Apply These 20 Local Marketing Strategies To Improve Your Small Business Revenue

An enormous 85% of business owners depend on word-of-mouth referrals, showing just how crucial it is to reach customers in your local area. Local marketing strategies are slightly different to the techniques and methods you’ll use for general marketing, as you’re working hard to find, reach, engage and appeal to local customers specifically.

Local Marketing Strategies

Here are 20 of the best local marketing strategies you can use to increase awareness and your customer base in your local area:

Get Involved with the Community

Getting involved with the local community can be a surprisingly effective way to engage with local customers. You’ll meet lots of local people and build valuable links. You can get involved with your community by attending local events, sponsoring charity events or perhaps donating a little of your spare time volunteering.

Claim Your Google Local Listing

More than half of business owners still haven’t claimed their Google My Business listing, which means that they can’t manage and update vital information such as opening hours, address, images and contact details.

Run Local SEO Campaigns

This is one of the most important local marketing strategies, is it enables local customers to find you when searching for businesses, services and products in the local area. There are lots of ways to improve local search engine optimization, including making good use of local-focused keywords and regularly updating a business blog with fresh, engaging content.

Make Local Business Contacts

Partnering with local businesses, especially those in similar or complementary industries, is a great way to start expanding your local network. Start in online professional groups on sites like LinkedIn, making sure you do plenty of real-world networking too.

Advertise a Loyalty Program

The reason this is one of the best local marketing strategies is because customers love to feel valued. Create special offers and discounts for local customers only, perhaps bringing everything together in a loyalty scheme.

Start a Referral Program

If you need a boost in word-of-mouth marketing, why not push your customers to do it for you with an irresistible referral scheme? It’s simple to start, all you need to do is offer a tempting freebie or special discount for the original customer and the person they refer.

Bring Your Staff into Your Referral Plan

Who better to act as an advocate for your brand than your dedicated staff? Offer a bonus to staff for referring new clients and customers.

Advertise in Local Public Transport Hubs

To reach local customers, you need to think about the places around town they tend to go. Public transport stations and hubs are excellent for this, so put your ads up in rail, bus and other local transit stations in your local area.

Engage with Audiences on Social Media

With 800 million active monthly users, Instagram provides a wealth of opportunities for small businesses to reach out to new customers. Make sure to tag your location in your posts, as research shows that posts with a geo-tag receive a huge 79% more engagement from social media users.

Use Targeting Tools for Online Marketing

Social media platforms such as Facebook offer many ways to target customers in your local area. You can use paid advertising features to ‘boost’ posts, setting parameters to target customers within a certain number of miles from your business HQ.

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Tell Your Story

If you’re from the local area you’re targeting and have a great story about how your business got started, make sure you tell it! Customers love to support a local business, especially one run by a hard-working local resident. You can create a video or do a series of blog posts and share them on social media.

Hold an Event

Throw a party or a launch event for your business or a new product and invite new customer to come to you. Putting on some free food, drink or entertainment is a smart move, as it provides an incentive to attend.

Get Reviews and Testimonials

Local customers want to use a business that they feel they can trust, which you can demonstrate with positive reviews and testimonials. Never pay for these, but simply email previous customers saying that you’d really appreciate a review if they had a good experience.

Win Over Local Bloggers and Journalists

Who are the influential journalists and bloggers in your area? Invite them to an event or send them a product to review and see if you can get some positive local press.

Send Out Targeted Email Campaigns

74% of marketers find that targeted personalization increased customer engagement, so as part of your local marketing strategies, make sure you’re tailoring your email campaigns to customers in the local area. 

Consider Running a Coupon Deal Site Offer

This may not be appropriate for all businesses, but as coupon deal sites such as Groupon group offers by location, a special deal or discount could bring in a host of new local customers.

Offer a Free Consultation or Advice Service

This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise in your field, while getting potential new customers interested in what you do. They may come for free advice now, but they’ll likely come back to make a purchase later.

Advertise in Local Newspapers

Never underestimate the power of traditional local marketing strategies such as print media advertising. Ads and features in local newspapers, as well as mailed circulars, can attract the attention of local customers.

Get Yourself on Local TV

Whether in a news story about a charity event or a paid advert, you need to get your business into the homes of local customers – all through the power of local TV networks.

Partner with Another Business

Could you team up with another well-known local business? For example, a design firm could team up with a printing company to refer clients and offer discounts.





