RP Summit LLC and Tom Kozlowski Marketing

Clickatell Intros Text Messaging Service For SMBs

tomk — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:23:16 +0000

The company is pushing SMS as the best channel for small businesses to deliver urgent customer communications to a broad wireless audience.

By Kevin Casey ,

InformationWeek
February 28, 2011 01:02 PM

Clickatell on Monday announced a new text messaging service designed for small businesses looking to use short message service (SMS) as a customer communications channel.

TechWeb’s David Berlind noticed that his Tweetdeck was scrolling so fast during Verizon Wireless’ iPhone announcement that he couldn’t even read the entries as they went by. Here’s what it looked like.

Founded in 2000, Clickatell has 13,000 customers of all sizes. The company has rolled out its Personalized Priority Messaging (PPM) platform in a new package specifically designed for small business use. Plans start at $24.95 per month, which includes up to 1,000 outbound text messages; inbound messages are free. The newest service is geared for the smaller end of the SMB market, de Villiers said, targeting businesses with between one and 35 employees that send up to 10,000 text messages per month. Clickatell offers higher-cost plans that include features such as dedicated short codes for companies with larger message volumes.

“[SMBs] are recognizing the fact that not only do their kids and teenagers use SMS more than they do email nowadays, they themselves use text messaging more often and respond to those more frequently than perhaps a very noisy, cluttered inbox or other technologies,” de Villiers said. He gave as other usage examples: Medical offices looking to mitigate no-show revenue loss; Internet businesses such as a used-vehicle site that offers new inventory alerts via text; and real estate businesses that deploy SMS to manage leads.

de Villiers, who identified Sybase 365, Syniverse, and Open Market among Clickatell’s key competitors, said SMS is particularly well-suited to highly targeted, time-sensitive messages. “Text messaging is not intended to be used as a mass send-and-forget technology. Certainly, folks don’t like to receive an SMS message if it’s spam,” he said, noting that the costs associated with send SMS have helped keep the channel relatively free of junk messages relative to email and other communications channels.

Given that, it would appear that text messaging is better-suited to customer service and communications with current clients, rather than marketing to prospects.

“There is a very big opportunity to serve existing customers through priority messaging,” de Villiers said. But the CEO sees customer acquisition applications, too — but with an interesting caveat. “You can absolutely look at collecting mobile numbers and asking people to sign up through SMS. But that’s assuming that you’re targeting an audience beyond the smartphone data plan audience.”

de Villiers said that while smartphone sales are booming, that audience is limited to higher-end consumers who can afford the devices — and the monthly data plans required to use them. So while an iPhone app might be a good way to target the upper crust, de Villiers said, text messaging is better able to capture the broad market of wireless users. “You are excluding several million consumers by focusing only on mobile email or mobile social networking,” de Villiers said.

E-com increase

tomk — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:57:00 +0000

E-commerce, social networking usage, online video viewing and online and mobile advertising all increased dramatically in 2010 after 2 years of depressed spending, according to ComScore’s annual whitepaper, U.S. Digital Year in Review. The year saw Facebook emerge as the #4 most visited web property, increasing its U.S. audience by 38% to 153.9 million visitors as of Dec. 2010.
Total U.S. e-commerce spending reached $227.6 billion in 2010, up 9% y/y with travel spending increasing by 6% to $85.2 billion and retail spending up 10% to $142.5 billion
9 out of every 10 U.S. internet users now visit a social networking site in a month, averaging more than 4 hours/month. Nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook
The U.S. core search market grew 12% overall in 2010, driven by a 4% increase in unique searchers and an 8% increase in the number of search queries per searcher
U.S. Internet users received a total of 4.9 trillion display ads in 2010 with display ad impressions growing 23% in Dec. 2010 vs. Dec. 2009. Social networking sites now account for more than one-third of all display ad impressions
The average American spent more than 14 hours watching online video in Dec. 2010 (up 12% y/y) and streamed a record 201 videos (an 8% increase)

Bing Surges

tomk — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:54:25 +0000

Usage of Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to slowly cut into Google’s commanding market share, according to panel-based web analytics firm Experian Hitwise, with Bing receiving 27.44% of web searches in Jan. when combined with partner Yahoo (up 6%), compared to 67.95% for Google (a decline of 2% from Dec. 2010.) Hitwise says Bing and Yahoo! Search achieved the highest success rates in Jan. – more than 81% of searches executed by Bing or Yahoo resulted in a visit to a website, compare to a success rate of 65%.

Which One is More Important – Product or Mailing List?

tomk — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:46:54 +0000

If you would ask this question, “Which one is more important – the mailing list or the product?” any savvy marketer would answer you, “The mailing list”.

Principally, any wise business person puts the importance of hungry demand (and not just any demand) in front of the product. In other words, there is no product if there is no demand! And a mailing list represents the demand or your business if you would like to call it.

If you frequent the Joint Venture forums and membership sites of any kind, you will find that product and service owners need mailing list owners more than the other way round. This is because the mailing list owners have the prospects that the other type of partner is looking for to sell to.

And if you are a mailing list owner, you do not have to necessarily make money from selling your own product. You can sell advertising space or craft a Joint Venture with product owners in return of commissions, recurring or not.

