The holidays, no matter what the economy is doing still represents a time of gift giving. While the money spent may be less, the act of buying gifts on e-commerce websites and giving them will still take place.

If your business is getting ready to send out your holiday targeted email marketing campaign, consider these 3 tips for a successful email campaign. They are basic, but often overlooked.

1. Keep It Simple. If you feature specific products, make sure you do a small amount. Blasting out and email with 20 products will cause them all to loose focus with your recipient. Make sure your product feature links right to the page to buy it, not just your home page!

2. Give Ideas. Most people struggle to figure out the perfect gifts for the people on their list. If you can point out how an item is perfect for a mom who likes to travel, or a friend who is into sports, you have made their shopping easier. The power of suggestion!

3. Outline The Deadlines. Make sure that your email states when visitors/shoppers can order and still receive their items on time. Seems simple, but it’s often over looked.

Make sure these 3 easy tips are covered for your email marketing campaign this holiday season and you’ll find success converting recipients into buyers. The feedback from some of our clients on their holiday email campaigns this past week has been very favorable.

Thanks to @pancheros on Twitter for putting this Twitter marketing story in front of me. (There are more benefits than you know to following a burrito tweeter.)

The Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette has a nice little write-up on a small restaurant using Twitter. Riley’s Cafe started using Twitter recently and implemented a “Twitter Tuesday” special. So far they have seen both foot traffic in the door as well as local buzz from it. Very cool.

Their first Twitter Tuesday offer was 25% off the entire bill.

You can follow Rileys on Twitter, I did: @RileysCafe

It’s also interesting to note that Riley’s doesn’t even have a website. They jumped right to social media and are using it to drive direct business, not just website or blog traffic.

It’s fun to see glimpses of where things are heading for how we consume video.  Last night was a reminder of this for me.  The Thursday night NFL game was only on the NFL Network and as a cable subscriber I was out of luck to watch it.  But where TV failed me, the Internet and my phone came to the rescue.

I was able to watch the Broncos come back on the Browns for a victory online as well as my phone.  Just a fun glimpse into the future of more media consumption online and mobile … with the TV fading away.  Think it won’t?

The only bad news was that Broncos QB Jake Cutler had a monster night in Fantasy Football … and of course I’m playing the team in my league that has him at QB.

Do you have anything to share on your transition to web or mobile from the tube?

Five is excited to launch BrandtAutomation.com’s website redesign.

Brandt Automation is a custom equipment design/build firm in Minnesota and they started asking great questions in meeting with Five on their website redesign like:

• Why don’t we show up in Google?
• How do we increase the value of our website?
• How do we generate more leads online?
• How can we and how should we update content?

As we dug into their situation we found out that they had a lot of great automation and custom equipment experience to share, but didn’t have the right stage to showcase it. The core of Brandt’s new web design was to give them the ability to not only share their automation services and capabilities, but to promote their custom solutions. A case studies section was built to give website visitors examples of their work with photos, details, social/sharing capabilities and other helpful information.

The web project involved web strategy consulting, custom web design, the Site Management Console (cms) and search engine optimization to start increasing the ability to achieve stronger rankings from Google and Yahoo. We’re pretty pleased with the new web platform that Brandt has, so check it out.