At webfaCeMEdia, we offer an email marketing service to businesses in Mississsauga or the Toronto GTA . Click here to find out more.

A lot of companies  are using email marketing to increase sales…..and it works!!  Besides improving your company image and your brand, think of some of the other benefits. You can use email marketing to remind a group about your offers while they are off your website. People usually need to see something a couple of times before they make up their mind to buy it. Email Marketing can help you accomplish that. You can use it to direct people to certain areas of your site for specific information or to other areas online for that matter.  You too can benefit from an internet marketing  or email campaign.

Almost all email marketing programs today will give you statistics to track which links on your message were clicked on, track how many emails were opened, how many failed to deliver and so on. These statistics will help you refine your message in subsequent email campaigns as you know exactly how many people followed through on your different “Calls to action” to click certain links. You can now refine your next message based on this. You can also include advertisements in your message about other products or services you may have or even cross offers from your affiliate and partner companies.

By sending carefully planned and designed messages which are all track-able, you will be collecting some unique feedback as to how your audience is reacting to your product or offer and to your message. Improving a product, service or marketing strategy is based heavily on feedback.
How do I get started in Email Marketing? First of all, you need to compile a mailing list if you don’t have one. You can do this in a lot of ways which are not covered in this article but one way to start is to compile all the email addresses you have collected or export your contacts from your email program.  You can even go through all your contact’s business cards and write everyone’s email address down. You will be sending your message to all the email recipients on this list.

Secondly, you need a newsletter template. A newsletter template is an html formatted layout that will contain your message. It is usually more effective to create one newsletter template and stick to it, than have to create a new and different one with every message. That choice is up to you. You can get a newsletter template created to match your brand by webfaCeMEdia. Click here to find out more
The next thing needed is the message itself. I’m sure I don’t need to stress the importance of planning this message carefully word for word because once you send it, all your mailing list recipients will be getting the message. Your message is the most important thing in an email marketing campaign. It is supposed to bring you business not turn your potential customers away. Some companies go as far as hiring a marketing company or a freelance writer to help create their message. Take your time with it. Remember it is better to send no message than to send the wrong message.

Lastly you need an email application to deploy your message. There are many applications and providers that will do this for you and deploy the message to your mailing list at the time of your choosing. webfaCeMEdia offers everything from newsletter template design to scheduling and deployment, we can even help you write your message and we are sure to provide you with accurate statistics so that you can see for yourself how successful your campaign was. Contact us to put email marketing to work for you and your business. We can help you launch a successful email campaign

Content Management Systems

Why do I need a Content Management System?

To update, add or remove content from your website.  Gone are the days of calling your web designer to update your homepage. Running a successful website requires a very “hands-on” approach. There are a lot of little tweaks and edits that website owners have to implement regularly to stay on top of their websites, search engines and their competition. It is almost virtually impossible for you to run your website effectively and achieve results if you have to “farm out” these changes. A good example is your website home page and the meta tags and meta descriptions that go along with it. Search engines index a website on average about once a month. If you are paying attention to your site visitor stats and your search engine placement (where your site falls in search results), you will find you have to make a number of word edits and refining to get your site ranked better and you will most likely want to make these edits before your site gets indexed again. Getting your webdesigner or webdesign company to make these edits is not very practical and could become rather costly. The solution to this is to have a Content Management System (CMS) in place and delegate the responsibility of managing your website thru the cms to someone in your organization.

Why do I need a Content Management System?

To change the design of your site without having to type in all your content again. A good Content Management System is usually flexible enough to have design (themes or templates) separated from content(text, pictures, images, videos). This allows you to change the whole look of your site or just a part of it, without a total redevelopment process and without losing any of your content. You could for example put up seasonal themes or time specific ads or graphics e.g. “Easter Special” and can remove or change these later after the time has passed. Without a Content Management System (CMS), this could be an expensive and tedious process and good luck getting those updates done right when you need it.

Companies in Mississauga, Toronto or the GTA should take advantage of webfaCeMEdia, our unique Content Management System puts you in control of your website, your content and your search engine placement. Upload video, music, documents and edit text all from the comfort of your own desk and without having to know any HTML or Flash Programming. webfaCeMEdia’s Content Management Systems, “Key Internet Tools” will prove a useful tool in keeping your website under your control and running up to speed. There are many other good reasons to have a CMS for your site. webfaCeMEdia is a multimedia and webdesign company in Mississauga serving the Toronto GTA. We can show you your options and equip you with the right set of tools.

Keeping in mind that your website has to do the basic job of the employee described in the previous post which are:

24hour Salesperson. Inform potentials about your service and/or product
Data Entry. Collect email addresses of potentials for your marketing use
Reception. Collect contact information and deliver them to you
Promoter. Let your target audience know that you or your service even exist
Compete with your competitors for online marketshare
Brand you, your service or your product
These points should be used as a checklist to make sure the candidate you have selected to develop your site has the expertise to deliver a site that will do those basic jobs. Some are harder to achieve than others. A good website should do all of them.

There are a lot of companies claiming to offer “affordable web design” and “creative design” and although they can come up with some really nice graphics and themes, they might lack the knowledge on how to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) the site properly or implement meta tags….things that are crucial to getting your site found in search engines. Always ask for references. A pretty portfolio is not enough.  Other things like updating the site for yourself through a Content Management System(cms) and being able to generate a email list are crucial. Another pitfall is getting caught in an expensive arrangement where  you have to keep paying someone to perform updates to your site on your behalf. Unless you really don’t wanna do it, there are cost effective alternatives by using a CMS.

In the real industry, there are designers and developers. Developers make everything look nice and sharp but the developers are the ones that program and make everything run smoothly in the background. Make sure you can get both types of expertise available to you as each takes years to master. It might be better to work with a team that has both types of dedicated experts.

Today’s websites now display all forms of multimedia such as video, audio e.t.c. Make sure your website has room for all these so you don’t have to spend again as your site grows. These are just a few things to keep in mind. Our recommended company for webdesign /website design/e-commerce development/email marketing/video or audio production in the Toronto GTA is webfaCeMEdia

Your Websites Core Responsibilities (beyond making your company look good):

24hour Salesperson. Inform potentials about your service and/or product
Data Entry. Collect email addresses of potentials for your marketing use
Reception. Collect contact information and deliver them to you
Promoter. Let your target audience know that you or your service even exist
Compete with your competitors for online marketshare
Brand you, your service or your product

You may or may not have such an employee. Let us assist and put them to work for you