• 68.46%  –  I keep separate accounts for personal and professional networking
• 9.13% –  I use filters, such as Circles on Google+, to make sure posts are seen by the right people
• 8.71%  –  I do not use social networks for professional purposes — only personal matters
• 8.30%  –  I only post things that are related to my job, no matter what network I’m on
• 5.39%  –  I don’t use social networks at all

One process for getting great results from email marketing campaigns is:

1. Define clear goals. Typically, in my experience, there will be different goals for each audience segment. Example: Goal 1 for customers vs. Goal 2 for prospects.
2. Deliver clear value/benefits. You know why you want people to buy from you. The trick to great marketing is to focus on why people would want to buy from you, and meet them there with a terrific offering.
3. Segment and target. Match messages to each audience carefully. Once you figure out what people in each audience segment you have want from you, it will be clear that what you have to say to each segment will be different. When it comes to crafting compelling messages, one size does not fit all.
4. Test. Test. And Test. The only way to really measure ROI from your email marketing is to know what is working and what is not. Test regularly. Some key items to test include subject lines, content layouts, timing and frequency.
5. Track results. To measure ROI track results regularly, and perform relevant analysis. For example, you might analyze the relationship between subject lines, open rate, and RSVP clicks for an event invitation campaign.
6. Revise and repeat. After taking time to test, track and analyze results, you can make changes to your campaign to get better results.

For lead generation campaigns step 2 is key. Typically our clients come to us with what they want to sell. We have had consistent success translating what are clients are selling into value propositions and offerings that fulfill recipient needs.

For event promotion campaigns step 3 is key. At different stages in the promotion of events recipients needs change. We have achieved consistently high performance on our event campaigns by making sure we deliver relevant communications at the right time.

We use SMS with extreme care as it does not have simple to implement opt-out features. We have had success integrating campaigns with social media.

Digital culture and technology web site Mashable.com recently posted a blog titled “8 Tips for Small Business Homepage Design.”

I recommend it, and decided to post my own version with different approaches to some of the key concepts that are based on my experiences developing sites for small businesses.

1.  Keep It Simple – Quickly and clearly communicate your product or service, and benefits to target customers. Provoke a positive reaction with design (image, color, layout, concept, etc.). Avoid flash and clutter.

2.  Avoid Scrolling – Instead create and link to separate category and/or detail pages that provide relevant information and benefits.

3.  Tell Your Story With Links – Be sure to provide links to relevant and current information that tells your story. Link to about, product or service, and news content that quickly and clearly tells what your business is about. A critical question to answer when writing content for your site is “So What?” – or – “Why would anyone care about what I am offering?”

4.  Keep Featured Products/Services Above The Fold - Make sure your featured products/services are visible when the Home page loads – without any scrolling.

5.  Be Current – If you actively use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, then be sure to include a live feed of your current posts on your site Home page. DO NOT do this if you do not use social media very regularly (at least twice weekly).

6.  Prioritize Brand Design – Use a consistent brand design across your entire business. Brand design includes your logo, colors, even the type fonts you use in letters, signs and print communications. Your business should “look” the same at your store/office, on stationery and business cards, in advertisements, on brochures and flyers, and on your web site (this includes Facebook and Twitter pages).

7.  Use A Featured Image With Your Home Page – This image will appear whenever you or someone else posts a link to your site in a social media site like Facebook or Twitter. It can be your logo, or you may create images for each product/service you offer. This really helps build awareness and visibility. A professional web designer/developer may be required.

8.  Be Creative! – You only get one chance to make a first impression. The more creative it is, the more memorable and favorable the impression will be. Go outside the box. Professional designers can be really helpful in this area. And by the way, you’ll know really great creative when you see it.

9.  Connect With Visitors - Collect visitor contact information right on the Home page. Offer value for registration – like email news and updates. Invite visitors to contact you and request information, submit comments, questions, or make other inquiries. Provide a link to a page (or links to pages) where visitors can connect with you. Make it easy.

Successful small businesses consistently deliver value and superior service, and they do it one customer at a time. They are heavily reliant on the personal perceptions and viral impact of their customers.

The most effective marketing tactics for small businesses help build on personal interactions with customers and enhance service delivery. The best small business marketing tools deliver personalized communications at low costs; and help collect, segment, track and use detailed patron data consistently in marketing communications. Database driven web sites, web analytics, and email marketing are all highly effective and widely used by small businesses. Solutions that allow small business users to take advantage of advanced features while hiding expert requirements and complexities will thrive.

