AFP - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao joined the Internet craze Saturday as he chatted online with netizens for the first time, broaching issues as diverse as a shoe-throwing protest and corruption among officials.

 Telemarket Office

Early History

Telemarketing is a registered trademark owned by Nadji Tehrani who founded TeleMarketing Magazine in 1982. Prior to that, the term was used extensively in Bell System communications relating to new uses for the outbound (WATS) and inbound (Toll-Free 800) services introduced in the late 1970s. It is a form of direct marketing where a salesperson uses the telephone to solicit prospective customers to sell products or services.

Categories

There are two major categories of telemarketing: Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer.

Within these two categories are two other broad divisions: Lead Generation, where the objective is to obtain information and Sales, where the object is to get someone to buy something.

Within these two categories, there are two other broad categories: Outbound and Inbound. Outbound telemarketing efforts are proactive, with the marketing person making phone calls to prospects or existing customers. Inbound telemarketing efforts are reactive, where the agent processes requests for information or takes orders. The demand is generally created by advertising, publicity or the efforts out outside salespeople.

Telemarketing may be done from a company’s office, a call center or increasingly from someone’s home.

Effective telemarketing programs often involve a two or more call process: The first call (or series of calls) determines the prospect or existing customer’s needs. The final call (or series of calls) motivates the prospect or existing customer to make a purchase.

Links

• American Teleservices Association
• Federal Trade Commission Information about Telemarketing Rules and Scams
• Federal Trade Commission Do Not Call Registry
• List of State Do Not Call Lists
• Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports regarding Telemarketing
• Telephone Preference Service - UK Do Not Call Registry
• Counterscript for use against telemarketers

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Telemarketing Avenger - Clip #28: Poor Dog

Reuters - iTunes has long been a double-edged sword for the music industry — on one hand, it provided a model for selling digital music. On the other, the dominance of singles sales over album sales leaves a revenue gap that labels are still trying to close.

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• Sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
• Sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to buy something immediately.
• Adding advertisements in e-mails sent by other companies to their customers.

Researchers estimate that as of 2004 the E-mail Marketing industry’s revenues has surpassed the $1 billion/yr mark.

Links

• E-mail marketing article on About.com
• SpamCon Foundation
• Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
• DIRECT Magazine - E-mail Marketing

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Successful Email Marketing - How It’s Done

AP - Facebook is trying its hand at democracy. The fast-growing online hangout, whose more than 175 million worldwide users could form the world’s sixth-largest country behind Brazil, said Thursday that those users will play a “meaningful role” in deciding the site’s policies and voting on changes.

Reuters - Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone network operator by revenue, is to offer Microsoft online services to small and medium-sized businesses through the computer, phone and browser, it said on Thursday.

AP - HBO on your PC? It could happen sooner than you think. Wary of the growing number of consumers watching TV shows online for free — and yet reluctant to upset viewers by yanking shows from the Internet — the nation’s largest cable operators are in talks with media conglomerates to take back control. They would create a platform to release cable TV shows online, but exclusively for paying subscribers.

Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.

The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing, from the merchant’s viewpoint, is that with this pay for performance model, no payment is due to an affiliate until results are realized.

Some e-commerce sites run their own affiliate programs while other e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique, although research has shown in general the increase to be approximately 15-20% of online revenue.

Some advertisers offer multi-tier affiliate programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-affiliates. In practical terms: publisher “A” signs up the affiliate program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher “A” attracts other publishers (”B”, “C”, etc.) to sign up for the same affiliate program using her sign-up code all future activities by the joining publishers “B” and “C” will result in additional, lower commission for publisher “A”.

Snowballing, this system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup. Most affiliate programs are simply one-tier.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

In its early days many internet users held negative opinions of affiliate marketing due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.

Currently there is much debate around the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of autogenerated webpages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of SEOing their sites with the search engines. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic Search Engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google’s algorithm update dubbed “Big Daddy” in February 2006 which was the final stage of Google’s major update dubbed “Jagger” which started mid-summer 2005 specifically targeted this kind of spam with great success and enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer generated duplicate content from its index.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Reuters - Yahoo Inc is set to unveil several tools on Tuesday to help marketers better target their online adverts, as the Internet company tries to win back business during a recession, the Wall Street Journal said, citing senior company officials.

Online Marketing is marketing on the Internet. It is a type of e-marketing, which in turn is a type of e-commerce. While at first the confusion of experiments, beta versions of websites, search engines and other online devices cause marketers to consider this world of the Internet unknowable and perhaps too unpredictable, there is now a growing body of work to which marketers are now paying attention in order to develop online marketing programs. The most known tools to marketers in the mid 2000s are currently tools grouped into 2 fields: online advertising and search engine optimization. E-marketing tools used to drive visitors to a web site include:

However, marketing online is simply not offline marketing applied to a new online world. Online marketing has a slightly different character and purpose as indicated in such seminal works as The cluetrain manifesto, Purple cow, Permission marketing, and other texts of smaller nature compiled in blogs and news sites.

References

• Smith, P.R. and Chaffey, D. (2001) eMarketing eXcellence: at the heart of eBusiness. Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK.
• Internet Marketing for Less Than $500 Per Year. ISBN 1885068697
• Building Your E-Bay Traffic The Smart Way. ISBN 0814472699
• The Online Copywriters Handbook. ISBN 0658020994
• The Complete Idiots Guide to Online Marketing. ISBN 078972037X

Video: Internet Marketing Secrets 1 of 3