August 26th, 2010 — lead generation
If you really want to be successful in marketing your business or firm, you simply must develop and implement an email marketing strategy. Everyone uses email. Even the popular social networks and blogs rely on email. But you cannot just write an email and blast it out to everyone you have ever met. That is called spam or “spray-n-pray” and it can really make people angry.
Email marketing, because it is so adaptable and trackable, is popular. A good email marketing strategy can be the best marketing tactic available to you. You can use it to build brand visibility, to alert customers and prospects of new products and services, to follow up after people buy or subscribe to your newsletter and to build a relationship with people. According to a 2009 study by Unilever, email marketing improves recall by 64%.
Components of an Email Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy should answer all of the questions you and your customers or prospects would ask about why you are sending out emails.
– Goals. What do you expect to accomplish by sending out emails? Your email marketing strategy should be very clear about the reasons for every email you send.
– Timing and Frequency. How often you send out emails to your customers and prospects is a critical part of your email marketing strategy. How often does your strategy indicate you should contact your various list segments?
– Personalize as much as possible. Because the intention of the strategy is to make each email sent relevant to the receiver, you will need to be very specific about who receives each email. In fact, you will probably want to send several versions of an email to different parts of your mailing list.
– What. What is your message? A good email marketing strategy will indicate that this should be different in each email. Will you send news of your company? How often? Will you send information and links to new content available on your web site? Will you promote special events, like sales? Will you provide information about additional ways you can serve your clients?
Any email marketing strategy is intended to sell whatever your business offers. A good strategy will reflect the recent trends and personalize the message as much as possible. Your strategy should also include analysis. You will need to measure the responses and purchases. Then you can tweak the messages.
Finally, your email marketing strategy must demonstrate respect for each person you email. Keep in mind that, according to John McKean (of the Center for Information Based Competition), 70% of our decision to buy is determined by how we are treated as people.
If you are a small business owner or professional and want to learn more about lead generation, see the free video, “How Article Promotion Can Drive 25,000 New Prospects to Your Site Every Month - For Free.”
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July 27th, 2010 — lead generation
You will just love this idea if you value the relationship you have with your customers. It will drive sales like mad, has the potential to grow your customer base and the return from your traditional advertising spend will be maximised.
As business owners we are always willing to invest in the growth of our business. Some of us spend a few hundred dollars a year on advertising, others 10s of thousands. It does not matter how much we spend we all want the best possible return from the outlay. However what do I hear when I speak to business owners about their advertising. They don’t know what works and especially now they just do not know what to spend it on. Do we take advertisements in online directories or yellow pages, are people still reading the local paper?… and it goes on.
So here’s a true story. It’s not mine but really gets to the crux of this article. I will keep the client’s details private.
To truly maximise the return from their direct marketing, the client felt they needed to increase the size of their direct marketing email database. Being able to communicate with people who were genuinely interested in their product was a top priority. An email database in excess of 50,000 people was their goal.
To achieve the goal looked tough at first, however the brief was simple. So a competition was developed where people could win a complete outdoor entertainment area including, furniture, Barbeque and more. A celebrity cook came with the prize and he/she would cook a meal for friends and family. (Something most people would want)
So using smart internet marketing techniques and autoresponders a web page was developed where people would enter the competition. They could also enter in store as well as by SMS. The promotion was advertised using traditional media, TV, radio, magazines as well as online (banner adverts etc) all pointing people to where they could enter.
It was such a great prize that the response was overwhelming (the prize that everyone wanted as well as combining both offline and online media to drive the promotion. By combining the too the client was able to build a database in excess of 50,000 email addresses. The client achieved additional free national media coverage that they were not expecting, they also achieved sales growth in many of their stores ans they were over the moon with the result.
So what did we learn. It costs approx $50 to maintain a client and $350 approx to get a new one. If you can you should be focusing most of your attention on bringing your old customers back. It’s not that hard to get peoples email address and mobile phone number so you can market to them in the future, you just have to remember to ask. If you want to get the best return from your advertising dollar you need to be marketing directly to your customers.
Remember it easier and cheaper to bring a current customer back to your business.
By focusing consciously on your the result you wish to achieve with your marketing you can double, triple, quadruple the return from your advertising spend.
Want to find out more about internet marketing, then visit Heatley Gilmore’s site on how to choose the best search engine optimisation package for your needs.
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March 24th, 2010 — lead generation
Without a steady flow of leads who decide to purchase your product, your business will not last too long. What you need are ways to keep that lead funnel filled, but how do you get leads for network marketing? There are several fairly simple MLM lead generation methods you can use in your business. This article will talk about a few of them.
