Tag Archive for 'email marketing'

5 Email Marketing Tips for Valentine’s Day

Published on January 24, 2012 in Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, valentine's day.

What could be sweeter than Valentine’s hearts? How about bigger profits for your online business? Valentine’s Day is a time to show customers how much you appreciate them – and to make sales. It’s also an opportunity to show customers that you have gifts that will bring a smile to their sweetheart’s face. Now’s the time to remind them of what you have to offer. Here are some tips for getting the online cash registers ringing this Valentine’s Day.

Get Them in a Buying Mood
A Valentine’s Day header gets the message across with few words. Spice up your emails with banners depicting cupids, hearts, roses and any other sweet theme that reminds your customers that the big day is coming. Come up with a fitting slogan like “The Savings Have Never Been Sweeter.” Get them in the Valentine’s Day buying spirit early, and motivate them with a special discount before they spend their money elsewhere. Entertain them with a list of list of ten ways to tell someone you love them using products you sell.

Inspire Them with Gift-Giving Ideas
Make it easy for your customers to buy by offering creative gift-giving suggestions focused around your products. Show them how your selections can make Valentine’s Day even sweeter for their sweetheart, and include a link to each product you mention. Men are especially appreciative of gift ideas and suggestions for how to impress their sweetheart without spending a fortune. Make it easy for them to buy from you.
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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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Email Marketing Tips for Fitness Clubs and Health Centers

Published on January 9, 2012 in General and Tips & tricks. 1 Comment Tags: email marketing, fitness clubs, health centers.

The fitness and health club business is a competitive one. Local advertising has its place, but these days more people are turning to the internet to get health and fitness information. That’s where email marketing comes in. Email is one of the most effective ways to form a relationship with health conscious people who may be interested in your services. If you’re not using email marketing for fitness and health, you’re missing out on an invaluable opportunity to “connect” with potential clients.

Why is email marketing so effective for health clubs and fitness centers? Once you develop a list, you can send readers useful health and nutrition information on a regular basis. This helps to brand your business and remind readers of what your facilities have to offer. Over time, you will gain customers using this technique, and you’ll be doing it without a hard sell. What kind of fitness information can you offer through email?

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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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Use LinkedIn to Keep in Touch With Prospects and Customers

Published on December 9, 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: customers, email marketing, linkedin, prospects.

Social media expert Linda Coles wrote a great overview of how to use LinkedIn Mail to keep in touch with your business prospects, contacts and customers. Linda says that LinkedIn’s Mail feature is one of the most under-utilized parts of the service. It can help to grow your connections and also increase business if used properly.

Because LinkedIn mail isn’t overused, it can work to your advantage by using the messaging function of LinkedIn properly. LinkedIn automatically limits your messaging capability to no more than 50 contacts at a time. This feature is probably intended to stop LinkedIn spam. You just need to break your contact list into segments, and target your messages.

First, you should go to your LinkedIn inbox and click “compose message.” Click on the “connections” icon to select the people you want to email the message to, and then be sure to click the “bcc” box at the bottom of the email. You can sort your connections by business or industry to target your messages.

Second, invest some time in composing a message that will be interesting to your contacts. Don’t just repeat newsletters that you currently sent out. These messages are a good place to highlight a book, website, industry article or event your contacts would find relevant and interesting. As long as you focus on adding value to the LinkedIn message, chances are, it will be positively received.

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Using Twitter To Empower Your Email Marketing

Published on November 18, 2011 in Tips & tricks. 1 Comment Tags: email marketing, subscribers, twitter.

Email marketing is powerful by itself, but combine it with Twitter, and you have an explosive combination. Need some tips on how to make the two complement one another? Try these tips for harnessing the power of Twitter and email marketing.

Use Email to Get Twitter Followers

Make it easy for the people on your email list to follow you on Twitter. Include a link to “Follow Us on Twitter” in each email you send out. Surprisingly, many businesses forget to take this simple step. Doing this can increase your number of Twitter followers quickly without any additional work on your part and build up your influence in the Twitter universe.

Twitter Your Email Subject Lines

Twitter allows tweets that are 140 characters or less in length. Keep your email lines short and catchy so you can use them as Twitter tweets. When they click on a tweet, a link takes them to the email and gives them a chance to sign up to be on your email list. Make sure your subject lines are intriguing. You need to grab their interest!

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