Source: www.smallbiztrends.com
Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

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What is the Difference Between Advertising and Marketing?

The difference between small business advertising and marketing is that advertising is a paid media placement to promote your business, i.e. buying an ad. Advertising is a specific technique and one part of marketing. Marketing in small business is a much broader set of activities to promote your product or service.

Advertising might be a TV commercial, a radio spot, a quarter-page magazine ad, a newspaper classified, a billboard or an Internet display ad.

Marketing in small business includes social media, free business listings, strategic product pricing, publicity, email marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization and more. It also includes advertising.

While advertising shares similarities with some other forms of promotion, advertising is usually more within your control. Small business advertising may better drive the results you need. Small business advertising also amplifies the impact of other forms of marketing, by making sure more people see your messages.

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Advertising and Marketing

Here are scenarios to illustrate the difference between small business advertising and marketing in a small business:

Advertising: You develop a creative advertisement about your new product. Then you pay to place that ad where you’d like it to appear. You have complete control over the message of your small business advertising. You also have control over where it appears.

PR and publicity: You announce a new product with the help of a publicity agency. A media outlet covers it. Unlike with small business advertising, you have no control over where or whether your story will appear. Nor do you have control over what they write in response to your press release and interview.

A sales event: You run a special sales promotion in your store for the new product. You carefully craft the promotion and pricing to make it seem like a good deal. But you still are faced with getting the message out about the special sales event. This is where small business advertising comes in — to better drive results. So you create ads that draw attention to the sale, to get people to the store to ask for your product. Without advertising to highlight your event, it may not be as successful.

Social media: You put the word out about your new product through your social channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. However, only your followers and a limited number of others see your social updates. Those who see the update love the authenticity and some buy the product.

Content marketing: You write and publish content on your blog or on other sites, as a method to develop thought leadership, develop a personal brand, highlight your company brand, improve your position in search engines and develop a dialogue with customers.

Marketing in Small Business

The above five scenarios are all part of marketing in small business.

Often it’s not a case of advertising OR marketing. Rather, you can get better results by combining advertising and other types of marketing for a one-two punch.

Here’s an example of how content marketing and social media combined with advertising will bring a bigger impact. You write an awesome blog post. You share it on social media to get visibility there. But sadly, only a handful see your social media update or blog post. So you decide to promote your social media post. You boost or promote your update (i.e., place a social media ad) to get your message more widely seen by thousands, get more social shares and drive more sales.

Small Business Advertising

Some refer to combining advertising with other content marketing techniques as a “POEM.” POEM stands for Paid, Owned and Earned Media. In a content marketing setting, owned media is the blog post you write. Paid media is the boost for the social media post. Earned media refers to the sharing others do after seeing your social media share more widely. See more examples of using Paid, Earned and Owned Media.

Do you now see the difference between advertising and marketing in small business? And do you see how small business advertising can amplify other marketing techniques?

Source: https://smallbiztrends.com

Image Credit: Shuttershock




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How Targeted Email Marketing Can Help Your Business Convert Better

Email marketing is one of the best ways to grow your online business. B2B marketers believe that email is their most effective channel for generating revenue. On B2C’s side, ⅘ of retail professionals trust email as their best method of retaining customers.

When done correctly, email marketing can help take your business to the next level. However, doing it correctly is the best “if” among most marketers.

Setting up opt-in forms to acquire subscribers and send all of them the same content is no longer enough. You need to develop a highly-focused strategy that will turn your email subscribers into customers.

Therefore, a targeted email marketing campaign is in order.

What is targeted email marketing?

By definition, this approach to email marketing lets you group subscribers that share the same characteristics into different segments.

At the very core of targeted email marketing is personalization, especially for e-commerce businesses. Instead of sending all your subscribers the same email, segmentation lets you identify what makes a specific group in your email list tick. As a result, you can create content that connects with each segment of your email list to increase the chances of conversion.

An example of a successful targeted email marketing campaign is from eCommerce enterprise Nykka. With the goal of engaging subscribers through personalized emails, it was able to send 29 million emails with an average opt-in rate of 13% and a click-through rate of 8%.

One of the most effective tactics Nykka used for their email marketing is by targeting highly engaged users and sending out emails of similar products from the ones they’ve recently purchased.

Image source: Boomtrain


By sending similar products to engaged customers who bought a particular brand and with an order value of $50, Nykka was able to convert more customers and increased its revenue.

