Internet marketing can be a cat and mouse game with you being the cat and the customer being a very wily mouse. Internet denizens are a clever sort and if they see something on your web site, they will not hesitate to sign up for a membership and even agree to receive your promotional emails. But those tricky customers have ways to dodging your email advertising so even though you think you are advertising to them, your messages are actually vanishing off the face of the earth. So we have to be just as clever as well.
Knowing how customers think is a big part of being successful in your marketing plans. Internet customers are just like customers in the old marketing model. They are curious about promotions and they want to enjoy your give aways and dodge ongoing advertising. The cat and mouse game is to get them to want your advertisements by attaching them to things they want and get them to give you their email addresses and even to add your email identification to their preferred contacts list so your marketing emails fly right through their spam filters.
Much of what goes into web site design is making a web "place" that will draw customers to register for a "membership" or otherwise provide you with their real email address. When you develop a system that is working with actual visitors on your web site, you can then build a mailing list that is of much greater value than any list of email addresses you might buy from a mass mailing email service. Your email list is pure gold because it consists of real customers who actually had an interest in your web site and your product or service and who are likely to come back if your marketing is well done. Not only is that email contact list gold to you as a business, it is of great interest to other businesses in similar lines of business as you who will pay well to get their hands on that marketing email contacts list for the same reasons you value it.
However, those tricky customers of yours even have ways of stepping around your validation schemes and it all lies in the fact that anyone can set up as many email addresses online that they want. You know from your personal use of email that you have one or two primary email accounts, probably with your ISP that go directly to your desktop email software such as Microsoft Outlook. But most of us also set up two or three or many more other email accounts with services like HotMail, Yahoo and others. Its easy to set up an account on these services to use for games or to register for contests.
Those alternate services are where tricky online customers can trap your emails and actually give you the impression that you are advertising to them when you are not. A typical ploy by internet denizens is to send any incoming emails that are not personal or of immediate value to a yahoo, hotmail or other free email service. The result is that even if you harvested their email address when they signed on for a service or became a member of your web site, your advertising emails are being "dumped" into these alternative email inboxes which the customer has no intention of keeping up with.
The customer might check those email boxes every few weeks and just hit "delete all" on the inbox knowing that they don’t want to see any of those emails. And when they do that, there goes your advertising and you may never know what happened.
One way to try to bypass this problem is to make verification of email a part of the registration process. In that way, the customer has to log onto that email box to see a verification email and hit a link in that email to validate that it is a valid email address. But the final answer is to make your marketing emails so interesting and valuable to your customers that they don't want to "dump them" into a holding tank email because they want to see what you are going to send them. And when you get to that level of relationship with a customer, you really do have a gold email list that will result in much higher sales for your online business.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Selling and Teaching via Email
Probably the most reliable way to get around the problem of email delivery problems is to shift the desire for communications from the merchant, which is you, to the customer. By turning the tables so the customer wants your emails, the customer will take the steps to white list your email sending address to make sure he or she gets every single email you send. And the best way to create that desire is to give them something of value in their email each week.
People come to the internet for many things including entertainment, discussion, free stuff and diversion. But one of the most common things that people want is knowledge. Yo have a specialized knowledge you can offer to your customers that will not only benefit them but it can be used as a marketing tool to open communications to your customers email inboxes in a far more effective way than any blind email or mass mailing could ever do.
There are several ways to offer training courses online including ebooks or videos. But what is most effective for the sake of opening a long lasting communication channel to your customers is an email course in which you step by step lay out your specialized knowledge about your field of expertise over a period of twelve to fifteen installments.
Sometimes this kind of offering is called an autoresponder series because the function of an autoresponder software package can be helpful with distribution of the e-course. An autoresponder is a specialized service or type of software that either automatically responds to events or emails by sending out a response email or it can be used to generate email traffic on a schedule. So you can use an autoresponder to send the next installment of your email course to those who "subscribe" to it and know that it will go out without fail on the appointed day.
Now probably the biggest challenge of offering an autoresponder email course is how to create the course. Few of us are writers and while you may have the knowledge, you may have trouble composing that knowledge in the form of a course. There are a couple of ways to solve this problem…
. You could hire a ghostwriter to compose the course for you.. You could speak the course contents into a tape recorder and then have it transcribed into a written course that could be sent to customers in short email installments.. You could even have a friend "interview" you to draw that specialized knowledge out of you. The interviews could be fairly free form and then you could take the transcriptions of the interviews and organize them by topic into an e-course to offer your customers.
