When interacting with clients one of the first questions we ask is how do you currently market to your customers. A vast majority of the time email newsletters or email promotions are not even in the top 5 resources.

Email marketing is a great way to establish brand familiarity, drive sales, and introduce new products or services. Let’s face it, you are not going to get every recipient to read and click through but at least you have brought attention to someone for at least 3 seconds.

How many times have you gone to a store just because you were familiar with it because you pass it on your way to work? Email marketing works in the same manner,

even for referrals, you may not have a need for that tailor on Fourth Street but your friend may.

What this means for your business:

No matter what business you have, customer data is important. Even if you are  restaurant or a limo company, develop an email list for you frequent or high revenue customers and offer exclusive deals. Making your customers feel important will not only increase retention but also incentivize casual customers to go to that next level.

To view a recent example that The Plum Tree Group has done with Magento please visit www.iprobbq.com

When looking for an eCommerce platform to build your business, the following things are probably very

Important to your decision, all of which come standard with Magento.

·         Easy to upload products and product lists including bulk upload

·         Search Engine Optimization

·         Cross Selling and Up Selling

·         Discount Codes

·         Newsletter Management

To view a full features list click here http://www.magentocommerce.com/features. If you would like more information on Magento and your business, contact us at info@plumtreegroup.net for a free evaluation of your business or current website.

Face2Face allows you to pick your actors from our widely diverse database (or bring in your own), create custom scripts, and implement images, effects, or a “click now” button.

What this means for your business:

·         Video advertisement on the web has increased conversion over static images or text.

·         If your business needs a boost in online product sales, quote requests, newsletter signups or even phone calls give Face2Face a try.

·         To find out more about Face2Face, visit http://www.dzinestand.com/face2face/

Or you can contact john@dzinestand.com

•Visual Communications and Design
•Consulting
•Information Technology
•Business Process Outsourcing
•Micro Venture Support

To sum it all up it is Plumtree Group’s goal is to help today’s best and brightest initiators to succeed. If you like to find out more about what Plumtree Group offers to those seeking to better their companies in today’s online market environment feel free to visit Plumtree Group on MySpace, friend us at Plumtree Group on Facebook, and check out our new video at Plumtree Group on YouTube.

The latest product to roll of The Plum Tree Group’s virtual assembly line is DataPointe –Where Data and Intelligence Meet. DataPointe is a robust survey tool for businesses of all sizes. DP allows you to create customer satisfaction surveys, product testing surveys, opinion polls, you name it. After the data has been collected you can easily analyze it using multiple graphing functions, formulas, as well as a Map Tracker that allows you to see on a map the location of the respondents using IP address tracking.

Best of all right now DataPointe offers a Limited 30 day Free Trial for Digital Oxygen readers!

For about the last year, we’ve had customers and prospects requesting of us to provide them with more thought leadership, exclusive content and centralized access to strategic tips, tools and solutions to give them an edge over their larger competition.  We have responded by offering Digital Oxygen, a business intelligence tool giving emerging businesses the innovative edge over their competition.  For more frequent updates, we have also made available the Plum Tree Group blog for those that need to be kept in the know on a more frequent basis.

One of the hot technologies to watch in 2008 is Adobe’s Flex.  Flex was introduced in 2004 and has been improved upon with the promise of changing the landscape of how Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are created.  See an example of Flex by viewing our online project database or our built using the latest version of Flex.

Hot Flex Project

See how Plum Tree has used Flex to create a build your own t-shirt application for a high profile athletic gear firm. You can view the prototype here.

Utilize the power of Facebook and MySpace. Once dominated by college kids and tweens, these social networks have become marketing and networking gold mines. Use these social networks to keep in touch with customers or attract a new market. Be sure to upload photos, videos, commercials etc to make your profile worthwhile to visitors.