Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged E-Newsletters and Email Marketing
Building Your Email List
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Building an email list is like building a business. Taking shortcuts to hurry the process along, such as turning to third-party mailing list rental or purchase, can backfire in a big way. Use your best selling tactics to promote your email list-building campaign, just like any marketing campaign you use to sell your products or services.
The potential ROI on email newsletters and other e-marketing campaigns is immense, often higher than any other marketing or advertising option. Which leads some to ask, why not just buy or rent a promising-looking list from a broker and start mailing to it? Because these addresses lack relevance, interest and trust, the three key ingredients that support every successful email marketing program. The reason why email marketing can produce such a high Return on Investment is because you typically have these three ingredients with legitimate email recipients. Otherwise:
* Relevance: You’re sending email to people who didn’t ask for it, which equals spam to most recipients, no matter how regulations may define unsolicited email.
* Interest: You also have absolutely no idea if they will be interested in your company, products or services.
* Trust: Unsolicited email can make recipients suspicious, which can cloud any future contacts they may have with your company.
At best, you might get a few nibbles, but the $$ spent on those email addresses could have been better directed elsewhere, like a search marketing program designed to attract browsers to your opt-in or preference center. More likely, enough recipients will complain via the spam button to prompt ISPs either to filter or block your email marketing.
As with any marketing campaign, your list-building program has an objective, strategies to achieve it, and ways to measure whether you achieved it. Yes, you want to create and build a mailing list. But with what kind of subscribers? Create a profile of your ideal email subscriber, and use it as a template to guide your strategies and tactics.
Also, be able to clearly define the content, format and frequency of your messages to be able to communicate the benefits of subscribing. Here are some strategies that can help you achieve your list-building goals.
1) Transparent and trustworthy email opt-in process: Permission is both the law in most countries of the world today and the expectation among email users. A transparent opt-in process explains exactly how to sign up for email, what recipients can expect and how you will use the information they give you. Provide this information on your opt-in or preference page with a link to your privacy policy.
2) Relevant, well-written and useful content: You can’t build a list without good content. (That is a primary focus for everything written by HTA, high-quality content is job #1!) As your program grows, track and analyze activity on your messages to see what does or does not engage subscribers.
3) Benefit-based invitations at every place where you encounter your customers or potential subscribers. First, tell subscribers what they’ll get in exchange for giving up their email address, “Sign up here for email-only discounts…” is far more enticing than “Sign up for our emails.” Then place this invitation where you will encounter customers or prospects, like posting on various pages of your site and seeing which one generates the most action. At Hat Trick Associates, we have quite a few other ideas on how to uniquely and effectively share your invitation that we share with clients.
You can measure your success in a number of ways. How many email subscribers do you want by what deadline? Setting a goal of 10,000 active subscribers in six months is good, but you need to factor in list churn and inactivity of up to 50 percent in order to achieve it. That could raise your goal to 15,000 subscribers in order to come up with an active base of 10K.
This sounds like a big challenge, but you increase your chances of gaining active email subscribers when you lay the groundwork first with a trustworthy opt-in process, engaging content, a wide network of invitations and careful list management.
5 Steps To Create Content That Converts…& Increases Your SEO
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Getting “found” online is the end goal of your content and SEO initiatives, in addition to the conversion of your web visitors into customers too, of course.
And it really wasn’t all that long ago that you could effectively grow your business or share your ideas online by “interrupting” prospective customers with Push methods such as banner advertising, unsolicited email messages, or other off-line (and old school!) methods like cold calling. But business people grew weary of being targeted by outbound marketing and promotions long ago, and the technologies in use today have become far better at blocking these methods.
Businesses and people in general have also changed the way that they shop and learn, primarily utilizing search engines, social networking sites and blogs to find the information that they need. “Pull” or inbound marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts by helping them get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn. Here are five tips that you can use to help yourself “get found” online:
1. Start with an extraordinary idea
The days of needing a huge advertising budget to spend on marketing and PR to promote your ideas are long gone. Today, truly unique or extraordinary ideas can find many ways to spread like wildfire on their own online, without any significant expenditure. And by comparison, those ideas that are not extraordinary usually languish unfound – regardless of how much advertising or public relations that you do. Make sure you have a unique, remarkable offering and it will spread like wildfire online, if it’s truly unique and innovative.
