SmallBusinessNewz

Since email marketing is such a popular method of advertising for small businesses, this study from MarketingSherpa is worth taking a look at.

They look at the marketing strategy of some pet supply specialists, who run some A/B testing on a couple of campaigns.  They took the following steps:

1. Test Vertical Design Locations
2. To Be Safe, Do It Again
3. Made Landing Pages Function for Education and Sales.

Im not going to regurgitate the entire thing here, but you can read about it here if you are interested.

Takeaways from the MarketingSherpa highlights include:

- Wisely placed educational articles may heat up sales in a blue economy. With consumers tightening purse strings, Web shoppers are not likely to be in as much of a hurry as they used to be. Therefore, holding people’s hands with educational content can be worthwhile for your brand, Magee says. “As people are looking at their dollars, they want to make a better buying decision.”

- Educational content can create a comfort level for Internet shoppers who don’t have the luxury of physically assessing products the way brick-and-mortar shoppers do. Hence, relevant content can help bridge that gap between the product and the shopper.

When it comes to using interesting content to drive sales, I looked at a  nice social media example from Lowe's and YouTube at WebProNews recently. Take a look at that too.