Email Marketing (Tool 3)

It is one of the most effective tool of direct marketing, which uses electronic mail for communicating commercial message to an audience. Every email sent to a current or potential customer could be considered as email marketing in its approach.

The purpose behind sending email to the customers is to enhance the relationship between the merchant and customers, as well to gain the customer's loyalty by adding some special discounts within the email convincing customer to buy something immediately.

Sending email messages based on the points, could help you in maximizing your investments:

• Introduce new products,

• Customized emails with their particulars,

• Share free tips with them based on your area of expertise,

• Announcement of events such as conferences etc.

• Offer discount coupons,

• Promote contests,

• Send out reminders regarding offers or contests etc.,

• Breaking News in your industry,

• Broadcast urgent issues and provide advises over them,

• Create a contact form and email newsletter sign up form on your website

• Send newsletters to customers and contacts based on their interests or demographics

• Start a fee-based or advertising-sponsored newsletter

What usually happens after sending the messages?

If you think that after sending the email messages you are done with your email marketing campaign, you are wrong. There are a lot of things you need to monitor and take action accordingly, such as:

• Email messages bounce, due to technical issues e.g. address no longer exist or the mailbox of the user was full or maybe the server was down at that moment.

• Some recipients, opens your message, read the content and click on the offers or link given inside whereas the rest delete it or leave it unopened.

• The recipients could ask you to remove them from your emailing list and by law if such thing happens, you must unsubscribe them within 10 days of their request. Mostly this doesn’t happen as the people who don’t wish to receive the emails in future, gets unsubscribed by clicking on the unsubscribe link included at the bottom of your message, provided by your email service provider.

How often are you sending this audience any type of messages?

There is no limit of sending messages, it could be as often or as infrequently as you would like but be careful of the consequences of your messages frequency:

Avoid sending any content which is not relevant because when people get emails which are not of their interest or irrelevant they get conditioned to automatically delete such messages. This practice could also lead them to put your email in to a spam folder and unsubscribe.

If you send messages few times a year, the bounce rate will be much higher due to the reason that many of the addresses would no longer exist, people might forget you and delete your message without opening or marking a spam.

It is good to send frequent messages such as twice or thrice a week, but with relevant content only. Irrelevant contents are mostly annoying to the subscriber and if they get annoyed by your messages result will be increase in your list attrition rate.

Tips on improving your Email Campaign

The fundamental and most important factor of email marketing is never trade, borrow or purchase an email list because the people who have not requested for receiving your email messages are most likely to mark it as spam.

If you are making signing up visible for newsletter then you should make unsubscribing easy and visible too. While unsubscribing you may ask the subscriber for their email address, first and last name interests or demographics.

Try to use double opt-in registration, with single opt-in, a subscriber enters his or her email address and is then automatically registered. Whereas double opt-in is the preferred method for email newsletter subscriptions because it requires confirmation, usually a verification code or link is send to your email address.

Always place link to privacy policy near the sign up form on your website. The policy should illustrate that how will you be handling the information and how people can contact you in case of any concerns. Subscribers always wants to be assured that the information they are providing you will kept secret and will not use for selling or trading purpose.

Remember! Don’t forget to send a welcome message to the subscriber as they sign up for the email newsletter. Tell them that how often they will receive the email, what they will receive and how they can unsubscribe with the service.

In order to avoid spam complaints, you should keep a proper record of your subscribers, such as website address from which they signup, the date etc. keeping record can help you in making the recall about their action of subscribing for your email messages.

If you think that you have not sent a mailing to your subscribers in a while, you may need to ask them that if they wish to continue receiving the message they need to provide acceptance by clicking a URL provided within the mail or by visiting a web page. Asking your subscriber to opt-in will help you in identifying the subscribers interested in your mailing messages.

Including a reminder that you have subscribed with our email messages works quiet well such as “Thank you for subscribing with us - Latest Issue:” it recalls the subscribers that the messages they are receiving are not spam and they have requested for it.

Avoid using such words which sounds spam or misleading within your email subject line. Send your messages regularly; insert your contact number and postal address too. This will help you in building credibility; the readers will get another method of contacting you as well it is compulsory now according to the new federal legislation.

Last and the most important factor of email marketing is interaction with your subscribers, so don’t forget to reply promptly the inquiries or spam complaints you receive from your readers. If you receive spam complaints, include person’s subscription details with your response.

I hope you will find this tool of online marketing every effective for your business and stay tuned for the next tool # 4

Why Business should be Marketed using New Media Tools?

The term media refer to the channels through which companies reach to the customers in terms of advertising the products or services. Let’s have a quick look at the traditional media marketing, which was based on radio, television and print advertising, outdoor or media known as billboards and direct mailing.

In actual fact the aim of traditional media is to make consumer recall the brand at the time of purchase through developing brand awareness and loyalty.

New media has replaced old media with internet driven technology which generally refers to website, online advertising, blogs, podcasts, e-mail and social networking sites to market products and services.

The traditional media has an advantage of reaching all types of audiences regardless of the term media or tech savvy but cons of traditional media are observed that the consumers were spending more time online due to the better interaction opportunities by New Media. Although it has been proven that the businesses are gaining success by integrating new media with traditional media a good example here could be billboards or posters where the audience can SMS for more details. Although it is a con for small business in terms of expense, traditional media particularly television advertising isn’t cheap.

Whereas if we talk about the pros and cons of new media the pros includes cheaper cost of targeting customers, higher engagement and interactivity, capturing customer in buying mode, faster ways of delivering the information required for buying and the ability to track leads on ROI though measuring clicks on PPC banners (online advertising).

