5 Big Internet Marketing Mistakes (That Are Incredibly Easy to Make)

The Internet is full of “must-do” lists when it comes to web design and Internet marketing. Click through popular blogs, our own included, and you’ll find many different tips on what you have to try, use, or manage if you want to find customers over the Internet.

Knowing which mistakes to avoid is just as important as realizing which best practices you have to follow, however. For that reason, we’d like to point out five big Internet marketing mistakes that are incredibly easy to make:

1. Pestering your customers. Email marketing is incredibly valuable, but lots of companies use it to simply badger their customers week after week (or even several times per week) with one offer after another. Be sure to mix up your sales pitches with some informative articles and ideas, so your customers don’t feel like you’re just contacting them when you want something.

2. Sounding just like your competitors. A lot of business owners and managers are at a loss when it comes to describing or differentiating their companies, so they adopt the approach to either copy their competitors or come up with web content that is similar to what they’ve seen. The end result, though, is a set of pages that doesn’t set a business apart from the competition.

3. Promoting too many sales or discounts. When you’re constantly having sales and offering discounts, you don’t just give your business a short-term revenue boost – you also teach your customers that they can get your products or services for less if they are willing to wait long enough. In other words, discounting too much or too often can make it virtually impossible for you to find customers for your normal prices.

4. Not building trust. Today’s consumers have a lot of skepticism when it comes to what they read and see on the Internet. That’s why it’s up to you to do everything you can to build trust and credibility on your website. Show them that their transactions are safe, that you’ve been in business for a long time, and that other customers are willing to vouch for you. That brings us to…

5. Ignoring online reviews. The online reviews your company has are your most important marketing tool, because they essentially amount to word-of-mouth advertising. Do everything you can to encourage buyers to leave good reviews for your business, and take immediate action to clean things up if the feedback you get is less than stellar.

Are you working against your own Internet marketing success by making these common mistakes? If so, the first step is realizing that they’re holding you back and deciding to be smarter in the future. The second step is to call us today and let us show you how we can make your website more effective and profitable at the same time.

http://www.washingtontimesreporter.com/article/20150522/BLOGS/305229999/1662

How to Build Profitable Customer Relationships Using Email Marketing

Like any relationship, your relationship with your customers is built on trust and communication. Happy customers equal a more successful business. Email marketing can help you get there, but only if you’re doing it correctly.

Here are seven simple ways you can use email marketing to build profitable customer relationships:

1. Be Consistent

Imagine if you went for weeks without hearing from your significant other. You wouldn’t like that, would you? Your customers appreciate consistent communication, too.

To stay connected, send them a regular newsletter. And if you say you’ll send a weekly newsletter, make sure you deliver it weekly. If and when they have a problem that your business can solve, you’ll be the first person they turn to.

Email autoresponders (aka follow up messages) are another great way of staying in touch on a regular basis. The key advantage is that you can automate these so they go out to every new customer at a set interval.

2. Get Personal with Your Messages

Having a relationship with your customers means you know who they are on a personal level. Segmentation is a great way to make your email marketing personal to your customers.

It starts with gaining an understanding of who your customers are, what their needs are, what struggles they experience, and what success looks like for them. A great example of this is Marcus Sheridan, who successfully launched a fiber-glass pool company in the midst of an economic slump, thanks to his ability to understand his clients’ needs and meet those needs with education.

Send your customers highly relevant content that satisfies their needs and interests, and there’s no telling what you can accomplish.

3. Be Clear and Direct

There’s nothing more frustrating that not knowing what someone wants. Being clear and direct in your emails to your customers only strengthens your relationship. When they sign up to receive emails from you, tell them exactly what they can expect to receive from you. When you send them emails, make sure you tell them what you want them to do with a clear call to action. Try to keep your calls to action to a minimum in your messages.

4. Provide Relevant Solutions

This one ties back to being personal. The more you know about your customers, the better equipped you’ll be to provide them with the content they’re looking for.

Before you hit “send,” ask yourself, “Does it serve me or my reader?” If it’s not serving your reader, don’t send it. Find a way to make what you want match with what your customer wants.

Another great way to strengthen customer relationships is to ensure that your customers know you value them. Who doesn’t love to feel important and appreciated. By rewarding your customers with exclusive content, information, discounts, etc., you deepen the relationship you have with them.

5. Involve Your Customers

Everyone enjoys feeling appreciated and valued. A great way of helping your customers feel this way is by asking for their feedback, listening to their input, and acting on it. This doesn’t just have to be feedback about your product or service, but about the content of the emails you provide them.

