How to Make Your Email Sizzle

June 20, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Are you clogging your customer's inbox?Aside from the personal, office related, or otherwise junk mail that is currently in your inbox, there are two types of emails both equally vying for your attention. The first type of email is boring, rarely catches your attention, and often ends up in the spam folder. The second type wins customers, is attention getting, and can spur potential customers to action.

Emails can be boring, and boring is dangerous for business. Here are a few strategies that can spice up your email campaign.

Do Not Reply

People like talking and communicating with actual people who can understand them and speak the language. This explains the general hate reserved for call centers who can’t understand their customers, machines, and companies who employ Do Not Reply as their method for responding to customers through email. 

There are now more tools available to help and grow a business to customer relationship than ever before. Do Not Reply isn’t one of them. Give people an opportunity to communicate and the relationship can grow.

That Sizzling Look and Feel

No email intended to spark interest or produce a lead or sale should ever look boring, uninviting, or otherwise “blank”. In other words, they cannot and must not look like any other personal or office email you get all day long. You wouldn’t pay attention to something boring, so why should your target audience?

Organizing your email in newsletter format, complete with graphics, space for calls-to-action, and invitations to connect separates boring from spicy. The goal is not just to get people to open the email but to click a link and follow through with a call-to-action.

@gmail.com?

Would you ever consider buying from a company using an @yahoo, gmail, or any other unbranded email address? Probably not. Unbranded elements detract from customer experiences.

Content vs Selling

Selling is boring, nobody likes opening the door to find a door-to-door salesman, or being chased on a car lot by a car salesman, or being sold in general.

Valuable and relevant content should always be more abundant in an email campaign than selling pieces. Value creates trust, and trust allows call-to-action, or selling pieces, to work.

How are your email campaigns working to bring in new customers? 

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing ·

The “Pros” and Cons of Traditional Advertising

June 18, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

I define traditional advertising as an aim wide, hit small type of strategy. It’s the type of advertising that isn’t centered around communication, sharing, or content but only around visibility. Considering these parameters, it’s easy to point out the types of traditional advertising:

  • Newspaper Ads
  • TV Ads
  • Radio Ads
  • Billboards
  • Junk Mail
  • Etc.

Given these examples, an easier way to define traditional advertising is: Traditional advertising is any marketing strategy that focuses on gaining max visibility by any means necessary instead of communication, sharing, and value. The traditional advertising strategy represents a hollow, crumbling shell. It’s the stuff that’s all shiny, inviting, and interesting on the outside with no real substance or value on the inside – and seeing it over and over and over again doesn’t help.

“Pros”

Large viewing audience potential.

Is this such a good thing? The number of ads you see today is far greater than the number of ads you saw ten, even just 5 years ago. Why? This number must increase in order for traditional ads to maintain the same level of conversions, that is, for every person that buys or follows through with an ad’s call-to-action, the number of impressions (people who seen an ad) must increase.

This makes sense when you consider the growth in new technology and the availability value online. Communication potential has increased to a dramatic level where companies and people all around the world can easy influence each others opinions through offered value in the form of social media posts, articles, whitepapers, and other simple online interactions traditional advertising will never be able to replicate.

Repetition Equals Reward

Super Bowl ads can be funny (but lately they’ve been somewhat lame, right?). Every year people look forward to the famous Super Bowl ads, more than the game in some cases. After the 50th time of seeing something that was once hilarious, do you still laugh? Does it even make a positive customer impression the first time? The old strategies of traditional advertising held that repetition led to reward – show an ad enough times to someone they can’t forget the brand.

Large corporations can get away with spending millions to have their ads plastered everywhere, and while this worked in the past, the Internet offers far greater options to help anyone discover their most favorable buying options in any category. Why go to a bookstore when you can see what thousands of people thought about a particular book online? – or shoe, car, trip package, etc. There is no longer reward in repetition.

Cons

Bias.

Before the Internet, people had no where else to turn to for advice on what to purchase and from where – advertising held an audience. Big brands were well known thanks to their marketing campaigns and therefore could be trusted. Personalizing an ad wasn’t necessary, or possible, the only important metric was how many people saw an ad. The more the merrier.

Today is much different, we see hundreds (if not thousands) of ads daily. The amount of knowledge and opinion readily available online easily offsets and attention-getting tactics used by traditional ads. Opinions have always shaped buying habits, now they are readily available.

No offered value.

Traditional ads can never power sharing and therefore have a limited lifespan from the initial ad launch. Value, on the other hand, can “live” forever in cyberspace, bringing in new customers and leads for years after creation.

How are your strategies capturing your target market’s attention? – through value?

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing · Tagged:

Is your email killing your brand?

June 5, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

EmailLittle else can be more detrimental to a brand’s success than having an amateur email address. The email is an integral part of a brand’s foundation – without it, everything else crumbles. Relying on a Yahoo!, Gmail, or IP (internet provider) email:

  • Kills credibility
  • Pushes leads away
  • Makes it impossible to acquire an effective stage.

Really, lack of a business email is a part of a much larger brand communication problem. Lead generation, customer communication, and the value adding infrastructure that all successful online brands rely upon are based on an effective communication system that connects team members, customers, and leads together.

The following rule will always be true of communication starved brands:

      No effective online marketing campaign.
 +  No new leads outside of word-of-mouth.
 =  No online presence!

What is the Stage

The stage is what a customer first sees when they come into contact with your brand – the relevant value you offer freely. Is your stage brightly lit, allowing your brand to easily be found online? Or is it crumbling under a shattered foundation.

The barriers that prevented most from getting found in the past are long gone; however, a new set of self-inflicted problems are plaguing brands in every industry and dimming their stage.

The 3 Step Solution to Fixing Your Brand and Building Your Stage

  1. Own your name. Realize that yourname.blogspot.com doesn’t count as an online presence. The same can be said for anything else that has you adding to another companies brand. Social media cannot be the replacement for a company site, email, or presence.
  2. Develop your stage. A brand’s stage – its online presence – can be promoted and aided by social media and other outposts but it’s the brand essentials (email, website, blog) that act must as the foundation.
  3. Create value. This is the differentiator, everything else is merely cog in a motionless wheel without valuable content.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing · Tagged: ,