Article Marketing
If you enjoy writing, you probably want to consider writing articles about topics that relate in some way to your business or product. If you are not so thrilled with writing, you can hire a writer for very little cost.
The next step, after the articles are all written, is to submit them to article directories. At the bottom of your article you should include an author’s resource box that has information about your product and where people can get more information about it. The author resource box is the main way to lead someone from reading an article related to your product to actually inquiring about the product.
All of the articles that authors have submitted to article directories are used by website owners as content for their websites. The resource box remains intact when the website owner publishes the article. So when a website owner publishes your article the number of links pointing back at your website and product information increases. For instance, if 10 site owners put your work on their websites and you had submitted articles to 50 directories, you now have 60 links that point to your product. The number of links pointing to your site grows with each web owner who puts your article on his or her site.
Email Campaigns
The simplest way to use email to generate leads is to use a signature line on every email you send out. It should have information similar to the author’s resource box you created for article marketing.
For a formal email campaign you can write (or have written for you) a single sales letter or a series of letters to send out with an autoresponder. You want to be extremely careful that you do not spam anyone. Spamming can quickly ruin your reputation as a trustworthy business.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are sometimes seen as the holy grail of Internet marketing. This is true and false. If done right, PPC ads can generate many leads. If done poorly, all you will get from your PPC campaign is empty pockets. Carefully monitor your PPC campaigns because it is very easy to find yourself owing thousands of dollars to the PPC company.
Forums
Posting in forums related to your product is an excellent MLM lead generation technique. When you are brand new to a forum, take a bit of time to observe before you jump in with a post. If you see a post that you would like to add a comment to, click on the comment link and add it. Your signature line should have information about your product and the product’s website.
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February 6th, 2010 — lead generation
You can achieve great success on the web with an effective squeeze page. Being a very useful and updated method of marketing, the squeeze page is generally opted more as it is very preferred by the search engines. On general basis the squeeze page has specifications and plus points related to a particular service or a product from online market which one wishes to buy. The web users can make an online payment to sign up for your webpage if at all they wish to join you as a regular member.
You must have an attractive title head in order to attract more audiences to your site. Headline will determine that reader would further take interest in your page or will move ahead. So you should design your headline in such a way that it should be able to capture readers’ attention instantly. The readers are very smart. They could take their decision within seconds whether to stay on the page or leave. It is really very important that the headline given by you and the content must be relevant. If the readers get attracted by any attractive headline of their use but they find something different in the content of the page, they would feel cheated and most visitors would leave the page without any hesitation.
The main reason to have a good squeeze page is that you can take out information form the readers about their name, contact numbers and the email ids. This sounds an easy job to do but frankly you need to know that techniques of taking out the contact details of your visitors. Another option that you can apply is giving gifts and discounted coupons by signing up and thus getting their personal information. The web visitors will become ready to give the personal details regarding them if at all you will avail them with great benefits. In order to win over the customers’ faith you will have to make them feel required. Along with this it is also important for you to be considered as a trustworthy product by your customers. An alternative that you can opt for is revealing your customer reviews to other people who can read it. Thus you will be considered as a genuine person.
Many squeeze pages can be utilized. It is advantageous to have more number of squeeze pages around the internet. For each squeeze page you need to have an exclusive URL. If you use multiple squeeze pages you can target more keywords. Keyword is the most crucial part of any business. You will get a clear idea about what will work efficiently for your business. It is also important to note that you should not put your squeeze in front of your portal site or your blog. This can be your largest blunder.
If you want to get the information from your visitors, you must create in them the sense of urgency. You must make the visitors feel that if they leave the page without giving the information, they would lose a golden opportunity. People will always like to achieve something without giving anything. So they would give you the required information instantly. When several personal questions are called for it would actually lead the visitor to get away from your page. Therefore you need to enquire about those questions which are not very personal and which can be given without any hesitation. Avoid asking questions like nick name, blood group, family income, etc. which may not be essential to you.
Interested now in designing squeeze pages? Then you should take a look at Squeeze Theme, a premium Wordpress theme that allows you to put up squeeze pages easily.
