Marketing Commentary from interlinkONE
Marketing. Web-to-Print. Warehouse Management.
Marketing during the Holidays
Posted by 
on Friday, October 23, 2009 
at 11:09 AM 
in The holidays are usually all about fun, friends and family.
Well, they also can help add a bit of good news to your business as well.
Here are a few ways to execute successful marketing efforts around events such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc…
- Throw an open house. By doing this you are opening your doors and welcoming your customers to spend time with your company on a causal level. Use the holidays as the theme on your invitations, as well for some of the decorations in your office.
- Send out creative emails and mailers with the current holiday theme. Reach out to your customers with a small holiday card. Almost all companies send out a holiday card in December, but why not a Thanksgiving card or a Valentine’s Day cards? Be unique and make your marketing efforts stand out. Use variable data to create personalized pieces.
- During the “time of giving” send out gifts to your customers and prospects… it fits the spirit, and helps people know that you are thinking of them and/or thanking them for another great year of business.
These are just a few ways to extend your marketing efforts during the holidays. Sure, it will take a bit of time and effort. But your customers and prospects will be thankful that you reached out to them.
Tags Using Flash on Your Landing Pages
Customer Service Tip from interlinkONE!
The experts on search engine optimization very wisely discourage heavy use of Flash on a corporate website. However, Flash may have a great place on landing pages and micro-sites that are dedicated to marketing campaigns that rely on channels other than Search to reach the world.
With interlinkONE’s marketing software, you can create landing pages and micro-sites that provide personalized content, track downloads to external sites and sales materials, allow people to update contact information, and also collect data from each site visitor via survey questions.
However, sometimes those sites need a bit of pizazz to ensure that people will respond to the survey, or download the ebook. Yes, sometimes those sites need Flash (excuse the pun!).
Here are a few ways that Flash could improve the success of your landing pages and micro-sites:
As the Welcome/Splash page:
Rather than directing people immediately to the survey page, you can present them with a Flash movie that greets them when they access the landing page. It should have a similar creative and theme as the original piece – the mailer, email, banner ad, etc. The Flash movie can entertain the user, and help to push across your message in a slightly different format – an animated movie, with or without sound.
After the movie plays, users can automatically be redirected to the survey page. Or, you can give them a “Click here to Proceed” link.
Animated Banners on Top of the Response Page
Best practices dictate that your Response/Survey page should not be too busy. The main goal of those pages is to get people to provide some information, and click the Submit button. Thus, you don’t want to distract them too much, or provide too many other options.
However, putting a Flash banner at the top of the Response page can help add a bit of life and oomph to your response page. Not only can it entertain the viewer, but it also might be used to further push your message. It can be an extra incentive to get people to provide answers to questions below, and to enter/update their contact information.
These are just a couple of ways that you could use Flash to help improve the success of your landing pages and micro-sites. If you have any questions about how to add Flash movies to your landing pages, please let us know!
