Email Marketing Strategies-Increase Your Segmentation Efforts

Whether you are new to email marketing or have been refining your email strategies for years, here is one strategy that is essential to your continued email marketing success:

~ Increase Your Segmentation Efforts

Email marketing data offers incredible segmentation power and the ability to take advantage of small audience segments that might otherwise be financially or technically difficult to reach. If you haven't started segmenting your list and sending more targeted messages based on recipient data or behaviors, start today. Most of the research in the email industry indicates that segmentation yields significant gains to email conversions. Some typical strategies for segmentation include:

Geography- This is an easy, fairly obvious segmentation strategy. For example, your customer in Florida is unlikely to be interested in a snowmobile. And your customer in Minnesota probably isn't interested in a jet ski--in the winter, anyway. Geography can also be a powerful indicator of buying patterns and other influences on the purchase cycle. Take the high tech industry, for example. In high tech pockets like Silicon Valley early adopters are far more common.

Demographics- This is another easy one, and can make a lot of sense. For example, we know men and women can interpret information quite differently. Younger vs. older audiences take in information in different ways as well.

Job title and function- Are you emailing potential users with no--or all the--buying power? An owner or CFO may want to know about ROI. A middle manager may just want to make his or her job easier. And an engineer or programmer wants to find better ways to work. And so on.

Purchasing frequency- Less frequent purchasers may require a time-sensitive offer to encourage them to act. Or maybe you want to reward frequent buyers with exclusive privileges via email.

Monetary spending- Adjust resources so you're dedicating your efforts toward customers who spend the most money with your company.

If you have been segmenting your email audience, don't stop. Try to find new ways to segment and look at segmentation based on historical email activity, perhaps treating people who are frequent "clickers" or "openers" differently.

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Email Marketing and Text SMS Marketing-Search Engine Optimization-Integrating Keywords into Your Content

The first step in planning a new site or evaluating an existing site involves mapping your identified keywords into the content of specific pages on your site. To do this, first try to understand what the expectations a user will have when entering the particular search term. They may be looking for answers to a question ("repair rip in rug"), comparing different products or services ("best horse blankets"), or actually looking to buy ("cheap, extra large horse rug").

Once you have identified the expectations of your users, you need to decide what type of page to present them. There are basically five typical web pages:

1) Information pages are educational, answering a question or providing insight on a particular topic. Where you're selling a product or service they may act as an extension of your commercial site, attracting targeted traffic through free content, then funneling it through to your products or services. A user might land here after searching on how to "repair a rip in a horse rug"--then be drawn to your advertisement for new rugs. Some searchers may have irreparable rugs, so it's the perfect time to sell them one.

2) Summary pages contain links to collated information. A summary page might be a list of particular products, or links to categorized information pages. You may want to optimize your summary page so that it contains less specific search terms. For example, a searcher who enters the phrase "horse rugs for sale" would be well served by a summary page with options like style, color, or size.

3) Product pages are the sales pages for individual products or services. You would match these types of pages with customers who are ready to buy using specific search terms. For example, a searcher looking for a "blue, extra-large woollen horse blanket" would be best served by arriving on the appropriate product page--because clearly they're already sure of what they want to purchase.

4) Generic pages are typical to most web sites. These include contact details, FAQs, technical assistance (for a product), and so on. Generic pages can often generate the most traffic. They are put up on a web site to help support a product but, with the right keywords, can be quite good at attracting search engine users.

5) A homepage is the top level of a website. It contains links and pathways to other areas of the site. Homepages should be used for more generic search terms, as specific search expectations are harder to gauge for this type of page. You only have one homepage, so choose your homepage keywords wisely.

You'll find that most of the time, the most useful page for a visitor will be an informational page. However, your most profitable pages will be your product pages. If your product or service can dominate the results in ready to buy keywords, you'll see a dramatic improvement in your online sales. Attracting ten visitors to your site who are ready to part with $100 for your product is worth much more than 1,000 visitors who are just browsing.

