Five tips for building stronger B2B email relationships

For many B2B businesses, email marketing is an important channel for marketing to customers and potential customers. And, in many respects, B2B companies have opportunities to use email marketing to build relationships in ways that B2C companies can't.

Yet relationship building is hard, and despite the opportunities email provides as a channel, many companies fail to take advantage.

So how can companies use email marketing to build stronger relationships with customers and prospective customers alike? Here are five tips.

1. Segment
Segmentation is an important part of any successful email marketing effort, and that's particularly true when building B2B relationships using email. If your company sells software, for instance, chances are you'd want to send a different email to a CIO than you would a technical lead responsible for deploying and maintaining your solution.

2. Make it personal
B2B email lists are often much smaller than their B2C counterparts, and that provides an opportunity to make emails more personal than is often possible in the B2C world.

Personalization can take many forms. When dealing with existing customers, emails can be tailored based on the type of product or service a customer has purchased in the past, or could feature the customer's account manager as the sender. For prospective customers, information frequently gathered during signup, such as industry and company size, can be used to deliver more relevant content.

3. Don't just sell
At the end of the day, most marketing initiatives are expected to directly or indirectly drive sales, but when it comes to email marketing in a B2B context, that doesn't mean that you should be selling all the time. Email can be a great channel for offering customer assistance with products and services they've already purchased, or to provide free advice to potential customers.

4. Demonstrate your knowledge, skills and capabilities
B2B purchasing decisions are often more complex and considered and that means that the messages you deliver via email will probably need to be more thoughtful if they're going to produce the desired result. No "Buy one and get one for 50% off!" or "Free shipping!" offers here. The key to producing a compelling message: know your customers, what problems they have right now and how your products and services can be applied to solving them.

5. Don't leave it all to your list
Email marketing isn't just about your list. If you want to build stronger relationships with customers and potential customers via email, taking the time to send direct messages is a must. For all the effort many companies put into producing content for email marketing campaigns, sometimes a simple "How are things going?" from an account manager can do far, far more to build a long-lasting relationship.

Source: https://econsultancy.com/blog/10675-five-tips-for-building-stronger-b2b-email-relationships

Tags: email marketing, email blast, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing service, email marketing singapore

10 Email Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners

Small-business owners are busy folks, especially in the current economy. They wear many hats, including that of marketer.

Email marketing is a medium for economically and effectively marketing your small business. But most everything out there that provides guidelines, best-practices, and advice on the application of the channel to your marketing efforts are largely geared toward bigger businesses.

And it can be difficult for those who plan and build email marketing plans and strategies for bigger organizations to step back and reflect on the days when office politics didn't exist and they had to do it all yourself...

Until now, that is, because here are 10 tips you can leverage and implement easily and quickly—while still having a positive influence on your bottom line—without having to worry yourself with multivariate testing, dynamic content development, and data integration.

Tip 1. Be yourself

You've been able to achieve your accomplishments to date by being yourself; that doesn't change in email. People frequent your establishment because they enjoy the environment, the way they are treated, the quality of your product... Your recipients need to feel the same emotion when they open your email marketing messages.

You can achieve that result through the look or tone of your message. Don't change your writing or speaking style just because you are writing in email. Writing for email can be much less "professional," lending itself more toward relationship building—and that does not come with servings of "Sir" and "Ma'am."

Tip 2. Start small

Starting small is easy when you are a small business. Unless your business lends itself nicely to email collection, you probably don't have a vast database of email addresses on record. But when you operate a small business, it may be easier for you than any of the Fortune 500 companies to obtain that information from your customer base.

The people who do business with you want to do business with you. They have built a trusting relationship with you and will give you that information. So just ask. Tell your customers that you are introducing a new, exclusive email blast program and will be sending periodic offers available to those recipients only. Provide point-of-purchase cards that customers can fill out and provide the permission... and you're off!

Tip 3. Don't over-promise

You may want to promise the world, but you need to keep it realistic. In the beginning, you may not have any idea how you want to leverage email to support your business, but before you can really validate it you need some email addresses.

