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Archive for the ‘E-mail Marketing for Small Business’ Category
Sunday, July 18th, 2010
Staying ahead of the competition is always a hard task. You need to spend time on your business and any time taken to watch your competitors is time away from what you need to do. E-mail marketing has become a popular marketing channel, especially for small businesses, and it can be a real time saver when it comes to watching your competitors. How so? Become a subscriber.
It sounds simple, and it is. Select the most important competitors in your market and subscribe to their offerings. You gain an inside seat to what products they are promoting and how they are promoting them. You can also pick up a lot useful information related to products, especially products that occasionally have issues.
Newsletters are one area that have become popular for publishing ‘how to’ tips and you will be surprised how many times you discover something new, even if you have been in the business for years. What is slightly amusing is that this information is not only free, but your competitors really cannot wait to hand it all to you. Subscribing to blogs is another way to gain information and it’s certainly faster than visiting each blog each day to see what is new.
Turn the tables on your competitors and subscribe to what they have to offer. If they are smart, they are probably already subscribing to your newsletters.
Tags: competitive information, newsletters
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | No Comments »
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
I’ve written about it before – e-mail marketing going social. Now, it seems, eMarketer is agreeing with me.
There was an interesting survey conducted by Aweber. A good number of small business owners are looking for ways to make their e-mail marketing more social. And it’s no surprise to those of us who have been doing it awhile that it’s a fairly easy thing to accomplish.
I was really excited to see that small business owners want to offer e-mail list sign ups on Facebook and other social media outlets. That’s a good idea. But equally good is the idea that your e-mail marketing messages can have the social sharing buttons that you see on popular websites. Wouldn’t you like your e-mail readers to be able to more easily share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter?
Of course, many big businesses have been doing this for awhile, but small business owners are a little behind and I think 2010 and 2011 are the years that we will catch up. What do you think? What are you doing to be more social with your e-mail marketing?
Tags: e-mail marketing, Social Media
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
If you are a local small business and think that you don’t need an e-mail marketing list because your customers come to you and you do business in the real, physical world – think again. You need an e-mail list. And it’s relatively easy to build one.
Since you have a brick and mortar store and you do business locally at a physical location, you have a built in audience for a list. Just capture it.
The first step is to ask for it at the point of sale. You can do that with a database system through your check out system or by having customers sign a sheet of paper on your counter. But you also want to take that all-important extra step of building a website.
Let’s face it, people shop online. And for most things these days they are likely to shop there first. Wouldn’t it be great if they found your website before they found your physical store? And when they do, make sure they find your e-mail opt-in form in a prominent location on your website. Chance are, most people will sign up for your e-mail list before they even visit your store.
Next, do some marketing online. You’d be surprised how many people you can drive to your website and to sign up for your e-mail marketing list with social media and pay per click campaigns. Even on the local level. You can connect with potential customers through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and reach thousands in a matter of weeks.
So what are you waiting for? Build your local opt-in e-mail list the smart way. Right from your store location.
Tags: e-mail marketing, list building
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 5 Comments »
Monday, March 1st, 2010
This is one of those questions that so-called experts like to ask. Is it out with the old and in with the new? Or maybe it’s just that the new is better equipped for handling the challenges of the old. Either way you ask it, the question is “Will e-mail ever replace direct mail?”
There undoubtedly will be those who answer “yes” to that question, but I’m not one of them. I certainly believe in e-mail marketing. But I also believe there will always be a market for direct mail – just as there is a market for radio, VHS and mini-skirts.
Truly effective marketing utilizes the best medium for the right audience. There will be some people you’ll reach better through e-mail marketing and there will those you’ll hook into your net with direct mail. If you use both channels to reach your audience you are more likely to get more buyers. Don’t give up on the old forms of marketing yet.
Tags: direct mail, e-mail marketing, marketing
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 5th, 2010
What if you knew that 20% of the e-mail that you sent to opt-in subscribers wasn’t reaching its destination. Would you change the way you look at your ROI? According to recent statistics from Return Path, you should.
This poses two issues for e-mail marketers:
- How can you increase deliverability?
- What is the correct measure for determining ROI?
Obviously, you can’t count bounced e-mail as deliverable. The problem seems to be, however, that we’re all getting more bounces than we believe we are because some of the e-mail we think is getting through isn’t. And we’re not getting an undeliverable report on the return. That most definitely affects ROI.
As an example, if you send 100 e-mails and you have a bounce rate of 10% then there’s an additional 20% that you should include in the bounce rate. Instead of 90 deliverables you should only count 72 deliverables. That’s a 72% deliverability rate. If you close an average of 25 e-mails from that 100 then you don’t have a 25% conversion rate nor is it 27.7%. Rather, your conversion rate is 25/72, or 34.7%.
Why is that significant. It’s very significant because if you can figure out a way to decrease the undeliverables then you’ll make more sales. Now the question for savvy e-mail marketers is, How?
Tags: bounce rate, conversion rate, deliverability rate, e-mail marketing, roi
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Small Business Newz reports that marketers plan to increase their budgets for e-mail marketing in 2010. This doesn’t surprise me. The big question is, Will it go social?
Social marketing has climbed up from the gutter in the last couple of years. E-mail marketing has always been popular, and effective, so there is no surprise that is will see a surge in the coming year. In many ways, small businesses will be able to leverage greater returns on a smaller budget.
We’ve seen the melding of social media and other Internet marketing mainstays, such as SEO. So my bet is there will likely be a social component to e-mail marketing. What that will look like, I’m not sure. But I can see how e-mail marketing can become more social. Would you welcome that in 2010?
