Monthly Archives: May 2014

Email Marketing

#Eyemails: How to Improve Your Industrial Email Marketing

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email-marketing-nj1.jpg (586×415)

 

Are you finding that your industrial email marketing isn’t exactly delivering the results you were expecting?  You expend your best efforts, maybe even hire outside experts to help you execute – but your response rate is still pitifully low (that would be below 10% in a manufacturing company.)  If you can relate, read on for some tips that can help improve your email marketing campaigns.

Make your subject line priority #1:  The subject line of your email is probably the most important key to a successful campaign.  If the subject line doesn’t compel the reader to open your email, you lose.  You’ve got no more than 50 characters to hook them so Include as much important and relevant information in your subject line as possible. For instance, if your email contains a special offer, make sure the offer is explicitly spelled out in the subject line.

Break out your lists:  Instead of sending every email to every address in your email database, try drilling down and segmenting specific groups to receive information that will be more useful or pertinent to them, or that has the greatest chance of a response.  At the most basic level, segment current customers from prospects.  Get creative, and experiment.  The more you try to address very specific, individual requirements and interests, the better your response rate.

Make your content relevant: This may seem like overstating the obvious, but you’d be surprised how often the content of an email broadcast is nothing more than a print ad plastered into an email.  Does the content of your email somehow provide value, or is it “all about me?” (your company.)  You must continually put yourself in the position of your email recipients and think about what would convince them to open and act on your email.  Focus more on how your products or company can ease their pain.  Keep it short, and don’t bore the reader with too much content.  If there’s more to be said, give them a link with the option to click over to a “Read More” page.  The whole point of the email is to get the person to take the next step.  What do you want that to be, and how do you convince them to do it?

If you can afford a marketing automation tool, PERSONALIZE: I don’t mean addressing the email with “Dear John Doe.”  When I say personalization, I mean the email is coming from the regional manager, account manager, inside sales person, or whomever will be interacting the most with the email recipient.  Automating the process and making the emails always come from that one main contact person can increase your email response rate by 4 times.

Read more: http://www.marketectsinc.com/how-to-improve-your-industrial-email-marketing/

Email Marketing

Are you an overwhelmed Marketer?

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Hello there marketer, you feeling OK?
Little stressed? Feeling messed up? Things not working out the way you planned?
It’s okay. “They” say 90% of what you worry about never happens. Or you’re looking for serious advice not based on fake statistics from a humor website?
One thing for sure is that you’re totally messed up!
So let’s see…
Contacting your entire unsubscribe list? Over budget? Unforgiving competition on social media? Well it’s true! But a lot of the things that marketers waste time doing, and lose sleep over, are things we could totally chill out on. Here’s a 10 list that can help you identify some.

  • Typos in your company’s Blog Posts: Don’t impact meaning or clarity, don’t worry about it. Try to prevent them, fix them when you find ones that slip through, and carry on with your life. In fact, just to show you that it’s not the end of the world, I’m going to add a typo in in this post. See? Everything’s still fine.
  • Your Email Workflows: Workflows are great because they help you efficiently segment your lists and target your email content. But many marketers get too fancy with their workflow logic, and their workflows end up looking a little something like this:

    We set up more and more workflows and after they run for several months, realize we wasted hours thinking through that logic only to solve for .0007% of our database. Your brainpower and time can be used better elsewhere. Keep the workflows simple.

  • Titles: As in the subject lines of your emails. It is fine to spend some time thinking of a compelling title. Or tweaking your email subject lines to make them more click-worthy. Once you’ve spent a few minutes making something both catchy, accurate, and SEO friendly, it’s time to stop digging for better options. Readers will not be thinking about your word choice to that level, and your brain can be used for bigger and better things.
  • Comments: Nobody commented on your blog post or on your latest marketing campaign! So what? … When you get wonderful, insightful comments, it’s definitely a bonus. But it doesn’t mean your content isn’t good, valuable, or even downright genius. It just means that post didn’t … incite comments. If people are reading it, linking to it, and sharing it on social media, don’t sweat it if no one comments.
  • Clickthrough Rate Benchmarks: Looking at clickthrough rate is important. No question. But how you relate to other companies, and even data from within your own website, is impacted by so many variables that the benchmarks are rendered completely useless. It depends on how much traffic you’re getting, what the call-to-action is, where on the site you are … there are just too many variables to make a vague benchmark useful. Unless you find a similar proxy for the exact scenario you’re trying to assess. Stop comparing yourself to others and focus on improving your own specific clickthrough metrics month over month.
  • Blogging: Blogging hasn’t been around for that long. And business blogging has been around for even less time than traditional “blogging.” The people that are saying they’re doing business blogging are people that are willing to just start writing something. There’s no secret, no special talent that you don’t possess because you’re some “other kind” of marketer. It’s just typing words, like you do when you write copy, when you put email campaigns together, when you update your website. Focus on the fact that you’re smart, you have something to teach people, and you know about your industry
  • Sounding Smart: Stop worrying about sounding smart in your marketing content. Focus on being smart and sounding like a person. People like people.
  • The Perfect Design: Amazing design is great! But it’s not the be-all-end-all of your marketing, either. Function is more important than hot design. If your less-than-perfect design isn’t making your users’ experiences worse or more confusing, don’t worry.
  • Failure: Failure is fine. It means you did something. But if you’re trying something new and it flops, pick yourself up, pat yourself on the back for thinking of a new way to move your metrics, and move on.

