Approximately 35 – 40 participants attended the Carolinas/Virginia Chapter event at Novartis Animal Health in Greensboro, NC on February 11.

Bruce Zawadzi, email marketing manager at Novartis Animal Health, and Bryan Kristof, director of marketing at Signal Design, shared eMarketing tips and success stories on:

• Internal and External…getting the Web sites right for brand and corporate
• Email marketing
• Online games for lead generation and sales training
• Web analytics
• Utilizing video online

Several new terms were mentioned including BACN (pronounced bacon) which is similar to spam but it is unwanted email that you did request rather than unwanted email that you did not request.  Also used were, SEM is Search Engine Marketing and SEO is Search Engine Optimization.

Zawadzi discussed PaperPetPals.com which was developed by Novartis as a fun web site that reminds pet owners when it’s time to renew their pet’s prescriptions. This site also has games like Mabel’s Rescue which is a matching game and a page where you can make the animals dance by clicking on several different types of dance which strings them all together.

Several tips were mentioned for designing or redesigning websites.  First, have positive messaging.  Refocus 80% of a landing page on a single primary audience.  Remove extra columns and use a larger typeface.

The speakers also discussed Blogger.com which is free through a Google account.  It allows specific groups of people to communicate in a blog. Another free tool through Google is Google Analytics which allows you to analyze who has visited your website by city where they are located.