Once you have the contents laid out, don’t publish the course until you look it over to see where in the outlines you can integrate marketing messages. Many of the products or services you offer as part of your business are directly related to your specialized knowledge. So by including links to your shopping cart pages or to web pages that can lead customers to purchase decisions, the course is both instructional and useful for promoting your web site and sales as well.
The next step is to get the course into the hands of your users. The first candidates to become "students" are the active cyber citizens who spend a lot of time on your web site. So look at the regular posters on your message boards and blogs or citizens of a chat room on your site or contributors to your wiki and open conversations with them about offering a course.
You can also create multiple ways to allow your customers to subscribe to the course series. An online sign up is always a good choice because you can harvest their email address there and then open communications to their email and see to it that your business email is added to their favored contacts spam filter list so they do not see the courses disappear into their spam bucket each week.
As the customer enjoys learning from your series, the added benefit of getting them used to an active interaction with you and your web site is put in place. And the course can be viral to be passed along to friends and family members so it recruits new customers as well.
People come to the internet for many things including entertainment, discussion, free stuff and diversion. But one of the most common things that people want is knowledge. Yo have a specialized knowledge you can offer to your customers that will not only benefit them but it can be used as a marketing tool to open communications to your customers email inboxes in a far more effective way than any blind email or mass mailing could ever do.
There are several ways to offer training courses online including ebooks or videos. But what is most effective for the sake of opening a long lasting communication channel to your customers is an email course in which you step by step lay out your specialized knowledge about your field of expertise over a period of twelve to fifteen installments.
Sometimes this kind of offering is called an autoresponder series because the function of an autoresponder software package can be helpful with distribution of the e-course. An autoresponder is a specialized service or type of software that either automatically responds to events or emails by sending out a response email or it can be used to generate email traffic on a schedule. So you can use an autoresponder to send the next installment of your email course to those who "subscribe" to it and know that it will go out without fail on the appointed day.
Now probably the biggest challenge of offering an autoresponder email course is how to create the course. Few of us are writers and while you may have the knowledge, you may have trouble composing that knowledge in the form of a course. There are a couple of ways to solve this problem…
. You could hire a ghostwriter to compose the course for you.. You could speak the course contents into a tape recorder and then have it transcribed into a written course that could be sent to customers in short email installments.. You could even have a friend "interview" you to draw that specialized knowledge out of you. The interviews could be fairly free form and then you could take the transcriptions of the interviews and organize them by topic into an e-course to offer your customers.
Once you have the contents laid out, don’t publish the course until you look it over to see where in the outlines you can integrate marketing messages. Many of the products or services you offer as part of your business are directly related to your specialized knowledge. So by including links to your shopping cart pages or to web pages that can lead customers to purchase decisions, the course is both instructional and useful for promoting your web site and sales as well.
The next step is to get the course into the hands of your users. The first candidates to become "students" are the active cyber citizens who spend a lot of time on your web site. So look at the regular posters on your message boards and blogs or citizens of a chat room on your site or contributors to your wiki and open conversations with them about offering a course.
You can also create multiple ways to allow your customers to subscribe to the course series. An online sign up is always a good choice because you can harvest their email address there and then open communications to their email and see to it that your business email is added to their favored contacts spam filter list so they do not see the courses disappear into their spam bucket each week.
As the customer enjoys learning from your series, the added benefit of getting them used to an active interaction with you and your web site is put in place. And the course can be viral to be passed along to friends and family members so it recruits new customers as well.
Viral Marketing Trumps Email Deliverability
The internet has turned another corner in the last few years. This should come as no surprise. The one constant about the internet is change. But the changes that have become a reality in the last few years have made fundamental changes to how we view the internet, how we use it and what we expect when we go on a web site and interact with the web site owners any more.
From wiki control over web sites to YouTube to social networks, the emphasis of the internet has shifted from the operators of web sites to the users. And with this change the way those of us involved in using the internet for marketing have begun to change the way we do business as well.
