It’s time to pay tribute to a powerful yet simple Internet marketing tactic that is often overlooked in favour of more “cool” options.
I am referring to the ‘lowly’ email signature file.
A signature (or SIG) file is a brief chunk of copy that is automatically appended to the footer of your outgoing email messages. Most email programs allow you to set this up in advance, and some allow you to easily choose and rotate between different SIG files.
If you work for yourself or a company, I strongly recommend that you – at the very least – include your name, title, company name, and contact info in your SIG file. (For those of you who are rolling your eyes at this ‘obvious’ suggestion, you’d be amazed how many people forget to include their phone number. Monitor your inbound email during the course of the next few days and you’ll see what I mean.) Even if you don’t have a Website, make sure that your email address is included as a clickable link.
Category: Bill Sweetman
Where are you going to be on Thursday, October 19 and Friday, October 20?
If you’re serious about Internet marketing, I hope you will join me and a few hundred other Internet marketing enthusiasts at the 9th Annual Digital Marketing Conference in Toronto, Canada.
As one of the members of the conference’s organizing committee, I’m pleased to announce that this year’s event has been expanded to two days. Plus we’re going to be holding it a suitably innovative venue, Kool Haus, located at 132 Queen’s Quay East.
There’s an established and long-standing process to developing and choosing names for new products. In fact, this is a business in and of itself, and it’s not unheard of for companies to pay tens of thousands of dollars to come up with the name for a new product.
Based on what my colleagues and I recently uncovered, I’d like to make the case for this money being spent on coming up with truly unique product names. Why do I believe this? It has to do with something that I’ve just named "The Spinbix Effect."
We’ve been working on a large and complex search engine optimization (SEO) project for a client that manufactures and markets lots of consumer widgets. For the purposes of this article, let’s pretend the client is "Acme." Each of Acme’s widgets has its own brand name. Some of the names are more generic and use words found in the dictionary, such as Acme Mosaic and Acme Hunter. Other brand names are completely unique words not found in the dictionary, such as Acme Spinbix and Acme Bunfob.
As part of our SEO project, we’ve been looking at inbound traffic to Acme’s Website from search engines. More particularly, we’ve been analyzing the keywords and phrases that are generating traffic for Acme. One of the most interesting patterns we observed was that products that have unique names (e.g., Acme Spinbix) generate higher search traffic (Website visitors) than products with generic names (e.g., Acme Mosaic).
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