Marketing Commentary from interlinkONE
Marketing. Web-to-Print. Warehouse Management.
interlinkONE headed to Graph Expo 2010
Posted by 
on Friday, August 27, 2010 
at 3:26 PM 
in With Graph Expo 2010 only a few weeks away, check out what interlinkONE has in store for the show.
Check out interlinkONE at booth # 969. Hope to see you at the show!
Tags Customizing Your Online Ordering Portal
One of my favorite features in the ilinkONE Version 8 software is how users can easily customize the look and feel of their online ordering portal. Primarily, users have quite a bit of flexibility on how they present their “Item Search” page to users.
When people visit a site to place an order, they certainly may know which product they’d like to order. But oftentimes, people simply like to browse. Thus, they may utilize the Product Group and Product Type categories.
In the ilinkONE Version 8 software, users have the option to present the Groups and Types via thumbnails. Thumbnails for each group or type can be displayed directly on the Search page. Users also have options as to how big the thumbnails may be (by default, the thumbnails are 100 x 100 pixels and the large option is 250 x 250 pixels). If you only have a few items, then you certainly may take a look at using the large thumbnail option.
But no matter what you choose, you certainly will want to ensure that the sizes of your thumbnails are consistent.
If you’d like to do this in your own instance of our software, it’s real easy. The main two things you need to do are:
- Modify your Client Rules to display thumbnails for Product Groups and Types (other options include text links and dropdowns)
- Create your thumbnails, and then upload them via the Database Admin pages for Groups and Types
I hope that you find this feature helpful!
Below is the screenshot of one way that thumbnails could spice up the front page of your online ordering portal:
Using Direct Mail to Promote Online Activities
The Mailing and Fulfillment Service Association (MFSA) has been around for more than 88 years. As you can tell from their name, their primary objective is “working to improve the business environment for mailing and fulfillment companies”. (Full disclosure: interlinkONE is a Gold Partner in the MFSA Vendor Program)
Yes, traditional mail and fulfillment has been their focus for a long time. However, they are not shying away from using online tools to help them accomplish their objective.
I received a direct mail piece from MFSA this week. It contained an invitation to their New England Chapter meeting in September. The mailer listed costs, registration options, an overview of the agenda, and I also believe a choice of chicken or prime rib (Okay, I made that last one up).
However, one of my favorite pieces of content on the mailer was a line that said “Join the New England Chapter Group on LinkedIn“. The familiar LinkedIn logo was placed next to this line of text.
I am quite familiar with MFSA — I’ve attended conferences, I receive most of their email newsletters, I’ve been to chapter meetings, and I visit their website. However, I was not yet aware that there was a LinkedIn group for the New England Chapter. It is certainly possible that I have completely overlooked advertisements about it on those other channels.
However, for some reason, seeing the note about it on the direct mail piece caught my attention. I joined the group that day.
People see, hear, touch, and smell more marketing messages than ever before. We are all competing to find ways to get our message noticed.
In a multi-channel world, I think MFSA just did a great job of that.
The Direct Mail piece
The Promotion of the LinkedIn Group
ilink.me Anti-Spam enhancements
Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve rolled out spam prevention enhancements to our short URL service, ilink.me.
New anti-spam Error Message
In an effort to protect end users, we now validate the URL you try to shorten against lists of websites known to be unsafe. If you try to enter an unsafe URL, you’ll see that error message above.
We do this by integrating in real-time with trusted spam, phishing and malware lists, and will continue to keep our anti-spam protection as robust as possible by integrating with new services as they become available.
Enhancements like these should help ensure that users can rely on our ilink.me service to execute and measure social media marketing campaigns without interruption!
The Unforgettable Inactive Subscribers
This post originally appeared on the Pinto’s Beans of Marketing Wisdom blog
A few months ago, I expressed a bit of joy over the convenience of the Pandora app on my iPhone and their “strike while the iron is hot” marketing activity.
However, no matter how much I love music, I have fallen into the bucket of someone who has not used Pandora recently. In fact, it’s been a few months since I last used it online or via my phone.
Sure, I’ve heard my friends discuss how much they love Pandora from time to time on their Facebook posts. I see other employees using it as I walk around the interlinkONE office. But for me, I just didn’t seem to find the time to launch and listen.
Well, while I may have “forgotten” about Pandora, they did not forget about me.
Two days ago, I received an email from Pandora. It wasn’t pushy… They didn’t ask “where I’ve been”. But rather, they provided enough of a gentle incentive to make me want to launch and listen one more time. The email simply let me know that they had added songs that I might like to one of the playlists I had created in the past.
This type of content did a couple of things: one, it reminded me about why I loved Pandora — they help people discover new music! Two, it put the service in the front of my mind, which caused me to help move it up in my “things to do” priority list.
When it comes to your marketing efforts, you may also have a list of people who you view as “inactive subscribers”. Perhaps they haven’t opened one of your eNewsletters in months. Maybe they have ignored your invitations to listen to a webinar. But no matter what, the good thing is that they are still on your list. They have not yet opted out. We must not view these types of contacts as lost causes. Rather, we should creatively find ways to re-engage them.
