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Myself and Mary Carty are in San Francisco this week at the Web2Expo conference. If you are around give us a shout. We love talking to new people and feel free to pick our brains about email marketing.
You can find us on twitter @alanorourke and @marycarty

Alan

We all know the importance of a good welcome. A great example we came accross this week, is our local bistro. Lots of families walk their dogs along the strand each day but it is pretty difficult to have dinner with doggie in toe.

The bistro owner has created a beautiful outdoor area where dogs can accompany their owners. Bowls are provided for water and food and doggie do do is taken care of with the placement of special bins located far away from the tables. Other diners along the strand actively discourage dogs (and their owners). What other café’s view as a problem, this bistro has turned into a selling point. Smart, effective and makes perfect business sense.

Are you making it easy for your customers to come back to you?

Image leelefever

Happy St. Patricks day, from all the team here. Have a great one.

A few months back we ran a survey to track how Toddle.com is performing for our customers. From the results of the survey, we created a Wordle cloud of terms most used to describe Toddle’s benefits.

As you can see, the words easy, use, newsletters and professional jump from the graphic. This got me thinking – easy is hard to do. We built Toddle to ease the pain of newsletter design and sending for small business. And to make sure your message looks great, we test it in over 30 email clients. We take the pain you get the gain. We are really thrilled that Toddle is benefiting our clients every day and thank you all sincerely for your feedback and referrals.

What’s next then?
We are working on new template designs to add to the template gallery and new payment pathways to make payments easier. Find our two newest template designs here. Exciting times indeed!

I took this photo today. Yes, that is the roof of a car you see after the tide came in.
I wish I could say this is a rare occurrence.

Californian based artist Kellyann just tweeted us this great message.

Thank you! just sent my toddle via email list & twitter…rec’vd inquiry for sale minutes later…cheers to you. kellyannart.com

Congrats Kellyann, keep us updated on how it goes.

Extend Basecamp Project Management with this time saving Firefox extension.
Hard to believe that this extension is now four years old. We have released an update to this extension to make it compatible with Firefox 3.6.

Basecode adds a formatting bar to your messages box within Basecamp. See it in action below.

What is Basecode

Basecode is a simple to use Firefox browser extension designed to give easy access to the hidden formatting options available when posting messages and comments in Basecamp. Even better it adds a few extra features to Basecamp to make the day to day project management process even easier.
Check out the key features of the new Basecode2

Download and install Basecode for Firefox and use it free.

Procrastination is posting this video instead of writing this months email newsletter.

via: @eoghanmccabe

Are you procrastinating? What are you doing right now?

Two great new designs are now available in Toddle and to be very biased I believe they are our best yet.
As always they look great in Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail etc, even with images disabled. We hope you love them as much as we do!

                         Birmingham Roller                                               Bremen Tumbler

Log in and get started now.

The Trinity Enterprise Network invited Marketing Consultant Paul Hayes from Beachhut PR to give a talk on building an international brand. And they very nicely agreed to let me come along.

Paul was previously Marketing and Communications Director at Havok and currently works with JoltOnline among others.

Paul had some brilliant advice and war stories from his time in Havok, Pirtomedia, Demonware and Plastinum on how they, as a start up, had go out and sell to the leading companies in games and film. Image it seams is vital but not that difficult… or expensive.

I got a lot of great points to take away from the day and here they are in no particular order.

PR

• Start your PR locally. Use it as your training ground to hone and practice your message before you move international.
• With everything showing up on Google do not underestimate local press. A Wired journalist rang up Paul after a story in the Tipperary Star popped up in his alerts.
• Develop relationships with three key Journalists and publications.
• • THE trade publication of the industry.
  • A national publication
  • One international publication.



• Wired is THE publication for a technology company and it took Havok a year from initial contact to getting covered in the magazine.
• The easiest way to get international PR is to get on a plane and go have a drink with a Journalist and start a relationship.
• Journalists do not write for their readers first. they write for other Journalists and their editor. Remember this when pitching a story.
• It’s easier to get coverage if you ‘promise’ to take out advertising in the future. Most trade magazines are run at a loss to maintain an audience for other business activities, events for example. So do not stress too much if you are unable to take out advertising for a long while.
• Third paragraph PR is better for credibility. The public are very media savvy. They recognise a PR piece about a company for what it is.However if your opinion is mentioned in an overall industry piece it lends more credibility to you being an industry expert.
• You are the best person to tell your story. Do not use a PR firm to be the middle man. It annoys Journalists.

Business

• The first sale was for $1 to get past the ‘First Customer’ credibility problem.It was a marketing deal in return for using the customer in PR, Marketing and Case studies.
• There is value in everything you produce. Watch out for opportunities. Havok had an artwork tool to help users of their main product. 3dStudio Max wanted this for their application and it generated a nice bit of money for Havok over 3 years.
• Paul believes Tradeshow stands are a waste of money. Think smarter or of a ‘Meta Stand’.Instead of a stand Havok would organise wacky transport (with a bar) carrying VIPs from a tradeshow to the afters party and again at the end of the night back to their hotels. A fraction of the cost, and more memorable.

  

• One horror story in the early days of Havok involved 250k on a stand, intending to make a splash. They ended up wedged between Microsoft and Sony who each spent about $10 million to launch their next gen consoles. It almost broke them.
• At a tradeshow in Calais they rented a $20k Yacht and moored it outside the event instead of spending the $200k cost of a stand inside. They also got to save costs by sleeping 8 people and eating on it as well.
• For a tradeshow all you need is you and a laptop walking around. Just as effective.
• In most cases you are not selling your features. What you are selling is reduced risk.Customers assume that your product works. They want to know you will be around in 3 years and will not make them look bad to their piers and boss.
• And last was a question from the audience asking if the Trinity name helped them abroad when making contacts and selling. He said at the time no but after the very successful companies that have emerged over the years including Havok and Jolt Online it can open doors now.