Client Spotlight

Turning Online RFQs Into Orders

Phil Bearden, product and marketing manager for Ericson Products in Willoughby, Ohio says, "Easily 50% of our growth [in 2007] is attributed to our new website built by ThomasNet. This is the single largest growth year I have seen for Ericson…”

Bearden adds, “Our goal was to have one central online area for everyone to access for sales, training and customer service.” Bearden says that the company had several issues with its previous website, stating that it was “old and outdated,” it had no administrative tools to make changes, it was patched by “local experts,” and, most importantly, it lacked an e-catalog of products and provided no RFQ capability.

Expert's Corner

How to Write and Publish an Effective Online Newsletter

Susan Orr, Director of Strategic Marketing at ThomasNet, offers some easy-to-implement tips and advice to help you add a newsletter to your online marketing mix.

1. How and why are newsletters so effective in the online marketing mix -- especially for industrial marketers?

Depending on the nature of your products or services, your prospects and customers may greatly benefit from a newsletter. A newsletter is a great tool for companies to use to position themselves as experts in their field. This helps give the company a competitive advantage by educating the company’s customers and prospects about solutions to problems, new trends, new applications, etc. So, when those customers and prospects are ready to make a buying decision, they will be more likely to consider the “expert” in the field (the company publishing the newsletter).

Add a Newsletter to Your Online Marketing

"Newsletters are a top marketing tool -- and for a good reason: They work," says Harriet Hodgson, an editor and writer of newsletters for 28 years, on ezinearticles.com. She adds, "Try to make each issue of your newsletter better than the last. Like everything else in publishing, quality is the name of the game."

Using today's online technologies, both smaller companies and larger companies can easily create and publish quality company newsletters. Glenn Murray, a copywriter and guest author on Clickfire.com, writes, “Today’s internet and email technologies make company newsletters a very inexpensive, yet surprisingly effective, form of advertising. When it comes to newsletters, big companies and small are finally competing on a level playing field.”

Some of the advantages of publishing an online newsletter include:

• Communication with your target audience or customers, educating them on important issues relative to their/your business;
• Viral "buzz" -- word-of-mouth publicity for your company;
• Promotional branding opportunities; and
• Expert recognition for your company within your industry.

Offer Valuable Content in Every Issue

To benefit from all the advantages of an online newsletter, you must build value into each issue. Basically, this means that you need to offer your readers valuable content – “newsworthy” information and news that they can use to make their jobs and lives easier.

What makes an article “newsworthy”? A newsworthy story has at least one (and probably more) of the following elements:

• timeliness -- the story contains new information;
• impact -- the story somehow affects your audience;

Read more...

58%

Companies are allocating 58% of their online marketing spend to their own websites.

Source: Outsell Inc.'s HotTopics: Annual Ad Spending Study 2007: What B2B Publishers Need To Know About Advertisers.

News

Use Valuable Content to Drive Sales

Should You Shrink Your Email Subject Lines?

Online Video Views Increase 66% in 1 Year

Boost Conversion By NOT Focusing on Exit Pages ONLY