Simply put, let your audience direct your content. What better way to strengthen your relationship with your audience then by involving them in the creation of the content you provide?

Rapping coach Cole Mize does a fabulous job at this. Instead of just telling his audience how to do something, he asks his followers to submit their own ideas so he could spotlight them. He then creates a new video featuring his followers and a beat he creates just for them.

6. Be Spontaneous

Everyone loves something out of the ordinary. We call this surprise and delight. It does wonders for maintaining great customer relationships. If you struggle to be spontaneous, consider sending your customers a free ebook or video, or perhaps a free product or discount offer.

7. Be Authentic (aka Get Real)

Customers appreciate authenticity from businesses and brands. It builds trust, and they’ll stick with you if you are real with them. Isn’t it refreshing when a business or brand is honest and direct with you? Make sure your emails convey an authentic and real approach. You’ll be amazed at how much this can strengthen the relationship you have with your customers.

These are only a handful of ways you can build and maintain profitable relationships with your customers. What are some ways you like to build relationships with your customers? Share yours in the comments below

http://www.business2community.com/brandviews/aweber/how-to-build-profitable-customer-relationships-using-email-marketing-01230370

21 Ways To Market Your Business Online On A Shoestring Budget

Who says you need to spend millions on marketing? Columnist Steve Olenski tells you how to market your business yourself without spending a ton of money.

I often hear from business owners who feel they’re too busy running their business to spend time on marketing. This is valid — and to be honest, sometimes marketing is best left to the professionals.

But a problem arises when you simply don’t have the budget to hire a full-time consultant or marketing person. The following will cover 21 ways you can market your business yourself, even on a tight budget.

Online Review Sites

Having your business listed on online review sites is important not just for driving traffic and sales, but for protecting your online reputation. The following sites are some of the most influential, as well as the most cost-effective (free!).

1. Set up a Google My Business page: This listing will get your business on Google Search, Maps and Google+ and enable customers to review your business. Local business reviews tend to receive high rankings in the search results, giving you some great (free!) real estate. Google+ Local reviews also influence the search rankings of people you’re connected to, meaning your business’ reviews may also appear when your connections perform relevant searches on Google.
2. Create a listing on Yelp: As the biggest online review site, creating a Yelp listing is definitely worth the effort. It’s free, and gets you in front of the platform’s more than 140 million monthly visitors.
3. Create a free Angie’s List page: Users pay a monthly fee to use the platform, but listing a business is 100 percent free. Available for service-based businesses only.
4. Get listed on Yahoo Local: Yahoo offers local businesses the opportunity to get a basic business listing in its directory for free. Listings are integrated with other Yahoo products like reviews, maps and events.

Social Media

5. Join industry Facebook and LinkedIn groups: Become a valued member of two or three groups in your business’ industry, offering advice and support. This helps to establish you as an expert in your field, and ultimately builds your reputation and sales.
6. Create your own Facebook group: Create a free Facebook group for customers or prospects to get help or support with a problem related to your niche. (For example, a social media consultant could start a “DIY Social Media Mastermind group.”)
7. Use images to offer discounts on Facebook or Twitter: Using images to offer discounts or coupon codes is a great, non-threatening way to promote your products without being too “salesy.”
8. Promote a free, no obligation 15-minute consult to your followers: Reduce the risk your prospects feel by offering a risk-free consult.
9. Monitor brand mentions: Use a social listening tool like Social Mention to monitor and contribute to conversations happening in your niche.
10. Create and share an original infographic: A tool like Piktochart requires no design or coding skills, and costs start at only $29 per month — much cheaper than hiring a designer to do it for you.

Blogging

11. Contribute guest posts to a well-known industry site: To find blogs to contribute to, do a search for “your niche” + “guest post”.
12. Hold free webinars on your site: If you’ve investigated webinar software, you already know how costly they can be. Not to mention that most require a monthly subscription — not exactly small business-friendly! A great, low-cost alternative is using a WordPress webinar plugin like WebinarIgnition. It has a one-time cost of $97 for unlimited webinars with unlimited attendees.
13. Partner with a complementary business to co-sponsor a contest: Co-sponsoring the contest gives you access to each other’s audience, maximizing your efforts. Submit your contest to popular sweepstakes sites to extend the reach of your contest.
14. Install a free social sharing plugin on your site: Using a free WordPress plugin like Share Buttons ensures all your blog content can be easily shared by your readers.
15. Comment thoughtfully on blogs in your niche: It’s perfectly acceptable to leave your website URL in the appropriate field, just be sure to use your real name or business name, not keyword-rich anchor text.
16. Create an award for businesses or products in your niche: Create a simple badge using a free program like Canva, and then write a blog post of the Top 10 _______ (e.g., Top 10 websites for Web designers). Award each of the winners with a badge that links back to the post. This strategy works best once your site has built up a reputation in your niche.

