list you generated using lead generation techniques, consider using an email list cleaning and validation service. It will save you from expensive headaches in the long run.

Remember that Edge Research survey we mentioned earlier? Well, respondents also indicated that email marketing receives 15 percent of their marketing budget on average—more dollars than any other marketing tool. If your business sets aside $50,000 per year to woo clients, that’s $7,500—money wasted if you engage in bad email marketing. If you’re not going to follow basic email best practices, you’re better off spending your marketing dollars on bad pizza and Rolaids, or better yet, just opt for the zebra costume and don’t forget to grab your buddy to fill the head end, because you deserve to be the ass .

OK, OK, I know…. Why would any company, in their right mind, refer their paying customers to a competitor?

Without understanding the reasoning, I can definitely understand why the majority of people would initially think it’s stupid, makes no sense and is the dumbest business decision that they have ever heard.

As an ESP (Email Service Provider), why would Email Answers refer our customers to other ESPs?

To fully understand why we would refer our customers to our competitors, you will first need to understand what we do and the services we provide. Email Answers offers many service that all revolve around email marketing. We are an Enterprise ESP, Email Publisher, Email Marketing Agency, Managed Email Marketing Service Provider and provide Email List Cleaning and Validation Services.

Since eList Manager, which is our Enterprise Email Marketing Platform is primarily used by large marketing companies, Fortune 1000 and lead generation companies, it would not be the right fit for a company who has an email list of 5,000 to 100,000 records and isn’t marketing to their database on a constant basis.  Since a large portion of our business is email list cleaning and validation, we are constantly speaking to customers who place orders on our website, for this service, who either have problems with their current ESP or are just starting to send email marketing campaigns to their customer base.

Some of these customers are either having a problem or not happy with their current ESP, due to the customer service they are receiving or email platform they are currently using. Since a large percentage of our customers, who have their email list cleaned and validated, wouldn’t be a good fit for our eList Manager Platform, due to their list size or marketing plan, we refer them to ESPs we feel would be the best fit for their needs. We can be unbiased in our recommendations, because we do not get paid for these referrals or receive a commission from the ESPs we refer our customers too. We provide these ESP referrals to assist our customers in making a good decision and so they don’t make the mistake of choosing the wrong ESP to work with.

Sometimes it’s not about making money, but more about providing a service above and beyond what our customer expects. We strive to build ongoing business relationships by providing an extraordinary customer service experience.  This is the reason that a large percentage of our new business is generated by referrals from our existing customers.  This is also evidenced by what our customers think of the service we provide, as seen in our Aggregated Survey Reviews.

On an average monthly basis, we refer 50-70 of our email validation customers to other trusted and vetted ESPs. We have found, as a byproduct of our referrals, we now have these ESPs referring their customers to us, who are in need of having their email list scrubbed and validated.

With any successful business, you need to look at the long term and not think about short term results. Building long lasting relationships with your customers will benefit you more than you realize down the road. Don’t work for today, work to build a future for tomorrow.

Since its 2008 release, Google Chrome has been steadily gaining popularity and gaining an increasing market share among internet browsers. The browser upholds Google’s reputation of innovation and industry dominance, proving to be the go-to browser for the masses. Chrome’s appeal lies largely in its simplicity and speed, while surpassing the competition in both. Below you will find a wealth of Chrome’s useful features and functions.

1. Search by site

In the Chrome address bar (sometimes called the “omnibox”), type ‘site:’ followed by your keywords to restrict a search to a particular website. For example; site: emailanswers.com will bring you to all of the indexed pages for emailanswers.com. If you add a specific search term at the end of the site search, ie. site:emailanswers.com email validation, this will search only emailanswers.com for the keyword email validation.

2. Browse files

Chrome offers a simplistic file explorer — try typing ‘C:’ into the address bar and click Enter to browse your hard drive.

3. Check memory usage

Enter ‘chrome://memory’ into the address bar to see where all of your RAM is going. Try ‘chrome://chrome-urls’ to see the other diagnostic shortcuts that are available.

4. Rearrange apps

Click and drag an app on the Apps page to change its position – drag to the far right to create a new page of apps.

