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Email Marketing Basics

Email marketing is a great way to proactively reach out to customers and  prospects, but doing so means walking a fine line between spam and offering  value. But if done right, e-mail marketing is a great way to sell your products  and services as well as build on your brand.
Permission-based email marketing is the ideal way to reach out to your customers  to communicate either information that is useful to them or that helps your  bottom line. Acquiring your customer’s permission can be as simple as including  an opt-in (as well as an opt-out) during the purchase process, whereby your  customer populates a contact field that includes an email address you will use  to further interact with them later in the relationship. The key here is that  you want your customers to want to receive emails from you, because they know  you aren’t just trying to make a sale–you’re also trying to help them be more successful in their business.

What Content Should I Include in Email Marketing Campaigns?

• New, discounted products and services
• News and tips that help your customers and prospects in their daily business
• Good, informative content about their industry

How Should I get their Attention & What Should I Always Include?

• A compelling, catchy headline
• Always use a consistent brand and company name
• Always include a Call to Action
• Always provide contact information, including email and, if possible, a phone number

List Services

Beware of companies that sell email lists. While there are plenty of businesses that sell email lists legally, there are plenty that do not. The last thing you want to do as a business is anger your prospects and potential customers by initiating a relationship via SPAM.

Opt Out?

Always give the recipient of your email marketing activities a way out. If you’ve ever been on an email list that you couldn’t get off of, you understand the annoyance and why it’s a good idea to provide people a way to opt out of the list.

A Few e-mail Guidelines:

• Don’t send email to people who don’t want it
• Make a point to let your reader know you aren’t sharing their email address
• Do not over-email your readers. Email them once a week at most, depending on the situation
• Be very clear and concise in your emails. Make sure you don’t confuse your readers
• Provide the option of HTML or TEXT

Following the rules of the game for email marketing is not that difficult, and doing so creates a clear, pleasant experience for your readers. Before sending out an email campaign, make sure you ask one basic question of yourself, namely, Would I want to receive this email? If you wouldn’t, why would your readers?

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM as it is known in the industry, is a type of marketing online that promotes websites by increasing a website’s (and thus a company’s) visibility in Search Engine results pages, or SERPs. According to SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, some of the varying types of SEM include paid placement, paid inclusion, and SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. SEM has also been defined as the practice of paying for listings on other web properties with the ultimate goal being improved search listing results on SERPS.

Paid Placement

Paid placement normally refers to Pay Per Click (PPC), which is an advertising model based on payment being made to the advertiser for every click or number of clicks made on the advertisement by users/consumers of a website. Advertisers bid on keywords and groups of keywords for which the advertisers want to be displayed for based on the search terms they believe their target market will search for.

Pay Per Click ads can appear on content network websites, and the ad networks like Yahoo!, Google AdSense, and other similar ad networks’ provide relevant ads on page by matching the ads to the content on the page where the ads appear. Sponsored links, where an advertiser’s ad is displayed beside or above the natural or ‘organic’ results on SERPs, are usually more prominent that the other ads displayed, as they are usually highlighted or made to stick out more in some form or fashion.

There are currently three dominant companies in the online ad business, including Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter, all of which have done extremely well, though Google is by far the most dominant superstar of the group.

Should you use a Professional to run your Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft adCenter Campaign?
While you can probably figure the whole ad business yourself after a good many training sessions and continued learning, it’s much easier to let the pros handle it. It takes a good long time to understand the nuances of Search Engine Marketing, but the main issue is time. Managing campaigns means managing money, and getting the maximum ROI on your spend is key to a thriving business online. SEM management is sort of like the stock market: anyone can dive in and throw money around, but only a few are going to know what they’re doing and proving it through their returns. It’s also probably best to take it slow in the beginning, so you give yourself a chance to learn the ropes and test what works and what doesn’t.

Call To Action – What to do to Boost Your Call To Action

A Call to Action is typically a statement or a pretty button at the end of a commercial website, email, or advertisement that asks the consumer or user to take some sort of action, be it clicking the button, clicking a link, filling out some sort of lead generation form, or making an immediate purchase right then and there.

Call to Actions are simply inducements for users to take some sort of action that will benefit, in some form or fashion, the owner of the website, either financially or by providing the owner information or content that is beneficial to them or their website. But just because a Call to Action is present on a website doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a ‘good’ or ‘effective’ Call to Action.

 A few things to ask yourself about your Call to Action, which is often how you, the website owner or advertiser, measure your click-through and conversion rates, include the questions:

1. Is your Call to Action compelling and/or persuasive?
2. Does the user know what they are being called to do? (Meaning is it clear?)
3. Do they know how to do it? (Click here, etc.)
4. Is the Call to Action visible? (Meaning is it clear on the page?)
5. Is the Call to Action urgent? (No, we don’t mean is it blinking, flashing, etc)
6. Does the action take the user directly where they need to go?

Call to Actions should also address the correct audience, and appeal to that audience in a way that they find appealing. This often requires a little more insight into your users, which requires making sure you know who your target audience is and what they find compelling.
Some of the compelling ‘rewards’ or ‘offers’ in Call to Actions are white papers, free e-books, certain types of downloads, free trials of software, your product or service, etc.
Just remember, it’s the whole package that needs to be compelling–the content on your webpage, email, or advertisement, the navigation, the user experience, and finally the Call to Action and the offer you’re providing your user once you actually get them to take the desired action.

Copywriting Basics
Copywriting is one of the most important things–if not the most important thing to do–if you’re going to have an effective website as well as execute effective marketing online. Copywriting is crucial to keeping your readers interested enough to stick to your website and not head somewhere else. Copywriting is crucial for Print as well, but we’re only going to be talking about online copywriting here for the purpose of brevity.

Copywriting for the World Wide Web (although I can’t remember when the last time someone actually called it that in public) requires taking certain actions into consideration, namely writing for the search engines via keywords. Copywriting online has become a little bit of art, a little bit of science, but isn’t really all that difficult to execute once you know what you’re doing. Depending on the goals of your website or blog, one of the first things you should be aware of are the keywords your users and/or client and prospective clients use when speaking about your product or service.

The key is, if you know what keywords they’re using to find you or your competitor’s products and/or services, you’ll be one step closer to getting their business. Copywriting, in this sense, is more about providing useful information to your target audience–after you’ve actually made it possible for them to find you. Do your due diligence when it comes to finding the keywords you’ll want to write your content around.

And don’t overdo it–meaning that if one of your keywords is ‘appliance,’ don’t try to trick the search engines by writing ‘appliance’ 500 times. Just write the copy as if you were writing an article for publication (because, really, that’s what you’re doing), and make sure you include the word ‘appliance’ a few times, in a normal context.

And, of course, make sure you’re writing compelling content. You want your readers and users to find your site informative, and you want to be their main source of information for all of their needs–at least when it comes to the product and/or service you’re offering yourself up to be as the one-stop shop for Thought Leadership.

And last but not least, edit your copy, making sure you’re not misspelling anything–because no one likes misspellings from their respected source.

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