My name is Erik Gifford and I am a network marketing coach and trainer and independent marketer.I have been involved in the network marketing industry since 2002.For a FREE 20-MINUTE CONSULTATION about your network marketing business,please call 004722520239/
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If you are searching for simple email marketing software that provides a platform for your online marketing campaigns, we encourage you to use our friends at iContact. iContact allows you to use multiple channels such as email, RSS feeds, and blogs to distribute your message to your prospects and customers. [ Learn More ].
Can You Have More Sales, Too? Helping over 51,000 businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber's opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.
Have you ever considered using a sign up form to capture valuable contact information that you can use to reach out to customers or prospects? Maybe you've got so much money rolling in, you don't need to think about different tactics you can use to drive sales. If that's the case, stop reading this. If not, it's high time you put some sign up forms in place.
In this day and age, a beefy email list isn't a nice to have, it's a must have. By using sign up forms, people are choosing to turn over their information to you, which means your growing list is going to be highly qualified. Think about it this way - if you don't have a growing list to market to, how are you going to effectively get the word out about your latest and greatest offering, sale or promotion? Spreading the word means creating opportunities for folks to spend money on those tempting items or services.
You need to create opportunities for customers and prospects to come to you, and don't let up. Truth be told, you can expect up to one-third of your list to dry up, or become non-deliverable yearly.
The following tips should help you grow and maintain your list, ensuring you every chance to sell things - you know, make money.
1. Place a sign up form on your website
This is perhaps the most immediate way to start growing your list. Always make sure you place your sign up links in prominent locations on your website such as left or top navigation areas. The link doesn't need to flash, or say, "hi - click on me", but you need to make it clearly visible and attention grabbing.
2. Online transactions
If you sell online, during the checkout process add a checkbox for people to sign up for information on upcoming sales or offers, or to sign up for your newsletter. Also try including a link to your website sign up form in your email receipt to the customer.
3. Collect contact information in person
Ask your customers for their email address when they come in to make a purchase, or have a sign-up sheet handy at your counter. Don't stall adding them to your email list either. A timely thank you or welcome message is a great way to keep your business fresh in their minds.
4. Touch points
Give folks any and all opportunities to reach out and touch you. At the cash register and online shopping cart point-of-sale, online product registration, packaging inserts, thank you cards and order confirmations. Give them as many places as possible to provide their email address, or sign up for alerts and newsletters.
5. Promote it
Do what you can to increase site traffic to motivate new sign-ups. Generate some interest with coupons, free gifts, any sort of download, you get the idea. Think about what would make you sign up and go from there.
6. Don't get greedy
Ok, so you'd love to have all sorts of data on a customer or prospect because it makes it easier to sell to them right? Wrong. When thinking about a sign up form, less is always more. Don't make it difficult for them to sign up by asking for too much information, adding too many fields in your form, or making the experience time-consuming, confusing or painful. Remember, people that choose to be contacted by you will always be your most responsive email subscribers. By following our sign up form advice, you're sure to be on the right path to driving awareness of your company, and ensuring your sales continue to grow.
Yesmail Direct is an easy-to-use emarketing application with intuitive tools for email and direct mail, perfect for small businesses. See our products at http://www.yesmaildirect.com.
Using email marketing to directly connect you with your customers has been simplified with iContact. Signing up for an account today promises to empower your business' online communication needs. Sending personalized emails to your customers and your prospects doesn't get any easier than with iContact. [Sign up for a free trial]
Your email program is going strong and now your CMO is asking "what about mobile?" Let's face it, the world and your customers have gone mobile, so your email program needs to follow suit.
Reaching your target audience today can feel like an exercise in virtual roulette, an assortment of options to choose from, each feeling as much a gamble as the next. Mobile has become a key component of today's marketing venue, so you need to be prepared to enhance your email program to market to the exponentially growing numbers of mobile users and to introduce mobile messaging into your mix.
Be a mobile marketing maverick
Since your customers have adopted the ease and portability of handhelds and cell phones for media management, it's time for marketers to adapt and customize their messages based on customer habits and preferences. As digital media adoption rates soar, customer demand for mobile engagement will skyrocket.
Be where your customers are
As an email marketer, it's essential to be at the center of your customers' attention if you hope to earn and hold their business. According to AOL Mail's fourth annual Email Addiction Survey, 16% of survey respondents said they check their email from a mobile device. What's more, 55% of respondents said they upgraded to a new cell phone in the last year so they could check email on-the-go. Crunch these stats and you've got a major trend towards mobile migration.
Clearly, to be successful in today's market, your email program must adapt to meet consumer demand in the mobile stratosphere. Don't think of mobile as a replacement to email, think of it as an enhancement to the strategies you already have in place today. To get started, try out these simple yet powerful tactics for integrating mobile into your email strategy starting today.
