Email Marketing is Not Dead, Bring it Back to Life With These Resources

If you think that email marketing is dead, think again. With most online businesses making most of their money from their email followers, it’s clear the approach is still quite vital.

First, email has always been one of the main communication channels on the Internet. It was there even before social media was born. So there is still a segment of the market that is more accustomed to communicating that way.

Second, email will always be a personal communication channel. Sure, some may feel that most email they get is spam. But almost everyone has an email account just for the sake of sending messages and files. This is exactly the reason why business owners should not take email marketing for granted.

With this in mind, Small Business Trends has come up with a list of past articles that can help you in this area. Here’s a collection of the best email marketing articles from our archives.

Why Email Marketing Is Small Business’s Best Friend

Recent research shows that email marketing can generate more new customers for your business than social media outlets. To take advantage of this, there are several key ideas to keep in mind when you’re beginning your campaign. This listing shows you what sort of campaigns can best be created via email and how best to generate customer response from your efforts. Here’s why email is so small business friendly.

The Power of Permission in Using Email Marketing

The main power of email marketing is in the power of permission. You won’t see many other mediums that market to customers by asking for their permission first. By asking leads to fill in their names and email addresses, you are asking for their permission to market to them. Once they grant you that permission, they are much more willing to listen to what you have to say.

This article looks at how to gain and keep that trust you’ve established with your customers who’ve signed up to receive your emails. Use the power of permission marketing for yourself.

How to Use Email Marketing to Segment Customers and Generate Loyalty

One of the benefits of email marketing is its ability to segment customers.

By asking customers to sign up for your email list, you have the ability to learn more about their needs and can often separate them into categories based on those needs. As a result, small business owners are in a better position to target customers specifically and create more customized products and services. This generates more customer loyalty. And it makes email marketing an even more indispensable part of the marketing process. Here’s how to segment your customers.

55 Email Marketing Tools For Small Businesses To Use

Email marketing — especially as your list of subscribers grows — is not easy to do alone. And a plain-old email message may not be enough to wow the customers you’ve worked so hard to earn.

Luckily, there are a multitude of tools that allow you to make your email marketing job easier and more effective, and to generate messages that are more attractive. Some of the tools on this list are free or are freemium services. They offer everything from insights into the reach of your emails to templates you can use to make your messages more visually appealing to your subscribers. Here are the email marketing tools businesses should evaluate.

30 Useful Small Business Email Marketing Apps

Here is a list of more apps for creating effective email marketing campaigns. These tools will track who opens your emails, what keywords get them clicking through to your website, and other behaviors of the recipients of your messages.

Many of these apps offer free trial periods for you to get familiar with the products. Some are geared toward small business owners. Here’s the complete list of email marketing apps for you.

24 More Small Business Email Marketing Applications

And if that list is not enough for you, here’s an update to our list from several years later. This list of 24 email marketing applications is a great refresher on where things stand more recently as far as email apps are concerned. Here’s the updated list of email marketing applications.

6 Best Practices for Savvy Email Marketing

Be careful not to spam those who’ve agreed to receive your email updates. That pretty much goes without saying these days. Apart from that tip, this list also covers topics like considering how your readers will receive your email marketing messages and what’s included in the subject line.

These tips may help you retain your current subscribers and gain new ones rather than losing them to “unsubscribe” requests. Here’s our list of email marketing best practices.

10 Tips to Give Your Email Marketing More Curb Appeal

Believe it or not, appearance is just as important in email as it is in traditional marketing. Here are those tips to make your email more appealing.

5 Steps to Successful Email Marketing

If you’re considering starting a new email marketing campaign and you’re a bit of a novice in this area, this is a go-to list to get you on your way. These five steps to successful email marketing should make you more successful too.

Email Tips To Help Close A Deal

If your marketing messages are working properly, a lot of your customers may be ready to make a deal. Closing those deals via email may require a bit more work. But once you’ve mastered how to close deals via email, it could greatly expand your business’ potential. Check out this list of email tips for closing deals.

Source : http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/07/perform-email-marketing.html

4 Things to Remember for Email Marketing Campaigns

An effective email marketing campaign is made up of several components and marketers need to find the right balance in order to truly prosper in the channel.

Despite being a traditional channel of engagement, a customer’s inbox is still the gateway to sales for a high number of businesses. Simply put, consumers still check their inboxes and, if content is interesting, it will be viewed.

The real challenge for marketers is developing messages that catch the attention of readers. Whether it is an exceptional discount, a competition or a beneficial piece of content, emails need to provide something extra to consumers.

1. Check your email campaign is optimised for mobiles

These days, all of us are glued to our smartphones, checking our Facebook profiles and emails several times a day in just a few slides and clicks.

However, many marketers still do not realise the importance of having a mobile-ready presence and it could be the reason why their email marketing does not reach targets.