The model for internet marketing that predates the shift to the WEB 2.0 methodology was heavily dependent on email as the primary line of communication with the customer. Next to online sales, email was the way customers sent in inquiries and the way customer support was handled. And other than online advertising, email was the most sophisticated method for internet marketing we had at our disposal.
Over time, however, the use of email for marketing began to see abuses in the form of spam. More and more the need to protect customers from spam communications has so dominated the world of email marketing that has become a cost burden for online merchants and customers alike and it has slowed or stopped email deliverability to the point that it is uncertain on any given business day whether you can depend on email to keep your business running or not.
As a result, a discipline and a methodology for circumventing email delivery interference points such as spam filters has imposed yet another new area of online knowledge that takes time away from running your business so you can focus on working with ISPs and learning the methods of spam control so you can carefully construct your emails so at least they will get to your customers. But the methods you have to use to jump through hoops to get your marketing emails to customers have come to dominate email marketing so heavily that the message and the communication has almost taken a back seat to just getting the email delivered.
It is interesting that the big changes in how the internet operates in some ways are going to retire this cumbersome email system before we come up with a solution to the email delivery problem. There are some very sophisticated internet marketing techniques that are showing themselves to be highly effective that never depend on email at all. And as modern internet merchants turn to these methods, the problem of email delivery may never be solved as much as it is ignored and allowed to die out on its own.
Viral marketing is one way modern internet marketers are recruiting new customers and getting the word out about products and services by tapping the power of video and the instinct internet denizens have for downloading free stuff. Viral marketing is a method where the merchant creates a download that is desirable. A funny video, a musical performance or an ebook make great viral marketing tools. But along with the free "toy", the download carries the marketing message of the merchant and is downloaded into the internet network of users quickly and with no cost to the merchant or the user.
The viral part occurs naturally as users upload the video or link to it on other web sites or share it with each other on blogs or through email. The marketing message spreads from customer to customer, like a virus spreads the flu and as it spreads, it directs new customers back to the merchant web site to become active customers.
This is a powerful marketing technique that depends on nothing more than human nature for success. And unlike the cumbersome email system, viral marketing has its own way of avoiding "spam", it is fast and it is cost free. But above all the one trait that makes viral marketing trump email marketing as the means to success for the future of internet marking is a simple principle that always attracts business people. It works.
From wiki control over web sites to YouTube to social networks, the emphasis of the internet has shifted from the operators of web sites to the users. And with this change the way those of us involved in using the internet for marketing have begun to change the way we do business as well.
The model for internet marketing that predates the shift to the WEB 2.0 methodology was heavily dependent on email as the primary line of communication with the customer. Next to online sales, email was the way customers sent in inquiries and the way customer support was handled. And other than online advertising, email was the most sophisticated method for internet marketing we had at our disposal.
Over time, however, the use of email for marketing began to see abuses in the form of spam. More and more the need to protect customers from spam communications has so dominated the world of email marketing that has become a cost burden for online merchants and customers alike and it has slowed or stopped email deliverability to the point that it is uncertain on any given business day whether you can depend on email to keep your business running or not.
As a result, a discipline and a methodology for circumventing email delivery interference points such as spam filters has imposed yet another new area of online knowledge that takes time away from running your business so you can focus on working with ISPs and learning the methods of spam control so you can carefully construct your emails so at least they will get to your customers. But the methods you have to use to jump through hoops to get your marketing emails to customers have come to dominate email marketing so heavily that the message and the communication has almost taken a back seat to just getting the email delivered.
It is interesting that the big changes in how the internet operates in some ways are going to retire this cumbersome email system before we come up with a solution to the email delivery problem. There are some very sophisticated internet marketing techniques that are showing themselves to be highly effective that never depend on email at all. And as modern internet merchants turn to these methods, the problem of email delivery may never be solved as much as it is ignored and allowed to die out on its own.
Viral marketing is one way modern internet marketers are recruiting new customers and getting the word out about products and services by tapping the power of video and the instinct internet denizens have for downloading free stuff. Viral marketing is a method where the merchant creates a download that is desirable. A funny video, a musical performance or an ebook make great viral marketing tools. But along with the free "toy", the download carries the marketing message of the merchant and is downloaded into the internet network of users quickly and with no cost to the merchant or the user.