Other Channels To Get Yourself Out There

17. Join relevant industry forums and respond to questions with helpful advice:I’m not talking about writing spammy, thin comments just to gain links back your site. Make meaningful contributions to conversions to capture the attention of other readers.
18. Sign up with HARO (Help A Reporter Out) to get free PR for your business:Respond to relevant media queries and land free mentions and links in publications like Huffington Post, Forbes and other popular outlets.
19. Email a well-known business or influencer in your field with an authentic testimonial: Businesses love receiving testimonials, and many times will post them on their website (along with a link).
20. Invoice your business like a pro: Make sure that you’re billing your clients on time each month as well as keeping track of everything. I personally love Due invoicing as it’s a free option that invoices clients, and for a small fee you can bill people over PayPal.
21. Answer questions on a Q&A site like Quora: These sites consist of real people looking for answers to questions. Search the site for relevant questions you can answer intelligently.

Over To You…

The Internet has leveled the playing field significantly when it comes to marketing. The reach and visibility that used to only be available to big brands with big budgets are now within the reach of even the smallest businesses.

http://marketingland.com/21-ways-market-business-online-shoestring-budget-127277

Creativity + measurability = Internet marketing success

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“If your website is on the Internet and no one ever visits it, does it really exist?”

I am not really sure of the answer to the tree question, but when it comes to websites, armchair philosophers all agree: A great website is useless if no one ever visits it.

To take it a step further, no matter how beautiful and functional your website is, it can be a complete waste of marketing dollars if the right visitors never find it.

Internet marketing has become a mandatory part of every general marketing effort. With essentially everyone using the Internet as their primary resource for finding and purchasing products and services, optimizing your Internet marketing strategy is critical to the success of most every business.

With myriad web-based marketing tools and options available, choosing the most effective ones is confusing at best.

Being in the website design and Internet marketing field myself, it has been interesting to witness first-hand which strategies work and which don’t in the quest to draw qualified leads to a website. I have seen email marketing, search engine optimization, paid advertising and affiliate marketing campaigns both succeed and fail in the quest to gain more website leads and sales. Predicting which marketing approaches will work for any given business can be difficult to say the least.

So what’s the secret formula for Internet marketing success?

In thinking about our own marketing efforts as well as those of our clients, the first step to determining the best Internet marketing campaign is to use tools that are easily measurable.

When you initially dream up a web-based marketing campaign, it’s tempting to make decisions based on opinions and hearsay. The color of your logo, the wording of a Google ad, the timing of a mass email — a group of intelligent, experienced and creative individuals often have completely differing subjective opinions.

Whether using email marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, search engine optimization, or any online effort, the ability to turn the subjective into the objective is what separates a profitable campaign from a waste of money.

The key is to collect your “best-guess” ideas about what marketing strategies and efforts will draw more traffic and sales, and then real-world test them to objectively prove or disprove their effects on profits.

Fortunately, most Internet marketing can be setup in a way that allows businesses to do quick and cheap trial-and-error campaigns before committing to the right mix of long-term marketing activities. Most every aspect from mass email subject-lines, to Facebook ad wording, can be deployed, tested and tweaked both easily and cost-effectively.

Over the past several years, the toolsets available to facilitate this trial-and-error approach to online marketing have multiplied and matured. You can gather most of the data you need using the ever-popular and free Google Analytics. Open rates and click-through rates are reported in most every email marketing system. Web ad testing tools that compare effectiveness of one ad versus another are affordable for any size business. There is no longer any reason to simply guess when it comes to online marketing.

Combining the creative mind to brainstorm ideas with the scientific mind to measure their effectiveness can turn subjective opinions into objective marketing decisions and ultimately increased profits.

http://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2015/05/15/creativity-measurability-internet-marketing-success/27336291/

What is the fastest way to write Engaging Email Subject Lines

Great post from Greham Jones about Writing the Subject line . An element most of us internet marketers struggle with ….

The Huffington Post writes several headlines for every article and then tests them to see which one works best. Over at Upworthy, they write 25 headlines for every article and will measure which one gets the most readers, ultimately sticking with that one. Headline writing for popular media sites is now as much of a science as it is an art.

But there is a message in their methodology. If your headline is not right, you won’t get readers in this fast-paced, distraction-heavy online world. These sites often spend more time on writing the headlines than they do on the article or blog post itself. Indeed, in the world of newspapers the people writing the headlines are usually paid more than the writers of the text below them. Not only that, big-selling tabloids usually have a couple of people whose sole job is to write the front page “splash” headline.

