Make your e-newsletter work it's backside off for your business!

Thursday, May 19, 2011

I read a terrible newsletter the other day. It's bad karma to name names. So I won't. Suffice to say, if the newsletter had been a person at a party I'd have avoided them like the plague and happily stayed in the kitchen all night. Clutching a glass of unpleasantly warm vino rather than fetching a fresh drink and risking running into them again.    

What was so offensive? It blew the company's own trumpet far too hard. Which makes for an incredibly tedious reading experience. It's a common fault with 'About us' web pages too. All too often they're pompous, self congratulatory and salesy. Instead of nicely straightforward, informative and factual.  

It's best to talk about the consumer benefits of your products, services and company values in your newsletter. And leave your business ego out of it!

Here's a few things that will help make your newsletter a success...

• clear, informative articles about new products and services
• customer feedback and testimonials - letting consumers blow your trumpet for you is much more effective than blowing your own
• industry news that's likely to affect customers
• interesting and relevant research in your field
• a short automated questionnaire to drive interaction. Which in turn consolidates relationships and encourages sales without being too overt about it
• a fun piece to keep things light - choose something that people can relate to on an everyday, human basis 
• anything that encourages a dialogue; feedback, opinions, competitions...     

... and a few things to avoid:

• stuff only an industry insider would understand
• 'puff pieces' bigging up your company
• internal news
• anything with a hard sell attached
• too many superlatives!

Just bear in mind there are international differences in attitudes. Once upon a time I advised a US client to tone down the sales focus in their UK newsletter. The results were astonishing. A demonstrable warming of the British market to their products, teamed with a rapid-fire growth in their prospect database and a healthier, more transparent repartee with existing UK customers. 

Event marketing made easy

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Did you notice this year's Easter TV advertising? There was a noticeable shift towards heavy event marketing, with retailers turning what used to be simply a well-earned bank holiday into a family-led event rivalling Christmas. That's event marketing for you. And it's looming large on ecommerce calendars this year.

How come? Who knows. It might be the economy, driving retailers and e-tailers to maximise every marketing opportunity and turn it to their advantage. Or it might represent a wider cultural change. It's hard to tell.

The Royal Wedding is big news this week with event-led campaigns covering everything from food and booze to Fast Moving Consumer Goods, clothing, souvenirs and gifts. Then there's the Olympics in 2012, set to be the biggest marketing and promotions opportunity since the last World Cup. 

So should you jump on the event marketing bandwagon and take your business to the party?

It depends how loud the media noise is. If you've got a big budget you can afford to stand out from the crowd. If not you risk becoming just one more squeaky little voice, lost in the roar. If you're a local business, hanging your hat on key local events can pack more punch than being one of thousands - or millions - basing their marketing campaigns on national or international events. 

Whatever you choose to do, it helps if your back-end system can deal with email and promotional campaigns with aplomb. One of your best weapons, as a small or medium sized business, is your ability to act fast. Add a great CMS to the equation and you can release campaigns tailored to hit your target market at exactly the right time. With a message powerful enough to knock their socks off.  

If your current content management and customer contact system is letting you down, now's a good time to migrate your website to a platform where you're in full control. Ask Chris for details.  

Email marketing - The wonder of targeting

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Email marketing is a massive success story. The online face of direct mail, it pulls in big money for ecommerce businesses who get it right. And part of getting it right involves intelligent targeting.

If you wouldn't recognise targeting if it bit you, here's some useful hints and tips to help you understand what it's all about. 

At a basic level, targeting means only sending an offer to people you know have a good chance of being interested in it. Approaching people who you know should respond positively means you'll enjoy a better initial response rate and convert more enquiries to sales. On the other hand, contact everyone on the planet - and his dog - and your % chances of converting are much lower.   
 
You can email your customer base and your database of opted-in prospects. And you can buy mailing lists of email addresses and carry out cold mailings. Either way, targeting is vital for success.

Emailing your customers: Buying from you means your customers have expressed an explicit interest in your products or services and are more likely than average to buy again. You can market to B2B customers with no opt in but you need their agreement if you're making offers to consumers.   
 
Emailing your prospects: Prospects are people who have shown an interest in your products or services but haven't bought from you yet. If your company works on a B2B basis, you're allowed to email your prospect database without an opt in. But if they're consumers you must get their agreement - their opt in - before you're legally allowed to market to them. 

