Online incentive marketing campaigns can be created for a small or large scale plan, something for any budget. Your promotional contest sweepstake, giveaway or special offer prizes can range from company logo items (pens/pencils) to coupons, gift cards, products and/or services and vacation destinations, just make sure that it is FREE. People love to win FREE stuff! The idea is to generate customer interest and enthusiasm. Campaigns that create a strong emotion (make your contestants laugh) will get recognized and passed along through the various channels; email and social media networks, etc.

Here are 10 reasons to plan an online incentive marketing campaign:

1. Find future new customers
2. Increase website traffic
3. Build your marketing prospect list
4. Strengthen your loyalty with existing customer relationships
5. Immediate sales increases
6. Company gets exposure
7. Increases new/existing product or service exposure
8. Increase marketing research survey response rates
9. Improve product/services using contestant ideas
10. Testimonial responses

This is a great tactic to generate an online buzz for whatever you decide to promote. As said before: People love to win FREE stuff! This should be a win/win. To be sure of a win/win measure your efforts. You want your efforts to get the attention it deserves. Creating a landing page or a micro site will make it easy to track your measurable desired data.

Best wishes for a successful online incentive marketing campaign. Cheers!

This is another great tool to add to your marketing portfolio.  It provides a great opportunity to listen and nurture your customer relationships. To get started, offer your customers an incentive to write a review. With their receipt or invoice, produce an invitation with the information needed to write the review, plus an incentive on the spot, like a freebie of some sort or coupon (Who does that? You just exceeded their expectations – that’s excellent!) And in your next e-newsletter or marketing e-mail invite your customer to write a review, give them a coupon incentive upfront too. Let everyone know that another special offer will be waiting on your Yelp profile.

To make it an even better marketing experience, make it a habit of responding to all your reviews. Set time aside each day or week, depending on your review volume. Customers love to know that their review was noticed, even if the review was negative. Negative reviews are opportunities to improve what you do and often result in a more loyal customer.

Word of mouth marketing is powerful. An online review forum makes it even more powerful. I hope you like this marketing tip and take advantage of it.

Cheers!

Here are some design tips to consider while creating your online customer survey:

• Start with your objectives. Clearly define what you want to accomplish. Do you want to; spot trends, know your customer satisfaction rate, or improve your product/service.
• Have clear concise questions and answer options. Use specific close-ended questions with 6 or less radio button answers to make the process fast and easy on the customer.
• Introduce your survey. In a polite tone, tell you customer why you are asking the questions; how long it will take, and explain what you’ll be doing with the results. For a high response rate allow your survey to take 5 minutes or less to complete and offer incentives. Incentives can generally increase responses by 50%.
• Test you survey. You can send the survey to a select employee group first, make changes as necessary, and then send to a sample test group before announcing or sending the survey to your full marketing list of customers.
• Share the results. Once all of the survey data has been collected and analyzed, post your findings and the action your company will be taking. Customers will be more responsive in the future. People love knowing their opinion makes a difference.

Additionally, the best days to send out surveys are Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Thursday. Test it; you will see what day of the week works best for the responses you would like to have. Also, depending on your response timeline, using a reminder can boost the number of responses. If you are looking for an out of the box online survey analytics company, try: http://www.surveymonkey.com/, http://www.zoomerang.com/, or http://www.questionpro.com/.

3 Cheers for an Online Customer Survey! Hip, Hip, Hooray! Hip, Hip, Hooray! Hip, Hip, Hooray to Online Customer Surveys!

Here are some helpful tips to consider as you create your newsletter:

• Make it simple, easy to read, and quickly scan-able with easy navigation. Format with a 12 pt. size font (I like Arial typestyle) in dark font color on a light background, publish only 3-5 articles, using a few compelling pictures and add a clickable table of contents with article titles at the top. For articles that have over 200-300 words, add a “read more” link to take your reader to your website for the full details.
• Set your standards. Keeping the same colors, article and promotional placement, and number of articles; sets a predictable standard that customers love.
• Establish a publishing schedule. Decide and commit to sending your newsletter at regular intervals. For example, if you were to publish a monthly newsletter, email it on the first Monday of each month. This too, helps establish a predictable standard that customers love.
• Format for the preview pane. Most people view their emails through the preview pane, so format the top 200-300 pixels with the most engaging and irresistible material.
• The 80/20 content rule. 80% of the newsletter content should be engagingly useful tip oriented articles and 20% promotional sales content.
• Subscriber access on the homepage. Put a subscribe box at the top of the homepage, only asking for the subscriber’s email address. Give the subscriber an opportunity to view current and previous issues. Also, offer a share button. And make your privacy policy easily accessible.
• Check it out. Send your newsletter to email clients, such as, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail to ensure quality viewing results in these various environments.
• Measure the results. Analyze what works and what does not work after each newsletter. Find out the: delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, sales rate and sign-up growth rate.

