Archive for the 'Best Practices' Category

Email Marketing Tactics for Doctors and Dentists

Published on January 31, 2012 in Best Practices and Tips & tricks. 1 Comment Tags: dentists, doctors, email strategies, health professionals.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to keep in touch with customers – and patients as well. More health professionals like doctors and dentists are using email as a way to reach patients and educate them about their health. Email is also a great way for health professionals to build patient rapport. Doctors and dentists are a busy group and rarely have the time to spend with patients that they’d like to have. Email offers an opportunity to “fill in the gaps” that exist due to time constraints. What are some email strategies that doctors and dentists can use?

Email Marketing Offers an Opportunity to Educate and Inform

Doctors and dentists can use email to offer patients health and lifestyle tips they can apply in their daily lives. A weekly email newsletter is an effective way to share tips for losing weight, avoiding colds and flu, keeping a smile white, preventing cavities to eating a healthy diet. Not only do patients appreciate health tips, they help to inspire patient confidence and create a stronger physician-patient or dentist-patient relationship. Dentists and doctors can also use email to let patients know about new treatments and developments in the health care and dental field. This can bring in new business.

A regular health newsletter can attract new patients too when health doctors and dentists use email marketing as a viral tool. Simply give patients the opportunity to forward the newsletter to family and friends. If they newsletter contains useful information, many will do it.

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What Social Media Can Do For Your Email Marketing

Published on January 27, 2012 in Best Practices, Internet marketing and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing campaigns, newsletter, social media.

Before the rise of social media, email marketing was the only way to reach people who had shown enough of an interest in a business to visit the website but weren’t yet interested enough to make a purchase. Persuade those people to leave behind an email address and the company could return to them with a special offer or news of a product release and pull them back through the door.
Since social media?
Well, all of those things are still true.

Social media’s strength is that it allows marketers to access prospects all the time. It lets them respond to their comments and posts, entering into the kind of dialogue that email marketing just can’t replicate. Lists (on Twitter and Facebook) and Circles (on Google+) let them target their messages, and social media has a much greater potential to send a brand viral than email marketing.

But those messages are often overlooked. While an email sits in an inbox until it’s opened, a tweet quickly disappears down a stream.
And while a Facebook page can generate lots of likes, the number of fans they collect is often smaller (and harder to convert) than the number of email addresses the company is able to collect.

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When You Don’t Have to Worry About Clickthroughs

Published on January 17, 2012 in Best Practices and Internet marketing. 0 Comments Tags: content, email marketing, promotion.

Folyo is a job service for freelance designers. Sacha Greif, the service’s founder and a designer with more work than he can handle, assesses designers, reviews submissions from companies and tries to bring the two together.
Unlike other freelance jobs sites though, Greif doesn’t post the offers on his website. Freelancers can’t bid or compete to win the projects publicly. Instead, Greif charges companies a $100 fee once their offers have been accepted, waits until the end of the week then sends the list of jobs to his subscriber list by email.

For Greif, the benefits are clear. Because he checks both the jobs and the designers both sides know that they’re receiving quality. Employers know that the freelancers they’re hiring have been hand-selected for their creativity and professionalism. Freelancers can feel confident that the offers have solid budgets and come from companies that know what they’re doing. Handling everything by email ensures that both the offers and the designers remain private.

The service has only been running a few months but it’s already generating more than $600 a month for a freelance designer who was only looking for a way to share his excess workload. And his list consists of little more than 300 subscribers.

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7 Effective Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy

Published on January 5, 2012 in Best Practices, General and Tips & tricks. 3 Comments Tags: online privacy.

There’s nothing more convenient than doing personal and business transactions online but that convenience carries risks. Every day unsuspecting internet users have their personal information recorded and their online activities tracked without their knowledge. Fortunately, there are simple steps you can take to keep your personal information private and protect yourself against unscrupulous companies who want your private information. Here are seven simple ways to protect your online privacy when you’re surfing the internet.

Make Sure Your Computer is Protected
To protect your online privacy, make sure your computer is well armed. Install a reliable anti-virus software, and make sure your computer is also protected by a firewall and software that blocks malware and spyware. You can buy these products from companies that offer them as a bundle. Anti-virus software protects your computer against viruses and Trojans, while a firewall filters out and blocks suspicious traffic to your computer. For maximum security, you need both.