The cons of new media includes non internet and media savvy audience, not well tested methods of marketing, difficulty of controlling the message such as blogs, could be ineffective without a website.

So, Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses should keep in mind:

What are their objectives?

Whom they are targeting?

Where they can find their customers?

How the message could be delivered to them? 

Small businesses can get high ROI through considering free online media such as blogs, networking sites and listings. Remember! Having a good website is an essential part of successful marketing strategy particularly in New Media, it should be simple clear and relevant to your audience not necessarily biggest or expensive one.

How you can use Social Media for Online Business Branding?

Today, online branding is a buzz word in the market. Online business branding requires the development of unique, strapping, and favorable associations in the minds of the people over the internet. Business having excellent website and a well designed logo has greater advantage to differentiate itself from competition and earn more profit in less marketing spending. However, online branding is lot more than just having a logo and a website. It involves extensive internet marketing strategy to stand your brand out of the crowd.

Blogging can do a lot for your business branding. With your blog, you provide tangible evidence of your expertise and achievements. Things you should do while setting-up your blog is to first get simple, easy-to-spell, content appropriate domain name. Secondly, nice theme design suitable to your business market then set everything necessary like about us page, comments, RSS etc. Make sure to update your blog regularly with quality content related to your area of expertise or industry to keep your readers engaged.

Subsequently, you need to increase your online presence. Therefore, get listed with blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search, comment frequently on other blogs that write about the same industry, use Google reader to store your searches, and check regularly that who is linking back to you through Yahoo! Site Explorer.

At the same time, to further extend your business branding, creating accounts on other social media and networking website would work. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc. are very useful to build your online presence. Also creating accounts on Flickr for photo sharing, YouTube for video uploading, Stumble Upon and Dig for voting, del.icio.us for social bookmarking, LinkedIn for professional networking, and Gmail for docs, reader, calendar etc. would definitely help to enhance your online visibility.

After all the aforesaid efforts, it’s time to start networking with the people around. Make your site and your efforts heavily about other people, ultimately it comes back. Allow people to reach you easily, thank them for their time and attention, and often ask questions in your community about your area of interest. Let people think that you care them a lot. Doing your efforts in building community grows out your brand as a natural extension.

Online business branding is still a new concept with considerable scope for further research. Social media is one very effective way to position your business and get your brand recognized online. Furthermore, it’s up to you how you use your brain over social media for brand visibility that would eventually return in a shape of business growth and brand identification.

How to Become a Podcaster a.k.a Audio Blogger

Podcasts are also known as audio blogging. Meng (2005) defined pod casting as “the process of capturing an audio event, song, speech, or mix of sounds and then posting that digital sound object to a Web site or “blog” in a data structure called an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) envelope (or feed)”.

Many of the marketers, trainers and consultants are now a days using podcasts for providing tutorials to their subscribers clients and students. There are four good reasons why companies should podcasts:

• To gain first mover advantage,
• To develop customer loyalty,
• To give the company a more human voice,
• To exploit the PR value of a new technology.

These audio files automatically gets downloaded onto the users’ computers, who are subscribed with the feeds of the service provider, which directly goes into the management programs onto the users’ computer such as Music Match, iTunes or Windows Media Player. These programs further transfer these audio files to the subscribers audio devices as they are synchronized with the computers and could be listened anywhere anytime as desired.

After uploading the content, it requires to be tagged via XML in a format known as RSS 2.0 so that it could be delivered to the people subscribed to editor’s RSS newsreader. As the content is delivered to the subscribed people it automatically, download to their portable audio devices as they synchronize it and will be able to listen it anywhere any time they intend to.

Curious about creating a Podcast of yours, just follow the steps given in the image below:


If you are having any difficulties in viewing the image try clicking on it.

Contemporary Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Technology has blessed small businesses to market themselves online in very effective manner through social networking to blogs to search engine optimization and plenty of new and useful marketing tactics.

Most probably these new ways to market small business online will not be effective for every business but if you know the options available to you it can help putting your business on the fast track to achieve success through online marketing.

So here are the three most expeditious and intense ways to market your small business online:

Marketing Maneuver #1: Usage of Blog

Chum relationship with customers is the key to success for small businesses. The matter of fact is that the personal element is what makes a small business work better than a big business. This gives competitive advantage to small businesses by adding value to a product or service that big businesses cannot do. A blogs is the most effective way of identifying and getting connected with the potential customers for a small business owner. Blog writing and commenting on other blogs helps you in creating clients rather than the customers. One lifetime client is worthy than ten customers.

Marketing Maneuver #2: Usage of Social Media

Internet provides numerous ways of getting connected with other people all over the globe. People get connected with each other through chat rooms, forums and other social networking mediums. New tools of social media marketing such as Twitter took this marketing approach to a new level, where it has given an immense contingency to market small business online. It gives you an opportunity of connecting with people where as blogging helps you in making that connection personal. It was not possible to get connected with your clients by using traditional marketing techniques, thanks to social media!

Marketing Maneuver #3: Usage of Search Engine

The most common way of marketing your small business online is creating and populating your blog or a web site with a good content on it so as one types in the keyword your site appears in the search engine results. However, search engine marketing combines few tactics and rely on natural (organic) or (white hat) techniques to market your site. Now a day search engine’s algorithm is entirely different of what it was five years ago. An entire new audience could be brought by mastering in the latest search engine marketing techniques.

Small businesses could be marketed online with many more ways but some degree of success could be found by using these three maneuvers.