Posted on 5th July 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |Social Media |email marketing
Business Growth, Business Tips, contest, customer, customer service, email, email marketing, giveaway, ideas, incentive marketing, internet sales, Landing Page, marketing strategy, micro site, online promotion, Social Media, special offer, sweepstakes, web marketing
Online incentive marketing strategies are an affordable and powerful marketing tool. These are the online promotional contests such as, sweepstakes, giveaways and special offers companies use to get their customer’s attention. Going online with this type of marketing is taking over; it is quick and easy for the user and cost effective for your company, saving on postage, paper and printing costs. When planned well with clear goals your return on investment (ROI) is worth it.
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:
- Find future new customers
- Increase website traffic
- Build your marketing prospect list
- Strengthen your loyalty with existing customer relationships
- Immediate sales increases
- Company gets exposure
- Increases new/existing product or service exposure
- Increase marketing research survey response rates
- Improve product/services using contestant ideas
- 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!
Posted on 28th June 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |email marketing
Business Growth, Business Tips, customer service, email, email marketing, ideas, marketing strategy
The word of mouth has long been known as a powerful marketing tool. Have you considered using online reviews to spread the word? Reviews are very successful for Amazon. Why not use this marketing strategy for your business? Yelp offers a fantastic online review forum to market your company. This online marketing tool allows your customers to share their experience with your company by writing reviews, be it positive or negative. In addition you can communicate back and forth, post offers and announcements and add photos. And it’s free! For details take a look at http://www.yelp.com/business?country=US.
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!
Posted on 21st June 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |email marketing
Business Growth, Business Tips, customer service, email, email marketing, ideas, marketing strategy, web marketing
Have you considered adding a survey page to your website? Or adding an email survey invitation to your marketing portfolio? Implementing an online survey needs a sincere marketing strategy behind it in order for it to be an effective business tool with usable results. It’s a great idea to measure the level of customer satisfaction with your products and/or services and you want your survey to have a positive impact on your customer as well as your business. You want this marketing tactic to be planned out completely with everything thought through, it’s among the top most effective and affordable marketing tactics available, so make it count.
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!
Posted on 14th June 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |email marketing
advertising, Business Growth, Business Tips, customer service, email, email marketing, internet revenue, marketing strategy
An email newsletter, when put together effectively, can be a fantastic avenue to generate traffic to your website and increase your sales revenues. Keeping the format clean and sharp looking with useful engaging articles and irresistible promotional special offers will give your subscriber a reason to open and read more.
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!
Posted on 12th January 2010 by Jose Bono in Business Tips |Marketing
email, email design, email marketing, point of sale
Here are ten tips you should keep handy for your next e-blast:
- Statistics show business to business emails are best sent Tuesday – Thursday at the start of the business day and/or after lunch.
- Statistics show businesses to consumer emails are best sent Tuesday – Thursday between 5pm and 8pm, Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.
- Choose a schedule you can do (weekly, biweekly, or monthly). Be Consistent!
- Do not use all caps or multiple exclamation points on your subject line.
- Improve your deliverability by adding a message at the top of your email to remind the user to add you to their address book.
- 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.
- Make your “From” name recognizable. Keep it the same. It is the first thing your recipient looks at.
- 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.
- Only send to your permission based email relationships.
- Keep your content relevant to what your recipient requested.