Your preference may be to offer big promises of frequent offers and discounts—but unless you are prepared to deliver on those promises, don't make them. You may just want to use email for reminders and notifications.

For example, if you own an auto repair shop, you may want to use email to remind folks when it is time for their next oil change. Or, if you're a dry cleaner, you can notify customers that their items are ready for pickup.

Tip 4. Find a email marketing vendor

Selecting a email marketing software vendor could be tricky. If you search online, you will find that they vary in sophistication, from the simplistic to the complex. You are going to want to demo a few email blast vendors to see what really works for you. But do not be afraid of what you don't know. Ask questions, see how much guidance and advice they are willing and able to share—and, most of all, be comfortable in your decision.

Tip 5. Use what you know

You know more about your market, your customers, and your location than any consultant could ever tell you. Leverage that information when you are planning your email marketing programs.

For example, if you have a large professional customer base that uses smartphones or PDAs, then you may want to develop messaging that will be accessible while your customers are on the move. Or if they have children, you may want to appeal to them accordingly.

Appealing to the recipient by leveraging information you know about them extends your relationship to the inbox.

Tip 6. Stay compliant... CAN-SPAM is real

Just be compliant. Include a valid unsubscribe that only requires one click to convert, present your mailing address in the messages, unsubscribe people when they ask you to, don't steal email addresses, and don't be misleading. It doesn't matter what size your company is, if you are sending email blast you need to follow the law.

Tip 7. Drive subscription

Make sure you tell your customers via your Web site and in your store that you are building your email database and tell them why. If you are not driving subscription through every touch point, you should be. Otherwise, how do you expect to get them?

Tip 8. Offer an incentive

While it is typically not recommended that businesses offer people an incentive in for subscribing to receive emails, doing so can be a successful tactic for small business owners.

In large organizations, providing incentives to the masses tends to result in a poorer-quality recipients because chances are they are just providing their email address to get the free stuff.

But because of the closer relationship that most small-business owners have with their customer base, the incentive tends to be perceived as a "thank you" to a good customer and not just a ploy to get an email address. Be careful, though—too much of this sort of thing, and it can begin to add up!

Tip 9. Track your results

As much as I would like to tell you that you don't need to do this, you do. You can never know how email is working for you if you don't track it.

I am not saying that you need to tie every email you send back to a dollar amount that it drives through the door, but identifying early on what your email marketing program objectives are and then measuring against them to determine your success is key in leveraging the channel to the best of your benefit.

The goals can be as simple or complex as you want—anything from achieving a 50% open rate because you are striving for brand awareness or tracking conversion to the penny and driving an ROI of 5:1. It's up to you!

Tip 10. Now do it!

Yes. Once you begin collecting email addresses, you actually need to send them email. In small business, you have up to a six-month window from the point of collection to the delivery of your first email—but if you are going to get the address, you really should be using it as soon as possible.

It may not be possible to start sending right away, but you certainly should within three months of acquisition; otherwise, you may see complaints, bounces, and nonresponsive recipients because they don't actually remember providing you permission.

Email marketing is a highly lucrative and largely viral marketing channel and can be an effective and immediate solution to driving new and increased business. What are you waiting for?

Source: http://www.marketingprofs.com/9/email-marketing-tips-for-small-business-owners-trivunovic-osterday.asp

Tags: email marketing, email blast, email marketing software, email marketing singapore, email marketing company

Dos and Don’ts of Email Remarketing

By using existing metrics and subscriber behavior to remarket to your consumers, your email marketing campaigns can become much stronger and more effective. Here are some best practices for email remarketing.

Too often, busy digital marketers send a one-size-fits-all campaign and move onto the next one. Any kind of segmentation is often going to drive more impressive results. In fact, 76 percent of email revenue came from segmented emails in 2013, up from 55 percent in 2012, according to the "DMA National Client Email Survey 2014."

Marketers take heed - the plethora of email metrics from each campaign result in some bountiful follow-up options. I made a list for those rolling out some smart, metrics-driven, and behavioral-focused efforts.

