Up and Running Blog

January 2011

email

Email Marketing Do's and Do not's

by Kristen Langham on January 5, 2011

Email marketing can be a viable sales channel for many organizations, but it can also be scary, uncharted territory. Recipients can tell you they never want to hear from you again, emails can bounce if you don’t have updated email addresses, subscribers can mark your emails as spam (even when they aren’t!), and your email service provider can shut you down at a whim due to too many complaints (yes, this has happened to us even though we always comply with the regulations regarding spam. Sometimes free-will can be brutal! )

So where do you start? How do you ensure your emails get delivered, opened, and not marked as spam? You can find tons of information on the rights and wrongs of email marketing, and I certainly don’t have the perfect answer. But I do have some real-life experience and a few things I have learned along the way.

1.    Never send an email campaign from your personal email address. If you do, be prepared for an avalanche of email into your inbox, with everything from “out-of-office” auto responses, “this email address is no longer valid” emails, to questions from those who received your campaign. Set up and use a general email address (like info@companyname.com) that can be monitored by you and others in your company. There are email management solutions that make this easy.

2.    Check all the links in your email – multiple times – to make sure they direct to the correct page/website. If you are offering 20% off your products, you don’t want to accidentally direct your recipients to a page that doesn’t contain information on the sale. It only takes a couple minutes to double check all your links and it could save you hours of questions on the backend.

3.    Choose an email service provider wisely. There are so many options out there these days, and each has a different selling feature – free templates, price, report analytics, ability to send auto responders, customer support, email deliverability, to name a few.  Research wisely – your provider really does impact your success.

4.    Test, test and test some more. What is the best subject line? Will an image increase conversion rate? Should you use a button or a text link to increase the click-through rate? Test all these things! Ideally, your email service provider will have the ability to do A/B testing so you can easily measure the results. But even if it doesn’t, you can manually test these things on your own. WhichTestWon focuses on a test of the week (homepage/ landing page/email) and shows the results of the test. You can sign up for their newsletter and vote for which page/email you think won and see the results. It’s fun and you can garner some useful information for your own use as well.

5.    Look through your own inbox and pick out newsletters and emails that appeal to you.  Why do you open the emails you do? What compels you to do so? Is it the look and design? Or the content? Or the possibility of a special offer? Think about the emails you welcome into your inbox and apply some of those ideas to the emails you are sending out.

I think you can never truly perfect email marketing, so please share other tips and suggestions you have up your sleeve!

Kristen Langham
Email Marketing / Project Manager at Palo Alto Software

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Behind the New Look of SBA.gov

by Tim Berry on January 5, 2011

Congratulations to the Small Business Administration (SBA) for a great new redesign of its flagship SBA.gov website. The recent release is a huge improvement. This has always been the granddaddy source of official information on small business in the United States. For years its had thousands upon thousands of pages of information about starting a business, running a business, finding financing, government programs, small business research. It’s always been the first place for real businesses to look for real information.

But it has never been this easy to navigate or this well organized. There was just so much information, it could be hard to find and sift through it all.

I’ve spent some time with it since it came out just a couple of weeks ago, sort of in the holiday lull, and I like it a lot. The new version is a lot easier to use, meaning categories are easier to understand and searching is more logical.

The new site highlights a new SBA Direct tool designed to help users navigate quickly to information on specific topics like financing, marketing, and business planning. It also leads you to local resources quickly. The idea is to make it “hyper local.”

The team in charge looked deeply at analytics showing the actual usage patterns of the previous site, meaning what topics business owners looked for depending on their industry and stage of growth, and so forth. They also used advances made at the related business.gov information site, which is much more social with blogging and forums. As a frequent blogger on that site, I’ve seen the progress as it has evolved.

I’ve been a fan of the SBA for 20-some years now, during both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, during booms and recessions, without ever having taken out an SBA loan for my own business. What I get from the SBA is reliable information; programs like SBA local offices, Small Business Development Centers, Womens’ Business Centers, and SCORE, and small business leadership.

For small business information, analysis, statistics, not to mention tutorials and step-by-step guidance, www.sba.gov is the first place to go.

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Facts about Using Yelp for Small Business

by Carolyn Higgins on January 4, 2011

Article by Carolyn Higgins

With more than 75% of adults turning to the internet to make LOCAL buying decisions, social networking sites like YELP are more popular than ever. In June of this year, 33 million consumers visited Yelp to learn about local / small businesses.

Whether you know it or not, your small business may already have a presence on Yelp. The question is – are you in control of it? Yelp is a social networking site that allSocial Media Marketing small businessows consumers to learn about – and rate – their favorite (and not-so-favorite) places to eat, shop, play, and spend their hard-earned dollars.

Ignoring social sites like Yelp isn’t going to make them go away or prevent negative reviews. Remember the golden rule of Social Media Marketing? SOCIAL MEDIA IS AT LEAST 51% LISTENING. And if you haven’t set up your listening station to be notified when people are talking about you (using Google Alerts, for example) on the web, you are missing a huge opportunity – and you could be responsible for sabotaging your own business.

Some Yelp Basics:

  1. You don’t have to claim your page or set up an account for people to be able to post reviews- That’s right- anyone can add your business and review it. You may already be there and not even know it. This could be extremely damaging to your business.
  2. Claim/unlock your business page- go to yelp.com to claim your business page and unlock all the tools that are available to business owners. Like tracking number of visitors, demographic info of reviewers so you can learn more about your target market and how they found you, you can post hours, specials, photos, or anything else you want your potential customers to know about your business – and of course the ability to respond to reviews.
  3. Respond to negative reviews – either publicly or privately – what a great way to turn a negative into a positive! We all make mistakes and most consumers will forgive a mistake if it’s handled appropriately.

