• The best time to tweet is 5PM ET
• 1 to 4 tweets per hour is ideal
• The best days to tweet are midweek and on the weekends
• The best day to share on Facebook is Saturday
• The best time to share on Facebook is Noon ET
• Consumer promotion emails are best sent between 7pm and 10pm.
• Holiday promotion emails are best sent between 5pm and 7pm.
• Emails related to property and financial services are generally opened between 3pm and 5pm.
• Email abuse reports are reported highest in the early morning during all days of the week, with the weekend being the highest.
• Email bounce rates occur highest in the early morning during all days of the week, with the weekend being the highest.
• Email open rates and click rates are highest in the early morning during all days of the week, with the weekend being the highest.
• The optimal email sending frequency is generally 1 to 4 emails a month.
• The average blog gets the most traffic around 11AM
• The average blog gets the most comments around 9AM, as well as on Saturdays
• The average blog usually gets the most inbound links around 7AM, and especially on Mondays and Thursdays

Data courtesy of kissmetrics

Happy holidays! As we celebrate the holidays, I want to wish each of you the largest ROI with your web marketing campaigns.

 Here are a five key web practices to keep in mind:

1. Know the season: Offer an updated look to your web site (even if temporary). Show that you have the holiday spirit.
    
2. Know your customers: Put your customer information to good use. Make sure that your site offers up a dynamic list of products and services that can help your customer locate that special gift for Aunt Susie.
    
3. Make the sale easy: Holiday shopping can be a pain so make sure that there are special holiday landing pages developed to make it easier for customers to locate the most popular holiday items. Use last year’s data as a point of reference, but be sure to also know the hottest trends and products.
    
4. Make it a steal: Like you, your customers love a great deal. Make sure that there are banners and other highlighted information about new products and savings that might be of interest to that customer. These items should be visible until the sale is completed.
    
5. Follow up: Offer the customer a reason to return to your web site. Give them the option to sign up for updates on sales, and new products and services. This will enable you to build and maintain a long term relationship with the customer. Be sure to send the customer a thank you (whether by mail or email) and include a special gift or offer to show just how grateful you really are.

Use these tips throughout the year and design your web site to keep your online customers and website visitors happy.

Email marketing is one of the most simple ad natural online marketing tools. It is simple the act of designing and sending a strategically planned email to a specific target group. There are specific, proven best practices for design in email marketing. And there are set guidelines on how to implement an email marketing campaign so that your business won’t be blacklisted as a SPAM engine.

Even with the popularity of social media, email marketing still wins for generating purchases. This means that though no one marketing channel is going to deliver all of your potential consumers over time, email marketing delivers brand familiarity, develops consumer trust and generates repeated business. Why do you think it is so very popular?

Survey says! Email and search still sway most online buyers.

Email and search marketing still have the greatest influence on consumers’ online buying behaviors, whereas social media, though it generates awareness, is rarely associated with direct revenue, according to a study by Forrester Research and GSI Commerce. More…

If there’s a billboard in the dessert and nobody sees it, was it worth the marketing spend?

Having a website is as important as having a phone number for your business. But not all websites are created equal. A pretty website can be like a billboard in the desert… if no one finds it. A website should be a marketing tool that helps you generate leads and sales while at the same time reducing advertising costs.  

Marketers who provide web design have a huge advantage as they know what works to convert visitors into buyers on the internet. They deliver a site that is visually pleasing, organized, is manageable and converts web prospects.

Remember that web designers are not marketers. Therefore even though they may create a beautiful site it is worthless if it does not move people to buy.

Email: We all get them and we love to hate them, but they wouldn’t be so popular if they weren’t effective.

So what happens when a friendly email becomes a marketing tactic? It can either annoy you and gets labeled spam, or it enlightens you and leads you to become aware of a great new product or service.

It can also lure you to purchase the same product and request more information about the services. And even if this tactic fails for 60% of its intended recipients, it still builds brand awareness for those failures and is the most cost-effective failure a business can experience.

So if you’re a business owner who has passed on email and has not recongnized it as a fantastic business generating tool, think again. Email marketing is likely to bring you the largest return on investment. Add an enewsletter to your companies marketing toolbox and watch for a significant increase in your company’s brand awareness.