Benefits of targeted email marketing

Targeted email marketing is a powerful way to communicate with your leads and customers and get them to purchase again. Below are some of the benefits as to why this is the case.

Higher conversion rate

As mentioned, you shouldn’t do email marketing without committing to it wholeheartedly. Merely sending email blasts to your subscribers is one of the best ways to get them to unsubscribe.

To make the most out of your email marketing campaign, make sure to understand who your subscribers and customers are. Getting as much information about your customers allows you to humanize them and lets you create emails that they’d likely click on and read than ignore.

By identifying and catering to “high-value segments” in your email list, you can increase conversion rate by 208%.

Higher customer engagement rate

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. Without them, your business will crumble. However, it is not enough that you acquire as many customers as you can. You need to get the same customers to buy from you as many times as possible. In fact, it costs five times more to acquire new customers than to keep your currents one. Also, the success rate of selling to previous customers is 60-70% while the chances of making a sale with new clients is at 5%.

These statistics prove that you need to keep your customers engaged with your brand as much as you can. And what better way to grab their attention than through targeted email marketing.

Sending a personalized email increases customer engagement by 74% according to marketers in this study. By segmenting your audience based on their habits and preferences, you can send more meaningful emails to them, which in turn compel them to interact with your brand.

Increase in customer retention

Part of grouping customers for targeted email marketing involves knowing their calculated lifetime value (CLV). It computes how many customers you have, the average dollar for every sale, and other factors. By coming up with your CLV, you can predict the average value of your customers should you keep them around.

Retaining these customers can be done through targeted email marketing. The fact that 80% of businesses look up to email marketing as the way to keep customers means you’re not the only one who shares this belief. Sending customers emails that “speak” to them will generate better reception from them. As a result, it increases the chances of them staying with you as long as you provide them with excellent service.

Personalization and creating hyper-targeted segments for targeted email marketing

For your email marketing strategy to work, you must group subscribers and customers accordingly. However, finding the common denominators among them is easier said than done. Nonetheless, below are steps to make the process much easier for you.

Generate your segments

When slicing your email list, you need to group them accordingly using different segments. Whenever somebody purchases from your site, you need to gain access to their age, gender, buying patterns and more. This personally identifiable information (PII) give you an idea of the kind of customer or subscriber each is so you can send them emails tailor-made to their desires and needs.

Choose your focus segments

Since your goal is to profit from your email list, you must determine which of the segments you should dedicate your attention to the most. Not all segments are created equally. Some contribute to your bottom line much more efficiently than others. Your goal now is to determine which segment will have the greatest effect on your profitability.

Segments that you need need to look into are the following:

Past purchases– Find out the products customers in your email list purchased from your website. You can then upsell related products they might want to buy from your site.

Buying frequency– The more people buy from your site, the more chances that you can make them purchase again. Also, you can reward customers by offering them your loyalty program. If you don’t have one yet, learn how to plan and implement your loyalty program in this HelpScout post.

Seasonal sales– Some of your customers only buy from your site during particular seasons. If you’re selling products with a high demand in the period, i.e., Christmas decorations during the holidays, then you need to segment customers who bought only at that time.

Create content for each

Once you’ve figured out which segments to focus on, it’ll be easier for you to craft emails written specifically for that group of subscribers. When done correctly, you can expect your conversion rates to skyrocket and potentially hike up your sales.

When drafting your email message to each segment, you need to keep these things in mind:

Image Source: Shopify

Maintain consistent tone– You need to stick to your voice when delivering a message to your segments. The tone should embody your brand – it is one of the reasons why they buy from your shop in the first place. Whether you revel in humor like Chubbies as seen in this Black Friday email example or take a more formal approach in your emails like Idealist in another example, it is crucial to use your tone to full effect.

Communicate message – Make sure that your email message is clear and leaves no room for misinterpretation. It doesn’t matter if you draft a long, persuasive copy or write a short one. What’s more important is whether the message gets through to your subscribers.

Provide value– Even if you’re not selling anything online, targeted email marketing is an excellent way to share useful content to your subscribers. You can use email marketing so send exclusive resource guides, curated content, and surveys. For example, SuperOffice regularly sends out white papers to its subscribers to provide them with content that resonates with their needs. While white papers and other resource guides can be used to supply your email list with information simply, these can help B2B companies bring their subscribers down their sales funnel.