*The above article was inspired by Hubspot for marketers

Online Marketing

3 Biggest Challenges in Online Marketing

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In order to run a successful online marketing campaign, companies need to be able to effectively juggle multiple factors simultaneously. Online marketing is not one thing, but rather, a combination of smaller campaigns that work together. For example, an online marketing campaign will include SEO, content marketing, and a sound social media strategy.

While there is a laundry list of possible challenges for online marketers, here are the three challenges most marketers face.

1. Optimizing for Mobile Users. The massive growth of smartphones and tablets, has led to an increasingly larger number of people are searching the web from a mobile device. This creates a unique challenge for online marketers. Mobile optimization should not be avoided. In order to survive and grow in the current digital world, companies have to focus on mobile users. This means having a responsive website that allows it to be fully utilized from a desk top, mobile phone, tablet and any other mobile device. In addition to being responsive, companies also need to tailor their content to mobile users. Mobile users are more drawn to image or video based content. Articles need to be concise and all links need to be fully functional.

2. Social Media Management. Social media management can be a significant challenge because it can be a full-time job by itself. Many large companies have entire departments dedicated to their social media networks. Each network needs to be treated differently because users on different networks have different expectations. For example, Facebook allows for photos, videos and longer status updates. You want to post things to Facebook that will engage conversations, likes and shares. However, Twitter is tailored more to small bits of information or links to information. Twitter also tolerates multiple posts a day, while Facebook users get annoyed by companies that post too often.

3. Effectively Implementing SEO. Google basically dictates SEO because they are the largest search engine, so they get to make the rules regarding what will get a website a top ranking in the search results. While SEO used to mean effectively using certain words, it is now significantly more complicated and integrated as part of content marketing. Companies need to establish themselves as an authority within their field.

http://www.josic.com/3-biggest-challenges-323in-online-marketing

Online Marketing

Get an Internet Marketing Plan

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Internet Marketing Plan

Do you’ve have a home company? Does a person conduct some business, but actually want to take your organization to another level? If this seems like you, the number 1 thing that can be done to assist yourself is placed up an online marketing plan. Should you already come with an internet advertising plan in position, you may wish to look in to revising this. Many people believe that they don’t need an online marketing plan to achieve success. This might be true, but in the most common of home based business owners, an online marketing plan is really a huge crucial to achievement. Follow the actual tips below when you’re setting upward an online marketing plan.

1. Ensure that you put your online marketing intend on paper. Many home based business owners claim they have an online marketing plan, but can’t show it for you because it’s only within their mind. By getting an online marketing plan in position it is possible to remain on pace with no trouble whatsoever. An online marketing plan is really a key in order to staying upon course without having getting lost on the way.

2. Your online marketing plan ought to be diverse. Many home based business owners drop prey in order to only utilizing one online marketing strategy. As a result you are going to be hurting yourself if your technique stops working you’ll have no possibility of recovering rapidly.

3. When assembling an online marketing plan you would like to make certain that you make use of strategies which have been proven successful again and again. These consist of strategies for example affiliate advertising, and putting ads in various ezines.

Affiliate marketing is especially successful because you don’t have to pay anything up front to get started. With this particular program, you’ll pay affiliate marketers to deliver traffic for your site. But the primary advantage is that you simply just pay your own affiliates once the customers they send really purchase something from you. Which means that you are becoming free advertising, and just pay up whenever you make the sale? This is among the most popular online marketing strategies.

Another online marketing strategy which works is actually placing advertisements in ezines. Ezines venture out to subscribers on the daily, every week, or month-to-month basis. The best thing about utilizing ezines is that you could market in order to people inside your industry. If you’re selling workplace equipment, you may put your own ad within an ezine for those who may be searching for your items.