Before planning a campaign, it is essential that responsive design can be used. This approach allows emails to shrink or expand depending on the size of the screen they are viewed on, ensuring that readers do not miss out vital information or suffer with poor quality video and images.

2. Use reliable email marketing software 

There are many applications capable of delivering email marketing campaigns.

These pieces of email marketing software make it possible for marketers to identify the exact number of opens and clicks their messages receive, along with any downloads.

With these email marketing programs, companies can assess their email marketing efforts in detail and identify the strengths and weaknesses of their email blast campaigns.

3. Links! Links! Links!

Emails should be seen as a gateway to a company’s brand and need to include relevant links to readers.

Whether these are in image format or simple text, links will allow potential customers to gain more of an insight into a brand.

However, organisations need to use hyperlinks in moderation. If there are too many links on one page, readers will simply not know where to click.

What’s more, marketers need to be wary of compromising their brand identity. For example, if a company is aiming for a thought leadership approach, links need to offer advisory information to readers and give something that consumers can benefit from.

On the other hand, if an email marketing campaign is primarily sales-driven, links should point out particular offers and invite readers to spend their money by outlining the particular advantages of a product or service.

4. Emails are never perfect, carry out A/B testing

While email marketing campaigns are generally much cheaper than many other marketing channels, managers often still look for instant success and, sadly, this is not possible.

It may take a few weeks or months for an email marketing campaign to deliver the desired results, but professionals should not be discouraged by a weak open rate.

By carrying out A/B testing, marketers can finetune their emails and maximise their marketing potential.

Source: http://www.orphea.com/en/industry-news/article/content-management/4-things-to-remember-for-email-marketing-campaigns/801753025

Tips for Creating an Effective e-Newsletter Program

A challenging economy has encouraged many small businesses to test out email marketing with an invitation or announcement. It’s simple, affordable and trackable, after all. But the idea of creating a consistent e-newsletter that you issue on a monthly basis seems daunting.

Well, fear not. You can put a surprisingly compelling newsletter together with a small amount of information. In a recent Extreme Email Makeover session that VerticalResponse hosted, we found that many customers are putting too many offers together in one email and calling them newsletters. The result is that nothing stands out, it isn’t clear to the customer what action they should take, and over time recipients might stop opening the emails. A great e-newsletter can be created with very basic information that is readily available. The key is a balance of information and offers (remember the “what’s in it for me?” factor). Start by testing a newsletter format with three topic areas and then increase to five over a series of a few months to see if you get more clicks. Let your audience decide the right amount of content with open and click-through rates.

Easy e-newsletter content topics:

1. A Message from the Expert – A short paragraph from you to your audience or an introduction that drives recipients to your blog for a feature-length article. Consider offering Five Ways to Improve X in 2009. Include the first two lines of copy in your newsletter as a teaser and link to the full story on your blog for the full list.
   
2. Customer Testimonial – A simple quote from a happy customer about how your product or service helped them or fixed a problem, a measurable result achieved; or, link to a video testimonial that you host on YouTube.
   
3. An Offer – Do you have a white paper, discount, or promotion currently running to announce?
   
4. Event Schedule – Link to the event page on your website or directly to an industry event you plan to attend.
   
5. Quick Fact – What’s the most popular selling product last month? What do your customers view as the greatest challenge for them next year? Gather important insights and facts with a simple online survey tool and share results in each issue.

The final challenge is committing to frequency so that your audience will come to expect your newsletters. Write your first three issues at the same time. Line up three customer quotes, three notable events worth covering, and three facts to share from a single survey. Remember, this month’s event can become next month’s main article. That’s a formula for successful email newsletters in 2009.

Source : http://www.mplans.com/articles/tips-for-creating-an-effective-e-newsletter-program/

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?

Email marketing is a way to reach consumers directly via electronic mail. Unlike spam, direct email marketing reaches those interested in your business’ area of expertise. The information is sent out more like a laser-guided missile than a bomb: No matter what you’re selling, it is a way to reach thousands of potential customers directly at a relatively low cost when compared to advertising or other forms of media exposure. It brings your business’ message through an attractive mix of graphics, text and links directly to people who may have never heard of your business or considered your products, but are knowledgeable and interested in your business’ area of expertise. Once you understand– what is email marketing?–you can start to implementing these practices to reach more customers.

Email marketing also provides an easy way to track how effective it is. By keeping track of how many hits your website gets after a mass mailing, it’s easy to gauge whether this technique works for your company. It’s also a good way to guide existing customers back to your business. Many companies also provide an “unsubscribe” option for viewers in an effort to focus only on interested potential customers. Also, your company can opt to have a feedback mechanism where potential customers can tell you directly what they liked and disliked about a particular advertising campaign.

Email marketing is a popular way for businesses to reach customers. According to the Direct Marketing Association, research firms spent over $400 million in 2006 on direct email marketing.

