In marketing a lot of time and effort goes into the philosophy and science of targeting the proper markets, understanding your customers needs, and crafting a campaign that demonstrates your product as the superior solution to their problem. What if there was something you could do that would increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by over 300% but it had nothing to do with the actual campaign?

Reducing Friction

Go to this website, click that link, call this number, fill out that form; Anytime you ask people to do something you are creating a point of friction. Your audience will not continue unless the reward is greater than the friction they are experiencing. It is easy to forget about friction but doing so may severely inhibit the success of your campaigns.

Now that I have you thinking about friction, let me show you what happens to your marketing efforts when you reduce it. Read more…

I put together a lot of marketing strategies that revolve around a corporate website or microsite as a destination for visitors. A lot of effort goes into creating and executing these strategies. So you can probably imagine the anxiety I went through when one of the sites I manage was hacked. I was on the phone with my hosting company, Rackspace Cloud and they walk me through the steps of cleaning out the injected data, getting the site back up and running and finding the vulnerabilities. I thought I had taken the proper steps to protect the site, but I was wrong and I want to share that information with you so that you can avoid that same mistake. Read more…

It has long been rumored that Google was going to start ranking pages based on page load time. Think about it, if your page takes longer to load then visitors won’t get to see as many pages. Less pages mean that Google doesn’t get to serve as many advertisements to those visitors and they end up making less revenue.

Google asynchronous tracking optimizes how browsers load the Google Analytics JavaScript, so its impact on the user experience is minimized. It also allows you to put your Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering. Visitors get to see your pages faster, and Google gets to serve more adds – everybody wins!

I put together a new Joomla 1.5 plugin so that you can easily add the new tracking code to your Joomla powered site. Read more…

This article was guest written by Joel Book

One of the most valuable assets a company has is its database of email subscribers.

Just ask highly successful large companies like Papa John’s, Scotts, and Hitachi Data Systems as well as hundreds of small and mid-sized companies like CardsDirect, Aptera Software, and Powell’s Books. Each of these companies has the ability to deliver relevant and timely information and offers to their email subscribers – when they need to do so. By “owning their own communications channel,” these companies are not dependent on traditional print or broadcast media to attract customers or drive repeat sales. They have the advantage of choosing when, how and with whom they communicate. Read more…

ExactTarget just published my article, 4 ways to use analytics to improve your email campaigns on their email marketing blog. I am excited because this is my first article as a guest blogger.

Please go check it out and let me know what you think. You can post a comment to their blog, this site or just @ me on twitter, @LaryStucker

Tomorrow FreshClicks will be publishing, “Wining Strategies for Growing Your Email Subscriber Database“ by  our first guest writer, Joel Book