Do

• Use metrics to build different paths based on their actions.
• Have a well-defined strategy of how, what, why, and when you will remarket. The planning will make or make the success not the execution. 
• Sweeten the deal to those who clicked but didn't buy.
• Do incorporate other marketing channels. I know it may seem shocking, but email works really well when connected to telemarketing and direct marketing efforts. Think phone call/direct mail as precursor or subsequent touch as the email. 
• Experiment on subject lines that drive interest (and opens) to those that did not open or click. 
• Provide extra attention and/or some VIP type offer to the best leads. That is what sales professionals do and email marketers should mirror them - because it works. 
• Automate much of the campaign pathing (example below of how BrightWave created and executed behavioral campaign path).

• Do track your ROI for all campaign elements. BrightWave has seen staggering ROI. For one international client, we saw a 3,886% return on investment. 

Don't

• Send the exact same email campaign a few days later to your entire list or even non-responders.
• Plan the efforts in a silo. Bring key digital stakeholders to plot how to best get the sale, regardless of channel. 
• Don't skimp on killer creative and content and make sure it is compelling on mobile. 
• Don't forget to test some of the seemingly minor things that could move the needle like call to action wording, pre-header.
• Don't forget to leverage technology outside of the email channel - especially retargeting - which can potentially keep the engagement going after the email. 
• Don't forget to deliver awesomeness to the inbox in some shape or form.

Source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2361309/dos-and-don-ts-of-email-remarketing

Tags: email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing malaysia, email database

Mastering the Inbox

Mastering the Inbox

If you're looking for ways to improve your email marketing campaigns, look no further. Here's a list of tips and statistics we've compiled to help marketers like you make the most of their subscriber lists.

1. Do you want to help your bounce rate? Identify emails that generated a high number of bouncebacks and investigate the source of the subscriber list.
   
2. Comply with the guidelines in the federal CAN-SPAM legislation. Most importantly, make sure that all requests for removal from your mailing lists are honored.
   
3. 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Convince & Convert via Salesforce.com)
   
4. More people read emails that deal with their finances and travel than any other category. (Return Path)
   
5. Desktop and smartphone email opens happen most often between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.—during the typical workday. (Harland Clarke)
   
6. Recipients often only read the subject line or the first few lines of an email. Include your CTA early on in your message.
   
7. Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long have an open rate of 58%. (Adestra July 2012 Report)
   
8. According to Google, there were over 425 million active Gmail users as of June 2012. According to email testing and tracking service Litmus, approximately 4% of all email opens can be attributed to Gmail webmail users, as of June 2013.
   
9. Use autoresponders to automate simple, recurring emails. Since welcome and thank-you emails will be sent over and over again as you gain new subscribers and followers, they are perfect for testing the marketing automation waters.
   
10. Bold, beautiful imagery is slowly taking over our inboxes, as we take cues from Pinterest and social hubs like Facebook and Twitter. Images help tell your brand's story, so consider taking the time to choose artful shots that complement your message.
    
11. Smart marketers are personalizing their communications based on a recipient's interests—using behavioral data, customer intelligence software, and a whole new generation of online personalization technology.
    
12. Start building your landing pages, forms, and email templates using industry-accepted best practices. 

Source : http://www.exacttarget.com/products/email-marketing/email-marketing-best-practices/mastering-the-inbox

Tags: email marketing, email blast, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing singapore

Save Your Subscribers 5 Tips for Email Lists that Last

Although there are email marketing subscribers that will allow themselves to remain on email marketing update lists indefinitely regardless of their interest in receiving those email newsletters, quite a few people will eventually unsubscribe or [oh, the horror; the horror!] route those emails to their “junk” folders. Do not let this happen to you.

Naturally, this is far easier said than done. After all, very few of us enjoy receiving email marketing and sales solicitations in our personal inboxes, just as we don’t spend an afternoon with someone trying to sell us a timeshare without the promise of reduced-rate hotel accommodations and free continental breakfasts. Clearly, the key is offering something that the recipients actually want. Not necessarily free products (although that certainly helps), but relevant information, tips and disclosures of special services of which they wouldn’t be aware without your updates.