The viral part occurs naturally as users upload the video or link to it on other web sites or share it with each other on blogs or through email. The marketing message spreads from customer to customer, like a virus spreads the flu and as it spreads, it directs new customers back to the merchant web site to become active customers.
This is a powerful marketing technique that depends on nothing more than human nature for success. And unlike the cumbersome email system, viral marketing has its own way of avoiding "spam", it is fast and it is cost free. But above all the one trait that makes viral marketing trump email marketing as the means to success for the future of internet marking is a simple principle that always attracts business people. It works.
The Only Real Email Deliverability Sure Thing
If you ever looked at the hundred of spam messages that get caught in your email filter, a common reaction you might have to the ploys these marketers are trying is "They must think I am stupid." What is particularly amazing is how hard email mass merchandisers (spam artists) go to great lengths to overcome spam filter methods to get their email into your email box but how little effort they invest in to not get deleted once they get there.
I was watching spam one day and I noticed a couple tricks that the marketers were trying to use. One was to include long strings of unrelated words on the theory that some of those phrases will draw the customers attention so you will open the email. But in the process the email was gibberish and it was immediately deleted so all that hard work was for nothing. Another ploy was to use a image of the message so that it could not be scanned for flag words that would be caught by a spam filter. It didn’t make the promotion any more appealing even if it did get to my email box and it got deleted.
The reason none of those emails ever work is that those marketers have no reputation with me. And that one word "reputation" is at the heart of how to overcome the deliverability problem and assure that a greater percentage of your emails gets all the way to your customers. To make sure that happens, you have to build trust with the customer. You have to build relationship so when they see your email come in, they want to read it. That takes work and it takes ongoing effort not only to build relationship with those customers but to maintain it. But it is the only real email delivery sure thing that will work every time. A good email reputation means more delivered emails and more sales. And when that reputation is hurt, so are your sales.
Have you noticed how often when you sign up to use an online service, they boldly display a guarantee that your email will not be used for promotional purposes or sold. There is one reason they are doing that. That company wants to build trust with you so if they contact you, you will trust their email and so you will continue to give them your private information for an ongoing online commerce relationship. That "friendship" between customer and merchant is pure gold to any online business and that is the kind of relationships you must build with your customers to make email deliverability issues become a thing of the past.
Any study of the real experts who are trying to solve the email deliverability problem will focus on this one issue - email reputation, trust and authentication. Internet customers take it seriously because to have access to their real email box, you have to deserve it. And to deserve the right to sell to a customer, you have to establish trust. They have to trust you that you are "for real" and not an internet scam. They have to trust you that you will offer them value both in the product or service that is your business but even in the email you send to them regularly. And they have to trust you that you wont betray their trust by spamming them or giving them over to spam operators who will trod on that trusted relationship to try to get a cheap sale.
You probably remember as a youngster your father telling you that trust is not something you can ask for. It is something that is earned. But you don’t just earn it once, you continue to earn it over and over again every day. That is what you must make your corporate ethic when dealing with the customers you sell to online. Treat them with respect and earn their trust. And if you do that, they will reward your respect with internet traffic on your web site and with sales. And that is how to prosper in an online world.
I was watching spam one day and I noticed a couple tricks that the marketers were trying to use. One was to include long strings of unrelated words on the theory that some of those phrases will draw the customers attention so you will open the email. But in the process the email was gibberish and it was immediately deleted so all that hard work was for nothing. Another ploy was to use a image of the message so that it could not be scanned for flag words that would be caught by a spam filter. It didn’t make the promotion any more appealing even if it did get to my email box and it got deleted.
The reason none of those emails ever work is that those marketers have no reputation with me. And that one word "reputation" is at the heart of how to overcome the deliverability problem and assure that a greater percentage of your emails gets all the way to your customers. To make sure that happens, you have to build trust with the customer. You have to build relationship so when they see your email come in, they want to read it. That takes work and it takes ongoing effort not only to build relationship with those customers but to maintain it. But it is the only real email delivery sure thing that will work every time. A good email reputation means more delivered emails and more sales. And when that reputation is hurt, so are your sales.