When it comes to email, the subject line is your headline. It is the first thing people see, and it is instrumental in helping recipients make the decision whether or not to open the message.

So the question is, how many alternative subject lines do you write for your emails? Do you split test your email subject lines to find the ones with the best open rates? It is also worthwhile reflecting on how much time you spend writing the subject line, compared with the text of the email itself. If you want the best open rates – particularly for marketing emails – you need to spend more time writing the subject line than you do in writing the email itself.

However, this all takes time. So, how can you write truly engaging email subject lines without spending hours on them? The answer is found in new research that investigated the engagement rate of different kinds of email subject lines.

The study looked at more than 9 million email subject lines in over 3,000 companies sending out emails to more than 2 million people. So it is a substantial study.

Contrary to popular belief, the research discovered that there was no relationship between the length of the subject line and open rates.

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/emailreadrates.png.png

The study also found there were some real “turn-off” words in subject lines, including the often used word “free” as well as “secret of” – both words that so-called Internet Marketing Gurus recommend you use.

What is more important is that the “call to action” is at the beginning of the subject, rather than at the end. Furthermore, the study revealed that there were some words that had a positive effect on opening rates such as “still time” or “fastest”. This suggests people prefer saving time to saving money.

So how can you use this information to speed up your subject line writing?

The first thing to realize is that in spite of what many people say, stop worrying about fitting your subject line into a certain number of characters. Focus on the quality of your subject, not the quantity of the characters. That will speed your writing up.

Next, forget trying to squeeze in all those so-called marketing phrases such as “free” or “secrets” and so on. Again, you are less creative with headline writing when you feel compelled to use particular words. When you remove the pressure for specific wording, you’ll write more quickly.

You could stimulate your subject line writing by using some tools, such as Content Row’s title generator, the browser extension Headlinr or the WordPress plug-in KingSumo Headlines.

You could also check out each subject line you write using the Headline Analyzer or the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.

Three steps to fast subject line writing

1. Focus on the reader and tell them immediately what action to take.
2. Forget about the length of the headline or using so-called trigger wording.
3. Check you subject line using an analysis tool.

That’s it – do that and your subject lines will engage people and you will get higher open rates. However, it is worthwhile focusing more attention on the subject line than on the email itself.

http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/fastest-way-write-engaging-email-subject-lines-01221972

Is Email marketing Dead ?

Minding your Ps and Qs in email marketing – three tips to keep your campaigns on the right side of compliance

mail marketing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s thriving. As The Drumreported late last year, email marketing spend in the US is projected to reach $3.1bn by 2019, up from $2.1bn in 2014. Driving much of this growth is consumers’ increasing preference to open – and act on – emails from their mobile devices. Fifty three per cent of total email opens occurred on a mobile phone or tablet in Q3 2014, according to Experian, while email is now the second-biggest marketing channel for mobile purchases.

Clearly, we’re in a period of email renaissance.

As email marketing budgets increase, it’s important that marketers have a proper understanding of the difference between email marketing best practices and email marketing laws and regulations. This is especially true now that the US is nearly alone amongst developed countries for its continued allowance of opt-out email policies. Almost all other developed nations have adopted laws and regulations requiring that companies receive prior opt-in consent before sending marketing emails, following Canada’s switch in 2014.

Minding your Ps and Qs when it comes to email marketing best practices and laws is imperative. As more commercial emails are sent each day, and consumers are increasingly tethered to a digital device for nearly all-day access to email, the onus is on digital marketers to ensure they follow not only the letter of the concerning commercial emails, but that they also follow an ever-evolving set of email compliance best practices.

‘Best practices’ aren’t the same as the law

Every marketer knows the concept of 'best practices'. The tried-and-true, but often unwritten, standards that guide many of the things we do in digital advertising. But it’s important to keep in mind that best practices are not technically law.

Here are three things to keep in mind to ensure you’re on the right side of email marketing compliance:

The US CAN-SPAM Act remains an opt-out law
The law is silent on the type of consent needed for a company to send marketing emails to individuals. All that is required is an unsubscribe link. While the US continues to allow opt-out email campaigns, this may change in the coming years. Therefore, for now, it is advisable to only send marketing emails to email recipients who have opted-in to being contacted, at least until the laws that govern commercial email activities are clarified.

Unsubscribe links: Don’t mail without them
Leaving an unsubscribe link out of your marketing email is a quick way to receiving a large fine from the Federal Trade Commission. Remember: you must include an unsubscribe link in every commercial email; it must be easy to find; and it must provide the free and unimpeded option for a recipient of an email to request to never receive a commercial email again from your company.

