Email marketing

Are You Missing The Key Element Of Marketing?

Jan 8, 2013 By Tea Leave a Comment

Everyone is raving about how important is to include social media marketing in your marketing campaigns and it seems that most small businesses are starting to grasp this message. But there is another component of online marketing, which brings real measurable benefits to your business. I’m talking about email marketing.

Have you ever heard that to make money online you need to build your emailing list? You might say ‘I don’t have online business, so I don’t need this’, but am I right to say that you run various adds, promotions, sales, product launches and similar?

Email marketing is as important for online businesses as it is for any other physical store or service provider. Email marketing helps you build relationship, trust and loyalty with your subscribers. And once you gain that, you know your subscribers will buy products and services from you, not your competition.

Email marketing is also the cheapest and the most targeted form of marketing. Why?

For 2 reasons:

#1:

People who sign-up to your emailing list are already warm leads. This means they will highly likely buy from you in the future. Why? People will not give you their email address unless they think you have something valuable to them. This means that anyone who is on your list is a potential buyer and you know that because they expressed an interest in your business. You cannot get more targeted campaign than that.

This is further enhanced by possibility to collect data on how your subscribers behave, which helps you to refine your approach and messages.

A cost of running an email campaign is nothing comparing to any other form of marketing. With Aweber you can try your email marketing campaign for as low as $1.“I want to try it”

So why are so many small businesses still reluctant to use email marketing in their marketing strategy? The most common reasons are:

Reluctant to try new things
It takes too much time
It won’t work for me
It’s too complicated for me to set up
It’s too expensive

If you fall in to the first category – excuse me from being blunt – sooner or later you will be out of business. How we do business today is changing and unless you change with it, your future is not bright.

According to Aweber’s 2012 survey, “the most business owners said they spend between 1 and 3 hours a week on their campaigns.” With 77% of surveyed business owners stating that email marketing increases their profit, it is worthwhile finding that time.

Thirdly, if your clients are human, there is no reason why it won’t work for you. The question is; are you willing to give it a try to find out if email marketing works for you?

I accept that for some, technical tasks can be a bit daunting. You might not be up for learning how to set-up your email marketing campaign or you might not even know where to start.

That’s fine. I can help you with that.

“Yes, I need help with email marketing”

Programs such as Aweber really make email marketing a breeze. With auto-responding follow ups and drag-and-drop email templates sending messages is quick and easy.

I know that you can learn. So, once your email marketing technical parts are set up, I will show you exact steps how to use email marketing tools and support you until you are confident that you can do it on your own. Worth giving it a try? Get in touch.

As for the excuse that email marketing is too expensive, there are free email marketing software providers out there you can use. I personally use Aweber which is used by most online marketing gurus. Here you can Test Drive it:

Can You Have More Sales, Too?

Helping over 115,000+ businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber’s opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.

I hope I gave you enough reasons why you should try email marketing or if you are already doing it, why you need to continue. But enough of me talking, let’s have a look what other 3000 small business owners and entrepreneurs have to say:

Data and infographic by AWeber

Share your thoughts in comments below or share it with your friends. Thanks

My Top 4 Social Media Tips to Skyrocket Your Business

Nov 27, 2012 By Tea Leave a Comment

Recently, I was approached by Biz.Yourself, an awesome website, a hub for all things biz, to share my top social media tips with their readers. There are heaps of tips I could share, however I wanted to pick the ones that will make a real difference to any small business.

Here they are:

4 Top Social Media Tips to Skyrocket Your Business

One of the biggest challenges of starting a new business is how to get your word out and get customers. You can have the best business idea, the best product or service yet if you are unable to spread the word, your potential customers will not even know you exist. The chances are that you will give up on your business well before the customers will have an opportunity to get to know you.

Luckily with social media and other internet marketing tools, this task has become less daunting. If you don’t have a massive marketing budget, using social media to market your business is the way to get your word out to the masses, reach your target market and collect quality leads to turn them into customers.

While it sounds so easy, there are some ‘DOs and DON’Ts’ of social media marketing. To help you get on the right track, I prepared 4 most common mistakes people do with social media with a solution how to fix them.

#1 No Strategy

Like with anything else in business you need to think before you act. Not having a social media strategy will result in un-resourceful use of tools. This means wasting time using the wrong social media platform and not achieving any results.

How to fix this?

Think about your target market; who are your customers? Where and when do they ‘hang’; is it Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest etc? What is their behaviour? Once you getter information, create a strategy of your social media use.

#2 Too Many Social Media Accounts

I’ve seen it too many times; businesses trying to manage too many social media accounts yet they are nowhere truly present. This results in spending too much time with too little results and lots of frustration.

How to fix this?