In a recent FastCompany piece by Gina Trapani titled “Work Smart: Claiming Your Name on the Web,” the author makes the following statement about creating one’s personal profile on the web, “To make yourself findable, claim your name in Web search results by setting up pages with information you’re comfortable sharing.”

The part about posting pages with “information you’re comfortable sharing” is key. The web today is a double edged razor sharp sword that advocates unlimited freedom of information and speech on one edge, while viciously cutting away basic freedoms when used as a highly monitored, mined, and scrutinized spying mechanism (as it is today) on the other.

Bottom line? Anything you post on the web is accessible to employers, colleagues, friends, family members, enemies, police, and other governmental and private agencies – without your approval or knowledge.

I recommend you consider all your online activity as essentially a strategic marketing initiative. Take care about sharing personal information on family and friends you wouldn’t want Hannibal Lecter to know (a bit dramatic maybe, but accurate). Take time to carefully consider precisely what you want to communicate. Write it down, review it a few times, then think about how you will communicate it. Will you blog daily, weekly, monthly? Will you setup and post to a Facebook page? Will you setup a LinkedIn profile? Will you Tweet some aspects of your life on Twitter? Whatever you choose, take the time to be strategic about it.

With more than 500 million users spending more than 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, the fact that the site is reported to readily comply with requests from national and private security organizations means you should take care with the information you share.

Just like in society where we have a class divide — The Have More’s, The Have’s, and the Have Not’s — there is a class divide in marketing between large enterprises and small to mid-size businesses.

Digital technology and the Internet have totally transformed every aspect of marketing from content creation to analytics. And, each marketing function has multiple skill sets required for effective implementation. This complexity is confronted and mastered with glaring success by large enterprises. But for mid-size and small businesses this complexity makes ROI virtually unattainable.

The real bad news for smaller enterprises is that they are offered limited tools that are sold as marketing solutions. The classic example is in the email marketing arena. Literally dozens of services offer “email marketing” that’s “easy-to-use.” But they tout their ability to tell their users who read their emails, or who clicked on a link as marketing. It’s not.

Every client I’ve ever worked with uses email marketing primarily to either entice a sale or promote attendance at an event. So I ask if they can tell who made a purchase or attended an event based on their email marketing I get the same pause for consideration, followed by a resigned “no” response.

The truth is that email marketing is very effective at enticing sales and promoting events, and you can measure the effectiveness including who actually takes the desired action. But it requires planning, proper configuration of email systems, and personal data collection to happen. These are the things not included in the monthly fee.

I look forward to the emergence of new offerings that fuse professional services with tools and technologies to enable the little guys to step up their marketing game.

Presently, support for HTML5 varies widely among browsers. A suggestion, for now, is to focus HTML5 and CSS3 development on mobile applications. More smartphones, being newer devices, use modern browsers that support HTML5 and CSS3. Using HTML5 and CSS3, mobile web sites can deliver faster and richer experiences by drawing on resources on a user’s smartphone, like their address book, same as mobile apps developed for specific phones like the iPhone or Android do.

Using HTML5 and CSS3 a retailer could access a database of information about a customer’s preferences and shopping history. Instead of storing that information in a cookie huge reams of data can be stored in a database on the client side, allowing a customer to quickly bring up the items they bought previously and reorder them, or select a stored shipping address during checkout.

Even though HTML5 and CSS3 are not ready for use on most live business web sites, businesses would be well served by starting to develop HTML5 and CSS3 mobile applications. This will help developers get ready for the day when redesigning the business web site to use HTML5 and CSS3 arrives. Code written for mobile phones must be very compact and highly optimized. Writing HTML5 and CSS3 code now helps developers write more efficient code and prepares them to meet your future needs.

A recent study by ForeSee Results shows that social media is a still maturing marketing medium, and that traditional marketing, including email marketing, are preferred.

According to the report, “social media interactions are a main influence for only 5 percent of visitors to retail websites” and “more traditional marketing tactics like promotional emails (19%), search engine results (8%), and Internet advertising (7%), influence more visits to retail websites.”

The report also concludes that traditional marketing techniques like promotional emails influence not only more traffic; they also deliver better-quality traffic. Some of the most satisfied site visitors arrived at a site because of previous familiarity with a brand, receipt of promotional emails, word-of-mouth, and visits to product review websites.

Only 8% of online shoppers said that’s social media was their preferred way to interact with a retailer. A majority want to engage with retailers, but but prefer to do so via email or on retail websites, rather than on social sites. Another key finding is that people are more satisfied with a retailers’ presence on Facebook than they are with Facebook itself.

Visit ForeSeeResults.com for more information or to download the full report.