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July 6th, 2009 — Uncategorized
If you are just an ordinary person trying to get in contact with your relatives and friends, a free email account is sufficient enough to do all those email tasks. But if you have your own business on the Internet and you are looking for a provider that can help you with your effective email marketing campaigns, checking your email surveys, newsletters or blogs and RSS feeds but will not consider your messages as spam, it’s best that you should seek assistance from email autoresponder software that will help you with your online marketing strategy. However, according to some email marketing service reviews, there are already dozen or even hundreds of email software that are existing right now that’s why, if you are really serious about your online business, you need to read some reviews first of each and everyone of them. Here, you will learn about one of the best email and autoresponder services and it’s called the iContact.
According to an iContact review, this software can help any online businessmen and can give them the ability to promote their products or services by tracking down email surveys, newsletter, blogs and autoresponders so that they will have an idea what kind of people they need to disseminate their message to in order to make them aware of what they are selling or promoting in the Information Highway.
For example, you need to make a mailing list of all the people that are interested in products like what you are promoting. Say, if you’re into health supplements that can detoxify the body, you need to have a list of these people who are visiting websites and registering with them to get some free samples. So, what you need is to get that information so you can also send them your own promotional materials and everything that can help boost your sales.
One of the dilemmas of online businessmen like you is wasting a lot of valuable time and money. So, according to some email autoresponder reviews, if you can find the email software, for sure, you can really have the chance to catapult your business to greater heights.
July 4th, 2009 — Uncategorized
E-mail newsletter and drip marketing needs play a major role in a company’s marketing strategies. If you’re not using e-mail for marketing your business, you’re simply not taking adequate advantage of the online medium to position your company as an expert.
Most business sales strategies focus almostly exclusively on customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is not cheap, though, which means a smart marketer will work hard to develop repeat business from an existing client base. While SEO and PPC advertising is a great tool to find new leads, permission-based bulk email software, when used responsibly and ethically, excels at:
- Converting them to sales
- Solidifying a relationship that will produce repeat sales
Some modern email marketing techniques are:
- Autoresponders (Drip Email Marketing)
- Newsletters (Broadcast Email Marketing)
- RSS Feed Updates (blog update subscriptions, etc.)
Auto-responders
E-mail drip campaigns are a great tool to keep in your email marketing toolkit. If you have never set up a “drip campaign,” you should do so immediately. It is one marketing tool that you can truly “set it and forget it.”
The downfall of any marketing technique is if it requires too much human involvement in order to work. In a perfect world, you should try to set up a system that runs itself. With an auto-responder, you can do just that. Here’s how it can work:
- A user signs up on your website (or you add them after a phone conversation)
- They instantly get an email with a free report or instant download of some sort. For the real estate field, it could be something as simple as “Why I’ll buy your home if I don’t sell it in 15 days.” You want to create a helpful resources that readers will want to enough that they will be willing to sign up to receive it by email.
- They will get a followup e-mail – automatically – an hour later, a day later, or a week later. You can even refer to “the email I sent last week” because your drip system automatically schedules the delivery of each message in the sequence.
- You can automatically send more follow-ups at key time periods. You can say “A month ago, I emailed you a free guide entitled….”
Broadcast Email Marketing
Broadcast emails are distinguished from drip campaigns because they are sent as a broadcast message to the entire list at the same time. Email newsletters are a perfect way to establish your expertise as a niche expert in your business, or you can use it to simply broadcast product announcements and company promotional materials. You decide what goes in the broadcast newsletter. The key is to make it fit the interests of your users as perfectly as possible.
An email newsletter marketing system should allow for email scheduling as well. With this feature, you can write announcements in advance and have them repeat annually, such as “It’s December 1st, have you done your Christmas shopping yet?”
RSS Email Updates
RSS Feed subscriptions are a great feature for marketing blogs. While popular browsers like Firefox make subscribing to a blog feed simple, a smart e-mail marketer knows that most people don’t read their bookmarked feeds - but people do read their emails. So if a subscriber is interested enough in your blog content to subscribe to your RSS feed by email, you are much more likely to keep her reading your blog than if she just bookmarked it in her web browser.
June 26th, 2009 — Uncategorized
The thing that a business will always do is to advertise their products and services on the radio, TV and print media. Without advertising, there is no way that they can get their message across to the people or to their would-be customers in the future. No one will ever know about what they are trying to sell if they don’t do a lot of advertising. However, in today’s world where Internet seems to rule everything, the best way to promote whatever you’re offering is through an email service particularly some autoresponder services especially when you are planning to do a lot of online surveys. With this mass email software, you will be able to reach as many as thousands of customers in a very personalized approach. If you’re into business, you should try to find out more about these email marketing strategy software and see how effective they are in promoting your products or services.