Notice we said “wouldn’t be aware [of] without your updates.” This does not include reminders that your business exists, or follow-throughs about previous email communications. If you sent an email alerting your customers about a sale or a deal, don’t send additional emails about the same sale or deal. Likewise for emails about newsletters, blogs or any other alert, because…

No one wants an inbox full of marketing emails – pare them down.

Even if – by some remote possibility – all of your email communications alert subscribers to completely different deals and services, you run the risk of your customers shutting down from the glut of information. Basically, when your email count exceeds one or two per day, the recipients begin to view your emails as a nuisance. Even if your emails describe valuable services, if you’re the type of organization that constantly sends marketing emails, the recipients won’t view the services described in those emails as being special or anything that would necessitate instant action.
It is also critically important that whatever emails you’ve sent contain beneficial, interesting or useful information, regardless of how many you choose to send, since…

Emails that present no benefit to the recipient will be disregarded. Give them value.

If you’ve made it a habit to send causal email updates or requests that your subscribers follow you on one of your innumerable social networking sites, your subscribers will learn that your emails do not provide valuable content. Where are the sales? Where are the notifications of new services? Where are the alerts to new merchandise in stock? Have you provided tips on how your products might be used effectively? These are examples of alerts that merit email notifications, since they are what consumers want. If consumers consistently get emails reiterating the same information about your business, products or services, they will come to believe that none of your emails say anything relevant. Speaking of relevance…

Expand beyond simple descriptions of sales.

Content is key, and while it is important to delineate what special services you have to offer, it is also important to occasionally expand into well-constructed and pertinent information, specific to your customers’ needs and desires. If you are a local plumber, for example, you might occasionally offer tips on inexpensive home maintenance techniques that will help customers reduce the likelihood of expensive replacements and services. However, you have to mete out your content judiciously; as we’ve said, overabundant emails will have the opposite of the desired effect.

Test their effectiveness.

Do your customers check their emails on their personal computers or on mobile devices? Which browsers will they likely use? Are they Mac users? Do they live in rural or urban environments? The answers to all of these questions will determine whether or not your email marketing strategies will be effective, and you can test them by using segmentation analysis and email marketing analytics tools.

Make your email marketing newsletters specific.

Don’t treat your email marketing strategies like your social media strategies. In other words, blanket sales pitches don’t work. If you are having a sale on ballet flat shoes, you’d better make sure that the subscribers to whom you’ve sent the notification would be interested – sending an email message about such a sale to men who are uninclined to buy or wear women’s shoes could lead to a mass of “unsubscribe” requests.
Quality will always be more important than quantity. Your email marketing strategy has to do more than get your business’ name out there – it has to speak to your potential customers clearly and effectively. Customers have to do more than tolerate your email communications in order to stay subscribed; they have to like them and – most importantly – need them.

Source: http://blogs.boomerang.com/blog/2014/11/12/save-your-subscribers-5-tips-for-email-lists-that-last/

Tags: email marketing, email blast, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing singapore

5 Ways to Align Content Marketing and Semantic Web Optimization

Marketers must integrate their content marketing and semantic search optimization practices in order to create a natural single-track strategy.

2014 has been heralded the year of content marketing. At the same time, we're optimizing our search marketing practices for the semantic search environment. Together, there's a need to merge the two different objectives into a unified strategy.

From a search marketing perspective, it makes sense to integrate content marketing and semantic search optimization practices. The introduction of Hummingbird has taught us to deploy search optimization strategies that contextualize queries. Digital marketing with content, on the other hand, is deployed to drive traffic and engage prospects. You can see where the two might combine to form a natural single-track strategy, right?

I've got five ways I believe content marketing and semantic search can be better aligned.

1. Google Authorship

It's been talked about here on ClickZ, on the Adobe blog, on Moz, and on many search industry blogs. Google has stated that Author Rank is used as a ranking factor, especially for in-depth articles. Moreover, you can't rank without content that is viewed, shared, mentioned, linked to, or otherwise distributed.

