"No Junk Mail" Signs Help Stop Unwanted Mail

This past weekend, my girlfriend and I stayed with some family in Montreal. It was cold but we had a great time!

While I was there, I noticed the French equivalent of a 'No Junk Mail' sign on the front door of the house where we were staying. What a brilliant idea! After discussing it with my cousin, I found that these stickers were quite popular in Montreal and I wondered why the idea had not yet caught on back in "The States."

Hopefully, there are enough people out there who really don't enjoy receiving hundreds of pounds a year of (difficult to recycle) junk mail catalogs, coupons and credit card offers. We'll be giving away 100 "Please, No Junk Mail" 8" x 2.5" stickers but first we need a few generous people to purchase some for $5 each including shipping. This will offset the cost of the weatherproof stickers, ink, postage and time!

So please, consider purchasing some. Thanks!

"Please, No Junk Mail" Stickers (Pack of 5)



$5.00 incl. Shipping & Handling

US Post Office Considers Converting to Electric Vehicles

In face of recent news of the US Post Office's struggling finances, Postal Regulatory Commission member Ruth Goldway has arrived at a solution--electric delivery vehicles. This option is both economically and environmentally beneficial for the USPS and the taxpayers.

Commissioner Goldway wants to use funds from President Obama's recently passed stimulus plan to convert the Post Office's 219,000 vehicles from gas to electric power.

Simply retrofitting the USPS's 142,000 standard delivery trucks would reduce gas consumption by almost 70 million gallons per year, saving the Post Office millions of dollars per year.

This plan is sure to meet resistance from oil company lobbyists and others like them but hopefully, anticipated public support will help push the measure through. If accomplished, the conversion will greatly help to reach President Obama's goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015.

Source: bigfatmarketingblog.com

Using Coupons to Measure Marketing Performance

Coupons are one of the simplest ways to measure the performance of your current marketing campaign. They can be integrated simply into both retail and online sales and will assist you in improving further marketing efforts. In this article, I will describe a few strategies for setting up a coupon program.


Design

Printed coupon design should be simple and attractive. Include the coupon or coupon code on a monthly newsletter, promotional flyer or direct mailing. For online campaigns, think about designing a banner or attractive graphic for your website's home page. The theme of the design should reflect some current event or holiday of importance to your business and its customers. Right now, Valentine's Day would be a good choice.

Integration



For online stores, the easiest way to begin accepting coupons is to sign up for a free Google Checkout account. Google Checkout is much like PayPal, which most people are familiar with, but funds are automatically deposited in your bank account after around 3-5 business days. For most businesses, this is a significant benefit. The Google Checkout account administration page provides an easy way to activate, deactivate and customize coupon campaigns. You can also track how many people have used the coupons.

One of the best features of the Google Checkout coupon system is its flexibility. If you choose, you can set the coupon to either a percentage discount (e.g. 15% off) or a dollar amount discount (e.g. $50 off). You may also permit the coupon to only be used by first time shoppers or shoppers with a minimum cart value (e.g. 15% off with a minimum purchase of $100).

Google Checkout integrates with a number of popular shopping carts including Zen Cart and OS Commerce (an open source shopping cart) in addition to providing it's own pop-up shopping cart. Click here for a demo store.

Analytics & Future Campaigns



Allow about 2-3 weeks after launching the marketing campaign featuring your new coupon then using Google Checkout, calculate your completion rate by dividing total orders by total mailings sent out. According to DirectMag.com, The average response rate for direct mail campaigns was 2.61%. Within sectors, nonprofit fundraisers enjoy the most success with direct response, getting rates of 5.35%. Close behind are retail stores (with 3.36%) and establishments selling services to businesses (3.34%). Your rate may be lower than this because the number of people who respond to an ad is typically higher than the number who complete a purchase.

With these numbers, you can calculate your ROI, or return on investment, and determine whether the campaign made money. If not, consider the following options:
- Redesigning your marketing pieces
- Target a more specific sector (i.e. if you're selling technical products/services, approach more technical companies)

Feel free to post any quesitons or comments below or by emailing: questions [at] EcoMailMarketing.com

Comparing the Top 3 Green Web Hosting Companies

Many people are striving to be green these days by driving less, turning off lights after leaving a room or replacing old light bulbs with modern CFLs, but it's easy not to realize just how far our environmental impact goes. It was recently "revealed" in an article by the UK's Sunday Times that every Google search generates approximately 7 grams of CO2. The next day a TechChrunch post challenged the figure stating that the source for the Times' numbers, a young physicist named Alex Wissner-Gross, made no such claim. Regardless of whether or not a Google search actually releases 7 grams of CO2 or not, it's tough to argue the fact that our online activities have real environmental consequences.

According to Dreamhost, a popular online web hosting company, their operations generated as much CO2 as 545 average homes! With much of EcoMail's business centered around our online presence from our web site and blog to regular Twitter usage, I decided to do some research into greener alternatives for our web hosting company.

The first thing anybody with a website should do when considering a switch is back up EVERYTHING. This can be accomplished fairly painlessly with a common FTP program like FileZilla for Windows or Cyberduck for Mac OS X. Simply download all your files from your webserver to you computer. Consider backing up to CD/DVD or an external hard drive for added redundancy.

The List:

I started out by comparing the following 9 popular web hosts many from this Lifehacker article , one as recommended by @philmcdonnell and the hosting company I currently use:








The Tests:

The most important factor for this article was carbon neutrality but price and overall experience including customer support, uptime and server speed are also important. Therefore, each company gets a score from 1-10 for each of the three criteria.

