The lighter side: Let’s party!

So you are planning a party for clients or friends. You’re a bit overwhelmed and could use some help in planning with a little bit of humor to lighten up your stress. Try evite.com. Top ten reasons you should use this site:

1. Your assistant has her own party to plan
2. So you won’t forget to invite your boss
3. So you will forget to invite your boss
4. Use their booze calculator to estimate your friends’ drinking habits
5. You’ll never run out of alcohol
6. It will help you remember to hide incriminating evidence
7. To make sure you know someone at the party
8. You can be the host(ess) with the most(est)
9. To make sure that you don’t lose the to-do list
10. To make sure that your significant other doesn’t lose the list

Make sure to hide the turkey when Nadine comes to the party. Cheers!

Top 15 email marketing design & content tips

1. Keep it simple and short
2. Let users know what the email is about
3. Insert low resolution graphics to capture their attention
4. Have a call-to-action
5. Personalize it
6. Your corporate identity should drive the look and feel
7. Use the same font family for all the copy and limit the use of bolds and italics to headers and proper names
8. Underscore links and make them in a different color.
9. Avoid too many colors. They tend to fight each other.
10. Emphasize call-to-action so users will focus on it
11. Emphasize other content sparingly
12. Offer useful information
13. Make the content relevant to the user and the subject in your email
14. Use the same newsletter design template for at least 4 months at a time to benefit from brand familiarity
15. Target your best leads, email to a select few to get a better response

Get more bang for your buck with email marketing

Namaro’s topic for the March blog is email marketing. We have done countless hours of research about on-line email marketing software and we narrowed down our final choice to verticalresponse.com.

1. The interface is user-friendly and intuitive
2. They offer design templates free of charge
3. You can create your own custom email design or modify their templates
4. You can personalize each email
5. You can work in code mode
6. One click content insertion
7. Preview everything in browser
8. Easily upload your database
9. Your database is reviewed for anti-spam approval
10. Your campaign is tested before you send it out
11. You set-up the launch date and time
12. One click to launch it
13. Once launched, you can monitor all sorts of stats like how many opened the email and what links they opened.
14. After the launch, you can edit your list and export it back to your computer.
15. You can sign up for free and they give you 25 free email credits
Send 25 email newsletters for free and see how it works for you
16. The cost per email is 1.5 cents!
17. For small companies, charging per email is cost effective

Let’s do some math:
At Namaro, not counting the research and strategic planning, it took us 1 day to gather the content for the subject of the newsletter, ½ day to apply our brand identity and custom create our newsletter template, a ½ day to layout the first newsletter, edit the content and finalize it, a few hours to check the list, test the newsletter and get approval to launch. We sent out 500 emails for $7.80 not including the email credits. This month we save on time since we can re-use the template we created for the first email campaign.

So with 4 days and $7.80 dollars we contacted 500 individuals—only two opted out. How cool is that?

Namaro Web Site Feedback

The web site feedback survey is now closed. Thank you for your participation.

Namaro Marketing Survey

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Top 10 Signs Your Website Isn’t Working

10. Your hair isn’t white in the company photo

9. You have background audio from your high school “rock” band

8. The text is so small a mouse couldn’t read it

7. Your doobie-smoking programmer hasn’t returned your phone call in a month

6. Your home page takes longer to load than Britney

5. You haven’t gotten a site-generated lead since before Bush was elected—the first time around

4. No one wants link up with you

3. It still reads “Under Construction”

2. Powerpoint had anything to do with the design

1. Your site is listed on www.webpagesthatsuck.com

iGoogle: Hidden Treasure

Surfing the net one night Nadine discovered iGoogle. A fantastic way to keep on top of your professional life, your personal interests, your travel plans, and possibly your sanity, iGoogle allows you to customize a web home page. There are thousands of gadgets—mini applications—to choose from and more coming every day. You can customize the header theme, I chose the beach scene.

As a courtesy for our blog readers, we’ve tailored an iGoogle site for people in the marketing industry that you can easily duplicate. Send us an email, we’ll forward the iGoogle setup files and you won’t have to do a thing. Or, follow these steps to set up the tabs yourself. 1. You need to be logged on in your browser with a google account (free) to save your settings. 2. When you log on to iGoogle for the first time, select only the News check box. 3. To create the Marketing and Personal tabs simply select the “Add a tab” button and type in the titles; uncheck the I’m feeling lucky box. 4. Add our listed gadgets by selecting the “Add stuff” button. Enter the titles of our recommended gadgets in the search window.

Have FUN!



iGOOGLE HOME TAB
We picked basic necessities that are good to have on hand.
5. YouTube Videos – good for a 3 o’clock break
6. Jon Stewart Quote of the Day – even when you don’t agree with him, he’s funny
7. CNN.com – keeps you on top of the latest breaking news stories
8. Google Hot Trends – let’s you know the latest greatest
9. Drink Recipes – obvious necessity
10. NYT Art & Design – we think a necessity
11. Date & Time – who can be expected to know otherwise?
12. Weather –
13. Skype – so you can keep up with the younger generation for free



iGOOGLE NEWS TAB
Can you have too many sources these days?
14. Funny Eyes – the eyes follow your mouse around the page
15. NY Times
16. Google News
17. MSNBC.com
18. New York Yankees News – can’t live without this for sure (call us to argue the point)
19. USA Today
20. Reuters
21. BBC News
22. NPR Topics



iGOOGLE MARKETING TAB
Stay on top of the latest in the marketing world without working too hard at it.
23. Pac Man - essential
24. Writer’s Unblock Tool
25. Marketing News
26. Trendwatching
27. Marketing: Case Studies & Know-How from MarketingSherpa
28. MarketingVOX – The Voice of Online Marketing
29. Marketing Profs – Marketing Concepts, Strategies, Articles, Research, Events and Commentaries
30. WSJ.com: Media & Marketing
31. Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog
32. Seth’s Blog
33. Duct Tape Marketing Blog
34. WPP Marketing Insights



iGOOGLE PERSONAL TAB
35. Art of the Day
36. Mapquest
37. Hangman
38. Internet Slang Translator – so you can figure out if someone’s dissing you or merely saying hello
39. Expedia – the Caribbean is always nice.
40. To Do pad – handy little tool
41. Daily Horoscope
42. ebay Search