Online Incentive Marketing Strategies

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Posted on 5th July 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |Social Media |email marketing

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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:

  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!

Online Customer Survey

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Posted on 21st June 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |email marketing

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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!

Market your Testimonials

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Posted on 28th April 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |Social Media |Web Design |Web Development

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Customer testimonials have the potential to be a powerful marketing tactic for your business. Collecting letters, cards and emails of positive, believable testimonials can be put to good use to build a glowing marketing portfolio for your company. Constantly be on the look out for that positive, believable feedback. Please ask for it too! See if you can get your customer on video. Most satisfied customers would not take the time to proactively provide testimonials, so just ask.

There are many characteristics that make up a great testimonial. Use a testimonial that addresses a specific benefit &/or addresses a personal situation, overcomes objection, especially where a customer admits to it, the more dramatic, the better. It’s best to show off the detailed and specific ones, but not the overly long ones. Keep it short and sweet.

When it comes time to use your testimonials make sure you put them in a relevant place. The possibilities are endless; ads, direct mailers, brochures, Facebook, Youtube, blog, on-line business directories, newsletters, web site homepage, product page, landing pages or group your testimonials on one page. Anything else?

Remember to get written permission from your customer, quote the lines you are requesting to use and state what media form will be used. To increase your believability, include your customer’s full name, city, state, job title, company. For top rate believability use your satisfied customer’s photo and email address. That’s what I call a “WOW!” factor.

It is a little bit of extra work, but powerful advertising for your company.  You can even encourage your customers to share their success stories by offering rewards for their testimonials.

Have fun with it! Cheers!

Selecting a Domain Name

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Posted on 14th April 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Web Development

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Creating your business presence on the Internet is very important to its success; your domain name is the main attraction, so plan carefully. If possible, start first with your domain name rather than a company name, this way you can clearly market and promote your niche on the web and in print. The consistency in what you call your business and web site makes it easy for your customers to remember. That’s what you want!

Selecting your domain name may turn out to be a daunting task, but an important one. You want it right the first time. Some helpful tips are:

  • Brainstorm as many words as possible that you prefer and are related to your niche.
  • List your niche keywords, which would be words used when searching for a web site in the search engines or directories. Try a combination. Also, the smaller and more defined your niche is the less competition you will have and the easier the search engines will find you.
  • Make sure all your word choices are easy to remember, easy to type, and easy to spell. Avoid any confusing possibilities.
  • Then make a selection of your favorite unique options, followed by searching for the availability.

Here are some tools and services to help you along the way.

http://ajaxwhois.com/ and http://www.domjax.com/ are tools to make your domain search effortless.

http://www.nameboy.com/ can search and generate a domain name based on your primary and secondary word choices.

http://www.dnscoop.com/ has statistics and estimates a domain name value.

Oh, I should mention a couple more things. First, you do not have to purchase your domain name from the above tools and services. Go to a registrar of your choice when you are ready. Second, be aware, domain names can cost under $10, read the fine print, registrars make more money by selling you packaged services. Pay for what you need.

Good luck and have fun!

Top 10 Business Web Site Mistakes

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Posted on 22nd March 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |web design

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Today, in doing research I came across “Top 10 Business Web Site Mistakes” at http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/internet-web-development/4015-1.html. I loved the article. I continued my journey, clicking through more articles, reading more and more information on the site, thinking this is great, it’s full of fantastic information, I need to share this.

So, take a look at, http://www.allbusiness.com/, for yourself. I hope you find this to be a helpful tool, as I did. There is so much offered, any growing business will find it useful. Make sure to take a look at their RSS directory and newsletter subscriptions.

RSS for Web Site Owners

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Posted on 15th March 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |Search Engines

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Well, last week I wrote about RSS feeds for you as the Internet user, this week it’s about you as the Web site owner. This is a fantastic tool for site owners! Getting directly to the point, you need to add an RSS Feed to your site to increase your visibility. Just by adding an RSS button to your site, you can double your site’s visibility. And this little button makes you appear to be a more credible expert in your field.

Need more reasons? Okay, here are several more reasons to add RSS feeds to your site:

  1. Deliverability: Subscribers request your information, no need to get a visitor’s permission, no need to wonder if the email was blocked by spam filters, and no need to worry if your message goes unopened or deleted.
  2. Value: It keeps your customer conveniently connected; their RSS reader will provide a list of your keyword headline news articles, promotions, etc.
  3. Content: Use multiple RSS feeds to deliver target content; visitors will be able to choose the content that peaks their interests. For example, a customer may want to subscribe only to information about blogging, and not e-commerce information.
  4. Syndicate: Offer third party information on your site that compliments your field of business, rather than developing your own content.
  5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Write your content using your specific keywords and phrases to help build your search engine rankings. Your site has the potential to get picked up and used as new content for other sites, which will push your site up the ranks.

Most platforms will automatically set up an RSS feed for you. If you are just getting started take a look at https://www.blogger.com/start or http://wordpress.com/.

Cheers! Here’s to having another effective marketing tool.

What's a Landing Page?

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Posted on 1st March 2010 by Susan Venancio in Business Tips |Marketing |eCommerce |web design

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A Landing page is a single page dedicated to one product or service. It provides your visitor everything they need to know in order make a decision to buy. A Landing page is where your visitor is converted to a customer, which plays a big role in your online marketing strategy. Below are some tips for your Landing page design.

  1. Use the F-Pattern Eye Tracking Principle: Format your page in an F-Pattern, Jakob Nielsen’s research shows a visitor’s reading pattern follows the shape of the letter F. So put your important information and images along the top and down the left side of the page.
  2. Important elements: Give your visitor all the information on the first page. Get right to the point without having your visitor scroll for additional information.
  3. Colors/visual images: Use the same marketing colors and images on the web as you use in print. This will reassure your visitor that they have “landed” on the correct page.
  4. Keep it simple: Use one column with lots white space, having 5 lines per paragraph. Your visitor’s reading comprehension will be faster using this format.
  5. Use standardized form: Your links should be clearly identifiable by using the underline and your description short and specific.

Something else to consider, is your competition. Visit your competitor’s site, discover what their Landing pages are like. Take notes regarding where you found the process to be difficult, even in the slightest way. Their weakness can become your strength.

I see a happy visitor becoming a happy customer in your future. And like I’ve said before, a happy customer means repeat business. Are we all happy now?!?

Video – How Did You Hear About Us?

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Posted on 30th November 2009 by Jose Bono in Business Tips |Marketing |web design

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