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email marketing

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Even though global IPO markets may now be showing a bit of an uptick, indicative of the trend of new company formations after the abysmal depths of 2007 to 2010, any entrepreneur who has been trying to raise capital for a new venture does not have to be told that money is tighter than ever and investors have taken risk aversion to new heights.

Venture Capitalists and financial institutions are extremely reticent to fund new enterprises unless they are confronted with bulletproof arguments as to the company’s success, leaving entrepreneurs scrambling for ammunition to prove that their business plan is the bomb.

One of the best ways to bolster any business plan is to dedicate a sizeable portion of the marketing section to describing how the company will thrive through the application of the most effective strategy, the one which provides the highest Return on Investment of all: email marketing. Here are five points you should make in your business plan in order to dazzle your investors with your email marketing prowess.

1. Return on Investment

The Direct Marketing Association has established that each dollar invested in email marketing can expect to generate a ROI of $43.52. A ROI of well over 4,000% not only is guaranteed to get any investor salivating at the lucrative possibilities, but will also establish your business plan as strategically superior and indicative of highly sophisticated business acumen.

2. Immediacy

More than half of all American Internet users check their email at least once a day. With the proliferation of mobile web-enabled devices, a considerable percentage of on-the-go users check their email literally dozens of times daily. There is no other medium which can provide such immediacy while ensuring that the customer can be accurately targeted at any time and any place.

3. Efficacy

The number of emails sent by reputable and ethical marketers has increased by more than 60% since 2007. You would be hard pressed to name a single major brand which does not share a profound commitment to email marketing as a cornerstone of their entire promotional plan. These thousands of leading corporations rely on email marketing because it works. Period. Demonstrating that you are adopting the same strategies as the big brands will reinforce your business plan’s strength, impact, and growth outlook.

4. Precise Targeting

Countless VCs have been burned by hotshot companies that blow millions for splashy ads on the Super Bowl and then don’t draw flies. Mass market appeal is no longer relevant or cost-effective in the online age where it has been replaced by the one-on-one conversation paradigm of email marketing. Instead of squandering your funding on reaching millions of people who would never consider buying your product or service, you can dedicate your efforts to specific, individual, concordant audience segments and personalize your message to suit their particular requirements and preferences.

5. Social Media Symbiosis

Email marketing has become so intertwined with social media that it is difficult now to specify where one ends and the other begins, as each is responsible for exactly half of the remarkable 72% of all traffic driven to landing pages. Even private Angel Investors who may not be overly Internet savvy have received the message loud and clear that social media is the way marketing is done in the 21st century. By integrating your social media strategy with the advanced audience strategies unique to email marketing, you prove to your potential investors that you’re covering all the bases.

Basing your marketing plan on email marketing is an invaluable strategy for success. Make email marketing the crux of your business plan and convince your investors that you’re in it to win it.

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First Impressions
First Impressions

What first impression is your email sending?

A couple months ago, I attended my first email marketing conference and came back to the office with pages of notes, my brain packed full of information, and a fire in my belly to completely revamp our email marketing program. Due to time constraints, limited bandwidth, other projects needing immediate attention and the lack of an unlimited budget, I haven’t been able to completely revamp our program. Instead, I have been taking baby steps and applying small nuggets of what I learned to improve our email marketing.

While the entire conference exceeded my expectations, my real “aha!” moments came during the session led by Flint McGlaughlin, Director of MECLABS. Not only was he one of the best speakers I have ever heard, he provided excellent insight and takeaways that I could implement immediately.

Flint had such good information that I wanted to share my top five “aha!” takeaways:

  1. eme = rv(of+i) – (f+a): email optimization (eme) = relevance (rv) x (offer (of) + incentive (i)) – (friction (f) + anxiety (a)): While you typically wouldn’t associate this type of scientific formula with email marketing, it makes sense if you really look at it and think about it. Optimize your emails by increasing the relevance, offer and incentive and decreasing the friction and anxiety. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?
  2. Your headline is your pick-up line: Start the conversation on a high note and keep it coming, because you have seven seconds to get and keep your reader’s interest in the first paragraph of your email.
  3. Understand the thought sequence and optimize it: Think about how people read and the logical sequence of thoughts when composing your emails. Don’t put your call to action above the fold; you haven’t developed the logical thought sequence yet.
  4. Clarity trumps persuasion: Be clear in your marketing. Don’t try and trick your customers into buying your product or service. Don’t market TO them. Communicate WITH them.
  5. The goal of an email is to sell the click. The goal of the landing page is to sell the product/service.

Adjusting my thinking about our email marketing and applying some of the “aha!” takeaways is one small step in the right direction of improving and enhancing how we engage with our customers via email.

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email

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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Congratulations! Your New Year’s resolution is to get serious about marketing your small business. You know that email marketing is a fun, effective and inexpensive way to do it, so now you’re tasked with building your email list. Where do you start? Here are 5 tips to get you started.

