All posts tagged Business

Email marketing has continued to gain popularity through difficult economic times because it requires very little upfront investment and offers extremely high returns. However, it can be intimidating when you’re just getting started. This article will help you to tackle the two major hurdles to launching a successful email marketing campaign: building up your list, and designing your content.

Building Up Your List

The basic principle behind building an email list is simple: you need to ask people if you can send them information, and you need to give them a reason to say yes. Where and how you ask people to subscribe to your list depends upon what type of business you run and what ways you are already engaging your customers. If you are the proprietor of a brick and mortar store, then ground zero for email list signups is likely to be your cash register. You may have noticed many large chains now asking for an email address at the checkout, as this is a highly effective technique. If you do most of your business through the web, then you will want to make sure your signup form for the mailing list is prominent on your web site and that it makes a compelling offer to potential subscribers.

Most people trying to build up new email lists are doing so through the web. This is a perfectly acceptable approach, but I do want to stress that offline approaches can be even more powerful. To convert your web visitors into email list subscribers, you first have to make sure that your signup form is noticeable. Too many sites have tiny signup forms hidden in a sidebar, or off on a page of their own. If you are serious about building your list, you have to commit your prime real estate to it. Think of this as free advertising for yourself. Sites tend to have the best response rates from large, attractive signup forms placed above the fold on the front page of the site — if not on every page of the site. Some site owners also report good results from flash or CSS-based “scroll-up” boxes, which display the form in a div that hovers over their actual page content. I would not recommend using a popup window to display your subscription form, as most web browsers now block popup windows by default.

Designing Your Content

The next issue, content design, revolves around you unique proposition to subscribers. What is it that you have to offer them that will be a genuine value? Simply sending out sales pitches repeatedly will cause people to unsubscribe from your mailing list fairly quickly, as will boring company newsletters. You must find a need within your market that can be fulfilled by your mailings. A good strategy is to sign up for some of your competitors’ email lists and think about what types of content you do or do not find value in from them.

By focusing in on these two essential processes, you can begin to develop an email marketing campaign that has a solid foundation. Once you have your mailing list in place, you can begin to experiment with more advanced processes, such as autoresponder campaigns, split testing, and market segmentation. But the real meat and potatoes of email marketing is simply this: asking people to sign up for your mailing list, promising that it will be useful to them, and then delivering on that promise.

How And Why Your Business Should Use Twitter

Welcome to the year 2010 where anything and everything is living on or being talked about online. As a business owner it is in your best interest to keep up with the latest trends and position yourself at the forefront of the market. One of the best ways to help you do this is by using Twitter.

Twitter is an essential part of any modern day business, large or small, like it or not. In a recent study it was shown that 80% of people trusted businesses more if they (the business) were on Twitter. Having a presence in social media works, especially on Twitter. It shows that you care for your customers and will interact with them. People like the quick access and personal touch inherent in Twitter.

Dell Case Study

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The Dell corporation is one of the, if not the largest, supplier of prebuilt computers in the USA. It reached this high point not only through hard work and systematization, but also through good customer support and customer satisfaction. In the latest move to increase customer satisfaction, the Dell corporation created several full time Twitter positions.

Currently Dell officially has at least 32 business and news accounts on Twitter (which you can see here) and even more individual personalized accounts. The official accounts are primarily for news, updates and deals.

In an InformationWeek post it was reported that Dell has earned over $3 million just from sales through Twitter, and that article was published back in June 2009. Imagine how much that has increased since then!

The personalized profiles are on a level of their own and do not bring in profit directly. They deal mostly with current customers and customer loyalty. The personal Twitter profiles of employees aren’t in the limelight today, but the unofficial tech support Twitter profiles are. These are a few customer service personnel from Dell on Twitter usually with the suffice “atDell”. These great people help people solve the problems which for whatever reasons cannot be fixed through normal channels.

This creates so much customer loyalty that is is almost mind boggling. Add this customer loyalty to the huge following Dell has on all of it’s other profiles, and this gives Dell a very powerful marketing advantage.

Why You Should Use Twitter For Your Business

If the large corporations think Twitter is a good business venue, it’s a sure bet that it is also something you want to do. Today’s society is online most of the time and Twitter will help you get known.

Whether your business is a small brick and mortar store or a website, it can greatly benefit from Twitter. Imagine if you owned a small local flower shop, and you were the first one in your neighborhood to jump on Twitter. You could find local businesses to connect with or even find people in your area who are searching for flowers. You could then send them messages about awesome deals or just list promotions you are running. For an online business there are even more possibilities since anyone who talks about a particular topic is a possible customer. All that is left is for you to connect with them.

How To Use Twitter For Your Business

The most common way of using Twitter for business is to use it to post updates. Most likely your business has some sort of blog, so it’s easily possible to automatically send Twitter updates with each new blog post by using Twitter Tools (if it’s a WordPress blog). Even if your business does not have a blog, you can post:

• Business updates
• Daily/Weekly/Monthly Promotions
• Sales updates
• Deal of the Day/Month/Week
• Website News
• Local Niche news
• General niche information or news

Another great use for your business is communication. Find other businesses in your niche and connect with them. Talk to them, get your name out and be friendly. There are two simple ways to find people in your niche. The first is to search using the Twitter Search function.