The Top Three:

Dream Host (www.Dreamhost.com)

Carbon neutrality: 8/10 - They have a nice page outlining their practices which include reducing waste, recylcing and purchasing carbon credits. They also include a set of really nice graphics to display on your home page indicating that you're using green hosting like this one:

Price: 7/10 - $5.95 per month for unlimited hosting only if you pay 10 years up front $714.00. Otherwise, prices start at around $11/month + a $50 setup fee. There are however discount codes available like "MAXLOVE" which will save you $97. Definitely not the cheapest host but not unreasonable.

Experience: 5/10 - I have not personally used Dreamhost but I've read numerous reports of downtime and slow speeds.

Think Host (www.Thinkhost.com)

Carbon neutrality: 9/10 in addition to purchasing carbon/energy credits, Think Host has a social mission. They run a tree planting program and every new customer gets a tree planted in their name. You can read more here

Price: 6/10 Think Host doesn't offer a monthly plan and prices start at $7.95 per month for two years paid up front for unlimtied hosting. The shortest commitment is 6 months which carries a $20 per month price.

Experience: 5/10 Reports of slow loading times and connection drops abound across the 'net. They do have a 24/7 help line though which is a definite benefit.

1&1 Hosting (www.1and1.com)

Carbon neutrality: 7/10 Currently only their European data centers use alternative energy but they plan to introduce the same policy here in the US next year.

Price: 9/10 Price is one of the best draws of 1&1. Their monthly plans start at $4 per month for 10GB of storage and 300GB of transfer per month and the more expensive business-oriented plans offer a 3 month free period.

Experience: 9/10 I've had a very positive experience with 1&1 with support, speed and uptime. There are many positive reviews for them out there too.

Closing Remarks:

For an overall experience, I would recommend 1&1 although they may not be the most green of the bunch, they are certainly the best value. I was surprised to find that so many other web hosting companies don't even offer the option of green hosting. GoDaddy in particular is a popular choice for many first-time web builders but I would strongly recommend that everybody stay away from them due to random extra "services" carrying hefty fees, terrible support and of course no green initiative.

Note: After this post was published, I received an email from Dr. Wissner-Gross of CO2Stats.com who wished to comment that "in addition to hosting, websites also have network and client-side [carbon] footprints." This is an accurate and important observation and following Dr. Wissner-Gross' advice, EcoMail has signed up with his company, CO2Stats to provide us with our online carbon offsets at a very reasonable monthly fee of $4.95. Be sure to check out the new CO2Stats seal on EcoMailMarketing.com!

Please leave your comments either below or @ecomail. Thanks for reading!

5 Tips for Creating a Direct Mail Letter

When constructing a direct mail letter, it is important to make your design attractive and catchy enough to grab your viewers' attention while being sure to prominently display all important information like your company's web address, phone number or driving directions. Read these 5 tips to help improve your direct mail campaign and increase conversions.

1. Include personalized VIP website links (e.g. CharlesNichols.EcoMail.com.) Once clicked, the viewer arrives at a website with his or her name displayed prominently. These links are also known as PURLs short for Personalized URLs and can increase leads by up to 5%. Setting up a personalized web system yourself can be complicated and time consuming and therefore, I'd recommend going with a company like EasyPurl - Note: I have not personally used this company but I would encourage all readers to try their free demo or Google "PURL" for other alternatives.

2. If you market to local customers, make sure to include easy driving directions. You need to make sure that people can find you without problems. A printed Google Map showing your company's location is a good idea especially if you end up with extra space to fill.

3. Use easy to read font. Fancy fonts might seem more attractive but the most important part of your mailing is to effectively convey a message.

4. Include coupons that can be used online. With the economy the way it is, a 20% off coupon will get people's attention. Coupons serve a dual purpose by enabling marketers to track the effectiveness of a campaign by comparing coupon redemption between campaigns. If you sell your products or services online, coupon codes are especially easy to integrate into payment processing services like Google Checkout.

5. Create a Twitter account and direct your viewers to visit it. Twitter is a rising star in the marketing world and allows users to share pertinent updates with other twitter users. Here is an article detailing Dell's effective use of Twitter as a marketing tool. You can visit our Twitter page at Twitter.com/ecomail

Testing Effectiveness Of Direct Mail Campaigns

When launching a direct mail campaign, one of the most critical components is to develop an efficient way to measure campaign effectiveness. This will enable you to determine cost-per-lead and cost-per-sale calculations and identify how good your mailing list is.

By far, the two easiest ways to measure effectiveness are coupons and web links. For local businesses, coupons tend to be more effective however, web-based analytics a far more detailed. By using the free Google analytics suite (http://analytics.google.com) a webmaster can obtain detailed daily statistics including total page views, geographic origins of each view and time spent per page or per visit.

Are For-Profit/Non-Profit Hybrids the Future of Business?

This evening, I headed on down to Brooklyn to attend a cool workshop hosted by Green Spaces (greenspacesny.com) on "Hybrid Structures for Social Ventures" presented by Christine Rico, a social venture consultant whose job consists of helping companies find the best way to mix for-profit motives with social goals.

One interesting part of the lecture centered on a revolutionary business model called an L3C or a "low-profit limited liability corporation" that fills the gap between traditional non-profit and for-profit companies. Currently, this particular legislation only exists in Vermont. However, for companies seeking to add a non-profit component, there are other alternatives including partnering with existing non-profits as Ben & Jerry's did.

To learn more about the L3C legislation, you can visit this website

Green Spaces is a cool company that offers "work space to launch green entrepreneurs" or basically, they rent out sections of a large Brooklyn loft to a handful of entrepreneurs who in exchange for their rent get, save a bundle on rent and get high-speed internet and access to a crew of Green Spaces interns from nearby colleges (which I hope to be one of sometime in the near future!) The founders are friendly, the wine was nice and it was an all-around great workshop. Anyway, definitely check out Green Spaces at GreenSpacesNY.com.

Image: GreenSpacesNY.com