Email marketing can be more than just text, rich media formats can provide images and give your product or service texture and flavor. In email marketing, you have the complete attention of the potential customer. Pop-up ads or other internet advertising often get in the way of what the potential customer is looking at: The content. But with direct email marketing the advertising is the content.

The internet is the most popular way for people to gather information about products and services he or she is interested in. Maximizing your business’ capability to appear in internet searches through press release distribution and email marketing are effective tools in reaching your current customer and potential customers with essential information about your products or services. It’s a technique used by businesses worldwide and it can help your enterprise grow and establish a presence on the web.
Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are an effective means of keeping your client base informed about the products and services your company offers. The email newsletter can be in the form of a press release, or it can include graphics and information about purchasing a product. Some email newsletters feature a coupon to entice customers to come back or take advantage of a special offer. It can be a regular way for your business to stay in contact with customers.
Email Surveys

An email survey is material sent to your clients or potential clients asking for their feedback. It’s a great way to test a new product, service or idea. It’s also a great way to show the customer that you care about their opinions and are willing to work with them.

Source : http://www.brickmarketing.com/what-is-email-marketing.htm

5 Tips to Boost Your Email Marketing Efforts

Email marketing can be a tough nut to crack, especially if you haven't done any of it all. I was skeptical at first, too, but then I realized that I don't necessarily have to connect with my email subscribers only as a means to an end. If anything, I can continue to build my community through my email list, a more connected community.

I'm sure that there are numerous bloggers blogging on daily basis about the ins and outs of email marketing, even here on Huff we've got several columnists writing about their experiences of email marketing, both good and bad.

The difference between cold emailing, and actually building a legitimate email list is that with your legitimate list, you're going to be building a community around; while cold emailing only works as a means to an end. Give and get principle. If you're looking to seriously boost your email marketing results, then give some of the following tips a try.

Treat Your Best Subscribers

Email marketing is a data-driven way of marketing, the more data you've gathered about your subscribers - the more tailored choices you're able to give to them. For example, out of your 1,000 subscribers, only 100 have opened, and clicked on your links in the email you sent.

Why not treat this special bunch to a special offer? It only makes sense, as giving these subscribers discounts is only going to increase their loyalty down the road.

Positive Popups

I've never been a fan of popup-marketing, simply because I didn't have good experiences with it when I started, but recently there have been some notable tools enter the market (think: OptinMonster, Pippity, SumoMe), all of which provide tools necessary to build user-friendly email popups!

Popup Ads have shown me that I can provide great quality content, and also collect an email address of a visitor when the time is right. Many of the new email marketing tools come equipped with smart algorithms that can capture an email address of even the most rare users.

(no subject)

Have you experimented with subject lines recently? Do you ever receive emails that don't have a subject line, like ever? Well, a study has confirmed that there is a significant increase in open-rate of emails that don't posses a subject line - most likely because the email client is then displaying the direct contents of the email: Hello Name, blah blah.

It's, then, much easier to see what the email contains, unlike using a traditional subject line like 'Hi.', or 'Sorry for bothering you.'. Try using no subject lines for a few emails (perhaps cold ones...), and see what it does to your conversions!

Reminders

If you think that every single email subscribers remembers everything about you, and your business - then you're terrible wrong. People signup for all kinds of services, often on frequent basis, and it's rare to see a list of 25,000 email subscribers; where every single person is in sync with your latest.

For that reason alone, it can be really helpful to email out reminders to your subscribers, letting them know that you're still alive and well, which will only increase the exposure of your own products, or just content that you're producing.

P.S

Postscript

Yes, using a postscript at the end of email can prove to be a very good place to put actionable calls. I mean, quite often the postscript part is where we inject something we didn't want to talk about in our initial letter, so if you're looking to boost some sales to older products, or just want to raise awareness - use a postscript at the end of your emails, and let the magic happen.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-ivanovs/5-tips-to-boost-your-emai_b_5944334.html

10 Basic SEO Tips To Get You Started

Every business with a Web site should make Search Engine Optimization -- trying to get your site as high up as possible on Google and Bing search-results pages -- a part of their growth strategy.

At its most basic, "SEO" means finding ways to increase your site's appearance in web visitors' search results. This generally means more traffic to your site.

While intense SEO can involve complex site restructuring with a firm (or consultant) that specializes in this area, there are a few simple steps you can take yourself to increase your search engine ranking.

All it requires is a little effort, and some re-thinking of how you approach content on your site.

Check out our 10 basic tips for search engine optimization >

Monitor where you stand

You won't know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings.

It's also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they're using to find your site, according to PC World.

Keywords, keywords, keywords!

You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms -- how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?

The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords, PC World notes.

BEWARE: Putting ridiculous amounts of keywords on your site will get you labeled as a spammer, and search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of "keyword-stuffing." Be strategic in your keyword use.