For more information on an SEO, Text SMS, or Email Marketing solution for your business, please check out this website: Pure Business Marketing

Email Marketing and Text SMS Marketing-Collecting Opt-Ins From Other Points

Your opt-in page should be your main focus for collecting opt-ins, but it shouldn't be you only opportunity to collect opt-ins. There are many other contact points with consumers where you could solicit an email address. The following are some great examples:

~ Contact form: Add a checkbox asking for an email sign-up on other web forms on your website. For example, a contact form for more information, a webinar registration form, a whitepaper download form, etc.

~ Product opportunity: The checkout process on your ecommerce site is a great time to ask purchasers to sign up for email from your company. These are your most active web visitors who have already shown an interest in your company.

~ Co-registration: Look into co-registration opportunities that would make sense for your business model. Be sure that your main focus remains on collecting qualified opt-ins, rather than grow a list of email addresses for people who may have no need for your product or service.

~ Transactional messages: Transactional messages present another opportunity to include a call to action that prompts users to opt-in to receive promotional email messages from your company. Again, these are people who have already shown an interest in your company.

~ Brick and mortar: If your company or organization has a brick-and-mortar business front, use this opportunity to collect email addresses from prospects either with a sign-up box on a counter or by asking directly for them. Again, be sure that the value of the opt-in is clear to prospects.

When adding a checkbox to a contact form, the checkout process or a co-registration process, you have the option to make this checkbox either pre-selected or unselected. It is a best practice to never have this checkbox pre-selected. Furthermore, it also makes good business sense. Using a pre-selected checkbox will add uninterested people to your list, and they'll end up skewing your results by opting out or generally never responding to your message. And it could be worse: they could end up reporting your messages as spam since they will not have recalled signing up for your email.

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Email Marketing and Text SMS Marketing-Paid Advertising with Google AdWords

From a business perspective, one of the most exciting and engaging features Google offers is AdWords. Every time you search on Google and notice the small, boxed advertisements on the right side of the page, you're seeing ads placed through the AdWords system.

What makes AdWords so exciting from a business perspective is that it's a completely different advertising model than anything you've ever seen. Print advertising is priced based on circulation, and if 10,000 people would see the ad, it'll typically cost you 10 times what a 1,000-subscriber publication would charge. This translates directly online with the CPM (cost per thousand) pricing of banner ads, animated ads, pop-up ads, and so on.

All of this traditional advertising, online and off, suffers from the same fundamental problem: an inability to ensure that the advertisement has some meaningful relationship to the content on the page. If I visit a web page about troubleshooting Microsoft Windows XP, ads selling me a carbonated beverage or vacation in Hawaii are pointless, off-target, and a waste of advertiser money. No one clicks on them. Contextless advertising is dead. It's a numbers game and the numbers are stacked against you.

By contrast, Google can already analyze and deduce the subject of any web page, a heuristic that's the basis of the Google search tool. Apply that to advertising and Google AdWords ensures that you only have ads displayed on searches that are from customers who are interested in your products or services. What's astonishing is that having your ads displayed on the search results page is free. You only pay for anyone who actually clicks the ad and comes to your website.

Relevance is a big deal because the goal of online advertising is to get visitors to click on your ad and get to your site. The better targeted your ad, the more likely your firm will appeal to the searcher and the more likely they'll click on your ad, come to your site, and purchase your product. The measure of success, after all, isn't how many people clicked, but how many sales were closed. That's the real bottom line.

For more information on a Marketing Solution for your business, please check out this website: Pure Business Marketing

Email Marketing and Text SMS Marketing-How to Drive Traffic to Your Opt-In Page

Once you have your opt-in page, confirmation page, and welcome message set, you can now focus on driving visitors to the opt-in page. You should have a strong call to action on your home page in a prominent location that directs visitors to the opt-in page. A popular way to construct this email sign-up box is with a form field where visitors can fill in their email address directly on home page, then be directed to a second page (your opt-in page) to collect additional information. This sign-up box or call to action should include strong copy on the value to the potential subscriber of receiving your company's email. Additionally, your sign-up box and benefits should be prominently displayed on every page of your website.

You may want to consider using an incentive to drive opt-ins, such as a cash giveaway, drawing for a coveted prize or valuable coupon to be used toward their next purchase. You will certainly increase the number of opt-ins collected with an incentive vs. no incentive: however, you may also see a lower quality of opt-ins as people sign up for the prize rather than your email. On the down side, these people may not turn into active recipients and may thereby lower your response rates. On the up side, you now have the opportunity to turn people into active recipients who otherwise may not have chosen to receive email from your organization.

