Celebrating Meatless Monday Boosts Savings

New reasons to celebrate Meatless Monday may lie in your pocketbook. Here's an excerpt from the website, MeatlessMonday.com that gives us some very real reasons to make the commitment to give up meat once a week.:

Tough times call for bold measures. Sometimes, though, the most innovative solutions are the easiest ones to implement. People looking to save money during this recessionary period need look no further than what they place on their plate. By cutting meat just one day a week, we can put more green in our pockets!

Here at the Meatless Monday office we did an informal survey of how much our families save a month by going meatless on Monday. By substituting beans, legumes, eggs, nuts and seeds for meat, the numbers add up. $80-100 a month, according to our little survey.

Medical nutritionist Lory Hayon of The Fertility Center of Las Vegas completed a cost analysis of a steak dinner for four versus vegetarian chili stuffed potatoes, which ran only $6.29. He concluded “‘if the average family of four spent $20 per meat-containing meal, seven days per week, they could reduce their grocery bill on average by $30 per week, or $1500 per year, by making three meals per week meatless.”

These numbers speak for themselves...

Read the entire article here.: http://www.meatlessmonday.com/cutting-meat-boosts-cash/

Epsilon Q1 2009 U.S. Email Trend Results: Performance Remains Stable

Open Rates Up 11.2% from Same Time Last Year

DALLAS, TX — July 8, 2009 — Epsilon today released its Q1 2009 U.S. Email Trends and Benchmarks Results which show an increase in open rates for the third quarter in a row, with 12 of the 16 industries measured seeing an increase over Q1 2008.

The quarterly analysis is compiled from 6 billion emails sent by Epsilon in January, February and March 2009, across multiple industries and more than 200 clients. The analysis combines data from both of Epsilon’s proprietary platforms, DREAM and DREAMmail.

According to Kevin Mabley, Senior Vice President of Strategic Services, Epsilon, "Coming off of the holiday season and facing a challenging economy at the start of the year, email marketing continues to perform well and provide stable results. The clients who continue to see strong results are those that segment their subscriber base and deliver timely, relevant information. Likewise, more companies are using triggers and transactions to drive highly targeted messages and these companies tend to outperform their peers.”

Survey Highlights:

• Deliverability continues to remain stable at 94.1%, up from 93.4% in Q1 2008.
• Open rates increased to 22.1%, up 11.2% from the rate of 19.9% in Q1 2008.
• Click rates increased 4.0% overall from last quarter to 6.1%.
• Business Products and Services, Consumer Packaged Goods, Pharmaceutical, Telecom and General Retail all saw an increase in all three major metrics – deliverability, opens and clicks – compared to last year.
• None of the industries measured saw a decline across all three metrics.

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Co-Op Web Ad - first look

I love this new ad created for us by Fat Trees for the Tucson Culinary Festival program. Isn't it beautiful?!?