Posts Tagged ‘email marketing’

Use Email Marketing and Social Media Together to Build Online Communities

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

B2B or B2C marketers should build their company’s online communities by creating targeted email blasts to the company’s customer and potential customer database. Create a theme, such as ‘We’re Listening’ to get your customers to tell honest stories of their experiences with the company, whether positive or negative. For any positive stories, use them in future newsletters or on the company’s website to show the community experience, which creates a positive halo effect that the company is a ‘people-type of company’.

For any negative stories, address them immediately and take action in whatever channel the communication came through, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn, so customers will believe that the company cares about them. Don’t make a mistake like what BP did when the oil spill occured last year, when they waited so long to address all of the negative comments on Twitter. If BP would have addressed the comments immediately, the image of the company probably would have been a lot different, as we know it now.

By addressing customer concerns will make your customers long-term advocates of the company and attract new customers based on the positive experiences of the current customers.

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Choose SEO First When Starting Your Online Lead Strategy

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Develop an online marketing plan with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as your starting point, comparatively to other lead generation channels, such as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), affiliate marketing, email marketing or media buys.

SEO, for all the newbies out there, is the organic listings that appear on the left-side of Google’s search results. It is free to appear in Google’s organic listings, which is how 75% of online users will find content. Also, 85% of Google Search users tend to click on organic listings compared to paid advertising links that appear at either the top or right-side of Google’s results. Although free to appear, it is not easy to get your website listed on the first page of the organic search, which is primarily where you want to appear, since most people tend not to go past the 1st page of the listings. So, how do you begin to make your site SEO-friendly?

Start with the title of the web pages. Name the title tags with 3-4 keywords that are relevant to the information on the page.  Next, make sure that your information on the web pages are specific to the keywords.  Lastly, get as many external links that go to your website.  The more links you have, the more it will help in the popularity of your site, which will drive your site up in the rankings of the organic search.

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Posted in online marketing, Search, SEO | 3 Comments »

For Customer Retention, Email Marketing Will Do

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

You’re getting tons of customers to your site, but you’re losing them just as fast as you are getting them, so what do you do?  Don’t expect that just because you built it, they should stay.  Building a good customer retention program is as important as creating a good customer acquisition program.  Email marketing is a good and simple way to keep your customers informed with new items at your site, community happenings, announcements and making sure that your user base returns to the site.  Here are some tips on what you can do to build a good email campaign:

1. Segment the Database – Do not send a mass email to all of  the database. This will surely have a lot of opt-outs or low click through rate back to the site.  Separate the database mailings by how you want to market to the user base, such as creating emails tarrgeted to either region, gender, age, or work title. Learn and understand what your customers want and mail to them accordingly.

2. Test Email Campaigns – Test different headlines, subject lines, graphics and body text to see what performs better.  Test, test, test!

3. Email Blasts & Newsletters – Try sending weekly email blasts with specific product or service offerings to your segmented database. Send  monthly newsletters that contain content that is more general and can appeal to a larger audience than the segmented email blasts. Monthly newsletters can contain content, such as news, third-party offerings, community happenings, and Refer-a-Friend programs. Make sure to be consistent about the newsletters delivery schedule to keep consistency.  This will help build brand-equity of the company site.

4. Do Not Send Too Many Emails In A Short Period – This is a big no-no.  The more emails that are sent in a short period will surely tire the customer base and ensure that your campaigns will be opt-out with more frequency.  Think about how many emails do you get…what are the ones that you opt-out of?

For more information or help on your email marketing campaigns, please contact Ashley Hart on the ‘Contact Us’ tab of the homepage of www.AshleyHartMarketing.com

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Posted in Ashley Hart, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »

Being Efficient in a Bad Economy

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

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.

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Is there a difference between B2B and B2C Online Marketing?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

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.

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Posted in internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search, SEO | 1 Comment »

Build Your Own Email List, Don’t Buy

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Email marketing is considered the #1 way to market on the Internet, but what does that mean to you, if you don’t have a database of users yet? How do you build an email list to market your services?  Should you buy a list from one of those online services?  Don’t even think about it.  I know it’s tempting to buy a list and it is the easy way out, especially, if you are just launching a site and don’t have any customers, but don’t build your email list this way.  This is a common mistake of Entrepreneurs and less experienced Online Marketers to buy lists and to send bulk email to the list, hoping that users will click on your email or newsletter.  This is definitely the way to get ‘black-listed’ on the top mail servers. Think about how much you hate getting email from companies or people that you don’t know.  So, how do you build your email list?

The best way to build your email list is to run targeted marketing promotions that require people to offer their emails to you. Also, try running online Search marketing, Cost per Lead, Cost Per Acquisition campaigns or try offline Event Marketing programs.  It will take time to build the list, but once you do, you will have a database of users that want to hear from you and will be more receptive to your marketing offers.

The last thing you ever want to do is to market to people who never requested your information, so don’t do it. Take the time, build your list and you will have an effective email marketing campaign.

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Posted in brand marketing, internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search | 1 Comment »