Best practice in has become less clear. Until recently, you were considered to be in compliance if a marketing email sent on your company’s behalf by a third-party provider included two unsubscribe links. The rationale was that recipients could unsubscribe from either the advertiser’s emails, the third-party partner’s emails, or both. A second camp has emerged, claiming that only one unsubscribe link should be included in commercial emails, so the recipient can easily unsubscribe from all parties associated with the email without the risk of only unsubscribing from one subset.

A reputable marketing partner with experience in email marketing will be able to guide you as to which best practice is most appropriate for your email marketing campaign.

Design your emails for mobile 
By now, most marketers have mastered desktop-based email marketing best practices. But mobile email best practices remain perplexing for many digital marketers. 

To avoid the ire of Internet Service Providers, which want to make emails load as quickly as possible on consumers’ mobile devices, it’s important to ensure your email creative is optimised for mobile. That means clean, simple designs without a lot of embedded links; simple, short copy; and no multi-layered images that can eat up the battery life of mobile devices. Complexity has no value when it comes to email creative in the mobile era.

Ultimately, maintaining email marketing compliance requires two critical components: diligence in understanding the various laws and regulations governing email marketing activities, and working with a credible marketing partner that can help guide you through this evolving maze while ensuring your campaign reaches ROI targets.

http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2015/05/01/minding-your-ps-and-qs-email-marketing-three-tips-keep-your-campaigns-right-side

How to use Get Response?

Which Email Marketing service do you use ?

I always recommend our customers they should start with Get -Response and once they have more than 1000 subscribers to research the market.

8 Tools That Help You Perform Day-to-Day Tasks More Efficiently

Every entrepreneur would love to be more productive and complete day-to-day tasks more efficiently, resulting in more time to allocate towards business growth.

With so many web-based tools and software to choose from, it can be quite overwhelming. I’ve put together a list of my eight favorite tools that I have used personally as well as have seen implemented by successful online business owners I deal with on a daily basis.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media-management tool suitable for businesses of all sizes. With over 10 million active users, this is one of the most user-friendly social media-management dashboards in existence. Smaller organizations can easily schedule Facebook posts and Tweets as well as monitor their social media return on investment with custom analytic reports.

Larger organizations can manage full-blown social campaigns among multiple users, departments and locations. While it can help larger companies better manage their social media staff, it can also help new startups that can’t afford to hire a full-time dedicated social media manager properly execute campaigns.

Related: The Best Content Marketing Tools to Help You Work Smarter, Not Harder

2. Basecamp

Organization is key -- if you are constantly searching through your email inbox to find messages or shuffling through sticky notes to locate information then you need Basecamp in your life. This tool is great for project management -- both internal tasks as well as client projects. You can quickly communicate with members of your team, clients, vendors and freelancers all in one place.

Having a simple project-management solution allows you to easily look in one place to get a complete status update. You can eliminate phone calls, emails and meetings -- everyone is literally on the same page.

3. FreshBooks

Accounting can be a complete nightmare and time suck, but thanks toFreshBooks you can easily track expenses, create and send invoices, and handle all of your business accounting in a single dashboard. You can quickly see how much money you have in outstanding invoices, and you can see when clients opened and viewed invoices. This eliminates the classic “I never received it” excuse, as you can see the exact date and time that the invoice was opened and viewed.

The ability to create invoices on the go will actually help you get paid faster as well. Your team can create invoices and bill clients before they even leave an office or meeting. As entrepreneurs we all want to get paid faster, and this is a tool that definitely helps to facilitate that.

4. Drip

There are several email-marketing solutions, but Drip tops my list for many reasons. Some other options do one or two things very well while lacking in other areas, while this piece of software does everything very well. The product is perfect if you actively market content. Write an ebook, put together an email sequence and let Drip do the hard work for you.

We use Drip at FE International to automate our email sequences and feed content to relevant people. It helps build trust, credibility and is simple to use -- great for non-techies like myself!

5. Dropbox

Entrepreneurs are becoming more mobile by the year. Having remote workers located all over the globe is a common occurrence in most startups, and a tool such as Dropbox allows you to securely store documents and files in one place, making it easy to share them with anyone.

Related: 4 Must-Have Ecommerce Automations

Dropbox not only frees up space on your computer, but it also makes sure you never lose a file again. No more needing to send presentations out to team members via email. No more worrying about employees keeping files safe. This gives you security, convenience and peace of mind.