Overall, having a top notch online marketing plan you’ll be increasing your likelihood of being prosperous. By placing an online marketing plan in to place after which following through by using it, you might find more earnings rolling in most months.

http://www.alouwebdesign.com/get-an-internet-marketing-plan

SMS

SMS Marketing Best and Worst Practices

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SMS Marketing Best and Worst Practices image sms marketing.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

SMS marketing may have been absent from our blog for a while, but it’s far from absent from the marketing world. I feel like every week lately, another company sends either an email or social media post announcing that they’re starting SMS campaigns. I usually sign up, to see what they’re doing with it.

Most of the time, I regret doing so and unsubscribe within a few weeks. SMS marketing is tricky – you’re reaching your audience in a very personal way. Think about email and social media; you receive updates from friends, colleagues, brands, celebrities, etc. But SMS messaging is usually reserved for people you’re close with.

When a consumer signs up for your SMS campaign, they’re letting you into a personal space where there’s a whole new set of rules. You can’t take a marketing campaign from another medium and transfer it to text messages. Mobile marketing in general is a whole new territory, and SMS is especially unique. There are some things that are absolute musts, and other things you want to avoid like expired dairy.

Make sure to:

  • Include a link: You only have 160 characters, and there will definitely be time where that won’t be enough. Instead of sending multiple, continuous messages explaining details, include a link leading to a mobile-optimized website at the end of your message or in your call-to-action. Even feature phones can connect to the internet most of the time. If you use a shortened link, try to use a custom one instead of a service like bit.ly to appear more trustworthy.
  • Keep it short: A lot of companies send multiple messages at a time as part of the same campaign so that they can use more than 160 characters. But blowing up someone’s phone is annoying, even if they’re getting some sort of deal out of it. Limit each campaign to one message, and try to make it concise enough that you don’t need to resort to “text lingo.” Do you really want text abbreviations as part of your marketing copy?
  • Test different times: Timing is key. You want to reach your subscribers when they’re awake, near their phones, and free to read your message. If they see the text but don’t open it, it’s likely they’ll get so many new texts that they’ll forget about it. You never want to be forgotten, especially if you’re sending a time-sensitive campaign. Test different times and stick with the one that garners the best results. It can vary depending on what the goal of your campaign is.

Don’t you dare:

  • Send every message to every subscriber: Just like with email marketing, you need to segment your subscriber lists for the best results. Not everyone will care about every message, and sending people irrelevant texts is a great way to lose them as a customer. Have subscribers check off what topics or types of offers they’re interested in when filling out the opt-in form so you know what kind of messages they care about. This way, you can segment each campaign accordingly.
  • Bombard subscribers: People get enough text messages already. Don’t bombard them with promotional texts every single day, or even every single week. You want to stay top of mind without annoying them. At the most, send out one campaign a week. According to MotoMessage, sending out texts once a week or a few times a month will get you the highest redemption rates, so don’t waste your time trying to send out more.
  • Forget a call-to-action: We’ve said it before, but all marketing content needs a call-to-action. What do you want the subscriber to do after they read your message? Sign up for something? Buy something? Redeem a special offer? Don’t make them figure it out on their own, tell them what their next action should be.

http://www.business2community.com/mobile-apps/sms-marketing-best-and-worst-practices-0524070#!NWaRl

Facebook

Facebook Connect

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Facebook Connect allows Facebook members to log onto third-party websites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identity. While logged in, users can connect with friends  and post updates to their Facebook profile.

Facebook Connect offers an infrastructure for website publishers that allows better targeting of ads by leveraging information stored in a visitor’s Facebook profile.  This means it could be possible to target ads the same way Facebook allows:

  • Location: target by country, state, city and radius;
  • Keyword: target by keywords that appear in a visitor’s Facebook profile;
  • Connection: target visitors based on their connection to pages, apps, events, groups and other websites;
  • Relationship: target visitors based on their marital status;
  • Age: target visitors by age;
  • Birthday: tee up promotions for visitors celebrating a birthday;
  • Education: target visitors based on the education info in their Facebook profile;
  • Gender: Tee up different advertising content based on gender;
  • Workplace: target ads based on a visitor’s workplace and job title; and
  • Language: target visitors based on their preferred languages.

The result will be great for advertisers and site owners.

