Online marketing solutions

One size does not fit all, even though many clothes manufacturers tell us so.  When trying on any garment, the fit is important.  Why buy anything for the sole sake of spending money.  In a bad economy, everyone is looking for bargains, wanting to become wiser spenders.  If you are sending out generic email newsletter campaigns, you are enforcing and repeating that message – one campaign suits all.  Your campaign is then assuming the times we live in and the people that you are trying to target never change.  Do you think everyone wants to hear and buy the same things?  Without any complicated demographics, our experiences tell us that statement is false.

So now you have your email lists parsed, your behavioral stats are in, and your demographics are tuned.  So now what?

Creating successful email campaigns takes time and planning.  Pretty graphics, a smart logo, and interesting content, make a good start, but, there are many other factors to consider.  Taking the time to rethink your strategies, while weighing and comparing past email campaign results, is the surest way towards the better path of a higher ROI.

As with any car that needs monthly maintenance, a smart email marketer regularly analyze their campaigns.  They look for all the ways to modify, fix, and improve on the results they are receiving.  They are out of the box thinkers that are not afraid to try new things.

So here are some suggestions worth considering when evaluating your future newsletter campaigns:

Revisiting your Style and Design. Times and people change.  What was eye-catching last year may be boring now.  Does your design look professional and inviting?  Does it strengthen and convey your image and message?  Test your design by sending it out to trusted family members, friends, and colleagues.  Have some fresh eyes help see where adjustments and changes may be needed.  Here are some areas of concentration:

• Colors and fonts
• Photographs and imagery
• Too much or too little white space
• Is your content easy to read and parse?  Can readers quickly scan finding what they want quickly and easily?
• Are your articles too long?  Do you link readers back to your website to continue reading longer stories?
• Does your newsletter contain clear and precise calls to action with links to a corresponding and dedicated landing page on your website?
• Have you created an alternative text-only version of your newsletter for users who block graphics, or read predominantly on mobile devices?
• Does your newsletter contain tips and valuable information with special sales and close out information?

Create Dynamic Content. Think beyond the sale.  Content needs to be catchy, interesting, but most of all, relevant.  Your recipients receive a great deal of email, comprised of spammers selling everything you could think of.  The average user spends about 4 seconds looking at the sender address and the subject line, before deciding to keep or trash.  Here are a few ways to keep ahead of your market and industry, while creating dynamic content for your readers:

• Make sure your company name is in the “from line.”  People hesitate to open an email when the name is not recognized.
• Your subject line should be short, catchy, and clearly represent your main content.
• Send out a survey asking your subscribers what they would like to see in future issues.  Give them a list of potential topics from which to pick.
• Ask your readers to submit questions about your industry, products, or services.  Let them know that those questions and answers will be put in the next issue.  Create a little anticipation.
• Invite readers to send in their problem solving success stories.  This will greatly contribute to making your email newsletter content interesting and relevant.
• Have contest for the best story, rewarding them with a gift or discount coupon.  Everyone loves recognition, with an added freebie.
• Be savvy.  Research the industry experts in your field.  Ask them if they would like to be featured in your newsletter, with a section promoting their book or article.  Let your readers see it is not all about you.
• Use Social Media.  Write blogs and articles and put those links in your newsletter.  Involve your recipients in a dialogue.  Create a personal voice showing that a real person is behind the company.

In hard economic times, we need to be innovative and creative.  Use all the technology tools available to create conversations and talk to your audience.  Reaching out in creative and fun ways brings in your personality, while you are building an Internet persona.  Do not be afraid to experiment.  You are dealing with everyday people, like yourself.  Get out there and have some fun.  Now is the time to be different.

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?

Whenever you’re attempting any type of marketing campaign, you need to get the word out about your company. You want clients and potential clients to feel comfortable knowing that your company or business is an expert in its field. And one way to do that is by keeping your customers updated with news and reports and worthy advice on products and skills that are related to your field. So since, the Internet is the king of all kings for marketing these days, a great way to be constantly in touch with your clientele is by writing to them through blogs and articles.

Articles have been around since the dawn of journalism. And articles come in many different forms. There are news articles, magazine articles, academic articles (in academic journals and papers), encyclopedia articles (anyone familiar with this thing called Wikipedia?), marketing articles (generally a little bit of content that tells you a lot about a product or business), and usenet articles (which is a bit more complicated, so we won’t go into it right now). If you look at Wikipedia, they’ll tell you that blogs and podcasts fall under the article category, but I beg to differ.

The closest type of writing that blogs relate to are columns, mostly personal opinion pieces in newspapers. The difference is that these days, anyone can write a blog, and you don’t need to be hired by a magazine or newspaper to get your opinion out there. In fact, at this very moment I am writing a blog. I’m telling you my opinion on producing and displaying content to the world.

There are pros & cons to writing both articles and blogs. On one hand, articles demand a specific type of format, including: a headline, lead, body, and conclusion. Articles are restricted in their type of writing and they tend to be more formal. Articles tend to follow a schedule. The reader expects to see a new article on the website of a company’s page, around 10:30 am on Friday, every week, in the same way that he or she expects to receive a monthly newsletter, on the 5^th of every month.

On the other hand, the opposite is true with a blog. Blogs are much more informal in their style, their content tends to be a bit more subjective and opinion-based, and also a little bit more unreliable. It doesn’t mean that you’re reading blatant lies as you read a blog, it just means that you don’t have 5 interns in the background fact-checking the content of a blog.

The downside of blogging is that if you want to keep your readership, you have to update your blog much more often than your articles. I remember once telling a friend I was going to start a blog and that I would write one blog per week and she laughed at me and told me that I was a fool and no one would read it, and if they did, they would get frustrated because I wasn’t updating my blog often enough. She was right. You can’t expect people to continue to read your blog if you don’t update it at least a few times a week. Ideally, you should write daily to keep people interested. I have a theory on why this is, blogs are not just informative, but they’re fun. Because they are informal and you have freer reign with your topics, it’s still more of a guilty pleasure for someone to read a blog. And we really can’t deny our guilty pleasures.

Blogs are also a great way to publish your link all over the web