There are other more factors that you need to consider when crafting emails for your segments. The approach to every email is different for each group on your list. Nonetheless, the three above should help build the foundation on how you should approach writing your emails.

Testing ideas to further optimize your targeted email campaign

You need to find a way to optimize all your targeted email marketing efforts to produce the best results. You can’t keep doing the same thing for every campaign and expect a different outcome. If you want to improve your campaign, you need to make the necessary changes. And to find out what you need to tweak on your future campaign, you need to scale your progress.

One of the most common ways to measure your email marketing is through A/B testing. By deploying different versions of the same campaign, you can determine the iteration that converted the most. You need to diligently test all your campaign so you can unearth breakthroughs in your email marketing that will increase your conversion rate further.

Assuming that you’re already doing A/B testing, below are other ways on how you can scale your targeted email marketing:

Send time optimization

Instead of sending all the emails to recipients at the same time, you can set the time when they will receive them. Factors such as time zone differences and email habits prevent you from launching a successful campaign without considering the factors.

By customizing the time when your emails will be sent, you can engage more subscribers and maximize the results of your campaign.

You can assign different times for each segment when its recipients will receive the emails. Once you’ve sent the emails, compare the open rate of your current campaign with the old ones. Measure the effectiveness of this approach and see and makes the changes whether the results are positive or not.

Experimental design

As valuable as A/B testing is when it comes to optimizing your targeted email marketing, larger businesses will find it limiting. The process of isolating a single variable for testing may not be enough for companies who want to put multiple variables to the test.

Image source: Bain & Company

The experimental design does exactly that. By increasing the variants being tested in a targeted email campaign, you can expedite the increase of your email campaign’s conversion rate. Experimental design is only effective if you have segmented your list accordingly. From here, you can determine the variants that appeal to a segment and will be controlled throughout the email campaign.

Surveys and micro-surveys

There is information that the data provided by your email platform isn’t showing you. You can gain access to the number of people who opened your emails, clicked on the link, and subscribed to your list, among others. What it doesn’t share with you is why they did.

You may have done something right that caused them to perform such actions. However, some of those answers aren’t as evident as it seems. Most importantly, you need to explain why people didn’t open your emails and unsubscribe from your list.

Therefore, you need to reach out to different segments in your email list. Instead of waiting for them to tell you what’s wrong or what you need to do, take the initiative by sending them a survey form. It should ask questions relevant to their behavior towards your email campaigns or a particular subject. The answers provided here can determine what you need to do with your email strategy and tweak it for the better.

As an example, Mailjet surveyed international differences when it comes to email marketing. The survey provided valuable insights on how people from all walks of the globe approach email marketing.

Conclusion

If you want to succeed with targeted email marketing, then you need to value what email marketing brings to the table. It’s one thing to acknowledge its benefits to your business. It’s another to take action on your email list by segmenting each one of them correctly. Doing the latter helps optimize your email marketing so you can send optimized messages to the right people, which will lead to higher conversions.

Source: http://tweakyourbiz.com/




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

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3 Advertising Trends That Are Revolutionizing Offline Marketing

Advertising tech trends you need to know in 2017.

Technology radically changed advertising. You do not even have to look as far back as the television ads of the 1960s to see the significance of those changes. Advertising technology has raced forward every year for the last decade to become one of the most futuristic industries there is today.

Ten years ago, advertising was just finding its legs on the internet. There were banner ads, pop ups, and endless email distributions. It was an era of blind advertising where companies treated the online space like the real world. Advertising was about as targeted as billboards: if there was a high volume of traffic, that was all that mattered.

But in the last ten years, technology has empowered advertisers to become incredibly specific with how they target potential consumers. They can aggregate search data and social media data to paint incredibly precise pictures of who people are and what they want to buy. Gone are the days of blind advertising online. But while advertising technology raced forward online, it stalled in the real world.

Billboards became digital, but they never became smart. Physical store locations still hang signs in their windows to lure customers in, but have no idea who the customers are. Advertising in the physical world is ready for modern technology, and it may finally be getting it. These are three advertising trends that are revolutionizing offline marketing:


    1.    Targeted Digital Out of Home

Billboards project a static piece of marketing to the crowd of people that can see it. Whether that crowd is Generation Z kids in a mall or Baby Boomers stuck in traffic on a freeway, the ads they see are not customized to them. But new technology is allowing advertisers to aggregate a huge volume of data in real time about the people who are in close proximity to billboards and that is changing everything.