1. Put a Guest Book in your store, office and/or on your website and ask people to sign it. Put a space for their email address with the message, “Would you like to receive offers and special members-only discounts from us? Join our mailing list!”

2. When you are networking and people hand you their business card ASK if they want to be included in your newsletter and/or special offers email list. Don’t put everyone who hands you a business card on your email list – believe it or not, that’s illegal.

3. Give something away for free. Either in your store, office or on your site; offer a free report, a free gift, a free session, for example. It can be a raffle or something you give to everyone who signs up (if you do this, make it easy and inexpensive, a white paper is perfect). It doesn’t have to be much, something educational, like a report or a free consultation – or anything a client or potential client will consider valuable and useful. Make it clear that when they agree to enter the drawing they will also be agreeing to receive emails from you.

4. Put an opt-in form on your website and Facebook page to sign up for a newsletter or special “members only” events and offers and drive traffic to it in your email signature, business card, signs in your office or store and in your social media accounts like Twitter.

5. Go through your Outlook list or Rolodex and contact each person one by one, asking for permission stay in touch via email more often. You can let them know that you publish a newsletter or send out special members only deals and you would hate for them to miss out.

Remember – as a small business, there are laws governing email. No matter how tempting it may be, never add people to your list who did not give you permission. Not only is it unprofessional and impolite it’s illegal.

For more information about growing your small business visit http://www.FortuneMarketingCompany.com

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 FortuneMarketingCompany.com

Email chiggins@fortunemarketingcompany.com or call us at 707.631.6340.

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Where it all went wrong photo by gary_foulger via FlickrI received an email the other day from a consulting company I have used in the past for Google Analytics. The email was for a seminar in Columbus, Ohio. It was a comprehensive one and two day seminar that, I’m sure, appealed to a wide range of people who use the service. The cost was low for most small businesses and was enticing. All the information given in the email made it the right seminar for me.

I had received a few of these emails for a few months previous for other seminars, which was good, helpful even. It gave me a basis that the company cared enough to want to offer me education on their systems.

TIP: When sending emails for seminars or conferences, getting the date out early is great, especially with some follow-up emails when the actual date is closer. Keep the seminar in the minds of the customers.

However, the date I received this particular seminar email blast was October 13th. The seminar was for October 14th. One day turn around.

I should say at this point, I do not live near Ohio, I am not even in the same time zone as Ohio. The only thing my state has in common with Ohio is the O. (Oregon, Go Ducks!) I am NOT the target for the “day before seminar” email blast. Who is? People in Ohio. People close to Ohio. Not people on the west coast.

Email marketing with a series targeted for a specific date can work, when done properly. Every piece of communication about this event was done perfectly, except one. They didn’t use segmentation in their email management tools to target their customers at each stage.

If you are sending out eblasts for a particular event, take the time to think about who should receive each email – It may not be the same set of people at each stage.

Nicole Poole
Online Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Where it all went wrong photo by gary_foulger via Flickr

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Does your blog or website have a newsletter for informational articles or product/service announcements?

If you do, most likely it’s an opt-in list you’ve cultivated slowly over time. So, what do you do when you want to grow that list? Do you invest in a high priced email list from a broker or do you find them yourself? If you want to find and qualify those customer leads yourself, where do you start looking?

Buying a list may be the easy route, but it can get expensive. The alternative being collecting the email addresses yourself. But as I mentioned above, that can take a while if you aren’t being aggressive about it.

So get aggressive! You’re in business to make money, don’t be afraid to sell your product to people who want and need your product or service. A newsletter to give your customers that value added benefit of being your customer might be just the thing that keeps them coming back to you instead of moving to your competitor.

iContact has 9 creative ideas you can use to build your email list.

Nine Ways to Collect Email Addresses

Your website – If you’re not promoting your email list on your website, you’re not using your website well enough.

Current email lists – Using current email lists to build your own email list is an essential part of your growth. If your current recipients see something of value to them, they may think their friends will benefit as well. Allowing them to pass your email along may easily add to your list.

In-store sign-up – Add sign-up forms so people can opt-in to your email list when checking out or browsing around.

Contests – Register participants’ addresses and announce the winner through your next newsletter.

Coupons and discounts - Offer special incentives through email only, and allow recipients to pass them along to friends.

Advertisements and direct mail – Never pass up the opportunity to inform readers about your email community. Direct them to your website or have them send an email to you requesting their addition.

Business cards – On the back of your business card, promote your website and the opportunity to receive informative emails or newsletters.

Trade shows and networking events – Offer collateral material that requests them to sign up on their own.

Seminars – Give seminars on your area of expertise, and have people sign up to your mailing list for future seminars, discounted rates, and other announcements.

Be creative with these ideas, mix and match, or come up with your own ways to collect emails.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

  iContact allows businesses, non-profit organizations, and associations to easily create, publish, and track email newsletters, surveys, blogs, auto-responders, and RSS feeds. We are thrilled to be able to share their expertise with you and give you an opportunity to use their best-in-class email marketing software for a special 10% off the lifetime of your account.

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