December, 21 – Noblesville, IN, Even though the Expression Engine website content management system is relatively new for SaucePan Creative, lead developer, Justin Kimbrell, has won a national award for his work. The plug-in, “Google Maps for Expression Engine,” beat out many other worthy contenders to take the top honor in the “Best Field Type” category at the Devot:ee’s AcademEE Awards 2011. The awards are in their 4th year and have recognized some of the most influential and innovative solutions for the Expression Engine platform.

“We had several website projects at SaucePan Creative that had a need for location information tied to driving directions and a visual display of a Google Map,” said Mike Sauce – Owner SaucePan Creative. “Justin put is skills to work to not only solve the client needs, but build a self contained and universally adoptable plug-in for the entire Expression Engine community. I’m excited for him to continue to develop and adapt the plug-in as we gain feedback from other users and our own business scenarios. Through this open, community approach to continual improvement of the plug in, we will be able to offer our clients a “value add” through software upgrades and even better utilization of the Google Maps technology.”

Google Maps for ExpressionEngine makes it easy for website managers, admin, and developers to quickly implement many of the powerful features within Google Maps, and doing so without writing any programming. Using a simple and intuitive interface users can add points of interest, routes, regions, directions, radius based proximity searches, create custom maps, and a lot more.

“I decided to make the project public in April, 2011 with intent on giving back to the community,” Said Justin Kimbrell – Lead Developer at SaucePan Creative. “The project has quickly grown in popularity and is used by people all around world, and is currently available in five languages. I get a great sense of satisfaction knowing I am able to make a quality product that real people use on a daily basis. What start as a free project, now has people waiting to pay for the next major release, which will be for sale around the 1st of next year.”

About SaucePan Creative
SaucePan Creative is a full service marketing and website development company located in Noblesville, Indiana. Founded by Mike Sauce, and co-owned by Gabrielle Sauce, SaucePan Creative has been serving clients innovative and creative digital media solutions since 2002. They are located at 936 Maple Ave, Noblesville Indiana and can be reached at: (317) 773-2194.

It is true that over 60 percent of online marketing dollars will be spent on social media management and relationship building in 2012, the runner up is email. I would also argue from past experience, that email marketing can be more cost effective when you look at actual dollars spent to revenue.  In fact, I feel that in a business to business situation, email is more accepted as a method of communication.

NO SPAMMING – Let me take a moment to define what I mean about email marketing. I’m not talking about purchasing a list of email addresses and sending an email blindly to the list. I’m talking about utilizing an existing customer list or a list that was cultivated through a special event promotion or offline method. With that said, the use of regular and targeted email messages to the company list can have many benefits but the emails must be targeted an simple.

KEEP IT SIMPLE - Gone are the days of a huge, monthly email newsletter. People already receive a huge amount of email on a daily basis so it is important to reach a balance of the amount of information in each email vs. the frequency that it is sent. The email should be crafted in a way that it is easy to scan for only the information that the viewer finds interesting, and if at all possible, provide an excerpt with a link to a blog post or web page with the full details of the story.

DESIGN MATTERS – Many email list providers offer do it yourself templates for email. I could go on and on why I feel that template based any things are a bad idea, but I will just say that you are a unique company. Why would you want to look generic? Take the time and have a professional designer layout your email in a way that the design looks and feels like your company and it utilizes design principles that allow for easy scanning and proper use of typography.

By following this approach to your email marketing in conjunction with a solid social media campaign (not just a parrot of your email campaign) you will achieve a solid 1-2 punch to online marketing for 2012 that reaches your audience no matter which outlet they prefer.

If you would like more information about how we utilize email with existing saucepan creative clients, please contact us today! info@inthesaucepan.com or (317) 773-2194