5. Manage handlers

Visit Content settings (under Privacy on the Settings page), then click ‘Manage handlers’ to change the applications used to handle email and calendar links inside Chrome. 6. Privately view any web page

6. View webpage privately or incognito

Like most browsers, Chrome has an incognito mode that disables history logging. Open up an incognito window whenever you want to quickly check how a site,  such as your Facebook page or Google+ profile looks to someone who isn’t signed in as you. If you’re using Windows, Control+Shift+N opens a new incognito window.

7. Disabling spellcheck

If you don’t like Chrome correcting you on your spelling, you can disable the feature under the “languages” heading on the advanced settings screen.

8. Switch between Google accounts

Use the ‘Add new user’ button on the Settings page to sign in using another Google Account. You can then quickly switch between them by clicking on the user icon in the top-left corner.

9. Reopen a tab closed by accident

If you’ve just closed a tab you didn’t mean to, right-click on the tab bar and choose Reopen closed tab to bring it back.

10. Highlight to search

Highlight a word or phrase on any webpage and then right-click and you’ll find an option to search the highlighted word or phrase in Google search, which will open in a new tab.

11. Find text in a web page

Press Ctrl+F at the same time and type your text in the newly open find box to find keywords in a page. Matches will be highlighted in yellow.

12. Zoom In

Use the Ctrl button in conjunction with your mouse’s scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

13. The address bar is a calculator

Type a calculation into the address bar to see the result in the suggestions without even hitting Enter.

14. Stay in sync

Sync some, all or none of the following by signing into Chrome with your Google account: apps, bookmarks, extensions, auto-fill data, passwords, open tabs, search bar history, themes and settings.

15. Analyze web pages

Right-click on a web page and choose ‘Inspect element’ to see the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other resources it’s made up from.

16. Go further back

Click and hold on the back button to see a list of recently visited pages for the current tab.

17. Change the theme

Like Gmail, Chrome comes with a range of official and unofficial themes. To change the theme,  click ‘Get themes’ on the Settings page to browse the selection.

18. Delete and wipe out everything

Clear everything in Chrome’s memory by hitting Ctrl+Shift+Del, ticking all of the boxes (from history to cookies), selecting ‘the beginning of time’ as the timespan and clicking ‘Clear browsing data’.

19. Enlarge text

If you can’t quite make out the text on your screen, you can increase the default text size via Settings > Web content > Font size.

20. Change History

Head to chrome://chrome/history and you can remove specific pages from your browsing record via the check boxes and the ‘Remove selected items’ button.

21. Edit most visited sites

If there’s a thumbnail on the ‘Most visited sites’ page you no longer want to see, click the cross in the top right-hand corner of the image to replace it with the next most visited site in Chrome’s list.

22. Change Chrome Version

As well as the stable version, Chrome is available in three additional versions, which get increasingly more cutting edge and less stable. You can choose from the Beta, Dev and Canary. Search for Chrome Release Channels to try out a new version and switch between them.

23. View background tasks

Chrome is powerful enough to have its own task manager. Press Shift+Esc to see what’s running in the background (typically extensions and offline caching tools), alongside your open tabs, and how much CPU time and memory space each one is taking up.

24. Pin tabs

Pinned tabs will compress along to the left-hand side of the screen, take up less room and in some cases (e.g. Twitter), they glow if there’s an update to the page. They also keep their places whenever you start up Chrome in the future. Right-click on a tab title to access the pin tab option.

25. Go offline

Keep emailing even when your online connection is down with Offline Gmail from the Chrome Web Store. Google promises more offline apps are on the way.

The answer is simple, money!

Spammers assume they can take shortcuts and send unsolicited email to entice people with money scams, get rich quick schemes, Viagra offers, and just about anything else you can imagine to get ahold of your money. There is often financial incentive for these spammers to send this garbage out to the masses.  If you’ve ever received an email from a Nigerian Prince or the late General Mumimbo’s wife, which I assume most of us now have,  asking you to help them get the millions of dollars out of their country, you know where I am  coming from. All they need you to do is provide your bank account information to store their millions and they’ll cut you in for a share. Now if you think about this for a moment, you might think to yourself, who would be stupid enough to fall for this old scam?  Now think about how many people these spammers need to fall for this scam to make it worthwhile for them. If your answer is anything other than “1”, you’re not on the same page as the rest of us.

Let’s do the math.