Tags: 2010, e-mail marketing, SEO, small business, Social Media
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
E-mail marketing is still the top method of marketing for online entrepreneurs. It will probably be a long time before it is toppled. For a while it looked as if RSS might overtake it, but there are still a lot of people who don’t understand RSS. They understand e-mail marketing. And they will continue to allow marketers to contact them by e-mail with a few reasonable restrictions.
Practically speaking, e-mail marketing has been around longer than most forms of online marketing today. Most people are comfortable checking their e-mail every day. But not everyone trusts online e-commerce still.
While user comfortability is on the rise for all forms of online marketing, e-mail marketing has the greatest comfort level. It is this level of comfort among the consumer crowd that makes e-mail marketing so special. In their own e-mail boxes, people feel like they have more control over what they see. It’s easy to delete unwanted e-mails and takes very little effort to say ‘yes’.
From the looks of things, e-mail marketing won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
Tags: e-mail marketing, online marketing
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
E-mail marketing is still one of the most used forms of Internet marketing and it’s easy to see why when you consider that it offers one of the highest conversion rates. Think about it. People on your e-mail list are on your list because they’ve requested to be there. If you are doing e-mail marketing the right way then you have a double opt-in process, which I recommend. That means your e-mail recipients have told you twice that they want to receive your marketing materials. If you send them something they like then they are as likely to buy it as anyone.
I like e-mail marketing. If you have a responsive list then you’ll make the sales. You’ll get conversions. And that leads to more success.
Of course, e-mail marketing includes a newsletter, but that’s not all it means. It also entails e-mail postcards, brochures, sales letters, and other types of marketing done through e-mail. The key is send out a newsletter with a consistent schedule. You don’t want to send out e-mail too often or send too little. Too much and people will get annoyed. Not enough and they’ll forget about you. So once or twice a week is enough.
And if you do it often enough with just the right offers, you’ll see the conversions. Guaranteed. E-mail marketing works.
Tags: conversions, e-mail marketing, sales
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | No Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2009
An autoresponder is a cool software package that will automatically send an e-mail to any e-mail address that signs up or opts in to a mailing list. It is most often used to follow up with subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or other e-mail list. You can send one follow e-mail through an autoresponder or several. It’s up to you. But it’s a good tool to have.
When you set up an autoresponder you need to think about what its use will be: Who will receive it, when they’ll receive it, how often they’ll receive your mail, and why. Standard information, right?
Of course, an autoresponder message need not always be a sales message, though it can be. The main advantage is you can set your messages to send and then forget about it. Once you turn the autoresponder on then anyone who triggers the response will automatically receive your messages. So you have to put some real thought into what your messages will say and how many you’ll send out to follow up with a list.
Let’s say you invite people to sign up for a newsletter. After they opt in, or subscribe, you send an automatic message thanking them for their subscription. A few days later you can have the autoresponder, pre-programmed, send a follow up message offering an upgrade to your paid newsletter. A few days later you can send a similar message. Maybe every third message you want to see an offer for a free gift. What you send is up to you. Get creative. There are no hard and fast rules. The main idea is to save yourself time by programming the autoresponder to send messages to people based on their level of interest. It’s an essential tool for anyone doing business online.
Tags: autoresponder, e-mail, e-mail marketing, newsletter
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
You did it all right. Took your addresses, made up your e-mail, sent it out, got your responses, double opt-in, the whole works. From the looks of things, you got a 98% delivery rate. All is good, right? Not according to this article in WebProNews.
It seems that less than 80% of e-mails sent are not delivered at all, with 17.4% not delivered with no return-path notices. What do you think of your open rate now?
This is common and what services are the biggest culprits? It used to be AOL and they’re still on the list, but not at No. 1 where they sat for the longest time. Now it’s Gmail. Thanks Google.
Gmail accounts for 23% of all nondelivered e-mail, Hotmail for 20% and MSN for 20%. The two biggest search engines account for 63% of nondelivered e-mail. So what does that do for e-mail marketing?
Comcast and AOL fall in at Nos. 4 and 5, respectively.
So is there a way to ensure that your e-mail IS delivered and delivered on time to the address that you sent it? Are there some best practices to follow for e-mail marketing so that your e-mails are received by those who’ve opted in to receive them? Yes, actually, there are some things you can do to ensure that your e-mails reach their destination, but remember that there is no fail-safe way and that there will always be some percentage of bounces. Here are a few tips to make your e-mail marketing go more smoothly.
- Be sure you follow all CAN-SPAM laws
- Ensure you mail your marketing messages to a list of subscribers who recognize your company name
- Segment your lists so that subscribers receive only the messages they are interested in receiving
- Use an e-mail service that is reputable and keeps a close eye on deliverability rates
- Get a custom domain name
- Avoid the use of the word “Free” in the subject line (it triggers spam filters)
- Send your newsletter at the same time and on the same day every week/month
- Encourage your subscribers to whitelist your e-mail address
- Use a spam checker on your e-mail before sending it out
- When you get a bounce on an e-mail address, delete it from your list
- Don’t send your e-mail in straight HTML, use multi-part MIME instead
- Go light on graphics within your e-mail
- Monitor the blacklists and make sure your name is taken off any list you appear on
- Use DomainKeys
- Respond to any spam test alerts you receive
- Offer text e-mail messages as an alternative to HTML (multi-part MIME)
- If you are accused of spam deal with it quickly and take the necessary steps to prove you are not a spammer (of course, if you are a spammer then this won’t help you)
That’s it. If you do these things then you will increase the likelihood that your e-mail messages get through to their intended destination.
Tags: deliverability, e-mail marketing, spam
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 3 Comments »
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