An email newsletter is another opportunity to showcase your company’s personality. Also use your target audience, competition and newsletters you receive to help guide you towards writing and designing a great newsletter. If you are looking for material inspiration to cover in your newsletter try: a main editorial, “From the President” article, testimonials, special featured products/services, upcoming events, promotions, coupon, other industry expert interviews with tips/best practices, FAQ section where you answer customer submitted questions, customer feedback, surveys, or enter a contest.

I hope these tips help you write and design an irresistible newsletter. Get creative and have fun!

Cheers!

Good “Subject” lines are important. Again, be consistent. A good strategy is to have the initial part of the subject line remain the same, and then add a tag line change at the end. Recipients will recognize your emails when it arrives and give new taste of what is inside.

Here are four bad subject lines examples:

• The Email Marketing Monthly from Guava Graphics, dated for November 1, 2009

This is way too long. A character subject line this long will get cut off and have a higher chance of being blocked, Keep your subject lines between 20 and 50 characters.

• GUAVA GRAPHICS BUSINESS TIPS CHRONICLE

All caps … NO! NO! Most likely, your message will get blocked.

• Business Tips

What is this message about? Make it look like a new issue by adding a tag line.

• Email Marketer Special – Save $10 Today Only Buy Now!!!!

Warning!!!! A dollar sign and multiple exclamation points can cause the message to have a higher chance of being blocked.

Take a look at the revised subject lines:

• Guava Graphics Monthly, November 2009
• Guava Graphics Business Tips Chronicle
• Business Tips: 4 Email Marketing Helpfuls
• Email Marketer Special: 50% Off

We hope that you find these tips helpful in maximizing your deliverability.

1. Statistics show business to business emails are best sent Tuesday – Thursday at the start of the business day and/or after lunch.
2. Statistics show businesses to consumer emails are best sent Tuesday – Thursday between 5pm and 8pm, Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.
3. Choose a schedule you can do (weekly, biweekly, or monthly). Be Consistent!
4. Do not use all caps or multiple exclamation points on your subject line.
5. Improve your deliverability by adding a message at the top of your email to remind the user to add you to their address book.
6. Send your emails in both plain text and HTML. It is estimated that 5% of your recipients will not be able to see your message otherwise.
7. Make your “From” name recognizable. Keep it the same. It is the first thing your recipient looks at.
8. Regularly add to your permission based email relationship list. Do you have a sign-up opportunity on every page of your website? Also, use your point-of-sale for signups. Special events are a great opportunity, use paper sign-ups or have a laptop handy for an online version.
9. Only send to your permission based email relationships.
10. Keep your content relevant to what your recipient requested.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming all businesses are pulling back on their initiatives. In fact, your competitors may be counting on your nervousness. Now is the time to strategize and market smarter. Targeting your audience, targeting those personas on your website, improving your e-marketing plan … those need to happen now. How the heck do we know this?

As a service provider to many businesses in California and the east coast, we are seeing the trend of scaling down on expensive ads and shot-gun tactics to sharpshooting optimized techniques. The best part … it’s working. They are seeing real results in this economy. Real visitors, real conversions, real sales.

What should you do? You should start … start somewhere. Start online. Here are 4 real goals for your business:

1. Email your customers – send them a straight forward email about your new deals, new products and more. Use inexpensive services like Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) to help you achieve this.
2. Freshen up Your Website – even if it’s just a couple new images and new content, you need to do it now.
3. Be Found – Google is your friend. Be sure to add your business to Google’s free local business listings (www.google.com/local/add). Yes it’s free!
4. Socialize – get your Facebook page and Twitter account set up for your business. Your competition may be doing this already. It’s just one more audience that you’re not taking advantage of – And it’s free.

So don’t panic. Take a deep breath before you jump. The water’s fine. You can still market to people in this environment successfully.