by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 6, 2016 | Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing, Small Business
Email marketing is a basic, yet elemental solution to reach out to millions of people in a matter of seconds. Your personalized message is a cost-effective business tool to touch a larger target market at a much lower cost than hard-copy mass mailings or print ads.
Email Marketing Will:
- Help you build lists
- Increase website traffic
- Generate sales
- Stay in touch with clients
- Share data about your company
- Create an instant call to action
- Enhance your brand or corporate image
As a form of direct marketing in the digital world, your communication is sent directly into the hands of your consumers, delivering impact and content. This isn’t simply a mass broadcast, but a carefully crafted bulls-eye message to your interested audience. Your email marketing campaigns are delivered via different types of email or messaging platforms. Tip: don’t spam your readers and ALWAYS ask permission before you send a newsletter, a text message, or add them to a list. OPT-IN!
- Transactional – triggered by consumer action. When a customer buys a product, pays via credit/debit card, or even makes an online reservation, emails or text messages are generated based upon this activity. This type of communication provides the marketer with an immediate opportunity for another touchpoint with the consumer to deepen the relationship and buyer satisfaction.
The Transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email, and can generate 6x more revenue. Experian
- Email Newsletters – regular emails delivered to opt-in subscribers containing relevant industry content, solutions to pain points, and company news in addition to some promotional news/e-commerce products. These help to keep your audience connected and informed during the purchase or marketing cycle.
- Mobile Messages – text messages for appointment reminders, sales, special mobile opportunities as well as typical campaigns read via a device. Mobile messaging continues to grow at exponential rates – be mobile-ready, mobile-friendly, and responsive.
A fundamental purpose of your email marketing is to make it simple and easy for the consumer to act. You want them to opt-in, click, engage, share, purchase, and be your brand evangelist.
Guide Your Audience
- Add a signup box in your email signature, website, social platforms, and other marketing collateral
- Make your content rich and relevant
- Solve pain points and address gnawing issues (How can you improve their lives?)
- Add share buttons
- Embed links to your blog, products, and services
- Always use a CTA (call to action) in your emails
Engage Your Readers
- Readers want to know, ‘What’s it in for me?’ Make sure your email delivers
- Your email needs to capture their attention immediately. Use a clear and captivating subject title
- Content should be relevant and engaging. It’s too easy for your reader to click the delete button. If either of these two expectations is not met, your reader may delete or unsubscribe
- Encourage your readers to share your e-newsletter by offering incentives
- Keep it short and sweet
- Add links to drive traffic to your site or to reference other attention-grabbing articles
- Develop a reputation as value-added – a resource in your industry
There are many email marketing platforms to choose from so it is important to review the features, benefits and cost structure of each of them, learning which one best suits your company and your needs. Consider your present situation as well as future expansion. What might work now, may not work in a few years. As with any marketing or social media communications, consistency is key, as is your content marketing. You are writing for your reader, not for yourself. Understand their wants and needs. Hold off on sounding spammy and merely pushing products and services – it becomes overkill and annoying. Your marketing efforts should be to not only educate and inform but more importantly, build the relationships with your audience. This is the heart of your business! Thanks for reading. I hope you found this post useful and informative. What successes have you experienced with email marketing? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Sep 3, 2014 | Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Back in the day, and yes I’m dating myself here, there was an ingenious advertising campaign devised by Wendy’s using the slogan “Where’s the beef?” Everywhere, from Saturday Night Live to the White House, people were asking “Where’s the beef?” and poking fun at investigating where the true value of something resides in comparison to face value assumptions. Back in the day, Wendy’s used the campaign to highlight the fact that Wendy’s burgers were actually larger than Burger King or McDonalds, and that these competitors had simply used larger buns to create an illusion.
Recently, I’ve been looking for the “beef” in my social media marketing. Like many small business owners I wear a lot of hats, and fortunately my passion for my business far outweighs the tremendous hours that are required. Particularly as a small business owner, I have to be discerning about where I spend my time and how.
Social media at times feels a lot like those competitor burgers – enormous yet not a lot of meat or substance. It’s a delicate balance to keep up with social media etiquette, find relevant and interesting content and even retweet and repost others’.
I’m fairly new at social media, having dragged my feet for years, but I could quickly see that you could spend all day every day attending to social media endeavors and still never quite get done, let alone have any time left over for your “real” job. I’ve enthusiastically embraced that social media is an integral and important tool for us to use. The reality of incorporating social media into my existing responsibilities created additional challenges. Social media takes a lot of TLC, patience, and dedication, and success doesn’t often happen overnight, or look like you expect it to.
Recently I found myself creatively asking my social media coach that old Wendy’s question, “Where’s the beef?” I began to list the justifications for my perceptions. Almost any small business owner could recite them in his/her sleep:
- There are only so many hours in the day.
- I’ve got to put my time where it makes the most sense strategically.
- Every hour I spend doing one thing means I’m not spending it doing another.
- [Fill in your own!]
By the end of our conversation, however, I realized that I’d unwittingly fallen into the same illusion that the viewers of the old Wendy’s commercials had suffered. I’d been looking at the numbers associated with my social media initiatives rather than the quality of those relationships themselves. In other words, I’d been looking for the big buns as the burgers rather than the beef itself.
Is it more impressive to say that you have 25,000 twitter followers than 5,000? You bet! In the course of two months since I started with social media, I’ve gained a few hundred net followers. Does that compare with the visions of what I could gain during that time? Not even close. The numbers had been how I was defining my success and had also over time become the source of my frustration.
But just as the bigger buns created the illusion of delivering bigger burgers, the focus on numbers is also an illusion. There are numerous ways to create a massive following, from purchasing followers, to setting aside my operational tasks and focusing exclusively on social media initiatives. That would get me the big buns I desired, so to speak. But that’s not what I really wanted. I didn’t want just big buns – what I really wanted was a good, high quality burger.
That’s what I need to remember, what every small business owner needs to remember when they start asking, “Where’s the beef?” Those efforts we make, every new social media connection made organically, adds the quality into the burger you’re creating.
“Social media is the vehicle, not the destination. You can’t just ask, ‘What’s the ROI of social media?’ You have to ask, ‘What’s the ROI of specific activities that we engage in via social media?” Hal Thomas
I’ve created new relationships with those in our audience who are genuinely interested in who we are, what we offer, and want to partner in ways that benefit both of us. The “beef” in social media isn’t really about the numbers. Yes, it looks impressive, but the true growth comes from the quality of the relationships you form. Within the past two months, we’ve found new columnists to write for us as well as new radio guests and those burgeoning relationships were formed easily and swiftly in ways that we never could have done without social media. The “beef” has been found and the quality of that beef will continue to feed my small business in ways that a couple of fluffy, big buns never could on their own.
Guest Author:
Christine Andrew
Christine Andrew is the founder and CEO of CoSozo, a wellness and empowerment media company she created in response to what was ultimately the terminal illness of two of her loved ones. CoSozo, literally Greek for “Healing Together” was founded on the desire to bridge the information gap between the alternative and allopathic medical worlds and empower individuals to make informed decisions that align with their own personal beliefs.
Christine held a long and successful career in the biopharmaceutical industry, primarily in the development and implementation of quality systems. As a consultant, Christine worked with manufacturers both within the U.S. and internationally to prepare for and successfully pass regulated industry inspections and also to develop systems and strategies to produce and maintain quality standards.
Today, Christine has what she calls “the best job in the world” using the powerful platform that CoSozo has developed to bring the spotlight to issues, information, and resources that can help people everywhere live happier, healthier and more fulfilling lives.
