Email Marketing: Nothing is Free

One of the best ways to sell a service is to offer something free and then ‘make the money’ back by charging for extra services. Many people who are new to email marketing are caught by these marketing ploys because they do not understand what are now considered standard services in the industry.

Standard Email Campaign Services

There are other tools available that small business owners should consider. These tools include:

• Spam Filter testing before the campaign is initiated
• Subscriber management tools
• Simple Importing and Exporting
• Simple Design tools
• HTML and Text versions of the same email
• Who is using a ‘share with a friend’ tool.
• Applications for using the tool on websites and social networking/bookmarking sites.
• An anti-spam policy to protect all clients from unethical ones.
• A web based version of the email is available
• Full Metrics and Reports
• 100% privacy
• No hosting costs
• Multiple, customizable, templates

Nothing Is Free

Many of the services have a ‘back handed’ offer of free. They offer a free service, but when the list hits a certain level they charge an high fee for extra hosting. A more common trick is to make it almost impossible to export the list, making it almost impossible to switch servers.

Another way the ‘free’ services keep their costs down is to advertise on your emails, or build their own lists from your lists. Everyone has seen this in some emails where the tag line at the bottom for the ‘email marketing’ company is actually more prominent or better looking, than the actual email.

The most devastating trick is to expire the campaign after 30, 90, or 120 days. Some people keep old emails. I do, especially ones I may want to use in the future, or for making purchases at Christmas. The campaign manager should have 100% control over how long the links remain alive.

Do not settle for anything less than the best service. A penny saved today could cost your company money tomorrow in lost clients, lost sales, and diminished credibility within your industry.

What You Wish You Knew About Email Marketing

Everyone has a story, something they wish they knew about a product or service before buying it. Email marketing is no different. Some people are stung so bad they abandon this lucrative marketing method. Others lose time and money on low-quality tools, or schemes that sound good but do not work.

There are several things to look for when buying an email list, or setting up an email marketing account.

DIY scripts

The scripts they can add to their website that manages their mailing list tempt many people. However, people often learn too late that their web hosting system forbids sending email blasts to a list of subscribers. Others shut down websites that ‘hog the server’s CPU’ for more than 15 seconds. While, some of the servers with limited bandwidth bill their clients for the ‘surge.’

I knew one person, through a networking group, who received an $1120 bill for bandwidth after sending out an email blast in December with a large graphic Christmas Card in it.

Grade Your Service

There is a mindboggling variety of email campaign and mailing list management services. Not all are created equal. Some have high monthly prices for managing lists. Others charge high prices depending on the size of the list – no matter how many emails are actually delivered a month.

A+ Delivery Cost

A good service will charge a fee of less than $.01 per delivery. Bulk service may charge as low as $.05 for delivery. The client should pay no fee for hosting their list.  The system should not increase the cost as the email list grows.

A + Privacy

The mailing list should remain the private property of the client. Check the fine print. There are reports of some list hosting companies keeping abandoned lists. Make sure the service will not use your list if you abandon it or move from their service.

A + Metrics

A good service will track all metrics. The client deserves more service than just a ‘list host.’ They should expect, at the minimum:

• % of delivered emails
• % of opened emails
• % a click through
• % of unsubscribed
• % of spam complaints
• % of bounced emails

The metrics should go beyond the basics listed above. It should list who opened the emails, what time the emails were opened, and tools that let the small business owner compare different campaigns.
Before signing for an email marketing campaign service, grade them, make sure they are offering everything needed to run a successful campaign.

 

How To Link It To Your Industry

The marketing world is full of catch phrases. You are not your Consumer. Link to Your Consumer. Behavioral Marketing.  The list is endless. These mission statements mean nothing without a point of reference. Marketers use these phrases to try and explain to business owners. Instead of talking down to business owners with catchy phrases, marketers need to learn how to listen to business owners.

Many small business owners enter the entrepreneur world with a solid understanding of their industry. They worked in the industry, networked with clients, and were consumers of the product. Successful business owners have their hands on the pulse of the industry. They subscribe to the trade magazines. They attend conferences. They are members of the national associations. So, why do marketers fail to listen?

Many small business owners have the experience and knowledge needed to market to their own consumer base. They just need the tools to do it. There are several ways to market a product. The easiest include email marketing campaigns and internet advertising.