6. Parsely

You have probably heard about the importance of content marketing several times. In fact, you are probably publishing content on your blog regularly -- but do you know if it is working? How is your audience responding to your content? What kind of ROI is your content marketing returning? Parsely is a tool that answers these questions for you.

When you can quickly identify content strategies that are working to expand your online reach it allows you to spend more time producing more content and less time trying to fire out what is working and what isn’t. Focusing all of your content production around strategies that are proven to work means you will experience a higher ROI from your campaign.

7. Desk

Providing excellent customer service is a must for any business, andDesk, an application from SalesForce, can help you provide effortless customer service. With this app you can begin to offer online customer support -- answering pre-sale questions as well as addressing complaints quickly before they develop into major fires. You can look at data and see how long it takes to answer customer service inquiries, allowing you to establish benchmark response times to strive for or beat.

One of the other great features is the self-help option, which allows you to publish answers to common questions and for individuals to search the knowledge pool before submitting a support request. A thorough knowledge pool can help eliminate a significant amount of customer support inquiries -- this reduces your expenses and work force.

8. GoToMeeting

As I mentioned above, remote working is common among startups and even large established companies are converting positions into remote jobs, allowing their employees to work from home. GoToMeeting allows you to conduct video conferences in HD quality, share your screen -- desktop or iPad -- with your audience, and record the entire meeting to share with those that couldn’t make it.

Not only is this tool great for organizations to use internally, but it can also be used to conduct webinars to generate leads or to offer demonstrations to potential clients. The days of the traditional conference call are long gone -- video conferencing is the new standard.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244543

How to Use Email Marketing to Build Brand Awareness

You know building awareness for your business is important.

But how do you stand out and actually get the attention you need to reach new customers and generate new opportunities?

This was the dilemma faced by Davidson & Company, LLP, a full-service accounting firm located in downtown Vancouver.

“One of our taglines is that ‘We’re not your typical accounting firm’” explains Bahar Saadat, client relations & marketing manager at Davidson & Co. “Traditionally, accountants have a reputation for being boring ‘bean counters’ but we want to show people that we have personality, and that we have real people that are great to work with.”

For Davidson & Co, building awareness means having a way to stay top-of-mind with existing clients, and being able to reach potential clients in the process.

Recommended for YouWebcast: Zero to Millions: The Secrets Behind Building a Business and Growing a Digital Audience

For the last two years, the firm’s best tool for reaching these audiences been email marketing from Constant Contact.

“We started with email marketing to communicate and share industry updates with our existing clients,” Bahar explains. “But it’s really grown into one of our best drivers for brand awareness. We’re noticing more people talking about our business, and we have more people showing up at our events.”

If you’ve been struggling to get the reach you’re looking for, email marketing can help. Consider these four tips from Davidson & Co to help you get started:

1. Ask for permission

Growing an email list can take some time, but as Bahar has discovered, it’s better to collect email addresses the right way, rather than trying to take shortcuts.

“We’re careful to only add people to our list that we’ve met and have an existing business relationship with,” Bahar explains. “When you let people know what they’re going to receive — for us that includes information about our events and industry news— people are very willing to sign up.”

Getting permission has proven to be particularly important for Davidson & Co, following the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), which went into effect on July 1, 2014. The legislation introduced new requirements for businesses to obtain consent before sending marketing messages.

“I know there were a lot of business that were worried about CASL, but for us it really hasn’t been a problem at all,” Bahar explains. “We reached out to our audience to let them know that we were aware of it, and gave them the option to update their subscription and an overwhelming number of people said they wanted to keep hearing from us which was great.”

2. Put your audience first

Asking permission will get people onto your list, but once they’ve signed up it’s your responsibility to provide something of value.

With an average open rate higher than 50 percent, Bahar has found that one of the best ways to provide that value is to start with her audience and understand what they’re most interested in receiving.

“It’s all about providing something that’s relevant to them and promotes engagement,” Bahar explains. “When we started out, we were just really sharing a graphic with a short message or announcement, but over time we’ve paid attention to what resonated and began to introduce more and more.”

The firm recently used audience feedback to tweak their strategy and make video a central part of their marketing strategy.

“We thought video would be a fun way to humanize our firm and show the people behind the scenes,” Bahar explains. “It really took off, even to the point where we are running into clients and they are telling us how much they enjoyed a video we sent out.”

The firm has also sent an online survey to a segment of their client base to learn more about what they’re interested in receiving.

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3. Share your knowledge

You’ll get more people opening your emails when you shift your focus to providing content that’s interesting to your subscribers — which is a great first step towards email marketing success.

The next step is to understand what type of content would get people to take an additional action.

For Davidson & Co, that means sharing helpful advice and offering the chance to learn more at in-person events.