Steps to mobile marketing success
Step #1: Create 'mobile friendly' formats for your email
Not all email layouts and styles are right for mobile media. As you target your traveling audience, be sure to think simple, design for tiny screens, mobile software, and use patterns most common to portable media devices. Mobile users spend mere instants accessing messages, so say it fast and focus on benefits. - Craft clear and easily understood offers for the subject line. - Put the most important subject matter at the top of emails for faster access to substance. - If you include links, ensure landing pages are optimized for handhelds. - Make messages brief, concise, and worth it, with clear action items and incentives.
Remember, the size, layout, and design features useful in standard email communication will not produce the same results in mobile messaging, potentially causing recipients to hit the delete key without bothering to read further.
Step #2: Have a plan and stick with it
Plan for success by identifying your goals and the tactics you'll need to achieve them. Ask yourself, "How can mobile marketing help me build my business and meet marketing milestones?"
The first action item should include an assessment of the unique qualities of the mobile lifestyle. Content and user flow that informs via full scale Web layout won't necessarily scale on a Blackberry. Play to the strengths of this small, multifaceted platform and run campaigns that bring value to mobile users, e.g., click for ring tones, access mobile-only special offers.
- Build a mobile marketing strategy that integrates with your overall marketing plans. - Outline campaigns and relevant offers that specifically appeal to mobile users. - Set goals with incremental dates and milestones and track performance.
Step #3: Collect mobile data from your Web site visitors
Before you begin a mobile campaign, turn to your own captive audience, your Web site visitors, to see what, when, where and how they want to be communicated with on their mobile device. Within your website's communications preference page, gather key data points, such as: - Mobile number - Mobile opt-in agreement - Type of information users want from mobile messages - Basic demographics, like age, gender, DOB, email, phone, zip (geo targeting), and interests - Mobile phone type and carrier specifications - Email address
If possible, offer incentives for completing the form to fuel sign-ups. While you're at it, drop hints indicating that exclusive, top-list deals and announcements are coming soon in future mobile messages from you.
Remember, those who opt-in to receive mobile news are likely: - Too busy to proactively obtain all their data from the Web, and - Don't want to miss the latest, greatest development about their favorite brands, hobbies, and heroes.
Maximize the medium by offering perks that save users time, give them useful tips, and sell them over and over again on your value.
Step #4: Create an infrastructure that's industry compliant
Mobile marketing, like any medium, has its rules. The good news is, following these guidelines can afford you smooth travels along this new superhighway.
To ensure your infrastructure is up to snuff, first check with the Mobile Marketing Association - their code of conduct and industry best practices cover essential protocol you'll need to know to keep yourself in good standing.
Simple things like using compliant SMS aggregators and sending permission-based communications are big deals in the small world of handhelds. Just like in the email arena, there's no spam allowed! Also take note: clear, accurate and age-appropriate messages are keys to fair game.
Step #5: Get down to details-develop campaigns, then track results
Since mobile marketing is actually a segment of your overall marketing strategy, sync it up with business goals and develop campaigns that mirror and compliment what you're doing in other venues. Get your hands in the details, set quarterly goals, and outline the steps that get the job done.
Take stock of these integrated tactics along the way: - Compliment current promotions with mobile-only offers. - Encourage mobile user interaction by emailing, mailing or broadcasting special offer access codes that deliver a "gimmee" (e.g., song, ring tone, coupon, widget). - Use mobile messages to: drive people back to your Web site, build your brand, and promote your services. - Set up a testing calendar to try out SMS methods, calls to action, and audience receptivity. - Measure response time: speed, time-of-day, day-of-week; and create a matrix of best times and types of messages to send. - Test calls-to-action that incorporate coupon redemption, click-through rewards, and latest/breakthrough news; adjust tactics based on results. - Send different emails to different audience groups; test which performs best and modify future sends accordingly. - Ask yourself, "What makes my audience respond?" and do that.
Step #6: Analyze and apply campaign success
As you wage campaigns, your testing and tracking activity will reveal what's working and what's not. Now's the time to fine-tune your methods and build a strategy that grows with your business goals.
If a campaign results in a high number of opt-outs, take note and analyze the demographics, subject lines, calls-to-action, times-of-day, and message offers to locate the source of failure. On the flip side, if a campaign hits the roof, boosts sign-ups, surges sales, and triples Web site traffic, try to identify the muscle behind the homerun-and create a few clones!
Criteria by which to analyze campaign success: - What was the level of interaction on handsets? - How many recipients unsubscribed? - How many new users subscribed? - How many recipients sent in the survey? - What days of the week and times-of-day did users respond? - How long did recipients wait to respond? - How many coupons were redeemed, songs/ring tones/skins/widgets downloaded? - How many recipients clicked the call-to-action link and/or clicked to my Web site? - What other responses did the campaign yield?
Stay focused and get in the game.
As the face of email marketing forever changes, take charge and evolve with the times. Integrating mobile strategies into your marketing mix will help you reach more customers, more often, and more reliably. With a few adjustments to your program, you can create scalable campaigns catered to mobile devices that get you in the game to win.
Yesmail Direct is an easy-to-use emarketing application with intuitive tools for email and direct mail, perfect for small businesses. See our products at http://www.yesmaildirect.com.
