Introduction

Many organizations are utilizing email marketing as part of their internet marketing strategy.  There are numerous email marketing services provided that support all types of businesses such as: Emma, ConstantContact, Aweber, etc.  In today’s environment, businesses are sending emails to promote products & services, cross-sell additional services, inform customers, and provide discount coupons.  The question is: Are businesses leveraging email marketing to support multi-tactical internet marketing campaigns?

In most cases, businesses are not leveraging email marketing to drive successful campaigns.  Marketers continue to see email marketing as a single tactic that has a limited impact on the goals of their campaigns.  The biggest example of this is the lack of integration between databases, website, and email marketing campaigns.   A local business owner has a limited amount of hours in a day and a limited amount of resources.  However, most of them do not streamline the lead acquisition process to work together.  If the systems were integrated, a similar scenario can be applied to large corporations that employ or utilize 3 different employees to do the job of a single email marketing professional. Simply put, the website form does populate to the database, and neither of these automatically feed to the email marketing system.  In general, this is a manual process that costs businesses time, resource, and money. 

How can effective Email Marketing Help Your Business and Drive Results?

How you ask?  Well, let’s start with efficiency.  The ability to integrate your website with your business’s database, website forms, and email marketing services tools may cost additional money upfront; however, in the long-run you will not need to use manual processes that require more resources.  At DaBrian Marketing Group, we provide businesses will the tools to connect website forms to an email marketing system and eliminate the database itself.  In our client’s case, the email marketing system or email marketing service is the database.  In addition, you can use event or email triggers to confirm opt-in email addresses after receiving a contact submission form.  In less than 30 seconds, you have populated your form into a specific list with the email marketing tool, confirmed an opt-in email, and responded to a prospect with relevant content.

 Email triggers can be a useful and impactful tool for customer acquisition & lead generation.  We live in a society of instant gratification so being able to deliver relevant information or set the expectation to receive a response to a question is critical.  This can help to separate your business from the competition.

The ability to reduce the resources used for an email marketing campaign will reduce the campaign cost.  If implemented effectively, email marketing can position your business to be on your customers’ minds and reduce your overall acquisition cost. The bottom-line is Return-on-Investment. 

 Testing to Drive Results & Revenue?

Once you have become proficient with your automated process, it is time to start testing your email campaigns.  There are a number of different tests you can do with a single email campaign.  These tests include A/B, A/B/C, and multivariate testing of headers, subject lines, layouts, landing pages or calls-to-action.  The more successful your business is at getting customers to open emails, the greater the probability that the customer will respond to your call-to-action. Usually, better open rates and click through rates translate to better ROI. 

Conclusion

The truth is that just about every business uses email marketing to communicate with customers.  Unfortunately, not every business takes the time to evaluate opportunities to integrate technologies, test, or measure their results.  These are simple fundamental businesses practices that should be gone.  The ability to establish internal processes and best practices are critical to every business’s success. 

 The fact that you have an email marketing tool does not mean that what you are communicating is relevant to customers, or even driving results.   It is our recommendation that businesses start to take a holistic approach to all internet marketing strategies & tactics.  Continue to push the envelope for maximum results that will lead to maximum returns.      

 

 

Brand advertising is only for big brands right? McDonald’s, Coke, Apple… they pay for splashy ad banners on websites and billboards by the road side. Not to mention sexy TV ads. What about your online business? Guess what… you also need to invest in brand advertising. Surprised? Read on.

Spending all your advertising dollars on paid search (i.e., Google) to drive traffic to your website is crazy. Okay, maybe not crazy… but really, really expensive. That’s why everyone tells you to search engine optimize (SEO) your website. That way your site will show up in “natural” search results when a prospect types in a keyword you care about. And that’s huge since natural search clicks are free of charge!

But while most people click on sponsored listings based on ranking (that’s why marketers splurge to get ranked number one), many will click on a natural search listing based on recognizing the brand. So brand awareness matters big time if you want to increase the likelihood that prospects will click on your search listing. This is especially true since research shows that people click on natural search listings more than 70% of the time!

Not convinced of the importance of brand awareness? Then let me say it another way: people are more likely to buy from a brand they’ve heard of.