“In the past, we had relied on print invitations to promote our events and that made it difficult for people to share the events and invite other people,” Bahar explains. “With email, we have people who open and read our invitations but also share them with others. It’s a good sign when we’re meeting new people at our events that we didn’t send an invitation to. Email has played a big part in that.”

4. Be consistent

Consistency is important — both in the look and feel of your messages, and in the frequency that you communicate with your audience.

Email templates make it easy to create professional-looking messages that can be customized to match your brand.

“We put a lot of thought into how we put our marketing together because we want people to get to know our business,” Bahar explains. “Our goal is to really humanize our business, so each message that goes out will have a video or photos of our staff or clients.”

They use that same consistency when deciding what time and how often to send to their audience.

“In an industry like ours, it can sometimes take a few years before you actually convert a new client,” Bahar explains. “So, we really focus on being consistent and building the relationship anyway we can.”

Each month, Bahar and her staff put together an outreach plan that aligns with industry activities and events. With a list of over 3,300 contacts, Davidson & Co has built an audience of people who care about their business and look forward to hearing from them each month.

This has resulted in new business opportunities, increased referrals, and greater brand awareness for their firm.

“We all know accountants love numbers, and with email the numbers don’t lie,” Bahar explains. “It’s been the most effective tool for delivering our message.”

Put your email marketing strategy into action.

Whether you offer services to other businesses, like Davidson & Co, or want a better way to build relationships with customers, email marketing can help.

http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/use-email-marketing-build-brand-awareness-01198301

4 Revolutionary Behavioral Email Marketing Ideas

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Email marketing is a crapshoot.

You send mass emails hoping that some small percentage of people will open, click and convert. The bigger your list, the less you know and the more you're forced to guess about what to say and when to send.

But what if you flipped the paradigm by sending email as a result of behavior? Instead of begging uninterested users to take action, you're moving already-interested people through a buying cycle.

Promotional email isn't dead, but data-driven behavioral email is proving to be more effective. In this new world of email marketing, personalization, dynamic segmentation and data reign supreme.

That future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. And that is a huge opportunity for you. Here are five ways any business can take advantage of behavioral email.

Related: This Is the Biggest Email Provider You've Never Heard Of

1. Send the best welcome email in town

In the time it takes to create and send one promotional email, you could craft the perfect welcome email. Welcome emails are an essential part of the onboarding process for every business. A great welcome email will impact on your activation rate, helping you turn subscribers into avid readers, free trial users into raving fans and new customers into lifelong partners.

The goal of a welcome email is to guide users to the next step. Ask yourself, "How can I show the value of my product/service/information as quickly as possible?"

If you're Twitter, that means encouraging users to complete their profile. If you're Amazon, it means driving new customers to your most profitable products. And if you're Basecamp, it means getting people logged in so the product can sell itself.

Figure out which action gets people hooked, and build your welcome email around it.

2. Don't let anyone leave without asking, 'Why?'

Imagine someone walks into a store, picks up an item off the shelf to check it out but leaves without buying anything. A good salesperson would never let this opportunity slip away without at least asking a few questions.

Whether you have an e-commerce store, a SaaS product or a mobile app, people are kicking the tires all the time without converting. Don't let them leave without 1) incentivizing them and 2) asking for feedback. Here are a few ideas:

• Send abandoned shopping cart emails. According to Baymard, 68.07 percent of all carts are abandoned. Collect email addresses early in the checkout process so you can ping people who abandon
• Send "Are you still interested?" emails. Airbnb is great at this. When you a view a listing but don't book, you get an email the next day asking if you're still interested
• Send inactivity emails. If someone has signed up for your product or service, most of the really hard work is done. If a user is inactive, send them a little reminder. RunKeeper and Mint.com have this down pat
• Ask for feedback when people are really done. This information will be incredibly valuable for your business development

Related: 4 Examples of Bad Email Manners

3. Renew, renew, renew

Email is the perfect way to turn expected problems into simple solutions.

For example, if you sell dog food, trigger an email reminding customers to replenish their supply at a regular interval. Try to time the arrival of the email with the customer's realization that it's time to buy more dog food. It's a problem you can easily solve over and over again.

If you have a subscription-based product, renewal emails are the lifeblood of your residual sales. Remind users how much of a pain it will be to switch to another product and provide an easy path to renewal.

Timeliness will drive more revenue than a catchy subject line or a beautifully designed email. Be there when you're needed.

4. Kill it with email receipts

Transactional emails are opened at up to eight times the rate of promotional email according to Experian. Considering that most transactional emails lack any marketing value, this is a massive opportunity.