Read more: http://www.socialmeteor.com/2010/01/27/better-than-google-adsense-socialsense-from-facebook/

Online Marketing

7 Basics for Social Media – Online Marketing in a B2B World

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Start with the Basics

 B2B online marketing is really about presence. Your prospects and customers want to know they are doing business with a hip company that knows enough to have presence on Twitter and other social media sites. So, at a minimum, you need to establish your online presence. Here are a few core sites where your flag should be hanging:

-Your website: Hopefully, this is more than a single page, or even just a few basic pages. I’ll elaborate on the overall website and its optimization in another article, but a website showcases who you are, and serves as home turf. You have the most direct influence on how people perceive you through your website. What are conveying to your prospects, customers, and partners today?

-Blog: This is similar to your website in that you have full control over the look, content, and presentation.

-Twitter: At a minimum, have a Twitter account live, and a semi-customized page. You can decide if you want to be a re-broadcaster of others’ news, respond to others queries, or send out your own thought leadership comments. Just be sure that you are posting on a daily and consistent basis.

-LinkedIn: Depending on your industry and how engaged contacts are within your prospects or customers, you should have a company page and product page at a minimum. Occasional announcements can correspond with your press releases or you can engage “all-in” by joining various groups. LinkedIn bought Slide Share, which is yet another form of having online presence – we’ll reserve this for a deep-dive or advanced topic.

-YouTube: For the last few years, video has been the big, anticipated wave. While viewership is tremendously high and articles in the news now contemplate the future of cable operators – video still hasn’t fully caught on in B2B. However, it is still important to put some videos on YouTube, again, simply so that your prospects and customers see that their vendor is hip with the market.

-Facebook: When it comes to B2B, Facebook isn’t the ideal platform to intrude into your prospects’ personal time. Nonetheless, you need a flag posted here. Be sure to put some effort to obtaining “fans” or “likes” to this page from internal employees, vendors, and customers to start.

-Pinterest, Instagram: By now, you must be thinking – when will this list end?! And how does someone manage all of these sites without an army of online marketing specialists? I couldn’t ignore these sites, but in B2B, this normally would not apply, unless you have tangible goods that you want to showcase to customers and prospects. Or, for example, if you are a limo company that wants to show corporate customers your fleet, or other customers enjoying your services.

At this point, we have only scratched the surface of online marketing basics. If you don’t already have presence on these sites – that is your first step. If you do not have an in-house resource to set this up, it is worthwhile to have a contractor set it up for you*. If you do have in-house resources – make sure there is a reminder or checklist on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to keep content fresh. It never looks good when you have a Twitter account that started, but has no activity for several months in a row. If you cannot maintain it – skip having the presence until you can.

Read more: http://businesstips.com/7-basics-for-social-media-online-marketing-in-a-b2b-world/

Online Marketing

Five Key Strategies That Will Help Your Marketing Campaign

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It is always important to be at your best in your marketing campaign. After all, there are many ways for you to improve your lead generation campaign. From the way you communicate with them, to the manner you presented your products, all these play a key role in turning B2B leads into actual sales or closed deals. If you want to approach your market better, you will need to use some essential marketing strategies, such as:

Collect customer data – there are a lot of ways for you to do that, like tapping into social media network or simple conduct telemarketing surveys for the job. Big data is very important, since this will help you paint a more accurate picture of your market, giving you a better idea on how to best do business with your prospects. This greater outlook will help you be more in control of the conversation, as well as convert leads more effectively into sales.

Use the right call to action – the reason why some businesses fail to bag new customer or buyers could be traced to the calls to action that they used. To be effective, you need your call to be compelling. Not only that, you need to spread in into various media, like print, television, social media, and even email. You have to make sure that your content is also good, since good content serves as good bait to them.

Personalization – one cannot have enough of personalization. Imagine someone calling you by name, offering you the right product, at the right time, and at the right place. Now that is ultimate personalization, one that will surely get the attention of customers. Your business may not be able to achieve that, but you can always aim to get closer to it. You should give it a try.

Use different marketing channels – think multiple, so to speak. If you want to reach out to a wider audience, you need to spread your message through different channels. Social media, email, telemarketing, all these and more should be mixed and match to help your appointment setting campaign gather more sales leads.

Try outsourcing – this makes sense, especially if you have a hard time juggling between marketing, production, and management of your business. There is nothing wrong asking outside help, really. Just make sure that whoever you hire works well with your business, and that they are reliable enough to deliver what they promised you.

these five essential marketing strategies are very useful for your campaign. Think of these as the ropes you need to swing through the ever-complex marketing jungle.

http://www.sales-and-marketing-solutions.com/five-key-strategies-that-will-help-your-marketing-campaign/