That’s why, a lot of businesses today are taking the option of promoting their products or services through the Internet with the help of an email newsletter software instead of availing the advertising services of TV, radio and print or the tri-media and why not? Try to look at it this way. You just need to invest a few hundred bucks on one email software and with that little advertising tool, you can already reach dozens or even hundreds or thousands of potential customers all over the world. But you have to make certain that you’re also endorsing your products on the Internet, you need to have your own virtual store or your own web site to be able to do that. Anyway, with software like this, it can help you gather in a list of people who are interested in the types of products like your own.
Now, you know how this kind of software can help you with your online business. The next thing you can do is find the best email software and before you can do that, try to read some product reviews first to gain more understanding and to help you choose from among the top email software.
June 12th, 2009 — Uncategorized
Creating a successful email marketing campaign depends upon a few key points. Keeping it simple is the most important. Having real content in your email is more important than an ostentatious attention-grabbing window of opportunity if you wish to get desirable results from your business. Think of revamping your campaign if presently it is ‘gimmicky’ as it may be responsible for warding off people.
Try the following if you are considering a change in campaign. A simple newsletter can be emailed. The reason for this is a recent report by Nielson Norman Group, the average e-mail user only reviews and Internet newsletter for an average of 50 seconds. However, in marketing campaigns boarded by emails, the reader’s attention is held for a lowly average of four seconds. A newsletter format clearly holds the attention of the average reader 10 times more than the regular email.
We now come to the real designing of the newsletter or email. Creation of a simple email marketing design that effectively captures as well as retains the attention is vital. As a matter of fact majority of the customers and e-mail users read only a part of the e-mails received by them. You must master many important concepts to make it successful. By using Delta Squadron you could literally boost your success. They just glance at the content of the other emails opened by them. An individual’s taste is the deciding factor when it comes to figuring out the advertising dynamics that they find attractive. For this reason, you’re e-mail newsletter or advertisement should appeal to each of these demographics. In addition to being simple, an email marketing campaign which exploits ASIC principles of design will be successful. Makin use of distinct colors for statements that you want the reader to focus on will help grab your reader’s attention. Keep in mind that email inboxes vary from standard for emailing sources. To explain, AOL and Hotmail have very different standards for opening e-mail. It’s a good idea to use colors and fonts that will be visually appealing in any e-mail genre. Many email forums are now limiting their design segment in the range of 200 to 300 pixels. In other words, your email design should not be out of proportion. Your marketing designs should be such that the content is distributed evenly and the flow is smooth. Numerous studies on the e-mail and document reading patterns of internet users have been conducted throughout the web.
If you aspire to grab your reader’s attention, you can definitely do so with an e-mail marketing design. A five second view of any page is the basis for the construction of the most effective design. Before putting any information on your page you should ensure that it can be read / scanned within five seconds. Drawing on your understanding is a good thought. When it comes to marketing and media, to ensure that your message takes up less real estate than standard e-mail advertisements. Your email advertisement will be filtered out as junk by majority of ISPs if it looks like spam or occupies too much space. For placing in your email, choose pictures that convey your message instantly, using pictures and logos just for the sake of adornment will be inaccurate.
Ensure that you have more than just beautiful pictures in your marketing campaign if you really want to capitalize on it. The E-mail marketing industry thrives on speedy responses. This implies that you need to make it a point to give every available opportunity to your potential customers to get in touch with you. Including your contact information within your messages will make it easy for people to contact you.
Every email that you send to your would-be clients should necessarily include links to your site, your address, phone numbers, fax number and any other information that will assist them to get in touch with you. Let’s admit it! An ill fitting email marketing design will definitely cause your email campaign to be unsuccessful.
Information is control!. Use the knowledge you have gained here and from other means effectively and your email campaign will have a lot better prospect of accumulating revenues to your bottom line.
June 10th, 2009 — Uncategorized
Email marketing is a genius, easy way to generate leads for your business. You have to view it as an art form, because today people have been deluged with marketing emails and most of it is just plain old spam. If you are going to use email marketing for your business, you have to be careful with how you use it.
Email marketing must always be used as a voluntary means of getting people to contact you. You should continue sending your newsletters and special email announcements until someone on your mailing list decides to contact you to do business, and can even communicate with them after that. That brings us to the challenge of how you get your email mailing list to start with. You get this with opt-in.
Opt-in works by having people come to your website and deciding on the option of signing up to receive your free e-newsletter. They will give you their name and an email address. You will then make use of an autoresponder to make sure that every time you write and blast-out another issue of the newsletter, or have a special offer to tell about, this person receives a copy. They will not reject your newsletter or think it is spam, because they have opted-in to receive your information.