If a spammer sends out 10 million spam emails and gets 1 moron to send them money, their probably well ahead of the cost it took to send out those millions of emails. According to the FBI, these online scams cost Americans $485 million a year. The Internet Crime Complaint Center annual report said the number of complaints about online fraud rose 3.4 percent in 2012 to 314,252. Even though these figures are posted by a government authority, they are still low and not accurate due to the fact that a large percentage of people who get scammed never come forward to file a complaint because they are too embarrassed. These scams often result in both monetary and emotional distress. On average, each victim reported a loss of approximately $8,900.

Consequences

In 2008, an Oregon woman, Janella Spears, lost $400,000 to a Nigerian advance-fee fraud scam, after an email told her she had inherited money from her long-lost grandfather. Her curiosity was piqued because she actually had a grandfather whom her family had lost touch with, and whose initials matched those given in the email. Spears sent hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of more than two years, despite her family, bank staff and law enforcement officials all urging her to stop.

Conclusion

Spammers will never disappear or stop trying to deliver their scam emails into your inbox. They will be around as long as email is a technology people use to communicate. Spammers will continue to send junk and scam type emails as long as there are gullible and ignorant people who will buy what they are promoting or continue to send them money due to their own greed and stupidity.

Back in the 1800s, Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, extensive traveler and avid beard enthusiast, coined the term “natural selection.” Science has since accepted it as one of the mechanisms of evolution whereby nature kills off the dumbest of critters while the smartest (Galapagos finches who invest in all-natural beak enhancements, perhaps) survive.

But unlike animals, who just do what animals do and let the evolutionary chips fall where they may, people do a lot of stupid stuff. Thanks to the glory of the Internet, there are even websites where you can read and watch it all. Take for example the Darwin Awards. Spend a few minutes there and you may think twice before riding without a helmet, spray-painting your face gold, or spot welding a gas tanker. However, these imprudent tales will not deter you from royally screwing up your marketing.

Consider the following mistakes we’ve deemed the stupidest—and learn how to avoid them.

1. Believing “More” is Always “Better”

If you have more money than Carlos Slim, who is the richest man in the world, then by all means spend your marketing dollars on high-priced television, radio and print media ads. Why not, you have plenty of cash to burn. You’ll feel cool. Your Call of Duty buddies will think you’re cool. But the rest of us will think your not that cool because your wasting your money. In the majority of cases, success is not about spending more—it’s about spending smarter.

Whether you’re running a mom and pop shop or a Fortune 500 company, you can best access today’s diverse audiences through highly targeted digital marketing campaigns. From web-based ads to email marketing campaigns, these tools are effective, affordable and Darwin approved.

2. Pulling the Lever

Marketing is not like playing a slot machine in Vegas. There’s a lot more to it than dropping in quarters and pulling a lever. If you think you can invest a few bucks, send one email or place one ad, and then sit back with your proverbial bucket ready for a deluge of winnings, you’re not the sharpest tool in Darwin’s shed.

Successful marketing requires planning and development, careful implementation, consistency, repetition and constant change. A well crafted strategy is essential. And that strategy can’t be managed like a bad case of diarrhea. If it sounds like too much to handle, use the brains your mama gave you and outsource your campaign to a managed email marketing service company.

3. Failing to Measure

Every man has measured how tall he is at one time or another—even though most women will tell you that size is not important. It has nothing to do with your height and little to do with attraction. If genetics provided you with an average or even less than average height, natural selection will not lead to the eventual extinction of your family line.

However, failing to measure the results of your marketing efforts could damage your business. Make sure you have a plan in place to track the number of responses and actual sales any advertisement generates. Compare approaches and you can avoid wasting marketing dollars on duds.

4. Cutting the Budget

The experts keep telling us that the economy is improving. Unemployment is holding steady. Home prices are increasing, and men are buying new underwear. However, we understand that many small businesses are still feeling the pinch of the recessions slow recovery. Unfortunately, when executives tighten their belts, they often slash marketing budgets.

In reality, marketing is the last place any business should cut back—unless they want to go the way of the dodo. When cash flow is slow, you need to reach out to new prospects and retain current customers more than ever. Remember, digital marketing, such as an email campaign with guaranteed opens, allows you to spend even the tiniest budget more intelligently.

5. Falling for the Con

The floundering economy has given birth to more than the Octomom, Kate Gosselin and Michelle Duggar combined—though rather than babies, it has squeezed thousands of kicking and screaming consultants out of its clown car. You can now find these “professionals” everywhere, proclaiming their sales and marketing prowess with all the finesse of a “Buy Here-Pay Here” used car salesman.

