Forget declining open rates and click-throughs… when I invited Chicago subscribers to a WordBiz roundtable last week, 100% of those who RSVP’d showed up. We crammed into a meeting room provided by B2BWorks.net, a B2B marketing agency with offices in Chicago’s cool River North neighborhood.
We had a lively discussion about email marketing and blogs. Yes, declining open rates for email are a big problem. Along with a corresponding decrease in conversion rates. Re blogs, several attendees expressed concerns about the time it would take to write and maintain a blog. Another topic was RSS feeds: will they provide a new venue for advertisers to push their messages?
Pictured from left to right are: Rickey Gold, Donna Beasley, Fred Faulkner, Debbie Weil, Frieda Curry, Philippe Matthews, Betsy Harman, Brent Brotine, Hilary Marsh and, standing in the doorway, Chris Whalen, B2BWork’s Senior Director of Client Solutions. Behind the camera is Rich Kraneis of The World’s Shortest Excel Book fame (highly recommended, BTW). Rich was a guest expert on my live tutorial, Understanding Online Conversion. You can order the enhanced PDF transcript, Audio CD & Web metrics calculator from this event. Quite apropos re the topic of improving conversion rates from emails or e-newsletters that do get opened. Missing from the photo is Julie Lohmeier of Zacks.com.
I wanted to say one more time Thank You for the invite to your little business blogging pow-wow. Just think, if we had more time what could have been brought to the table. Strategies, experiences, tips and tricks. You can host a whole day on the topic! I hope I didn’t preach too much about the use of blogs, RSS/XML, etc. I firmly believe in online marketing/publishing/etc. when it comes to using it for one-to-one conversations with customers, potential customers, and feedback on your products and services.
Thanks so much. It was a fun afternoon and I learned a lot. I work with nonprofit organizations and I love the idea that blogging is so simple and inexpensive and before the session I had never thought before about using a blog as a CMS. Fred had that great idea. Thanks.
What a treat, Debbie. I’ve followed your blogging ideas with much interest over the past months, and it was great to see all the enthusiasm you project in person!
Thank you so much for arranging this get-together, Debbie! We got the chance to meet or reconnect with local folks, and had the honor of meeting you in person too! Great discussion — I learned a lot also.
Oh, good, I’m not the last one to post. I had no idea the photo was up. How cool! This was a really productive session and it was great to meet everyone. I think Debbie should come in and do this every month or so. Group? Has anyone started blogging as of the session? I’m afraid of the time commitment.