Have you noticed how often when you sign up to use an online service, they boldly display a guarantee that your email will not be used for promotional purposes or sold. There is one reason they are doing that. That company wants to build trust with you so if they contact you, you will trust their email and so you will continue to give them your private information for an ongoing online commerce relationship. That "friendship" between customer and merchant is pure gold to any online business and that is the kind of relationships you must build with your customers to make email deliverability issues become a thing of the past.
Any study of the real experts who are trying to solve the email deliverability problem will focus on this one issue - email reputation, trust and authentication. Internet customers take it seriously because to have access to their real email box, you have to deserve it. And to deserve the right to sell to a customer, you have to establish trust. They have to trust you that you are "for real" and not an internet scam. They have to trust you that you will offer them value both in the product or service that is your business but even in the email you send to them regularly. And they have to trust you that you wont betray their trust by spamming them or giving them over to spam operators who will trod on that trusted relationship to try to get a cheap sale.
You probably remember as a youngster your father telling you that trust is not something you can ask for. It is something that is earned. But you don’t just earn it once, you continue to earn it over and over again every day. That is what you must make your corporate ethic when dealing with the customers you sell to online. Treat them with respect and earn their trust. And if you do that, they will reward your respect with internet traffic on your web site and with sales. And that is how to prosper in an online world.
WEB 2.0 to the Rescue
You may have heard about WEB 2.0 but perhaps you thought it was some trendy new toy that would go by the wayside like lots of them do. Instead it represents a revolution in how the internet works. And to an internet retailer or merchant such as you and I, it represents a solution to one of the biggest problems we face in staying in touch with our customers and that is email deliverability problems.
The reason WEB 2.0 is going to come to the rescue in saving us from our email deliverability problems lies in how it basically changes the way people use and view the internet and internet communications in particular. Before WEB 2.0, if you wanted to communicate with your customers, you had to take the communication to them. Hence you put together an email that you sent out via a mass mailing or using a service and you hoped that you would hear back from some percentage of your customers about this most recent promotion.
To a large extent under that system, you never knew if the customer got your email or if they took advantage of what you have to offer because of the email you spent money to send out. But a bigger problem that has grown bigger and bigger with each passing year is that spam and spam filter software that is designed to protect individuals from the potentially dangerous effects of spam also have created a huge problem of email delivery verification for online merchants to contend with.
As long as the formula is that the merchant must take marketing to the customer, email delivery problems will be the bane of the internet merchant's existence. That is why WEB 2.0 is going to come to the rescue by changing the basic assumption of how we communicate to customers. With WEB 2.0, you no longer have to take marketing to the customer because the way the internet now works is customers come to you where you can interact and market to them dynamically on your web site where they might "hang out" for extended periods of time.
WEB 2.0 and how it works can be seen in some of the most explosive new internet services of the last five years including YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia. These web sites are the first fruits of a redesign of the internet that makes cyberspace a place where the internet population create the content and how customers interact on your web site is as important or more important than what you put on the web site yourself.
WEB 2.0 has the potential to take email out of the marketing loop entirely. If you retrofit your web site to accommodate the interactive concepts you see used on Wikis, on YouTube and on MySpace, you can create an environment so driven by customers that it is an ideal environment for marketing, for customer communications and for sales. You can use this kind of online community setting to place your sales force in a cyber sales room to casually interact with customers and guide them to purchase decisions in a low key, no pressure way that is just what customers like in an online community.
One of the great innovations of the WEB 2.0 approach to web site design is that you can actually link videos or web site pages from other web sites and make them part of your own. Get familiar with the way modern web sites work and interact with your web development gurus so they can guide you in how to use WEB 2.0 methodologies to bring customers to your sales setting rather than having to go to them with email marketing campaigns. And when you have successfully made that transition, you may never have to worry about email deliverability issues again.
The reason WEB 2.0 is going to come to the rescue in saving us from our email deliverability problems lies in how it basically changes the way people use and view the internet and internet communications in particular. Before WEB 2.0, if you wanted to communicate with your customers, you had to take the communication to them. Hence you put together an email that you sent out via a mass mailing or using a service and you hoped that you would hear back from some percentage of your customers about this most recent promotion.