Email marketing is a brilliant way of keeping your name and business in front of someone. It is said that a person has to be asked to buy, either directly or indirectly, six times by someone before they will take serious action. There will be some exceptions to this with people who love you right away and buy then and there. Given how most people are, you should always keep your brand top of mind with them or they will forget you quickly. People have little spare time these days.
Now, the thing that is great about email marketing is that you are only sending out your emails to qualified leads. These people came to your website on their own, and then signed up for your newsletters, there must be some reason for them doing that. This means that they have interest on some level in you. Some of these leads are likely to be more motivated than others are, but at least they are not completely dead end leads.
It is key that you make your e-newsletter bursting full of content, without giving up all of your trade secrets for free. Make people look forward to your next issue. Compel them to start forwarding your newsletters to their friends and family. Set them up for those special, limited time offers. Give them the notion that you are a great person to buy from because you a very smart, entertaining and are willling to give them great information. Go beyond what your competitors in this area are doing.
Use email marketing strategies like this and your business will eventually take off and soar.
June 8th, 2009 — Uncategorized
Internet marketing may have developed a sudden surge these past few years, but many internet business owners have been around for a while and know about how to market their service correctly. It is important for beginning and intermediate network marketers to gain knowledge these veterans in order to be successful. I personally show people here at my website how to become successful online marketers.
As more and more online based businesses are put up, the need to hone new internet marketing skills based on this new medium have arisen. More and more marketing strategies have been discovered and developed to deal with the online marketing business world.
And now, since the rise and growing interest in online marketing, the demand for online marketing coaching has grown dramatically and a new form of business has been created: internet marketing strategies. Although there are companies that are all too eager to help your site and business build a clientele for a fee, there also many free ways that can help you market your business for free.
One of the best ways to build your business is autoresponder email marketing, also known as email marketing. Opt-in marketing needs the permission of a willing customer to subscribe to your marketing materials, that may take the form of ezines, ebooks and promotional mailings via an email list. The more marketing quality information is sent, the more chance there is to make sales. In order to do this though, you have to build a list of all those who want to subscribe to your autoresponder marketing information. If you have questions about network marketing, go to my website for information about how I can help you.
From your list, you will get your targeted buyers, and it’s a good list since they already have shown interest in what you have to sell since they have willingly subscribed to your list. These are the subscribers who liked what they saw on your site and have decided they want more information and maybe even purchase whatever service and/or product your website offers.
Many people might believe that list building takes hard work and a long time to build and collect names and addresses. This isn’t so, Sometimes it takes a bit of of patience and a little strategy, but in doing this list, you open your site and your business a whole new world of target marketing. Taking the effort to grow your online business to a new level, if more traffic and good profits are what you want, an opt-in list will do wonders for your network marketing.
There are numerous articles and information about network marketing available for everyone to read and follow about how to build an opt-in list. Sometimes you may get confused because there are so many and different strategies. Different network marketers have different approaches in building their autoresponder list, but no matter how different the methods are, there are always some crucial things to do to build your list. Here are four that I’ve come up with here at my website.
1) A very simple autoresponder form is critical. While some may say this is too soon to subscribe, if your homepage provides a good impression, then people will want to opt-in. On the other hand, if somehow a website visitor finds something that he or she doesn’t like and turns them off, they may not sign up.
A good autoresponder form for subscribing to your opt-in list is not hard to do. Write a short sentense offering information about your site. Give them an ebook, special report or training series. Then there should be an area where they could put in their names and e-mail address. This form will save and send you the data. As more people sign in, your list will be growing.
2) As mentioned previously, your home page must be high quality. You need to have well written articles and descriptions on your site. Depending on what your site is about, you need to capture your website visitor’s fancy. Make your site useful and very easy to use. Don’t expect everyone to be technical. Invest in a good design for your site, make your graphics attractive but don’t overdo it.
Do not waste your time making the homepage too overly complex. Not all people have fast internet connections, therefore the faster your site gets loaded, the better. Go for a look that borders between simplicity and sophisticated.
3) Give excellent products. A return customer is more likely to bring in more business. Now and then, a satisfied customer will recommend a business. Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than an expensive ad. As your list grows so shall your business. With more members on the list, the more people will get to know about what you have to offer.
4) Keep a clean and private list. Never ruin the trust your customers have given you. If you sell e-mails to others and they get spammed, many will probably unsubscribe. Remember, a good reputation will drive more traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your current customers.