Here you can search for specific terms or keywords such as “flower shop” or even “#flowers”. You are bound to find people talking about your topic. It’s also possible to use the advanced localized searches.

Another great way to search Twitter is to use the People Search feature.

Search for a topic name, such a “flowers” and you are bound to find someone with a ‘flower’ in their name or description.

Another great source of niche information for Twitter is a Twitter Directory. This is a directory of users who have registered themselves in such directories under those specific topics and niches. This is a great way to find people in a specific niche and even by location.

All of this will help you not only connect with others with like minds, but it will also help you create a brand following. The more people whom you interact with and help, the more they will follow you and see you as an authority on your niche. Don’t just put information ‘out there’ though, listen to what people are saying and try to solve their problems. The more you listen and the more you help others, the more they will trust you and will be more likely to recommend you and your business to their friends.

So go out and make Twitter friends. It’s bound to give you one of the best ROIs around, especially since Twitter is a completely free tool!

For the uninitiated, social media can seem like an impenetrable cloud of mystery. Everything sounds so easy in principle: get on Twitter, have a Facebook fan page, write a blog. But sometimes you do that and no one seems to be interested, you’re pumping out everything you can think of, telling people what you had for breakfast today, and no one’s following you.

There is much written on the internet about the two main focuses of using social media for business. The guiding principles of effective social media use are establishing you or your brand as an authority within your niche, and building a relationship and trust with your customers/audience/clients. These should certainly be the aims of your social media use.

What can make it hard to effectively do these things, and to jump into using social media effectively is the sheer volume of information out there. If you start looking at the internet wanting to learn how to use Facebook and Twitter to promote your brand, you will be bombarded with information that can be difficult to relate to if you don’t live and breathe web design and the internet. There are underlying principles at work that most people seem to miss as they obsess over which Twitter app is the best for scheduling tweets and which Facebook poll has the highest click-rate.

The use of social media is no big secret. It’s the same as living in the ‘real world’.

It’s Good to Talk

People like to tell other people about great deals, cool things and interesting titbits that they’ve come across. They try out a new pizza place and really enjoy it, later, down the pub, they say “hey, I went to this new pizza place, it was amazing”. The next time their friends want pizza, they think “hey, remember that pizza place that Jack/Jill said was amazing the other day? Let’s go there.” And when they get home and sit in front of the laptop, they might go “hey, check out this amazing web design” (if they’re a geek).

That’s how social media works. It is not advertising. Advertising is advertising. The key to social media is understanding that it is social. It’s about encouraging people to talk about your brand.

The difference between people talking about your brand down the pub and online is that they must be aware of your online presence. This is where traditional advertising comes in. When developing your website, make sure that there are clear ‘find me on Twitter and Facebook’ buttons. Do the same with any mail-outs (either snail or electronic) you do, put it on flyers, whatever you’ve got. Too many companies set up Twitter and Facebook accounts without telling anyone and wondering why no one is following them. Social media works on a feedback loop principle, if 1 person is following you, they will perhaps tell 5 people about it of which 1 may also start following you and so on. If no one knows you’re there, the feedback loop can’t start.

Just to reiterate: it is absolutely essential to incorporate social media into your web design.

Making Friends and Influencing People

Aside from word-of-mouth, the other social aspect of social media is in making friends. Yes, you want people to trust you and your brand so that your product becomes the ‘go-to’ product within your niche (what I like to think of as the ‘Dyson Effect’). But you’d be a fool to ignore the weight people give to the produce of people they like. People support the endeavours of people they broadly support or like.

Campaigning

A great example of this is the use of social media to promote grassroots mobilisation. The classic case being Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama used social media to allow people ‘behind the curtain’ so to speak by regularly updating Twitter and Facebook, by posting regular blogs and videos. He made people feel like they were part of something.

Jamie Oliver has learnt a considerable lesson from this. The main thrust of his social media presence is his Food Revolution campaign. Although an admirable campaign in itself, it also provides a focus for people to gather around, and by supporting Jamie Oliver in this campaign, they are then more likely to support him in his television and publishing endeavours. In short: they will watch his program and buy his books because they support him as a person. And yes, this is incorporated in his web design.

It can work on a much smaller scale though. Compare the last time you went to see your friend’s band with the last time you went to a live music night with a line-up you’d never heard of, even though you actually don’t like your friend’s music. That’s where the value in engaging with your followers on Facebook/Twitter comes from.

It may be a tautology, but the main point to be learnt from this is that social media is social. That is often forgotten. As a corollary, it must be remembered that people need to know you’re there. If you’re at a party and hide in the corner, no one’s going to talk to you. That’s why it’s important to incorporate social media into your web design so that existing customers or supporters will be able to find you.