Sure, you might find that some may actually know what they are doing, but fall for the con of one who doesn’t and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. Always lay out clear expectations regarding costs, timelines and results. Check references and ask about the quality and reliability of delivered work. When in doubt, choose a full service marketing company with a proven track record.

Darwin published his theory of evolution in the 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. Recognized as a preeminent scientist and one of history’s most influential men, England gave him a nobleman’s funeral in 1882 and buried him near Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. Today, his name lives on in conjunction with acts of the utmost stupidity in the Darwin Awards. Don’t let your marketing become an award nominee or winner.

In marketing, we are constantly in pursuit of what makes a message or an idea “stick” in the marketplace. What is it that causes a consumer to not only look, but to be entrenched in the message of an advertisement plastered on a billboard, in a shopping mall, on your computer screen or in your morning read of the New York Times?

Let’s face it – we are all distracted in this action-packed, media dominated, technology-driven world we live in today. So how can we redirect the attention from the hustle and bustle of everyday life back on the featured content of our new promotion?

In an effort to discern what makes an advertisement “extraordinary,” let’s feast our eyes on Nikon’s new advertisement of its S60 camera that has the capability to detect up to 12 different faces in a scene.

What do you see? (You can click to enlarge the image.)

At first, you may be taken aback by what may seem like a provocative, even erotic scene of two young girls in nothing more than skimpy undergarments. Now, if you can ignore the obvious and take a closer look, do you see the individual faces in the windows of the apartment complex across the street? Beyond this, what about the young man behind the curtain? He’s not so easy to spot upon a fleeting glance, but realization of his existence in the ad truly conveys the product messaging in little to no words at all.

So why exactly has this ad gone viral and contributed to a steady sales stream? 

It’s no surprise that humans are visual creatures. Creating a visually-stimulating advertisement is perhaps the central theme in any marketing strategy. We see this with the rise of social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram that rely on photo-sharing capabilities to appeal to a mass target audience. Advertisements that incorporate visual and interactive components often add life to the body copy, and the visual element is what often drives the user to read the copy in the first place.

With the Nikon advertisement, we are a witness to a marriage of visual stimulation and relevant product messaging. In marketing, you are selling way more than the product itself. Rather, you are selling a feeling and an emotional response driven by the purchase of the product. More exciting and arousing than a high-end digital camera is the “packaging” and strategic advertising that surround a well-made Nikon product. This product packaging is something that draws you in and makes you think a little bit. It tells a story without revealing the ending. It makes you cast your eyes on the advertisement time and time again, and leaves you wanting more so that you are never full or satiated.

The fact that a camera can detect up to 12 faces sounds pretty cool, but it’s not enough to communicate this product feature using boring copy. When Nikon advertises the camera’s functionality in an attention-grabbing and creative manner, suddenly the audience is listening. When this advertisement goes viral and is shared by like-minded individuals, Nikon will reap the benefits of free advertising, and the product will end up selling itself. It’s worth the initial investment in creativity in the ad when you consider how it can shape brand perception and generate engagement and memorability of your product offering for months or even years down the road. If you want to read more about the power of viral marketing, read “How to Get More Exposure Than a New Kim Kardashian Sex Tape.”

Let’s shift gears and discuss how this topic applies to one of the highest revenue-generating digital platforms available - email marketing. One of the most common mistakes that occur with any email marketing campaign is the lack of effort and investment into the creative process. Many clients will slap together a few images and a few copy points into what they attempt to call an email advertisement. When they achieve lackluster results at best, they blame the failure of their campaign on the email marking platform used for sending or the list that it was sent to. Rather, if proper attention and strategic thinking were involved in designing an effective email creative, the results would speak for themselves. An aesthetically pleasing, emotionally-gripping advertisement with an effective layout and deliberate call to action is the cornerstone of success in any email marketing campaign.

Go against the grain of traditional, “rational” advertising and aim to create something that strikes an emotional chord with the viewer. Whether your ad is humorous, scandalous, dramatic, or all of the above, it needs to generate a strong emotional response. Why? When it comes to decision-making, feelings and emotions overpower cognitive thinking. You don’t need to be a big company to make a strong, lasting impression.