Greetings form ABC Gifts and Baskets

Even though the weather is absolutely gorgeous here in Virginia, and the trees are beautiful shades of orange, yellow and red, there are only 52 days until Christmas.

Are you ready for the Holidays? If not, we can help: just stop by our third annual Online Holiday Open House starting on November 7th.

I want to thank all those who emailed me back with feedback about the new look. And as you can see, we are back to the old format, better liked by most of you.

Enjoy this issue of Gift News, and don't hesitate to send us your questions, ideas, and suggestions.

We would also appreciate it if you shared our newsletter with your friends and associates.

Wishing you a great day,

• Gift Giving 101

One of the first things I would suggest is to send your gift at Thanksgiving, instead of Christmas if you want your gift to have a better impact.

While Christmas gift giving is widely practiced, a Thanksgiving gift would stand out, since not many people send a gift at this time.

Sometimes is not appropriate to send Christmas, Chanukah, Ramadan, or Kwanzaa cards or gifts in the 4th Quarter. If you don't know for sure, it's best if you don't send holiday specific gifts.

Make sure the amount you spend on a client's holiday gift is commensurate with the amount he spends at your company each year. You don't want to spend too much and make him feel pressured, and you don't want to spend too little and make him feel slighted or unappreciated.

When you work with a group of people at a client’s office do not send a gift just to the most senior member of the team: include everyone.

Find a gift for your clients here....

• Target Marketing: Six Lessons from Major League Baseball

Does your business struggle with profitable online marketing? If so, you are not alone. Attracting the right customers to a site and keeping them coming back—while also turning a profit—can be a challenge. Consequently, I'm always on the lookout for ways to demonstrate profitable online strategies.

Recently, as I watched the Baseball All Star Home Run Derby and visited Major League Baseball's Web site, it struck me. The league is doing many things to effectively find and attract targeted Web customers while simultaneously generating revenue. I noticed numerous lessons from Major League Baseball that you can take into account to profitably target your own customers. Here are six of them:

Lesson 1: Make your profit generators stand out. MLB.com has a separate, prominent navigation menu for profit-producing activities—MLB Shop, Tickets, Auctions, Subscriptions. The menu appears in the upper right of all pages, where potential paying customers cannot miss it. Importantly, each corresponding area of the site is narrowly focused on the visitor's interests. For example, the shop sells baseball—and only baseball—items. This is readily apparent from the slogan “For all things baseball.”

Lesson 2: Sell subscriptions. The league generates revenue from a variety of event subscriptions—live video broadcasts, live audio broadcasts, archived clips, and fantasy games. This also helps open the door for repeat purchases and add-ons.

Lesson 3: Include advertisements. Pop-ups and other online advertising are a fact of life on free-to-use sites. Major League Baseball demonstrates taste and intelligent implementation with its pop-under, limiting each visitor to a single impression. Banner advertisements and sponsorships are also apparent.

Lesson 4: Segment your visitors. The league uses a “hub and spoke” system, which allows visitors to choose their own interests. There is one general site (MLB.com), with links to several specialty sites (stlouis.cardinals.mlb.com, etc.). This portal approach helps segment visitors into specific interest groups. It is a win-win strategy. Visitors find what they are looking for, and the league can more easily target its marketing activities.

Lesson 5: Target locally. Each “spoke” of the MLB hub contains local content, which segments visitors regionally. The league targets products and services accordingly. For example, the Cardinals team site includes detailed information for Cardinals baseball events, ticket purchasing for Busch stadium games, and auctions for St. Louis baseball memorabilia.

Lesson 6: Offer tiered products. MLB offers subscription services at many levels. By packaging fantasy games into progressively larger bundles, it encourages trial visits as well as repeat visits. The offerings also target customers according to interest level and budget.

Gift Ideas for Growing Relationships...

• Is your business online? If not, take a look at these $5 Templates: you'll be amazed!

• A fully functional HTML website template with graphics in .gif or .jpg formats.
• Each template is designed using an "external" style sheet (CSS) for high performance and maximum design effectiveness. External CSS eliminates the many redundant HTML font tags, color tags, and other cosmetic properties that slows down the load time of your web pages and makes maintenance to your site a living nightmare with simple HTML or "internal" CSS. You simply edit one file and it changes those properties on every page of your website. It's like magic! The only reason not to use External CSS in your web design projects is because you did not know how until BasicTemplates.com came along to help you to design your site the very first time.
• You are not limited to the number of sites you may use the template on.
• No link back to their site is ever required.
• There are no extra fees for web designers to use them on their clients' sites.
• A tech support ticket system and knowledge base relative to the use of their templates is available to all customers. Just because you purchased a $5.00 template, does not mean that customer service stops after the sale!
• Many of the elements within each of their templates are interchangeable with each other which further extends the value. For example, use the header image of template #10, the style sheet from template #400 and navigational bar from template #555 and you can quickly assemble a new layout customized for your site or your clients' web site within minutes.

There are over 755 templates to choose from: just take a look, and see which one is for you. Click here.

• Holiday Calendar

Start your shopping now...

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