Update Your Operating System
When operating systems like Microsoft Windows issue an update, it usually has changes that address a particular security issue. If you don’t do regular updates, you won’t be protected. Make it a habit to check for updates and download them immediately for maximal online privacy protection.

Choose Your Password Carefully
When you choose a password, select one that’s a combination of numbers and letters, both upper and lower case, and don’t reveal it to anyone. Avoid using personal information in your password such as your birthdate or the name of a pet. Use a different password for every online account you have. If you have problems remembering so many passwords, use a reputable passwords site to store them securely. Once you’ve chosen your password, don’t save it on your web browser, and don’t forget to change your passwords frequently.

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In 2012 It’s Not Just Your Subscriber Demographics That Matter, It’s Their Location

Published on December 30, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, mobile email.

Email marketing has always made a number of assumptions about subscribers. We assume that readers are interested in what we’re offering if we can just get the message right. We assume that emails are more effective and a lot cheaper than the kind of junk mail that clogs up physical mailboxes and weighs down postal deliverers. And we assume that when we contact subscribers they’re sitting in front of their computers, either at home or at the office, ready to give our copy their full and undivided attention.

Most of those assumptions remain unchallenged. Email marketing is still effective, provided the copy is right. It remains much easier, cheaper and less intrusive than delivering leaflets to thousands of homes.

But it’s no longer being read primarily at the desk.

According to a new study, email opens on mobile devices rose by 34 percent between April 2011 and September 2011 in comparison to the previous six months. At the same time, the number of opens that took place on webmail and desktop fell by 11 percent and 9.5 percent respectively. More and more people are checking their mail more frequently, on the move, on smaller screens and in smaller bites of time.

That creates a new challenge for email marketers. We don’t just have to think about what kind of subject line will grab attention but how that subject line will appear on different devices and how the message will look on preview panes. Sometimes, the differences can have a real effect.

Wild Photography Holidays, for example, a travel firm, sent an email at the end of 2011 to promote a number of its tours. In webmail, even without displaying images, the email just about passed muster.

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Why Are You Really Sending Emails (and Are You Achieving Those Goals?)

Published on December 20, 2011 in Best Practices and General. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, sales.

Email marketing can bring a host of different benefits to a business. You get to keep pitching your products to people who might have stopped by your website. You can announce special offers and you can remind prospects that you’re still around and ready to sell to them as soon as they’re ready to buy. By staying noticed, you make sure that prospect turns to you and not to a competitor.

It’s no wonder then that email marketers usually want more than one result from their email marketing campaign. In a survey for MarketingProfs and Junta42 Research, 78 percent of firms that use email marketing said that they were aiming for “brand awareness.” Sixty-nine percent were hoping for “customer retention/loyalty” and 63 percent said they wanted “lead generation,” almost the same number who said they were hoping for “customer recruitment.”

The top two goals then were forms of relationship-building; the next two, demands for sales.
Those two, very different, sets of goals can be seen in the content that gets sent through email and lands in our inboxes every day.

When Audible.com, an audiobook outlet, sent a piece of email marketing recently, it settled for an electronic flyer — and a subject line that was almost deceptive. “Download a FREE Audiobook Today” the email promised, as though it were handing out a desirable freebie in return for visiting the site.
In fact, bringing up the email shows an image that says you can “Download A FREE Audiobook Today” and then in small print underneath that headline: “When you try Audible for 14 days.”

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How to Use Quora As a Marketing Tool

Published on December 16, 2011 in Best Practices and Internet marketing. 2 Comments Tags: businesses, online marketing, quora.

At first glance, Quora looks like another Yahoo Answers, a site where people can post questions and users can answer, but it’s much more than that. Quora is an ingenious combination of social networking, wiki and question and answer site rolled into one. It’s Yahoo Answer on steroids, and it’s growing in popularity.

How Does It Work?

Quora allows its members to post questions to the growing Quora community or search for questions in their own area of expertise to answer on a variety of topics. What distinguishes it from other online question and answer sites is the social experience. If Quora members like your answers, they can follow you or vote your answers up or down, making them more or less visible.

To add another dimension to the experience, members can edit answers in the same way entries can be edited on Wikipedia. It’s an interactive question and answer site with an added social component.
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