Internet Marketing Advice Blog » customer acquisition

Email Marketing Tips – How to Improve Conversions

ashleyh4 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:05:23 +0000

Email marketing is one of the best ways to keep in contact with your customers, as well as, acquire new customers. If you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, consider creating an email plan that sends an email once per week to twice per month to your customer base. Use email blasts for short message-specific or promotion-oriented emails and once per month email newsletters to send more general emails that can cross-promote your other products or services that your customers may not be aware of.

Start your email marketing strategy by creating an email plan that uses the 5-tier approach: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Product Usage and Loyalty Program emails. If you create a plan and segment your target audience by this 5-tier approach, you should be able to hit Open Rates of 30-40% with click-through rates of anywhere from 30-60%.

If you’re only receiving 10% Open Rates and Click-through rates in your email campaigns of a targeted customer-base, consider A/B testing to your customers to see what works and what does not work. Try changing the Subject lines first, but sending the same content to see, if you can increase the Open Rate conversion. Then try changing the headline only in the next email, then the sub-headline only, the action only, etc. Statistically, most users have to see the same email 3X, before they may respond to your email the way that you want them to.

With small changes each time you send an email or conduct a test, you should see improvements on your email conversions and hopefully increase your overall ROI!

Marketing on a Limited Budget for Small Businesses

ashleyh4 — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:13:39 +0000

Small businesses traditionally don’t have a big marketing budget, so the best way to compete to acquire new customers for your business, is to tap into your current database. How?
1. Offer incentives to your current customers for making a new referral to your business through Refer-a-Colleague programs
2. Contact your partners or business associates to participate in a co-op advertising program. This allows you to advertise for half the cost and to get prime advertising space
3. Try Cause Marketing events with non-profits that can offer you free publicity and exposure to the community

Although, it may be hard to market with a small budget, there are many creative marketing programs that small businesses can utilize in their current business channels to increase customer acquisition.

Being Efficient in a Bad Economy

ashleyh4 — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:19:32 +0000

It’s tough times out there, including for the online industry, so how do we make sure that we are getting the most for our advertising buck? Take a look at your current online marketing strategy and see which channels are the most inefficient. Get rid of them! Yes, I know what you must be thinking, if it’s bringing me even one client, it’s worth it…but it’s not. Now is the time to really pay attention to your customer acquisition metrics and conversions and see where you can cut the fat, so you can move over money to the most efficient channels.

Also, pay more attention to your customer retention programs. This is where many marketers don’t take advantage of the database they already have. Make email and viral marketing your best friend. Offer promotions to drive the traffic back to your site. I will guarantee you, by creating unique retention programs, you will increase the LTV (Lifetime Value) of your customer and increase your ROI. This will also help you to decrease your marketing expenses, since its much cheaper to market to current clients than it is to acquire new ones.

Is there a difference between B2B and B2C Online Marketing?

ashleyh4 — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:12:34 +0000

Is there a difference between Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online marketing? Absolutely. Don’t let an inexperienced marketer tell you otherwise. B2B marketing tends to focus on providing targeted content, such as white papers, case studies and webinars to their target market, in exchange for the target markets’ contact information. Also, B2B marketers tend to focus more on customer acquisition, rather than customer retention, since attrition is much lower in the business market than in the consumer market. Online marketing channels tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO and related business information websites.

B2C marketing tends to focus equally on customer acquisition and retention marketing programs. Consumers are more price & service sensitive than businesses. Consumers visit more alternative online services, if they believe there is a better value for them testing out varied sites. Many good B2C online marketers will focus on creating customer retention programs that keep consumers coming back to their sites to extend their Life Time Value (LTV) of their online members…i.e. if the average of an online user is 2 months at a casual gaming site, then the marketer seeks to extend the LTV to 3-4 months. By extending the LTV of an online member, potentially increases online usage at the site and will increase overall ROI for revenues.

Online marketing channels for B2C online services tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO, direct marketing, email campaigns, blogs, viral and affiliate marketing.