Online marketing solutions

Whether for your own company or the one you work for, beginning your adventure in the social media world of digital communications is a good decision.

Social Media has become one of the most aggressive ways to promote your site or business, increasing back  links, resulting in additional website traffic.  For any business counting their costs, while weathering a bad economy, social media has become a lifesaving path.

Social media is all about conversation.  It is a very appealing way to create relationships online – giving a face and voice to small and large businesses.  This strategy can easily add to an email marketing campaign, whose name and brand begin to take on a more personal and widespread public recognition.

Beginning your SM Campaign Strategy – Before jumping in head first, you need to know what tools you will be using, as well as the information you want to share.  As with any email marketing campaign, research, time, and strategy must always come first.  Here are a few tips:

Preparation and Research

• Create an audience persona. What does your target audience look like?  As an email marketer, demographics is a survival word.  Get an image of your audience, age, gender, spending and surfing habits, what sites they visit, and how they use the Web.  This forms your foundation.

• Check out your competition. Find out what your competition is doing in the social media arena.  What are they talking about, what are they writing about.  See what kind of responses they are getting.

• Policy Guidelines. Make sure your company has a social media policy in place.  Guidelines are needed for any employee that engages online conversations representing your organization.

• The Designated Blogger. It is very important to designate a blogger.  Whether you hire a freelance blogger, or give someone in your organization this opportunity, this is a serious commitment.  Blogging needs to be consistent, live conversations need to be monitored.  Give this serious thought – you need the right person creating the right voice and conversations.

• Goals and Meetings. Have your plans and strategies clearly defined.  Make time for follow-up meetings on the outcome and results.  This is a learning process.  You can easily modify ideas and content along the way.

• Interesting and Relevant. Whatever message you put out there, cannot be taken back.  People are stressed, quickly skimming through titles and bits of conversations, as they surf.  Take the time to surf around at what your target audience is talking about on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  Do not let stress or urgency make your efforts sloppy.

Don’t forget to have fun. Social conversations should have some lightness about them.  We are not engaging in metrics or behavioral sciences.  Bring a bit of fun into this.   The very fact of the enormous proliferation of social media, proves that people want a more personal relationship and voice with those they do business with or buy from.

Here are some of the top SM sites in which to get started – Click Me!

As great as a value added email marketing campaign can be, planning its content, timing, and target is just as important to its success.  The proper approach to any email campaign should start with a well thought-out plan, which requires a little more time and effort then most e-marketers realize.  Here are some points that you need to cover when planning your email campaigns:

1.   Permission-based mailing list. Unless you have the recipient’s permission (op-in), you are trespassing and may be considered sending spam, which is against the CAN-SPAM Act.  Know the spam laws.  Stay out of trouble.

2.    Content is still king.  Your content should be relevant and directed at an intelligent audience.  Your message should be clear, sharing the essential facts in carefully thought out wording.  The structure of your message should be easy to parse.  Remember to give your message a personal voice.  You need to provide them with something that they desire.  Your content should hold their attention long enough for you to market yourself successfully.

3.    Grammatical errors. The amount of errors found within many emails can be quite surprising.  Misspelled words and poor grammar convey a lack of professionalism.  Rushing to get a campaign out, may cost you the loss of clients.  Take the time to read your email campaign over several times.  Have someone else read it as well.  Don’t let pressure cause you to be sloppy.

4.   Are your graphics in overdrive? Too many cooks spoil the soup; too many graphics spoil your message.  Your graphics should compliment not overshadow your text.  Keep your message simple and easy to parse.  Oversized graphics can cause a slow download, causing impatience in the recipient

5.    A clear and precise call to action. Don’t make your clients perform and jump through hoops.  If you want someone to subscribe to an e-mail newsletter or sign up for updates about your product or service, do not make it difficult for them.  Filling out endless online forms, clicking through multiple pages, is annoying.  Even if someone wants your product, you may push them over to your competitor.

6.    Your “from” and “subject” lines are crucial to your email campaign.   Why?  Because that is what your recipient will see in their in-box before opening your email.  If you are not recognized in the “from” line, recycle bin or spam here you come.  The “from” line should represent your company or newsletter name that they signed up with.

Subject lines should be catchy and short. Keeping your subject line down to 50 characters or less is the general rule.  If your subject line is too long or cut off, it may quickly end in the trash bin.  Shorter lines help optimize your open rates.  Remember, subject lines need to be relevant to the content.

7.    Do you have a landing page? Are you sending people to your homepage?  Not good.  A targeted direct email campaign needs an accompanying landing page.  Creating key pages that people land on when they click a link from your e-mail campaign is very important.  Make sure that page has all the relevant information pertaining to the product or service you are marketing.  Giving a prospect all the information needed, on that page, enables them to be able to make a quick response.

8.    What’s in it for them? Don’t focus on telling your readers how great your business is, and the fabulous products you sell.  All they want to know is how does this benefit them?  Focus on what they want and need.  It’s all about them, not you.

9.    Using Social Media. If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, you can let clients know to join and follow you, as you use that media to announce your specials and discounted pricing.  That makes you cool, and gets your name out there as well.