How to handle a negative review:

Respond privately: If someone leaves a bad review you now have the option of communicating with them privately to work it out. I recommend doing so – immediately. Do what you can to resolve the issue- this is an awesome opportunity to create goodwill, save a customer, and perhaps generate awesome word-of-mouth marketing.

Once the customer is happy ask them, “Have we satisfactorily resolved your complaint?” “Would you recommend us to a friend?” If the answer is yes, ask them if they would either revise or amend their Yelp review to let people know how your resolved the issue. If the customer doesn’t do it- you can then go to a public response – see below.

Respond publicly: You can also respond publicly and I’ve seen this done extremely well. You can tactfully state your case. Did you try unsuccessfully to resolve the issue? Tell people! Did you go out of your way to try to make it right? Tell people! Did you respond to the customer privately and rectify the situation? Talk about it! Also keep in mind – there will always be complainers- and the Yelp community can spot one a mile away (anyone can access all of a person’s reviews and if they’re chronic complainers their opinion will most likely be ignored by potential customers).

ducttapemarketingbadge Carolyn Higgins is the President and founder of Fortune Marketing Company. Her personal mission is to help small businesses stop wasting money on advertising and promotions that don’t deliver and help you implement an effective marketing system that will bring you more customers – consistently.
For more information about Carolyn Higgins and Fortune Marketing Company please visit http://www.FortuneMarketingCompany.com.
Email chiggins@fortunemarketingcompany.com or call us at 707.718.4489.

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Bad Reasons *Not* to Start a Business

by Tim Berry on January 4, 2011

I just read Neil Patel’s Business isn’t fun! on his QuickSprout blog. It’s a great case of being very right but explaining very wrong. Try this on:

I hate to break it to you, but business isn’t fun. People start and join businesses to make money. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the New York Stock Exchange; companies are purely based on their financial performance.

Ha! See what I mean? Neil goes on to make some good points later on, but pointing to NYSE companies as illustrating anything generally applicable to business at large, much less small business and entrepreneurship? Not hardly.

There are a few thousand NYSE companies, a tiny fraction of the 26 million or so businesses in the US. And they’re exactly the wrong ones to look at because, by definition, they’re owned by thousands and thousands of individuals, not by anybody who ever started a business. How else could you judge a stock market company but by its financials?

But wait. What about the tens of millions of companies that aren’t judged by their financials? Those businesses you and I build because we want to, because we believe in what we’re doing, because we want to do what we like and make a living that way? Aren’t they more important? The software developers, graphic artists, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers making it on their own, doing it their way because they wanted to; aren’t they the right place to look at this?

All of which is bad reasoning, a bad argument, for a good point. But it comes later on. Before we get to the good points, I can’t help griping a bit about this one:

If you want to have a lot of fun, you shouldn’t try to create a business, you should stick with your 9 to 5 job.  [You'll have] less stress, regular hours, job security (SIC), vacations, and a simple life.

Oh dear: another bad example.  People with regular jobs tell me they aren’t much fun, or less stress, or more job security. Maybe they mean more vacations.

And what’s his good point? Several. He says it takes two things to start a business: 1) solve a problem, and 2) make money. That’s really true. And it is also true that starting your own business is a lot of work. You won’t be your own boss. You won’t have easy hours. You will have stress.

Neil concludes:

If you love making money like me, go for it. Just don’t do it for the fame and glamour.

Awkward: he should have said “fun,” there at the end, not “fame and glamour.”

And I conclude: Neil forgot that work, even hard work, is a variation of fun when it’s the work you choose. Not that it’s all fun or that there aren’t other things more fun than work, but some work is creative, and satisfying, and hey, most of us need to make money one way or the other, right? So isn’t doing your own thing part of the game?

Neil is smart, successful, and is doing what he likes. Some people would call that fun. And even if it’s more work than fun, not all work is created equal. Consider the alternative.

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Five Tips To Grow Your Business Smarter

by Tim Berry on January 3, 2011

Happy new work week, month, year, and decade. Are you glad to let 2010 go? Me, too. As we look at our businesses for this coming year, maybe we can do some things better, which may mean doing fewer things — or just the right things. Some ideas are better opportunities than others, and some ideas aren’t opportunities at all.  Here’s a quick list to help you jump-start the year:

  1. Beware of lists like this one; business doesn’t generalize very well. You aren’t typical. Use this and others as thought generators, something like the occasional whack on the head, but take nothing for granted.
  2. Look for contiguous growth first. Not all growth is created equal. Selling an existing product to existing customers is way easier than selling a new product to new customers.
  3. Strategy is focus. Find the sweet spot of your business. What really drives it forward and makes it grow? Some customers are better for you than others, and you get them because some of what you do is better than the rest of what you do. Can you concentrate and do something really important a lot better?
  4. Remember the displacement principle: everything you do rules out something else you don’t do. Sure, we’re entrepreneurs, so we want to do everything well; but this is the real world.
  5. Know what knobs you can turn. Close your eyes. Imagine you and your business as you are sitting in the driver’s seat of a vehicle. Now think about what knobs you can actually turn. What’s realistic? What can you actually do that will help?

Think about some of this for awhile, and you’re heading towards strategy. Develop it and put the specifics around it, with some concrete steps and ways to measure progress, and you’re a long way towards business planning.

(Image: snail_race/Flickr cc)

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