A successful campaign is a Joint Venture between the business owner and an email marketing service, or an ad agency. The business owner possesses knowledge that the marketer may not have. The best way to build a marketing campaign, and to establish a company’s credibility, is to tap into this information.

Blog

Most blog owners ‘miss the mark’ by publishing evergreen content. On the internet, evergreen content is something that everyone publishes, and is so ambiguous that anyone can write about it.  What small business owners educate their clients, and offer 100% transparency to their clients. Talking about the industry secrets and telling stories about working with clients, even if they are fictitious but based on real events, will help sell a product.

Forums and Social Networking

If your only objective is to get onto the networking sites and sell a product – then do not get started. Social networking is not about what you can get from a network, but what you give. Offering socialization and networking will eventually result in sales. The trick is to be patient. Find the right networks, and discard those that have no true networking involved.

Article Writing

One of the most powerful methods of building page rank, inbound links, and establishing credibility is through article writing. Keep in mind that the web is already full of evergreen content. Write something interesting and publishers will consider using it. If the signature line does not ‘invite’ guests to leave the host’s website, then the article will end up spread across the Internet.

Bad Sig Link: “learn more about article writing at www.mywebsite.com where you can download a free ebook.”

Good Sig Link: “Mr Guru is a published author who speaks locally on small business topics. His credentials and accomplishments can be viewed at www.mywebsite.com”

Newsletters

Many small business owners overlook email marketing and sending out newsletters. They associate these advertising venues with spam and ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ Sending out a newsletter is a good way to advertise, letting your ‘recipients’ publish articles in their blogs and websites is a great way to build inbound links.

Credibility Sells

All small business owners have one sales tool that can level the playing field – credibility. Use this to build your client base. Use the information that you know, your experiences, your skills, and your ‘insider’ information. In the end, the most powerful tool you own, is your personal knowledge.

 

Creating a Success Formula

There are several basic elements of a successful online business. Each of these can help a business owner learn how to promote their business on the web. Hundreds of thousands of businesses get started each year. More than 90% of web businesses disappear into cyberspace within a few months.

The reasons for failure go far beyond website and logo design. Many of them are the result of just throwing together a platfrom and hope people will buy. The following is an ‘internet based’ formula for building the foundation of a good internet business.

Calculating Your Success Formula

The success formula is fairly simple. Create - three elements for your web business, and limit the minus elements to two, if possible.

Plus:
• Testified/verifiable service
• Safe/reputable service
• Professionalism/certification
• Additional bonuses
• Recognized by industry experts.

Minus:
• High Prices
• Unfamiliar products/techniques
• Low quality marketing
• Forcing customers to change

Competitor Strength and Weakness

Next, do a competitor strength and weakness test. A good report must be done by an SEO specialist. However, the average webmaster can do a simple report.

Do not look for the flashiest websites, or the most promoted. Make a list of 10 websites that sell and fill in the following questionnaire:

• What keywords do they use?
• What titles do they use?
• Write out their descriptions
• How many pages on the website?
• How many pages of content?
• How many inbound links do they have? (link: www.domainname.com)
• Where do their links come from?
• Do they run an Internet Marketing Campaign?
• Did they hire professionals to create their platform, branding, advertising?

Now, find 10 websites that you believe are your competitors, and answer the same question. This is incredibly simple. An SEO’s software will run for 2 or 3 hours, to check just a few websites. DIY marketers try to do this all themselves. But, a pattern should start forming.

One thing an SEO’s software can avoid is being caught in the hype. It can be difficult to separate the real data, from the ad-copy. A success formula is based on your unique offerings and services. Every company online has a success formula (or a failure formula). These may be different between industries. The success formula for Ebay is not the same as it is for an online Magazine.

The first question is determined by your budget, the more you offer, the more money you need to promote it. Use those patterns to develop a web platform that will help your company thrive on the internet.

Five Overlooked Ways to Improve Search Engine Placement

Few people can rank high in today’s search engines without embarking on a link building campaign. The first thing that many webmasters do is try to cheat. They jump on the guru-secret bandwagon and follow all the free content, spammed across the net, secrets. In the end they waste hundreds of hours, and still lack any content in the top search engine positions.

Face it, we all want the #1 SERP for the most profitable keywords. Most of us will never see it. Even the largest SEO companies cannot promise 100% success, through every keyword, permanently, without including a few pages of small print in their contracts.