To a large extent under that system, you never knew if the customer got your email or if they took advantage of what you have to offer because of the email you spent money to send out. But a bigger problem that has grown bigger and bigger with each passing year is that spam and spam filter software that is designed to protect individuals from the potentially dangerous effects of spam also have created a huge problem of email delivery verification for online merchants to contend with.
As long as the formula is that the merchant must take marketing to the customer, email delivery problems will be the bane of the internet merchant's existence. That is why WEB 2.0 is going to come to the rescue by changing the basic assumption of how we communicate to customers. With WEB 2.0, you no longer have to take marketing to the customer because the way the internet now works is customers come to you where you can interact and market to them dynamically on your web site where they might "hang out" for extended periods of time.
WEB 2.0 and how it works can be seen in some of the most explosive new internet services of the last five years including YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia. These web sites are the first fruits of a redesign of the internet that makes cyberspace a place where the internet population create the content and how customers interact on your web site is as important or more important than what you put on the web site yourself.
WEB 2.0 has the potential to take email out of the marketing loop entirely. If you retrofit your web site to accommodate the interactive concepts you see used on Wikis, on YouTube and on MySpace, you can create an environment so driven by customers that it is an ideal environment for marketing, for customer communications and for sales. You can use this kind of online community setting to place your sales force in a cyber sales room to casually interact with customers and guide them to purchase decisions in a low key, no pressure way that is just what customers like in an online community.
One of the great innovations of the WEB 2.0 approach to web site design is that you can actually link videos or web site pages from other web sites and make them part of your own. Get familiar with the way modern web sites work and interact with your web development gurus so they can guide you in how to use WEB 2.0 methodologies to bring customers to your sales setting rather than having to go to them with email marketing campaigns. And when you have successfully made that transition, you may never have to worry about email deliverability issues again.
Making Your Customers Feel Special
The idea of marketing to a specialized niche of very active customers and then using that base to recruit in a viral way is new to the internet but one that goes way back in the non internet world of marketing. It is well known that if you create an elite group of dedicated customers, they will become a recruitment army for your business and become your marketing team that works for free without even knowing they are doing so.
This approach to marketing is not as focused on email communications as many of our internet marketing efforts were ten years ago. But that is a good thing for two reasons. The first reason is that dynamic marketing, meaning selling through a relationship model is far more effective and yields a higher per sale basket total as well as a much higher incidence of repeat sales than cold call selling and it is far less frustrating.
The second reason is that using email as the backbone of your sales program has become more and more problematic because of the influence of spam and spam filters which have made the free flow of marketing emails much more difficult to manage. Because spam filtering has become so aggressive and so successful, email delivery of marketing material is harder to do and takes a greater investment of time and ongoing knowledge that pulls you away from your customers and from your businesses. So the migration to dynamic selling and away from cold call and mass marketing email techniques is a natural evolution of the internet marketing model in the new century.
So the online experience of your customer takes on a greater importance in your marketing plan. But you will find that devoting more time and money to building a web "place" that your customers participate in actively will be far more rewarding than any scattershot approach to email marketing could ever be even before the eruption of spam which made email delivery such a nightmare.
One way to give your customers the feel of being part of your organization is to build a specialized membership area of your web site that customers must make an extra effort to become part of. In fact, many online retailers actually charge a small fee to be part of this membership site. That is effective because the fee gives your members the sensation of being part of a closed community and the revenue is good for your cash flow.
Your customers who chose to become part of the membership area of your web site should get some special privileges and rewards for their elevated status. So you might create a discount card that creates a desire to spend more in your online store only for those customers who are part of the elite membership area. Your customers will think they are getting something very special when in fact, all you are doing is exchanging a small part of your mark up for greater volume of sales which is always a good trade off for you as a retailer.
One of the big values of creating a membership area is that those who populate that membership can become part of the team to make contributions about future product or service offerings. This is tremendously valuable to your development teams because the more you "pick the brains" of your customers, the more you will offer products or services that are going to be a success when they hit the market.
You will see a greater sense of brand loyalty grow out of the people who enjoy exclusive membership in your reserved area of your web site. Make it a point to make that part of the site look elegant and luxurious. Its all just graphics but in cyberspace, graphics have a reality all their own. And don't take your eye off of the goal of using the membership area for recruitment of new customers through referrals or to take marginal customers and make them devotees as well. A few gift memberships can go a long way toward accomplishing those goals.