Receipts are a great place to start. If you're sending someone a receipt, it means the customer has already made a purchase. You've overcome a number of challenges to complete a sale. The receipt is an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with the customer.

You can't sell directly in a receipt, but here are few ways to make them more valuable:

• Include a referral code
• Offer a discount on the next purchase
• Ask customers to follow you on Twitter, Facebook or your blog

Email marketing can drive real revenue for your business, but you've got to think bigger than blasts. Behavioral email is key to unlocking the hidden value in your customers and users.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244327

Getting started with GetResponse

5 Reasons You Need To Increase Your Email Marketing Budget

Email marketing has undergone many shifts in the past two decades. It exploded onto the scene when email started becoming a more popular medium, and businesses everywhere scrambled to send, seemingly, as many emails as possible to their audience. Then, spam filters and legal email regulations started throttling back the “quantity over quality” mentality, and email marketers were forced to use more creative, appealing tactics in their campaigns.

The arrival of social media marketing and mobile smart devices changed the landscape of email marketing once again. People started using social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to do the majority of their communicating, leaving email as a backup or as a reserve for only business communications. They also started relying on their mobile devices more and more, working on the go with a small screen size instead of using the more convenient desktop setup. Many marketers projected this to be the end of email marketing altogether; since people were using email less often and email marketing tactics were beginning to wear thin on an uninterested audience, it seemed reasonable to think that the medium was a dry well.

However, the numbers are indicating that email marketing is alive and well, and companies are seeing substantial returns on their investment in the marketing medium. Almost any business in any industry can reap the benefits of a strong email marketing campaign, so consider implementing or increasing your email marketing budget in 2015:

1. Email Marketing Is Alive and Growing. The statistics don’t lie. At the end of 2014, 73 percent of marketers claimed that email marketing was a core strategy for their business. Additionally, 59 percent of marketers are planning to increase their email budgets in 2015 and beyond. Of course, it’s not always a good idea to go with the crowd and make decisions based on popularity, but these marketers have had experience with email marketing, and it looks like it’s been a positive one. It’s not entirely clear why email marketing is seeing a bit of a renaissance; it could be because people are more used to checking emails on their mobile devices and open rates are increasing, or it could be that the options available to email marketers are more diverse now than ever. Either way, email marketing is on its way up again, and it’s a trend you should get behind.

2. Email Marketing Feeds Your Other Campaigns. Email marketing isn’t just about email marketing, at least not anymore. Email marketing is simultaneously your gateway drug—which leads new customers to your other, more substantial marketing efforts—and your mortar—which ties all your other campaigns together. Through an email marketing initiative, you can draw people to your blog by offering snippets of content, or you can drive up your following numbers by inviting people to share deals on social media. You can also use your other marketing channels to invite people to sign up for your email blasts, resulting in a closed, cohesive system that nurtures your overall customer base as one unit.

3. Small Increases Lead to Big Returns. Email marketing doesn’t take much to get going. You can get a MailChimp account for free, and if you already have a list of customers, you can use that as the basis for your initial email blasts. After that, even small, low-budget upgrades can give you a massive return. Spending a few hundred dollars on a list of emails can net you hundreds of potential new customers. Spending some extra money on your email designs can present your brand in radically new ways to unfamiliar customers and increase both brand loyalty and engagement.

4. You Can Objectively Measure Your Results. There’s not much to lose by increasing your email marketing budget. If things go bad, you can always reduce your budget back to where it was or eliminate the campaign entirely. One of the greatest benefits of email marketing is that you’ll be able to objectively measure your results. With every email blast you send out, you’ll be able to monitor your delivery rates, your open rates, and the total number of click-throughs you receive. As long as you know your conversion rates, from there, you’ll be able to objectively determine whether your email marketing budget is enabling a profitable return. If not, you can make a change, but if it is, you can throw more fuel on the fire with an even greater budget.

5. People Are Demanding More. It isn’t enough to send a simple promotional email or a short list of new content on your site. People need more from email campaigns, and in order to give the people what they want, you’ll have to step up your overall budget. Serve them well with better designs, more appealing copy, and better offers—free giveaways, discounts, and special deals are all winners, but they take an upfront investment to be successful.

Remember that email marketing is about more than just sending as many emails as you can. You need to find an audience and get to know that audience first. Only then will you be able to anticipate your audience’s needs and create emails that actually have value to them. Modern email marketing isn’t about making a sales pitch or attracting as many clicks as possible; it’s about providing value to your users, and you’ll have to work hard to hold up your end of the bargain.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/03/11/5-reasons-you-need-to-increase-your-email-marketing-budget/