The technology is called targeted Digital Out of Home (DOOH) and it is effective because it can capture smartphone IDs when they ping wifi routers. Those smartphones are then matched to existing advertising IDs that catalogue online search and social media data. The result is an immediate profile of a whole crowd.

"Maybe the crowd is primarily millennials, or spanish speaking soccer moms, or people shopping for a new car of a certain household income; the digital signs can immediately serve an ad that best fits the demographic that is actually looking at it," explains Jonathan Frangakis, co-founder and CEO of DOOH targeting company Mira. "This all happens in near real time. More specifically, aggregation, scoring and ad serving happens in less than a second, so the digital billboard is always adapting to aggregate crowd profiles."

This technology does not mean that billboards will suddenly begin to serve ads based on your specific profile, but it will aggregate your profile with a crowd of others. That is a huge opportunity for marketers who have not been able to target demographics in real time in offline environments until now.


    2.    Online to Offline

As good as online marketing is at targeting customers, it does have a blind spot. A huge percentage of total commerce still takes place "offline", meaning at physical stores. That does not mean that the ads are not effective, just that it is hard to track their actual success.

New advertising platforms in the online to offline (O2O) space are bridging that gap. There are a litany of platforms and none has emerged as the clear leader, but the concept is that users would connect their credit cards to the platform and then continue browsing the internet and shopping like normal. What changes is that when the consumer uses their credit card at an offline store, it can be traced back to an ad that they saw online.

Connecting online ads to offline sales has been called a trillion dollar idea and it makes sense why. If advertisers could only pay for ad impressions that turn into sales, then they would functionally have a guaranteed ROI.

    3.    Offline to Offline

Okay, so connecting a specific sale to an online ad is great for marketers, but what about the $7.3 billion spent on offline marketing? How can advertisers calculate the effectiveness of those marketing expenditures?

New technology is working to unravel that mystery, too. The space is new and is not technically called offline to offline, but the attribution model effectively does just that. Companies offering this service use algorithms and data captured from online searches to calculate the likelihood a consumer saw a TV commercial or billboard prior to making a purchase.

While not as proactive as targeted DOOH or Online to Offline technologies, it is nonetheless a critical piece in connecting offline advertising to actual revenue. Marketing in the modern era requires actionable data, so efforts to retroactively establish what inputs drove a particular purchasing decision are becoming more important. "

The offline world is getting the technology treatment that the online world has had for years now," says Frangakis. "Advertising offline is not becoming obsolete, in fact in the coming years it could see substantial growth as advertisers begin to adopt these new technologies and data strategies."

Source: http://www.inc.com/
Image Credit: Getty Images



ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
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The Smart Way to Use Promotional Items to Build Client Relationships

A friend of a friend gave his wife a vacuum cleaner for Christmas. Relating this story to me, my friend wondered out loud how it was possible that his buddy was still alive.

This is the classic gift-giving mistake: gifting something that’s supposed to be practical, but comes off as too impersonal and utilitarian.

There’s another — even more common — gift-giving mistake, and that’s giving something that you would want to receive.

I suppose that sometimes our intentions aren’t all that terrible. We think that if it’s something we would want, others should feel the same way.

I also suspect that sometimes we believe that since we are close to the person receiving the gift, that we’ll get to enjoy it or use it as well, so it’s almost like giving the gift to ourselves.

Small business promo gifts

And this brings me around to a common small business gift giving error: Giving important customers or clients gifts that are all about promoting ourselves, and nothing about those who are receiving the gifts.

While promotional giveaways may seem like a great idea, you need to think about the message you’re sending and the results you want to achieve.

I’m not against handing out promotional items or sending them to clients or prospects, like gimme hats (You know, “Gimme one of them hats!”), calendars, magnets or ballpoint pens, but there are times when these kinds of promotional merchandise are not appropriate.

Think about the trade shows that you’ve attended. If you’re like most of us, you occasionally navigate up and down the aisles just looking for the promotional giveaways that are sitting on the counters. You grab a handful, stick them in a tote bag you’ve picked up at one of the booths and continue on your merry way.

The logos on these promotional products will remind you of the companies that offered them, but only in the most minimal of ways. This brings us to the crucial question of how you should weigh the merits of incentive gifts:

Do you only want to remind a client of your business in “the most minimal of ways” or do you want to make a big, lasting impression?