This approach to marketing is not as focused on email communications as many of our internet marketing efforts were ten years ago. But that is a good thing for two reasons. The first reason is that dynamic marketing, meaning selling through a relationship model is far more effective and yields a higher per sale basket total as well as a much higher incidence of repeat sales than cold call selling and it is far less frustrating.
The second reason is that using email as the backbone of your sales program has become more and more problematic because of the influence of spam and spam filters which have made the free flow of marketing emails much more difficult to manage. Because spam filtering has become so aggressive and so successful, email delivery of marketing material is harder to do and takes a greater investment of time and ongoing knowledge that pulls you away from your customers and from your businesses. So the migration to dynamic selling and away from cold call and mass marketing email techniques is a natural evolution of the internet marketing model in the new century.
So the online experience of your customer takes on a greater importance in your marketing plan. But you will find that devoting more time and money to building a web "place" that your customers participate in actively will be far more rewarding than any scattershot approach to email marketing could ever be even before the eruption of spam which made email delivery such a nightmare.
One way to give your customers the feel of being part of your organization is to build a specialized membership area of your web site that customers must make an extra effort to become part of. In fact, many online retailers actually charge a small fee to be part of this membership site. That is effective because the fee gives your members the sensation of being part of a closed community and the revenue is good for your cash flow.
Your customers who chose to become part of the membership area of your web site should get some special privileges and rewards for their elevated status. So you might create a discount card that creates a desire to spend more in your online store only for those customers who are part of the elite membership area. Your customers will think they are getting something very special when in fact, all you are doing is exchanging a small part of your mark up for greater volume of sales which is always a good trade off for you as a retailer.
One of the big values of creating a membership area is that those who populate that membership can become part of the team to make contributions about future product or service offerings. This is tremendously valuable to your development teams because the more you "pick the brains" of your customers, the more you will offer products or services that are going to be a success when they hit the market.
You will see a greater sense of brand loyalty grow out of the people who enjoy exclusive membership in your reserved area of your web site. Make it a point to make that part of the site look elegant and luxurious. Its all just graphics but in cyberspace, graphics have a reality all their own. And don't take your eye off of the goal of using the membership area for recruitment of new customers through referrals or to take marginal customers and make them devotees as well. A few gift memberships can go a long way toward accomplishing those goals.
Smart Money is On Web Site Traffic
There may be nothing more frustrating when you are trying to build a strong internet marketing plan than to see your email promotions fall apart because of poor email deliverability. The formula of marketing is one that you should be able to believe in.
. You know you have a good product or service that customers will benefit from and that will bring you repeat business once customer relationships are found.. You know there is a market niche out there that are highly likely to patronize your business.. You know that there is a market need for your product or service so once the customers are aware of what you have to offer, sales potential is significant.. Marketing techniques should work to bring customers on board to get the sales moving and take your business to the next level.
Small wonder that you get frustrated because with all the elements in place, the problem is your marketing emails are not getting to the customers. So you have to spend additional money on email delivery monitoring and management services and additional time establishing relationships with ISPs just to get permission to push your emails through to the customers.
There really is no equivalent blockage in the non internet marketing world. It is as though you put a billboard up on the busiest intersection in town where customers you know can use your services drive every day only to find they closed the freeway and none of the customers will see the billboard. But you have to pay for it anyway.
Maybe it is time to rethink the equation. For one thing, email is one of the oldest forms of internet communications there is. Maybe it is too old. It is old enough that a culture of fear has been built around the whole spam problem and sophisticated tools are in use by customers, ISPs and spammers all at war about whether scam artists should be able to abuse internet customers through email.
But something has changed right under the feet of email scammers that has also altered the formula for internet marketing entirely. And that change may have made email as a less important internet marketing tool. The thing that has changed is WEB 2.0 which has changed the formula for how people use the internet and how people market on it as well. Because WEB 2.0 has changed the approach to the internet to make web site more than just online brochures but living "places" where people interact and the web visitor becomes a vital part of the web site itself, that changes how we might approach marketing to web savvy customers.