Ignore Page Rank (for a few minutes)

A website can receive top search engine placement (SERP) before it is ranked, before it is indexed. This is because the search engines use up to 100 different elements to place a web page at the top of ranks.

Too many webmasters focus on keyword density, meta information, and inbound links. They completely forget that the end user is also factored into a page’s rank.  Example, a page with 10% visitors remaining on the page, for more than 30 seconds, and clicking through to another page, receives a high ‘authority.’

Many webmasters suffer from BO (Backlink Obsession). They create pages with low conversion rates, no reader value, and poor navigation, all in the effort to get at those coveted top search engine placements.

Link Flow

Not all links have the same value. Google divides the value of a link by its position on a page, and by the number of links on a page. Many webmasters damage their promotion/marketing efforts by removing Social Networking links, cutting down navigation, and removing features such as Top-Posts, Most Comments, etc.

One of the easiest solutions is the most overlooked. We’d be rich if we had a nickel for the number of times people looked stunned when they learned how simple the solution was – just use <no-follow> links.  They are not necessary. The website’s robot.txt file and sitemap will take care of the problem.

Lowering the number of links on a page increases the ‘value’ Google passes to the pages that are listed. This is one reason why most blog owners have 200 inbound links and achieve PR3, but SEO experts can achieve PR5 with less than 30 links.

Robot.txt & SiteMap

Search engines look for this file. It gives them a foundation to rank the site. They are vital to search engine placement. There is no reason why any website on the web should

Deep or Wide?

The experts will argue forever over the debate, “Should a website be created deep, or wide?”  From the standpoint of ‘fast indexing’ the answer should be wide. Using sub-directories, can reduce the number of links on a page, and still generate usable navigation systems.

Update Pages

No one knows why Google dumps pages from the index. Everyone experiences. There are solutions. Every six months go over the website, go to a page, make some changes within the first 10% of the page. Google webmaster accounts have a tool that lets webmasters resubmit an individual page. This can be time consuming. Wait until Google re-crawls the site and then submit the pages that were missed.

The search engines thrive on new content. Updating pages is one way to keep ‘on top.’ However, beware of changing the URL. Broken links can lower a web page’s rank very quickly.

 

Optimize for Online Sales

One way to increase conversion is to create a website that focuses on shoppers, not search engines. Too many websites are designed to target search engines. There is nothing ‘active’ on the site for shoppers. Most consumers are impulse shoppers, the value comes from the act of shopping as much as acquiring the product.

Real-world retailers use human-motivations to sell: prestige, affluence, fun, entertainment, and social acceptance. Many ‘get rich quick’ sites convince the average person to part with their money on a daily basis by promising to make life easy, solve problems, and make us beautiful. Webmasters could learn a lesson here.

Many ecommerce websites are so focused on search engine placement, they overlook the subtle art of selling.

Ask For The Sale

One of the most overlooked aspects of ecommerce is ‘asking for the sale.’ This involves more than placing a ‘buy now’ button on the website. It involves asking for the sale, and then letting the consumer buy.

Most abandoned shopping carts are the result of using the shopping cart as a marketing tool, not a buy-now tool. Here are a few common shopping cart problems:

•Ask for personal information
•Include a form to fill out
•Ask for shipping information before the sale is in the final stage
•Try to up-sell, add extra products to the sale, ask consumer to complete a non-sale action.
•Have more than three clicks from the ‘buy now’ button and the end of the sale

Consumer Focused Optimization

The most important customer-optimizing feature is the SLL security logo. It needs to be placed in a prominent spot on every page of the website. Statistics have proven that a security logo can increase a conversion rate substantially.

Here are a few tools that increase the conversion rate:

• Write the PPC ‘click’ text so that it solves a problem, and then lead to a webpage that solves the problem. This eliminates the confusion. Too many PPC campaigns lead to an index page and force the consumer to click through the site looking for the information, product, or service, they want.
• Include a customer review/ranking system.
• Let shoppers write reviews, and reward them for the review.
• Focus on selling, not ‘product cataloguing’ on the item pages.

These changes should generate results, even for a DIY ecommerce owner. The task of optimizing will never end. It is a constant battle to stay ahead of the competition, but it is a quest that is well worth the rewards.