Here are some ways to create brand awareness for your online business:

Issue press releases. Doesn’t matter how big or small your company is. Let your prospects know when you have important news that they’ll find compelling. And these days it’s pretty easy and costs only $25 to $100 to issue a press release. Interested? Take a look at PR Newswire and 1888 Press Release to get started. Run ad banner campaigns. Yes, buy ad banners! Banner advertising is a great way to generate brand awareness with your target prospects. And there are lots of ad networks and websites that cater to advertisers with limited marketing dollars to spend. For example, check out these ad networks:

BuySellAds.com and Adbrite.com. Publish content. Creating and publishing informative content is more important than ever in making prospects aware of you and your brand. So write articles, comment on blogs (create your own!), participate in online forums… and always mention your brand. Just be patient as it does take awhile. But before you know it you’ll start to create brand awareness (and website traffic too!) Leverage social media. There’s a lot of buzz about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube… to name just a few social media sites. And whether or not you understand what these sites are all about… your business needs to participate. It really does. So invest the time to learn how social media can help you get the word out about your brand.

There’s a lot to chew on here… so make sure and pace yourself. You don’t need to do it all at once to start getting prospects to recognize your brand.

How about first doing a press release on that big customer you just landed? Meanwhile, get started running an ad banner campaign that really cements your brand in the mind of your target market. And get in the habit of commenting on blog sites you like to read. Then see who in your company (maybe you) likes to write and put them in charge of your website’s blog. Next up is launching your website’s Facebook page, Twitter account, and then some videos for YouTube.

As I said… there’s a lot to do! The good news is that every step you take generates more brand awareness. Did I mention that prospects are more likely to buy from you if they’re already familiar with your brand?

Come visit us at www.leadtail.com.

So you finally have a website, can sit back and watch the world come knocking. You’re not sure what affiliate programs you’re going to use to earn money but you figure that you can’t really lose no matter what you decide. The minutes, hours, days past and very little if any visitors have dropped by your web page to say hi. You start to question the investment you’ve made and you’re calling the day job you just quit pleading to take you back. Good move. Let’s start from scratch before quitting your job and look at the little things you can do to slowly but surely raise brand awareness and ultimately drive traffic to your website.

Many people have come under the impression that you can start a website and watch the money come rolling in with little or no effort. Truth is that in most cases it takes effort to earn a dollar and that’s what this article is about. It’s about doing the little things right and taking the time to do it. Taking the time at the beginning will help alleviate the workload later. If it were possible to spend a couple of years working really hard to achieve independent wealth would you do it? This isn’t by any means a get rich article or even a make a part time income article. One never knows what the outcome will be in anything. This is merely a guide to a few free, easy steps I’ve learnt along the way that you may or may not find helpful.

1) Search Engines – Submit or Not? You can submit however it is very time consuming. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) will spider your site on their own. All of the other mid-small search engines will follow suit. Save yourself time on submitting to hundreds of search engines and focus on back-links. Once you have these your site will be indexed fast.

2) Directories – Instead of search engines put your focus on directories. There are literally thousands in existence. The main types are paid, non-paid and reciprocal. Be selective in which directories you submit to. Directories with high page rank are what you want to aim for as the quality of sites linking to you is important.

3) Online Classifieds – There are many free online classifieds available and are great vehicles for advertisement. Sites like Craigslist, Myspace and Kijiji can almost instantly bring a few visitors and provide back-links.

4) Articles – Try writing an article about the service or product you offer. Once you’ve done that submit it to article sites. Article sites are excellent sources of back-links and advertisement. Consider as well the possibility of a large site using your article on their web page. Like directories page-rank is important so be selective.

5) Post Blogs – Create blogs that are separate from your website. This can create awareness, increase traffic and be an additional source of revenue on its own.

6) Social Network Sites – Social Sites are more and more being used to promote web pages and are arguably the most effective way to win over an audience. You may or may not get traffic for this but it’s important to note that even if you don’t you’ll get honest feedback. Feedback is good for any business in order to understand what can be done better. Social Sites are kind of like free market research or focus groups.

7) Web Forums – Forums have been around since the beginning of the internet era and are still a very effective resource. Get involved with those of similar interest. Community Involvement is an integral part of running any business.

Seem like a lot? It is! However utilizing these steps will steadily improve traffic and hopefully help you reap the rewards you desire.

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