The Blog of Brandon Milford - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Design

A very cool seating system by Animi Causa.

Google has released their Zeitgeist for 2006 which includes the top searches for the year. They have also shared more information on how they came up with the data. Very interesting.

Adobe has released Photoshop CS3 Beta. If you currently have a serial number from CS2 you can enter it for an extended trial. The workspace looks pretty slick. They’ve "jazzed" it up a little with curved tabs and gradients. I’m very excited about CS3 as it will work with Mac’s Intel Core Duo. Woohoo! The full release is slated for Spring 2007. Here are a few screen shots:

I’m looking forward to the full launch in the Spring.

Mercury News reports that Google has set up an online marketplace allowing employees who have vested options to sell them online. Interesting consideration for employee retention.

"According to recent research conducted by the University of Illinois
and Michigan State University, it’s common for options’ holders to
discount their value. Bill Briggs, chief executive of Net Worth
Strategies, a compensation consulting firm based in Bend, Ore., that
worked with the researchers, said people can underestimate an option’s
value by as much as 60 percent, making them more likely to consider
competing job offers that might seem more lucrative."

After pre-ordering my copy of Hoopla a couple of months ago, it finally came today. Hoopla is the new book by Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B). If you’re not familiar with their work they are the agency behind Volkswagen’s “Safe Happens.” campaign, the Truth campaign, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, and the list goes on. The book features many of their most popular campaigns.

I highly recommend it!

We’ve launched IntelliContact Enterprise and improved our Public Newsletter Archive!

Today we introduced our latest offering with the launch of IntelliContact Enterprise. We have received a number of requests for additional service offerings which is the reason we decided to launch IntelliContact Enterprise. With this launch we now offer services such as:

• Dedicated Account Manager — You will have a dedicated Account
  Manager to service your account and provide you and your team members
  help with any questions you may have.
• Creative Assistance —
  We will consult with you on your creative to ensure maximum
  cross-client compatibility, inbox deliverability and response rates as
  desired.
• Message
  Review – We will review and edit your message before sending in order
  to maximize effectiveness and deliverability as desired. All changes
  are provided as suggestions, giving you the ability to make the final
  call.
• Frequency and Timing Analysis — As requested, we can
  provide a review of your sending patterns and provide recommendations
  on what changes may improve your open and response rates.
• Import Assistance – We can import large files for you, saving time while ensuring data integrity and accuracy.

We have also launched an improved Public Newsletter Archive(PNA). The PNA allows our clients to publish their email newsletter to an archive that includes all of their newsletters. This is a great benefit for our clients as it allows you to:

   1. Easily organize your newsletters.
   2. Build your lists by sharing your content with more visitors.
   3. Gives you access to quality content from other publishers.

Our new enterprise offering allows us to share our knowledge of email marketing with each client that signs up for IntelliContact Enterprise and the Public Newsletter Archive helps clients grow their lists, something we haven’t really helped with until this point. Very exciting! 

Ryan Carson from Carson Systems recently launched Carsonified!, his new blog. In a post yesterday he asks the question: "Do you need to spend money on advertising your web app?". This is an interesting question and one that I’ll answer in one word: Yes!

Ryan mentions they were fortunate with DropSend, a web app that allows clients to email large files, because it’s viral as every recipient of a file sees a link to DropSend. So this allowed them to spend little in advertising. We’ve had the same fortune with IntelliContact. Each message sent through IntelliContact includes a "powered by IntelliContact" logo/link in the footer and we send millions of emails each month, so it’s easy to see the viral nature in this type of advertising. Although this sends us many customers each month, we can’t depend on this to continue to grow our number of customers at a rapid pace. So what are we to do?

One of the first investments in advertising for us were cost-per-click ad campaigns. We’ve invested heavily in Google Adwords to further our reach and grow the number of users who trial IntelliContact.  As we’ve increased the number of paying customers we’ve also scaled the amount in which we invest in CPC advertising on a monthly basis. However, something you must consider when planning to invest in advertising is "what is the result you are aiming for?" Meaning, do you want those who visit your website to sign up for a trial or free version of your app first or would you like them to sign up for a paying account before leaving your site? Realistically most of us would like visitors to sign up for a trial/free version of our product prior to leaving our website. So, if you invest in advertising and the visitor comes to your website and signs up for a trial of your application, how do you then convert the trial user into a paying customer?

This is something you must think about prior to investing in advertising your web app. What has worked well for us is a trial autoresponder that we’ve set up to send automated messages to our trial users. After someone signs up for a 15 day trial of IntelliContact they receive a series of automated messages throughout their trial period that covers everything from welcoming them to IntelliContact to reminders that their trial will expire soon. Advertising online is wonderful because it gives you the ability to precisely measure every cent you invest. With that said, it’s not cheap and you have to think about the sales process and how you can ensure those trial users convert into paying customers.

We returned from Park City, Utah Sunday night around 11pm. The brainstorming weekend in Utah was a wonderful experience. There were 13 of us in Utah and we discussed, for the most part, product vision and goals for the future. We have a lot of exciting things planned for the future of IntelliContact and after this weekend we are all even more excited. Friday night we went tubing at Gorgoza Park and Saturday most of us went skiing at Park City Mountain Resort – I’m still sore. Sunday we wrapped up the brainstorming sessions and boarded a plane for Raleigh-Durham at 5:20pm.

Most of us returned on Sunday, however Ryan Allis (CEO), David Roth (VP Business Development), and Aaron Houghton (Chairman) remained in Park City for the Email Insider’s Summit that began on Sunday.

We’re continuing to prep for the launch on Thursday of this week that will extend our offerings and improve a current feature. So stay tuned…