Google Authorship has been shown to significantly boost organic visibility, even for authors who exist in fewer than 100 Google+ circles. Authorship markup helps with ranking on Google but more importantly, leads to higher click-throughs. This will, in turn, support better organic visibility. By distributing contextualized content that can be indexed using snippets through a Google+ profile, your chances for high visibility are increased.

2. Sharable Content

Search marketing analysts have been implying for years that social signals will soon correlate to better search visibility. While Google has denied using social signals as ranking factors, there is still a correlation effect where content with higher social activity may also rank higher. Obviously, shared content is not about link building, but rather a strategy - using content that provides value - which seeks to have your content shared among social circles, authority sites, and others. As your subject matter authority (see #4 below) improves, search relevancy will likely improve as well.

3. Link Potential

I realize that, in many circles, link building is not an intentional technique most enterprise SEOs engage in regularly. Partly this is due to the spammy ways in which SEOs have acquired links, which are repugnant to search marketers who optimize in a natural way. Traditional link building also takes more action, effort, and commitment than a social sharing strategy. However, because links remain a high-impact ranking factor, it's important to consider deploying semantic-centric marketing to build inbound links. In turn, this value will contribute to increasing your subject matter authority (see #4). Consequently, a robust content marketing campaign that is optimized for semantic search is more likely to yield page authority, thus greater search visibility, than simply deploying a social sharing campaign alone.

4. Subject Matter Authority

One intent of search engines is to provide searchers with the most likely sources of information for a specific query. In order to ascend to a position as a subject matter authority, your pages must reflect a combination of relevant information and popularity. The value you provide, when optimized for semantic search, can evoke higher search visibility because your site is recognized by engines as having domain authority, which is another way of saying you have become a subject matter expert, a "go-to" site for potential customers.

5. Structured Authoring

Many trends are pointing to structured authoring (SA) governing the future of mobile and local search. Every content marketing campaign should be developed with search results in mind IMHO. Therefore, content marketing that deploys structured authoring will be better positioned to have success in the space.

As background, I talked about structured authoring as the new normal in search optimization recently. Note, though, that SA has been noted by Bing and others to not affect ranking. However, because this siloing of data makes it easier for engines to index page data, structured authoring of information typically leads to greater visibility. The additional benefits include a consistent delivery of information and reuse of data and localization, both critical factors in the mobile search space.

Using XML to define attributes (called "resources"), we can assign a variety of subject, property, and object tags which, when used across multiple assets, produce a unified profile that searchers can approach through a diverse set of queries.

The content being distributed has to be specified (authored) with context in mind. Take the following example from schema.org that marks up a page for the movie Avatar:

< div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">
< h1 itemprop="name">Avatar < /h1>
< span>Director: < span itemprop="director">James Cameron < /span> (born August 16, 1954) < /span>
< span itemprop="genre">Science fiction < /span>
< a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer < /a>
< /div>

Supporting content related to this entry should provide additional context to the spiders. Here is an example of how a contextualized, related asset might be structured:

< div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">
< h1 itemprop="name">Avatar < /h1>
< span>Actor: < span itemprop="actor">Sigourney Weaver < /span> (born October 8, 1949) < /span>
< span itemprop="genre">Science fiction < /span>
< a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="release date">December 18, 2009 < /a>
< /div>

In this markup, we defined the actor Sigourney Weaver as an asset associated with the movie. You can see the variety of information that can be written into each snippet. There will usually be a robust set of resources that you can embed in each page. The more details you can provide in a structured author markup, the more likely your assets will be found in a semantic Web environment.