Link back to yourself

There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site -- it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages, SEO Consultant says.

You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content.

As with all other SEO approaches, be sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into excessive linking -- you don't want your visitors to get annoyed.

Create a sitemap

Adding a site map -- a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site -- makes it easier for spiders to search your site.

Search-friendly URLs

Make your URLs more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords.

Avoid Flash

Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. According to the Search Engine Journal, "Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page... Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results."

"If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold," the post continues.

Image descriptions

Spiders can only search text, not text in your images -- which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible.

Start with your image names: adding an "ALT" tag allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site. Perfect Optimization explains an easy way to do this.

The visible text around your images is valuable for SEO: MarketPosition suggests adding captions to all your pictures and being descriptive with the text in immediate physical proximity to your images.

CONTENT

Your content needs to be fresh -- updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.

"The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are full of oft-updated, useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline," MarketingVox explains.

One way to ensure that your site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog. "Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless!" the Search Engine Journal suggests. An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.

Social media distribution

A CEO blog is just one element of social media distribution, an important SEO strategy according to SEO Consultant. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.

Whether displayed on your company's account, or recommended, re-tweeted, and re-distributed by someone else, this strategy exponentially muliplies the number of places where visitors will view your links.

Link to others

An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites.

PC World suggests that you personally ask the webmasters of well-respected sites if they'll include a link to your site on theirs. Be sure to return the favor -- then everyone wins!

Make certain that your partner has a good web-reputation, of course. MarketingVox warns against getting tied to a "link farm" whose bad SEO habits could bring you down.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/10-basic-seo-tips-everyone-should-know-2010-1?IR=T&

7 Secrets of Professional SEO Article Writers

SEO blogs and articles are a really, really important part of our online PR services and social media management. At The Content Factory, we write around 40 SEO blogs and articles per week for our clients — not including landing pages — and each one helps drive traffic to their websites. Regularly posting fresh content on your site is one of the easiest ways to introduce potential customers or clients to your brand.

Of course, you can't just throw a bunch of words on a page and expect people to come running. Pro SEO article writing services know that if you build it, they will come…but only if you build it the right way.

Here are the 7 secrets of professional SEO article writers:

1. Get your keyword research on. If you're going to post content on your site anyway, you might as well take the time to make sure Google takes notice of your effort. Find out which keywords and phrases people are searching for (as well as what you can be competitive in), and make yourself a spreadsheet. Keep track of how many times you work the keywords into your web content writing, and use resources like iWebTool (it's one of our favorite free online PR tools) to track where you rank for the keywords you target.
   
2. Put the keywords to work. It's not enough to just use the keywords in 2-3% of the copy. You need to put the primary keyword in the title of the blog/article, as well as in the first and last sentence. By doing this, the keywords stand out to the search engine crawlers, as well as the eyes of the readers. Remember, the people using search engines are searching for that particular phrase because they want to know more about it/buy it, so it makes sense to give them what they're looking for. You'll get more clicks if you do — it's one of the tricks of the trade for professional SEO article writers.
   
3. Write about something people care about. Nobody knows your business like you do — so what kind of expert advice or tips do you have that you can share? If not, you can at least discuss news relating to your business. Our SEO article writers happen to be good at web content writing, which is where blogs like these come from. MilaniHair, our clip in hair extension client, regularly features commentary about celebrity hair in their blog, and people on Twitter and Facebook can't get enough of their posts. When in doubt, give your article a celeb focus — social media sites love 'em.
   
4. Make it long enough to count. Sure, 100 words of fresh content is better than no new content at all. Still, search engines tend to give preference to longer blogs and articles. Try to shoot for at least 300 words, but if you can get to 500 or more, go for it. In general, keep it below 1,500, though.
   
5. Optimize the optimization of your web content writing. If you use WordPress as your blogging platform, there are lots of free online PR tools (in the form of plugins) you can take advantage of. At The Content Factory, we use Platinum SEO and SexyBookmarks. Free and easy web PR is as simple as hitting the "install now" link.
   
6. Edit your work. The only difference between professional SEO article writersand regular people is an eye for self editing. Programs like OpenOffice, Google Docs and Microsoft Word make it easy — the red and green squiggleys give most of it away. Having an eye for aesthetically pleasing formatting is also important. Stay away from super long paragraphs and sentences that go on for miles.
   
7. Become your own online PR agency. Once you've written and posted the fresh content, the work is only half complete. The final step of all web content writing is acting as your own online PR agency — link to your content all over the place. Comment on blogs and link back to your site. Submit your content to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Social media management and web content writing go hand-in-hand, and as soon as you hit the "Publish" button on your fresh article or blog, you should tweet your heart out. Want more tips? Check out our 5 DIY Internet Public Relations Tips.

Source : http://www.contentfac.com/7-secrets-of-professional-seo-writers/