2. Create LOTS of content
Once you have found an extraordinary service or product, you need to create lots (and lots) of quality content about it. There are many ways to distribute your content – social media accounts, blogs, article marketing, tweets, videos, podcasts. Great content about a great product or service will attract the links you need from other sites. These links generate traffic, which in turn tells Google and every other search engine that YOU should be ranked more highly.
(Need some writing help to keep up with your publishing schedule or additional resources to help you distribute what you are creating? Contact us for your many cost-effective options!)
3. Optimize your content
All of your content should be “keyword optimized,” both for search engines like Google and also for users of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr etc. who will be spreading it.
Be sure to include some of the most important keywords within the title (or Title Tag) of your piece so it will be easy for the engines to find and identify it. But you also need to make the titles enticing for human eyes as well, with a subject line that will elicit responses. Something that arouses the curiosity of readers such as” “Everything you need to know about…” or statements that can only be answered by reading all of the content, such as “How to”, “What can” or “Why do”.
Lists are very popular as well, like “10 things you must do on your website” or “5 easy steps to…” Provocative titles such as “7 things your bank doesn’t want you to know” or other even more sensationalized titles such as “5 financial decisions that could RUIN your retirement” or “8 Mistakes that cost you money, every month” also often work well.
People often respond as well to avoiding negative consequences as they do to potential positive outcomes.
4. Share your content
After you have created a remarkable piece of content and optimized it, now you need to spread the word. Email it to your E-Newsletter subscribers, post the content on your blog, tweet it to your followers, update your Facebook page and LinkedIn profile with it, then share it with article directories.
If your content is truly extraordinary, others will share it online for you. And as your content spreads, you will have more people subscribe to you or Follow you, so that the subsequent content you publish in the future will have an even greater audience.
5. Measure the results
If you cannot measure your results, you’ll never truly know which methods or channels work best for you. For example, you should compare your results for Google organic search (both branded and non-branded), Google paid, your E-Newsletter and Twitter feed, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media, Forum postings, and any of the myriad campaigns you could be conducting right now.
You should track visitors, leads and customers over time, for every campaign. Then increase resources spent on campaigns that are working, and discontinue or scale back the ones that aren’t.
Newsletters – Print or Email?
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
As the economic recovery shuffles along – and “shuffle” seems to be the right word, companies and small business owners continue to look for ways to promote their products, services and brands in the most cost-efficient way.
And most understand that a newsletter can be one of the most powerful ways to build lasting relationships with their customers. But which deliver medium should they choose, email or print?
Both varieties share informative articles, customer resources, special offers and discounts. And either format requires a writer, a designer (at least once), and a mailing list.
E-newsletters have become so popular because they are a lot cheaper to distribute; can be sent more frequently; and can reflect up-to-the-minute price changes or offers. But they can be easier to ignore or delete, or blocked all together. And you also need to have – or begin building – an email list to distribute the piece. Sending unwanted spam to recipients is not acceptable to most legitimate businesses.
Print newsletters on the other hand usually have higher readership numbers and response rates, if only because the recipient is forced to view the publication, at least for a moment (perhaps on the way from the mailbox to the trashcan!) But this is often more than offset by their much higher costs.
Printing a newsletter means spending money on paper stock, the printing process itself, handling costs and finally the expense of postage. You may also need to purchase or “rent” a mailing list, an additional expense.
And all but the most simple of printed newsletters still need the attention of a graphic designer to “lay out” the copy and artwork, and get the document prepared and sent to the printer. Most e-newsletters can be sent without this expense.
But some publications are simply better as physical pieces of collateral. Newsletters that also serve as catalogs are one good example. And a printed publication has more “weight” in the minds of some consumers, especially for brand new businesses.
So which is better? For some companies, the answer is both. Since the delivery mediums are so different and have their own unique virtues, sending a periodic e-newsletter, along with a less frequent printed newsletter, can be a good strategy. And some publications simple work better as a more permanent, and portable, reference material, such as a yearly catalog.
When you harness the power of both e-mail and print newsletters in tandem, you can boost brand recognition, and revenues.
Need help writing your next print or email newsletter? Or maybe need some assistance in developing a brand new publication? Give us a call or send us an email and we’ll be happy to discuss your options.