Rich Snippets

Content marketing for semantic web search success starts with creating rich snippets. Rich snippets are parcels of information displayed in various formats on search engine results pages. On-page markup embeds schemas, which provide standardized rules that engines use when crawling your pages. Look at the image below:

Notice there are four types of snippets in the image: reviews with image, local map, images, and traditional text snippets. Your content delivery approach should be structured in a way that leverages as many attributes within your content as possible. Meaning it's best to structure your microdata, microformat, or RDFa formats to deliver one or more of the following resources that Google supports in every marketing asset you distribute:

• Reviews
• People
• Products
• Businesses and organizations
• Recipes
• Events
• Music

Doing so ensures that, when indexing your pages, search engines can easily depict the details that searchers are looking for. To see how your structured data will appear in a SERP, use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

Disambiguation

Let me provide a word of caution here. When you optimize your content marketing for semantic search, avoid conflicts around ambiguity. Disambiguation is required when spiders get confused about the use of certain language, and that can lead to ineffective visibility (i.e. high bounce rates due to irrelevancy). For example, the term board can mean an organized body, a piece of lumber, a set of connected circuitry, or the act of getting on a plane. Protecting yourself from ambiguity requires that you define on-page resources clearly and completely.

Content marketing for semantic search isn't terribly complicated - but it takes an organized approach to creating content using on-page markup, which connects machine-readable attributes that meet a searcher's intent. We must find ways to describe our business without embedding repeatedly the terms most directly used to search. With the dawning of semantic search following the Hummingbird update, content marketing has become more necessary in order to put what you have to say in as many ways as you can.

Content marketing gets much more interesting and valuable, to your prospects and search engines alike, as you continue to innovate in how that content's structured and delivered. Implementing just a few of these strategies on your most valuable content can significantly improve the effectiveness of your overall digital marketing efforts.

Source : http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2354261/5-ways-to-align-content-marketing-and-semantic-web-optimization

Tags : seo malaysia, search engine optimization, malaysia seo company

Google Inbox Could Make It Easier to Ignore Email

As content marketers anticipate the widespread adoption of Google Inbox, they must also prepare to personalize content so that it doesn't get pushed aside.

Google Inbox offers users a new way to sort and view email, which could make it more difficult for many email marketers to stay visible.

The Bundle feature in Google Inbox allows users to more easily sort related content, such as bank statements and promotional offers. According to the Google blog, the intention behind Bundle is to group similar email in order to "swipe them out of the way," which doesn’t bode well for marketers already caught in the no man’s land of Gmail’s "Promotional" tab, which filters most marketing email away from the primary inbox.

Content, and not a misleading headline, is key to staying relevant in Google Inbox, according to Jesse Noyes, senior director of content marketing for Kapost. "Bundle will make it harder to break through within the noise of Inbox by neatly categorizing messages by promotional nature," says Noyes. "Many marketers will try to game this system, much in the way content farms tried to game Google search results, but this is an ultimately doomed strategy. Marketers need to adapt by creating content that offers a fresh look at a trend, ties into the intended audiences concerns and issues, and doesn’t overtly push product."

Content should add value to a customer’s Inbox before pushing offers and promotions, says Noyes. For example, a sneaker company announcing a new type of running shoe will probably be sent straight to a seldom-seen Bundle. But an email that offers tips on improving running times adds value and is more likely to be read.

Noyes says that with Inbox, marketers must try harder than ever to anticipate customers’ needs. "Understand what drives a person to open your email. Is it because they desperately want new running shoes or because they want to improve their running performance and avoid injuries? If you can establish value first through your content, you’ll have a much better chance of getting into the inbox."

Google Inbox is still invitation-only, and audiences may be slow to adopt the new technology. Noyes warns that marketers need to wait "to see if this is Google’s next Gmail or Googles next Wave" before making any adjustments. Google Wave was the company’s short lived 2009 messaging and file sharing system that turned users off with its complicated features and difficult-to-navigate configuration.

However, if Inbox does take off, marketers need to be aware that fewer emails will show up on users’ screens. "If that stays true," Noyes says, "the chance of getting ignored will likely go up. You need to be recognizable to stand out."

Source : http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2377749/google-inbox-could-make-it-easier-to-ignore-email

Tags : email marketing, email marketing service, email marketing singapore, mass email, email list, bulk email, email database