For more tips, and information on an email marketing solution for your business, please check out this website: Pure Business Marketing

Easy Tips for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign-Create an Opt-In Page

Your opt-in page is very important because it is the place where consumers will decide if they will or will not give you their email address to receive email from you. It also sets the tone for future email communication. When done correctly, it can drive future email activity; and when done poorly, it will result in lower email activity. To these ends, the most important thing to do when constructing your opt-in page is to focus on building value and setting expectations.

Build the value of opting-in by focusing on what's in it for the consumer, not for you.

~ "Be the first to know"
~ "Free, timely market updates"
~ "Special offers" or "Special discounts"
~ "Save money with weekly coupons"
~ "Strategies to improve your....."

Set the proper expectations up front by explaining on the opt-in page:

~ The types of messages recipients will receive,
~ Message content,
~ Frequency of messages, and
~ If they'll receive third-party offers

Other considerations to take when building your opt-in page include:

~ Will you use a short or long sign-up form? A short form will garner more sign-ups, but a longer form will collect more information about the consumer.

~ Will subscribers need to create a password to opt-in? A password could give subscribers access to an account, but you are likely to lose subscribers who do not want to create a password just to receive email from you.

~ Will you provide options for subscribers to choose what types of messages they receive? Asking subscribers to select their interests allows you to send targeted messages, but requires more work to create separate lists and content.

Don't make these important decisions blindly. Test you opt-in page for higher conversion and/or more qualified opt-ins. Aspects to test include the following:

~ Incentive to sign up vs. no incentive
~ Long vs. short opt-in form
~ Copy (value statements)
~ Sign-up options vs. global opt-in
~ Create password vs. no password
~ Placement of opt-in box on your website

Follow these easy tips to create a successful opt-in page.

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Email Marketing and Text SMS Marketing-The Benefits of a Well-Crafted Email Marketing Campaign

Email receives a bad rap. Businesses often shy away from running email marketing campaigns in their marketing programs, as they are concerned they might be seen as spammers. Yet they're more than happy to have door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers represent them every day, where they lack any real control about the way those people interact with their potential customers--and it's never really made sense to me why.

The following is a summary of the benefits of Email Marketing:

~Email is cost-effective
While there are costs involved in email marketing, such as copywriting and design, your production and delivery costs are significantly cheaper than that of direct mail. For the same amount, you can send out around a hundred email for every direct mail letter.

~Email builds relationships
While email may not be the only method that helps connect you with your audience, it's the least intrusive--enabling the recipient to respond at their leisure. A well thought-out email plan can facilitate customer loyalty.

~Email is "push technology"
Just like telemarketing, email marketing pushes your message to prospective and existing customers, rather than relying on customers to seek you out first.

~Email provides timely results
The time between distribution and delivery of an email marketing campaign can be measured in minutes rather than days. This allows you to choose the time you deliver your messages with more precision, and also means results will become evident quickly after you start your campaign.

~Email is quick to produce
Once you're set up to run email marketing campaigns, you can easily launch a major marketing initiative to all your customers in a few hours. There is no other direct marketing source that could be implemented in this sort of time period.

~Email accommodates hyperlinks
With just a little click of the mouse, a customer can go from reading your marketing message, to purchasing at your online checkout. This speedy, one-step process is what marketing dreams are made of.

~Email provides detailed feedback
Email Marketing allows for comprehensive feedback. You can measure how many of your emails were successfully delivered and opened, how many times your links were clicked on, and importantly, how many sales you made. This also enables thorough campaign analysis.

~Email enables affordable segmentation and
targeting
Email marketing is agile, allowing you to vary the content sent to customers on your distribution list. You can segment, or split you lists up based on market segments such as geographic location, purchase history, gender, and age to send tailored messages, improving you conversion rate.

~Email plays well with others

Email works well when part of an integrated direct marketing campaign. While other methods can come across as pushy or disruptive, email is able to prepare your customers for a sales call--or as a follow-up to a face-to-face sale--without getting in a customer's face.

~Email can be a viral marketing tool
It's so easy for recipients of your email to forward your message to friends and family, quickly turning your small campaign into a viral bonanza.

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