ROI of promotional goods

I suspect that when it comes to important clients, you want to make a big, lasting impressions. If that’s the case — even though we’re talking about promotional merchandise as incentive gifts — you need to go back to rule number one of gift giving: It has to be about the recipient.

In other words, don’t be like people who select gifts according to what they want; your gifts should be items that those people will treasure. In the grand scheme of things they are “promotional giveaways” but only in the sense that you have shown your appreciation for a person by taking the time and expense to select a valuable and lasting gift.

Instead of printing your logo on something, why not print the logo of the recipient’s company? Or the recipient’s name, or initials? Make it about the person receiving the gift, and in the long run you will enjoy more value out of your investments in promotional merchandise.

Finally, if you’re trying to improve your company’s position with some major clients, don’t be a penny pincher. Think for a moment how much you would spend to entertain these clients. Perhaps you occasionally take them to dinner or to sporting events. Those can be costly promotional outings and when they’re over, they’re over.

However, some high-quality products that you can give away as promo gifts will last for years. Over time, your investment has the potential to pay for itself many times over.

Start your trial to experience our easy-to-use email marketing tools and more. You'll also have access to personal coaching and resources to get you real business results.

Source: http://blogs.constantcontact.com/

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Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
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7 Email Marketing Best Practices

The content of your email message is important, but your design is the first element that recipients will see. If you want readers to see your message instead of clicking to the next email, it’s essential to please their eyes and pique their curiosity. Here are a few keys to a winning email design:

1. Make it mobile friendly.
Two out of three emails are opened on a mobile device. Make sure that your email design is based on elements that work well in that environment. Those include large text, small file sizes for images, simplified layouts with plenty of white space, and touch-friendly buttons inside. If you use an image-based header, utilize responsive design to ensure that it shows up well on all screens.

2. Don't rely too heavily on images.
While some Web services load images automatically, many of your recipients will not see images unless they specifically enable this. For these readers, most images will result in a lot of blank white space. Always use alt tags and title tags to ensure that descriptions are still showing up when images don't. And, keep important information in the text of your email so that people don't miss it if images are not appearing. Read your email without the images to make sure that it still communicates well when all you see is text.

3. Make links easy to see and click.
You don't want to annoy recipients by making them hunt for links. At the very least, links should appear in a contrasting color (blue is the classic). Also consider underlining and bolding text links so that they show up easily. Use a combination of image-based buttons and text-based links so that all prospects can see where to click to get to your site. Having multiple links throughout the email makes it easier for prospects to do exactly what you want them to do.

4. Make sure you are CAN-SPAM compliant.
The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 requires that businesses make it simple for readers to stop receiving commercial mailings from you. Include clear instructions in the footer of your email that tell the recipient how to opt out of further mailings. The text should be large and easy to read. Failing to do this can get your message marked as spam. At the least, you can risk getting sent straight to the junk mail box. In worst-case scenarios, you can be fined for failure to comply.

5. Keep emails short and to the point.
When sending a commercial email, keep it under 300 words. Long emails look unwieldy to the reader and are more likely to get deleted than read. Deliver the hook quickly and follow up as succinctly as possible. Use subheads and bullet points to make it as “scannable” as possible.

6. Skip the spam-oriented words.
Spam filters often look for specific words to determine whether a message should go into the inbox or not. Some of the top spam words that have been identified are:

• $$$, cash, money, cheap

• Work at home, online biz opportunity, make money

• Buy, clearance, order, shop

• Free, f r e e, no cost

Exclamation points and all caps are also common triggers. What’s more, even when these words get past the filter, they can still turn off readers. While it can be hard to avoid every spam word, minimize them wherever possible to increase your chances of getting through. Get creative and find ways to share your message.

7. Test every mailing.
Before any mailing is released to your larger list, send it to a smaller test list to check your results. Open emails in both desktop and mobile browsers -- to ensure that your message looks good across platforms. Garbled messages with weird line breaks and broken images make a poor first impression. Make sure you can get your foot in the door with a professional look from the start.


Email can be one of the most effective tools in your digital marketing kit. However, efficient and pleasing design is vital. Ensure emails are easy to read and pleasant to look at, and you'll see a higher open rate, more click-thrus and happier recipients staying on your list.




Image Credit: Shutterstock.com
Source: https://www.malaysiamarketing.my

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
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Why Email Marketing Isn't Dead (And How It Can Dramatically Increase Your Revenue)

Some minor tweaks to your email marketing strategy will yield some major results (and happy customers).