Can You Have More Sales, Too? Helping over 51,000 businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber's opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.
Email marketing is one of most effective marketing channels for businesses. It allows you to connect and market your business to your prospects easily through emails. However, in order to use email marketing, you need to have a list. One of the problems that marketers face is getting the email addresses of their prospects.
There are many ways to get a list of targeted email addresses. One way is to buy or rent it. There are many companies out there that offer this service. The disadvantage of using this method is that the people in the list are not targeted. People will consider your emails as spam and will not read it. A more effective method to get email addresses is to build it. Entice people to opt-into your list by offering them with industry updates, freebies, product trial, etc. Building a list is the best option for you as it allows you to profit from it for years to come.
To build your list, you can place a newsletter subscription box on your website and allow those who are interested in your newsletter on a specific topic to register with their email address. Another way is to offer a free gift like e-book or voucher to anyone who opt into your list. Building a list allows you to collect email addresses from those who gave you permission to do so. This will make your list more targeted and allow you to get better ROI from your email campaign.
For businesses, there are many benefits of using email marketing. First of all, it helps you to save money. The cost of sending emails to your subscribers is very low, or sometimes is even free. All you need to do is to invest a little time and effort to create a list of follow up email messages for your subscribers.
Also, email marketing allows you to see results fast, especially if you have a targeted list. And having a targeted list is like having a loyal readership. This means that you can offer your product or service to a group of interested people on demand.
These are some benefits of using email marketing for businesses. But do understand that although email marketing is cheap and fast, you need to create compelling email content in order to see results. Content is king when it comes to email marketing. If your email does not have what your subscribers want to read and call-to-action statements, you will not get good conversion.
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency that specializes in search engine marketing.
The key to build a successful business is to have your own readership. It is easier to sell to someone you know than a stranger. Your readers will be your loyal fans who are more receptive to your product and service. And the best way to build a readership is to build your list.
Having a list gives you the ability to generate instant traffic on demand. By hitting the send button, you can access to a group of targeted audience instantly. Although a list gives you many advantages, you need to be careful with your email campaign. If done incorrectly, you will achieve mediocre results from it.
Now, let me share with you 4 mistakes that email marketers make and hope that you can avoid them:
1. Write a poor subject line. The subject line of the email is the key factor that determines whether your email gets read or not. With a poor subject line, your email open rate will be low and you will have an unsuccessful email campaign. So always come up with 10 subject lines and choose the best one for your email campaign.
2. Do not present real value to the readers. I have seen many emails by companies that talk only about themselves. You must understand that your readers do not care so much about you. In your email, you must let them know what's in it for them. Speak about yourself briefly and focus on what you can do for them. If your email contains too many "I", try to change them to "You".
3. Poor formatting of text. If you want your readers to finish reading your email, you need to format your text properly. Do not lump lots of text together as this will cause strain in your readers' eyes and make them close your email. Proper paragraphs will ensure that your email is smooth flowing and encourage readers to finish reading it.
4. Do not include call to action statements. If you want to increase the click-through-rate (CTR) of your email campaign, you need to include call-to-action statements in your email to encourage readers to click on your URL. Just listing your URL in your email is not good enough. You must tell them what they need to do next. An example of a call-to-action statement is "click on the link below now to download free report".
Your list is the biggest asset of your business. You need to make full use of it by getting the highest open and click through rates for your email campaign. Good luck!
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency that specializes in search engine marketing.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to market your product or service. With a loyal readership, you have the ability to generate traffic to your website on demand. But, there are many companies using email marketing to market their businesses too. So how to differentiate yourself from the others? The key lies in having good content.
It is important that your email content is dynamic and contains call to action statements to get higher response rate. First of all, you need to have a professional email template for your company. Agencies that provide email marketing services will usually include email template creation. A professional template gives more credibility to your company and engages the readers more.
Remember, content is king when it comes to email marketing. If your content is all about yourself or your company, readers will not want to read it. In every email that you send to your subscribers, focus on what you can do for them. They want to know what is in it for them in your emails. Give them solutions and suggestions that they can use to solve their problems. When they feel that you are providing valuable content, they will trust your company and are more willing to do business with you.
If you run out of topic to write for your email content, always ask what your readers want to read. Send them an email and ask them to spend a few minutes of their time to do a survey. To entice them to do the survey, give them a free gift like an e-book or voucher once they complete it. Survey is a good marketing tool and can help you to understand what your readers want. Then, you can create the right content to engage them and improve response rate.
When you are planning your email campaign, make sure that you take personalization into consideration. Personalization is very important in email marketing as no one likes to feel they are getting an email that is sent out to thousands of people. So always address the recipients by their first name and use language that you know they will respond to.
Lastly, you need to make sure that your email is easy to read. Break the text down into proper paragraphs to make your email smooth flowing. This will encourage your readers to finish reading your emails and get better response rate.
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency that specializes in search engine marketing.
Monday, April 20, 2009 at 09:41AM 