10.   The Three T’s – Test – Test – Test. Before you send out your campaign, do a sampling on a small number of people.  See what the response is.  How well was it received?  Better to delay a campaign, than to court a disaster.

There is still an important point to add.  Make sure that your e-campaign is targeted to the right audience.  An email campaign can only be effective when the right campaign, goes to the right people, with the right message.  Don’t let all your hard work go down the drain.  Make each campaign work for you.

Creating a professionally targeted campaign is not easy.  It takes planning, thought, and strategy.  Don’t let time pressure you.  Your campaign needs to be professional and relevant.  Do you have everything covered?

No business wants to spend money on a marketing campaign if they can’t see a return on their investment. Recent reports have estimated that for each business that spends a dollar on an e-mail marketing campaign, they can see over 40 times that amount in profits. That means $1 spent is equal to over $40 in profit for a business. Of course, it helps if you know how to make a good e-mail marketing campaign. If you listen to the following tips, you might end up with much more money in your pocket than when you started.

Plan your campaign before you begin

Don’t just send out emails with a loaded message of advertisements, coupons, and the life story of your business. An email campaign is not a one-time thing, it takes place over a longer period of time, like a year. You have to introduce yourself to your customer, gain their trust, and tell the customer about your business, a little bit about your products and services. Give the customers and prospective customers time to believe in your expertise and your excellent service and then you can make some friendly offers for sampling your services.

Send the right messages to the right people

Remember that not everyone is interested in the same thing. Certain customers will want to know about your new products and others will want to know about your sales. If you specialize in selling both paper and puppies, you can’t sell both of them together. A printing shop will be much more interested in the paper than the puppies, and a pet shop will be more interested in the puppies than the paper.

On a different note, you can’t send the same message to the same people because they have different roles in their businesses. It’s different if you’re trying to make a small individual sale or if you’re trying to be the sole supplier for a large company. You wouldn’t talk to an individual customer the way you would to the CEO of a large corporation.

Make it personal

Remember when you’re organizing your emails to customers or potential customers that you can’t just think of them as a mass of people. You have to tyr to use language that makes a person feel as if you’re talking only to them. Try to stay clear of the stereotypical marketing lingo that makes people want to automatically click delete.

Pay Attention to your own e-mail address

The name of the email address that you send your messages from matters. It shouldn’t look like spam and it should be something that customers will be able to easily recognize in their mailbox.

Don’t use words commonly used in spam

Remember you don’t want your email to be filtered as spam and you don’t want the customer to automatically delete it. If you start with an advertisement with the word “FREE”, and write a generic message, no one will be interested. Look up words commonly used in spam, and don’t put them in your emails. Also learn the spam rules so that your emails don’t automatically get shoved into spam.

Sample different colors and texts

Every email doesn’t have to look the same. If you think that a color change might improve traffic, then try it, or maybe a font change or different words. But try one change at a time, to see which is working and which isn’t.

Use few images

Don’t overload your messages with graphics. If you do use some that are related to your business or brand, try to make them look custom-made. Don’t steal others’ graphics.

Create a nice landing page

If the customer decides to click on a link you attached in your email, you should have a nice landing page that goes into greater detail about what you began talking about in the email.

Email Marketing is on the Rise

E-Mail Marketing is still the fasted and most cost effective method of sending large amounts of e-mail communications anywhere in the world.  E-mail campaigns seamlessly work with and harness the power of this successful and highly effective Worldwide Web Internet market.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Supporting statistics and facts are constantly mounting, leaving no room for doubt of its role and influence in the lifeblood of any business.  So we thought we would share some with you.  Calling all email marketers, your future looks very bright – very bright indeed.  Let the facts speak for themselves:

Forrester Forecast:  US Email Marketing Spending To Reach $2 Billion In 2014

Forrester Research explains that falling CPMs (cost per thousands), higher ROI (return on investment) and growing consumer use of social email accounts will all contribute to the use of email by direct marketing professionals. The firm says that in five years consumers will opt-in to receive over 9,000 email marketing messages annually.  The following information below will be the key grown for the future of email marketing.

Forrester’s research cites the following as key growth areas for shaping the future of email marketing:  We quote:

-” Retention email — email that recipients have blessed with their permission — will continue to replace paper communications and will make up the largest share of marketing messages. Retention emails will account for more than a one-third of all marketing messages in consumers’ inboxes by 2014, representing increased competition for marketers.

- While the bulk of the market will continue to deploy email marketing on a self-service basis, the growing complexity associated with data integration and new tactics to increase relevancy will drive healthy growth in use of email service providers.  Spending on opt-in ad-sponsored or ad-supported newsletters will double over the next five years as traditional print publishers face falling circulation and ad revenue.”

How much greater the proof of the awesome power of email campaign marketing, than the enclosed.

Email Campaigns helped save Circuitcity.com

CircuitCity.com Returns.  “After shutting down operations in January 2009, CircuitCity.com is back.  Much of the surge in traffic can be attributed to an email campaign to reach out to potential. CircuitCity.com customers, since nearly 33% of the upstream traffic, was referred by web-based email services.

The campaign was successful in driving visitors to the website that hopefully were previous customers that wish to re-engage with the brand.”