The death knell of email marketing is sounded daily from all corners of the business world. We're constantly seeing articles popping up in our news feeds suggesting that a significant percentage of Generation Z doesn't have an email address and that marketing your content is worthless if it isn't shareable.

Although it's true that the proliferation of social media has resulted in countless marketing options with more emerging all the time, the reports of email's demise have been greatly exaggerated. But the dynamics of email marketing are changing. Namely, it's heading toward deep personalization. Over the last year, this has more than doubled our email marketing revenue.

Email marketing can still work for you.

A recent study by McKinsey found that not only is email three times more likely to result in conversion than social media, but the average purchase price is 17 percent higher as well. Email inherently offers several unique characteristics marketers can take advantage of that social media simply lacks.

Since social media is designed for content that is seen by many and shared across diverse networks, it is naturally a better platform for marketing campaigns that are broader in focus. Email, conversely, presents an opportunity to engage your audience with a distinctive, tailored message that serves to nurture a long-term relationship.

The current climate rewards personalization.

Since the average email user receives approximately 121 emails per day, crafting content that stands out from the crowd becomes paramount. Successful email marketing campaigns of the present and future must increasingly rely on personalization in order to drive customer engagement and increase return on investment (ROI). For instance, sales site Gilt.com has over 3,000 iterations of its daily email content, each specifically crafted based on purchase and browsing history.

At Blank Label, we are moving to exclusively utilize customized, context-rich messaging with the intent of facilitating successful repeat purchases from our most valuable customers. These types of emails result in significantly more opens, website hits, and sales conversions when compared to a more generic, mass-produced email campaign. Like most brands, we used to send a single broad email campaign once a week. We'd see 30 to 40 percent open rates and decent click-through rates. But we're selling a personalized, customized product, so we thought our marketing should be geared that way too.

We now send more dynamic, customized emails, rather than generic emails. Most small businesses and startups can do this with an email tool like Klaviyo. We send them all our data, including a customer's name, what they ordered, when they ordered, etc. This way we can send an email like, "Hi Jim, I noticed you haven't shopped with us in a while," or, "The blue shirt you bought three of, we just got another one just like it," or, "Thanks for shopping with us five times this month. Here's a 20 percent discount." We've seen our open rates double with campaigns like this.

Email is still the best tool for customer engagement.

If you need any evidence of the importance of brand loyalty, Accenture found that the top 20 percent of customers contributes 150 percent of a company's profits. No matter which industry you are in, aiming for customer retention is always a good strategy for long-term success. Marketing to existing customers will always be cheaper than trying to attract new ones.

Thankfully, a successful email marketing campaign uniquely positions you to maintain robust customer engagement and mold the campaign to their needs as buying decisions change. Taking advantage of the attributes of an email service provider (ESP) can help you keep track of customer data and segment your buying populations into targeted lists. You can create specific emails for customers who have gone several months without a new purchase, even encouraging them with extra discounts in order to renew the relationship, or you can send specific product information to a group of customers who have historically bought the same item over and over.

It's time to evolve from the old era.

Most criticisms of email marketing are aimed at old practices that have little value in a world with universal mobile broadband access. Traditional email marketing campaigns grew out of the belief that repetition would eventually translate into conversion. In order to achieve this, companies created newsletters or other marketing content designed to be sent out at regular intervals to a mass audience. While repetition can be useful for increasing brand awareness, these types of strategies lead to predictability, and they condition your potential customers to ignore your messages.

While it's true that most companies today can't compete without a strong social presence spread across several platforms, there is still significant marketing ROI to be gained from personalized email campaigns. As digital outlets continue to diversify and become more specialized, it's clear that there's still room in the marketer's toolbox for a well-designed, targeted email campaign that uniquely presents your value proposition to the customer.

Source:www.inc.com
Image Credit: Getty Images

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The Difference Between Marketing and Advertising

If you ask the person next to you about the difference between marketing and advertising, there’s a strong possibility you won’t get a clear answer. That’s because for many people, there’s only a subtle difference between marketing and advertising that’s often difficult to explain.

To be honest, advertising and marketing are closely related disciplines that have much in common. Yet they differ in many ways too. To see the differences and how each can benefit you as a small business owner, you must first understand the basics of both.

The Difference Between Marketing and Advertising

What is Marketing?