Emailing a cold list: These people won't have heard of you so they're pretty cold in comparison to your customers and prospects. Check your bought-in mailing list is 100% opted in, otherwise you could run into legal difficulties. You can buy a list of millions and millions of un-targeted email addresses. But targeted lists always perform bettert. 

Testing goes hand in hand with targeting. You could carry out a mass email campaign to a segment of 1000 customers, another segment of 5000 prospects and a cold emailing to 100,000 targeted strangers. Testing them against each other head to head will give you all sorts of invaluable knowledge about - and insight into - the way your lists perform and how you might improve your email marketing results in the future.   

Email marketing - Communications to die for!

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Do you send out a customer newsletter? Perhaps you're not really convinced it's worth the bother. Perhaps you think it's too much like hard work. Or maybe you've been meaning to but just haven't had the time. 

Is email marketing cost effective? And what about newsletters... do they hit the ROI mark? To a large degree it depends what you send and when you send it. But the word on the street is that, done properly, email marketing can deliver a satisfyingly large chunk of new business.  

First and foremost, get yourself set up with an automatic email marketing system that does the bulk of the hard work for you. You don't want to tie yourself down to a manual process when you've got a business to run. And the last thing you want to do is irritate your customer base. So don't even go there before you're in a position to do things properly. Once that's sorted out, you can take the world by storm. 

Whatever you're sending to your customers and prospects, whether it's a suite of autoresponder messages, a classic email marketing campaign or a regular newsletter, here's a few handy hits and tips to help you beat it into shape and get the responses - of course, the hard cash - flooding in.

• make sure the information you're sending is of genuine interest to your target market, not just an opportunity for you to blow your own trumpet!
• express yourself plainly and clearly
• take an approachable yet professional tone
• keep it short and sweet - people don't have time to faff about
• make a special offer or give a discount to get people through your door
• avoid jargon unless your target audience will understand it without having to think twice
• always include a nice, strong call to action - telling people what you actually want them to do next makes a big difference to conversion
• send whatever you're sending regularly. It generally takes three goes for us to 'get' a message so persistence usually brings improved financial returns. Keep at it
• create a formal email marketing strategy and put in place tactical plans to achieve it, so you're not just floating around in marketing space making interesting yet random statements
• keep your tone of voice and creative approach consistent to help build your brand
• send messages later in the week - a surprising number of us are mightily peeved on Mondays but much more amenable to buying stuff as the weekend approaches!

Email marketing systems - nightmare or masterpiece?

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Perhaps you've generated a nice fat database stuffed solid with juicy prospects. And you want to convert them to customers. Maybe you're at an earlier stage and need to get your lead generation marketing in gear. Either way you want your email marketing system to work with you, not fight you every inch of the way. That way madness lies...

Adobe Business Catalyst sites by LucidSynergy incorporate a brilliant bit of email marketing kit that lets you get on with the job with no fuss and bother. No more dragging data, kicking and screaming, out of one system into another. No more sleepless nights spent hooking up disparate systems. Or dealing with the oft-resulting chaos. Just a lovely, clear, fast and easy way to send powerful, timely, sales-led messages to anyone and everyone suitable on your business radar.  

Here's what the email marketing module will do to help you take email marketing to the max. This isn't the science bit. Ask Chris if you want the completely un-gory details! 

Set the system's internal CRM to quietly build your databases and lists for you in the background and you're off. Integrated email marketing software lets you do all this and more really easily:

• import external lists
• export new lists from your databases
• specify what data you extract
• target the right offers to the right people
• add new customers manually if you wish 
• send thousands of emails a month without ending up tearing your hair out  
• time campaigns to go out when you want, at the intervals you want
• create unlimited campaigns and do exciting stuff like test different offers, pricing structures etcetera
• create and send unlimited newsletters to everyone or targeted groups / selected databases or lists
• automate your responses to prospects, either completely or partially, for brand consistency and great customer service
• measure and analyse the impact of your campaigns accurately in an instant
• use the lessons you learn to improve subsequent campaigns and improve your ROI / cost per prospect / cost per sale
• Use one of the many free templates or get us to create stunning newsletters and email campaigns to your branding
• relax in the knowledge that your site's sitting on Adobe's hugely popular flagship online business platform...