Most of the biggest success web businesses on the Internet today often establish the mailing list (or subscribers) first before the product. One fine example is Friendster.com.

Friendster.com, in the nutshell, is a website that connects friends and potential friends from around the world through a free membership access.

While Friendster.com does not make money from the number of members who join the site, the business makes money from selling advertising space and partnering with other big time merchants and businesses, owing to the established number of members Friendster.com has recruited.

This business is perfect example that demonstrates why every business should establish a need or demand before the product itself, and why you should do the same, whether you run a friends site or not.

By: Tom Kozlowski

Mailing List for Affiliate Marketers

tomk — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:30:52 +0000

If you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make a comfortable living from referring your prospects to other people’s product or service for decent commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list.

Building your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list.

Granted, that most affiliates, as in more than 90 percent of them, are not making money from affiliate programs, but this often results from the same amount of effort focused on least effective methods.

While having your own mailing list is, by a long mile, not the only effective affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive.

This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other affiliate marketing methods imaginable.

In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.

By: Tom Kozlowski

Making Money from Selling Advertising Space on your Ezine

tomk — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:30:25 +0000

If you would observe the company that delivers the daily paper to your doorstep for a business case study, you will come to learn that the newspaper publisher hires reporters, writers and other important staff to create the contents and deliver the papers to their readers.

In addition to the above mention, the publisher has to invest regularly in heavy duty machineries and tons of papers in printing tons of newspapers on a daily basis.

And in order to ensure that the newspapers are delivered on time, the publisher appoints agents at every part of the covered territory.

So, how does the newspaper company make money? It is obvious that selling a copy of the papers at less than a dollar would not even be able to even fund the operations.

The answer? Selling advertising spaces! You have definitely seen lots of advertisements in the newspaper. The publisher simply sells advertising space in the papers to advertisers who want to leverage their advertising efforts on the paper’s high readership.

On the same analogy, you can make money the exact way from your newsletter: simply by selling advertising space to prospective advertisers!

If your mailing list size exceeds 1,000 (5,000 is recommended) subscribers and beyond, you can start selling advertising space for say, $10.00 per sponsor ad.

In this manner, you turn every issue you send out to your subscribers into a profit-pulling device. And since there is virtually no end to the stream of advertisers as products, services and businesses are cropping every single day in every industry imaginable, so are your money making opportunities.

By: Tom Kozlowski

What is a “eZine” and why should you publish one?

tomk — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:02:43 +0000

On the Internet, it is very possible to make money without selling any product. One way of doing so is through starting your own eZine, also known as an electronic newsletter. They are great tools fpr SEO and internet marketing.

In a nutshell, you send out your eZine issues on a periodical basis to your subscribers. The good part is that you have a flexible choice in automating the process of sending out your eZine issues for you or manually sending them on a periodical basis.

As an eZine publisher, not only can you easily achieve the benefits a conventional newsletter publisher enjoys without having to chop down several trees in the process, you can easily and conveniently spread your marketing influence and expertise to your base of subscribers from the shoes of an ordinary individual.

In other words, you do not have to invest in expensive printing equipment, brick and mortar business, and hiring staff just to run your own newsletter publication, resulting in a lot of time, money and effort saved.

Basically, all you need to start your own eZine are an auto responder and broadcast feature to go with, enabling you to reach out to your massive subscribers whom you can regard as your prospects, too.

All in all, if you do not have the commitments of creating your own product for sale, then publishing your own online newsletter can be one of the wisest decisions you will ever make, given the benefits of impressive marketing power and influence it can offer to you.
[Tom Kozlowski www.advertisingagenciesnj.com]

4 Crucial Things You Need To Do To Build your List Part 4

tomk — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 17:14:14 +0000

Many business build their lists and then believe that they can use that list to sell other products. That can be a very big mistake.

4) Keep a clean and private list. Never lose the trust of your customers that have entrusted you. If you provide your customers e-mails to others and they get spammed, many will unsubscribe to you. Remember, a good reputation will drive in more traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your customers.

4 Crucial Things You Need To Do To Build your List Part 3

tomk — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 23:06:23 +0000

Remember it take 8.4 contacts to get someone’s attention. “Wall Street Journal” ( I have no idea where they get the .4 from The point is, do right by your clients, and they’ll do right by you.

3) Provide good service and products. A return customer is more likely to bring in more business. Every now and then, a satisfied customer will recommend a business that they have had a good experience with . Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than any expensive ad. As your clientele roster grows so shall your list. With more members on the list, the more people will get to know about what you have new to offer.

4 Crucial Things You Need To Do To Build your List Part 2

tomk — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:05:41 +0000

This is where we pick up from part 1. Remember consistency it the key to all marketing.

2) As mentioned in the first tip, make your homepage very, very impressive. You need to have well written articles and descriptions of your site. Depending on what your site is all about, you need to capture your website visitor’s fancy. Make your site useful and very easy to use. Do not expect everyone to be tech savvy. Invest in having good programming in your site, make your graphics beautiful but don’t over do it.

Don’t waste your time making the homepage too overly large megabyte wise. Not all people have dedicated T1 connections, the faster your site gets loaded, the better. Go for a look that borders between simplicity and sophisticated knowledge.