Marketing, in simple terms, refers to the means of communication between a company and its target audience. The American Marketing Association defines it as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Marketing involves techniques such as market segmentation, target group identification and market analysis to adopt the right strategy for customer engagement and product promotion.

Four primary elements that form the crux of marketing include Product, Price, Place and Promotion. These elements were introduced by marketer E. Jerome McCarthy. See the breakdown for each of these elements below.

Product

A product is seen as an item that addresses a consumer demand/need. It could be a tangible good or an intangible service.

Price

This is the amount customers pay for the product. Price determines the company’s profitability and thereby whether or not the company will succeed.

Place

Products must be located at a place where consumers can access them. Place involves strategies such as selective distribution, franchising and exclusive distribution.

Promotion

All means of communication that a company adopts to provide information about the product are considered promotion. Promotion may include elements such as public relations, advertising and sales promotion.

Let’s now try and understand what advertising means.

What is Advertising?

Advertising is defined as a form of marketing communication used by companies to promote or sell products and services. In essence, advertising is one of the components or subsets of marketing. In other words, if you think of marketing as a pie, then advertising will be an important slice of that pie.

The primary goal of advertising is to influence the buying behavior by promoting a product, service or company. To achieve this goal, advertising focuses on creative positioning and media. In doing so, advertising spreads awareness about what you have to offer.

According to the “Hierarchy of Effects” model  put forth by Robert J. Lavidge and Gary A. Steiner, a buyer moves through six stages when making a purchase. These are awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction and purchase. These six stages are further divided into three categories: Awareness and Knowledge (Cognitive), Liking and Preference (Affective) and Conviction and Purchase (Conative).

These three categories are explored a bit further below.

Cognitive

At this stage, consumers process the information provided to them through the advertising communication. Advertising should, therefore, present information on the product benefit to pique the interest of the target audience.

Affective

When consumers are in the affective stage, they should be able to start associating with the brand. Advertising should, therefore, resonate with the audience’s emotional aspects.

Conative

The conative stage refers to a stage where buyers are either actually making a purchase or simply showing the intent to purchase. At this stage, advertising evolves into a method of expediting the purchasing process.

How Do Advertising and Marketing Differ?

Now the big question is how do marketing and advertising differ? As mentioned above, marketing presents the overall picture of how a company promotes, distributes and prices its products or services. Advertising is a component of this overall picture.

Apart from advertising, a marketing plan includes other components such as public relations, sales and distribution strategies. All these elements are expected to work both independently and interdependently. All must work together to support the same marketing goal.

What’s interesting to note is that advertising typically accounts for the largest expense in most marketing plans. It’s not difficult to understand why. A well-executed ad campaign is run on multiple channels and at a high frequency to create the desired impact.

It’s also worth mentioning that creating a marketing plan is typically more time-intensive than creating an advertising campaign. Since marketing involves various disciplines such as market analysis, marketing research, positioning and segmentation, it includes more strategizing than does advertising.

In other words, advertising supports marketing by creating the right buzz about a company’s product or service. It generates curiosity in the minds of the target audience, but ultimately works to support the overall marketing plan.

Blurring the Line Between Advertising and Marketing

In the digital era, the thin line that exists between marketing and advertising is getting increasingly blurred.

With search engine marketing (SEM) and display advertising, digital marketers are now working in the online ad space. And social networking is turning out to be the most preferred channel for most of these marketers who are pairing advertising with marketing to achieve best results.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing. Here’s why.

Many believe social media is a powerful marketing channel that should be used cautiously for advertising purposes.

Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer at Collective Bias explains in a guest blog on IBM.com, “Ads have their place, but too many brands try to “advertise” within their social communications to drive immediate action. Not a good scenario, because over time that misuse of the medium diminishes trust and efforts to build relationships.

To leverage social media in the most optimal way, marketers need to have the right strategy for advertising and marketing. To begin with, it’s important to understand what customers want. Do they use social media to be bombarded with adverts and gimmicks? Or are they looking for information presented in an interesting way?

Brands that have checked the pulse of their target audience know how social media can benefit their integrated marketing communications strategy. Keeping that in mind, they know how to leverage it without overusing it.

For businesses, the key thing is to really understand how advertising and marketing work together to bring about the right results.

source:www.smallbiztrends.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is an organization consisting of professionals and entrepreneurs which focuses on the success of our Members. We help our Members establish lasting relationships and generate new business opportunities towards the growth of their business.
Stay Connected with WNFP!