If you’ve done your social media strategy you know where you customers are. Use one or two social media platforms regularly. This means your customers will get a chance to know you better, which will result in better relationship and a higher level of trust. And you want that because the quality of the relationship is what determines the sale.

On the other hand, using less social media platforms will free up heaps of your time that you can use to run your business to success.

#3 Ignoring Statistics

Yes, I know stats are boring. But unless you measure, analyse and test your marketing efforts, you will never know what works and what doesn’t. You might be wasting your energy and money on things that don’t work. Imagine how much more you could achieve, if you put more in to things that work. And unless you look at the stats you will never know.

How to fix this?

Make a weekly commitment in your diary to follow the stats of your social media. It’s actually rewarding when you see positive results and when you find out the formula that works for you.

#4 Not Collecting Leads

While collecting fans and followers is fun and it gets the word about your business out, the real value to your business are leads, which you can turn into customers. You need to figure out how to turn your fans and followers into customers. Otherwise, you are wasting your time.

How to fix this?

You need to get your fans/followers to subscribe to your emailing list. Once they are on your list, you have better chances to turn them into customers during your email marketing campaign.

To collect leads you will need to get an account with emailing service provider such as Aweber or Mail Chimp and then incorporate a sign-up form to social media account (where possible) or drive traffic to your website.

Connecting social media with email marketing is the key to your success online. A subscriber is a warm lead. While they might not be ready to buy from you as yet, they’ve expressed an interest in you and in what you are doing. Now is your turn to show them why they should become your customer.

Always post information that is relevant to your target market and be regular with your postings. A simple search online will give you heaps of common tips about how to use social media. These 4 tips are my top tips if you are serious about doing business with social media. If you follow them, you will have success and you will grow your client base.

Why Is Email Marketing Still The Best Online Marketing Solution For You?

Nov 19, 2012 By Tea Leave a Comment

Email marketing has been an essential component of any good marketing strategy for some time now as it allows businesses to engage with their customers easily, quickly and efficiently for a fracture of cost of any other marketing tool.

If you are already using email marketing in your business, you know the benefits already. So, the only thing you need to take from this article is that, with its ROI (return on investment) for 2011 at $40.56 for every $1 invested and with Direct Marketing Association predicting that email will account for $67.8 billion in sales in 2012, email marketing is still relevant and ahead of other online tools.

If email marketing is not part of your marketing strategy yet, you need to consider this:

A 2012 survey of consumer channel habits and preferences found 77% preferred to receive permission-based promotions via email: 6% preferred such messages via social media (reference).

The ForeSee Results 2010 report on the effectiveness of social media found that promotional emails were the second biggest influence on retail website visits. The biggest influence was familiarity with the brand (reference).

A survey of online marketing managers at the end of 2011 found 89.2% said email is the same or more important to their overall marketing strategy when compared to two years ago (reference).

In April 2011, 79% of search marketers said email had grown in importance as a source of leads (reference).

A 2012 social media survey found 87% of social media marketers also use email marketing: 93% plan to maintain or increase their use of email (reference).

Email was the channel most likely to get more investment in 2012, according to a survey of business leaders: 60% planned to increase their email marketing budget. Social media was the next most popular at 55% (reference).

Why does email marketing work?

There is a variety of reasons why email marketing works.

The most obvious one is that if a person opts-in to receive information from you, they consider you have something of value to them. They might not be ready to buy from you just yet, however by expressing their interest they opened their doors for you to turn them into customers. At this point you captured them as a lead, now it’s up to you to turn them into a customer with targeted marketing.

Email marketing helps you:

build relationship, trust and loyalty with your subscribers,

target your potential customers more precisely,

drive direct sales ,

collect data on how your subscribers behave, which helps you to refine your approach and messages,

customize and personalise your marketing campaigns, and

supports sales through other channels.

Does this sound like something you can benefit from in your marketing strategy?

Yes!

So how do you go about it?

The biggest mistake I see with email marketing is that businesses try to manage their subscriptions manually and send emails through their desktop email system, such as Outlook. This causes various problems with finding the right email address of the subscriber, their full name, limitations on outgoing messages from ISP and hosting providers to name just few. But the biggest is that once your emailing list reaches a certain size the limitations of manual emailing becomes a huge road block for managing and delivery of your messages.

If you are serious about capturing online leads and using email marketing as part of your marketing strategy, you need to sign up with one of the email service providers such as AWeber or Mail Chimp.

If this sounds all too technical for you, don’t worry, I help people just like you starting with email marketing. Imagine someone sets up all the boring necessary technical bits and makes things look pretty so that you can start collecting leads. And all you need to do is watch your list grow and have fun with your subscribers. Oh, and start making plans for next holidays as your bank balance is growing and you have more time for yourself. Isn’t that great or what?

Make a first step to make more sales…