As odd as it may seem, email may be too slow as a mode of communication with your customers in this day of instant messaging, message boards and voice over internet communications. It isn't that people don’t use email any more because they do. But with the imposition of so many restrictions causing email deliverability to become a nightmare, a shift in focus to direct marketing to a very active internet community on your web site is in order.
This means that instead of throwing good money after bad trying to fix the email deliverability problem, maybe email marketing is no longer where the smart money should go. Instead the smart money might be better used to update your web site, to make your online "presence" a real place and to build and then capitalize on live and active web traffic as a far more dynamic way to conduct your marketing campaign.
. You know you have a good product or service that customers will benefit from and that will bring you repeat business once customer relationships are found.. You know there is a market niche out there that are highly likely to patronize your business.. You know that there is a market need for your product or service so once the customers are aware of what you have to offer, sales potential is significant.. Marketing techniques should work to bring customers on board to get the sales moving and take your business to the next level.
Small wonder that you get frustrated because with all the elements in place, the problem is your marketing emails are not getting to the customers. So you have to spend additional money on email delivery monitoring and management services and additional time establishing relationships with ISPs just to get permission to push your emails through to the customers.
There really is no equivalent blockage in the non internet marketing world. It is as though you put a billboard up on the busiest intersection in town where customers you know can use your services drive every day only to find they closed the freeway and none of the customers will see the billboard. But you have to pay for it anyway.
Maybe it is time to rethink the equation. For one thing, email is one of the oldest forms of internet communications there is. Maybe it is too old. It is old enough that a culture of fear has been built around the whole spam problem and sophisticated tools are in use by customers, ISPs and spammers all at war about whether scam artists should be able to abuse internet customers through email.
But something has changed right under the feet of email scammers that has also altered the formula for internet marketing entirely. And that change may have made email as a less important internet marketing tool. The thing that has changed is WEB 2.0 which has changed the formula for how people use the internet and how people market on it as well. Because WEB 2.0 has changed the approach to the internet to make web site more than just online brochures but living "places" where people interact and the web visitor becomes a vital part of the web site itself, that changes how we might approach marketing to web savvy customers.
As odd as it may seem, email may be too slow as a mode of communication with your customers in this day of instant messaging, message boards and voice over internet communications. It isn't that people don’t use email any more because they do. But with the imposition of so many restrictions causing email deliverability to become a nightmare, a shift in focus to direct marketing to a very active internet community on your web site is in order.
This means that instead of throwing good money after bad trying to fix the email deliverability problem, maybe email marketing is no longer where the smart money should go. Instead the smart money might be better used to update your web site, to make your online "presence" a real place and to build and then capitalize on live and active web traffic as a far more dynamic way to conduct your marketing campaign.
Dump the Mass Mailings
What if you could drop a marketing email into 100,000 email boxes in one day and have 100,000 potential new customers see your marketing message and possibly become long term customers of your internet business?
That sounds pretty enticing doesn't it? That is the basic marketing strategy that many internet marketers have tried to use to build their online business. This is a methodology commonly called "Mass Mailings",. That is the polite word for this technique. The less complimentary term that email recipients use for mass marketing emails is simply "spam".
Mass mailing marketing has been big business on the internet. And it is unfair to say that it has been used exclusively by scam artists or pyramid scheme operators. Many legitimate business have tried mass mailings to build their internet business on the promise that the companies who offer these services have harvested tens of thousands of valid email addresses that they will send your marketing message to for a small fee.
Compared to the amount of emails that will go out, the fee seems fair. The marketing formula for success is also a reasonable one. Usually the fee for the mailing can be offset by a small number of sales, perhaps less than ten. And with 100,000 emails going out, the expectation that you might get a response of 100-1000 inquiries that could result in 10 sales is not unreasonable at all.
The problem is that for every 1000 customers who may have an interest in your product or service, you will have antagonized 99,000 others who see your email as nothing more than electronic junk mail otherwise known as spam. The spam epidemic has reached a level of crisis precisely because mass mailing services and software have made it possible for good business, scam artists and even virus producers to spread their bad emails to a vast audience if the spam is left untouched.
The result is that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to fight the spam epidemic. These companies sell software to you to fight spam emails by keeping up on the most up to date spamming methods and catching bad emails and sending them to your deleted box or a spam folder for future deletion. This sets in motion a vicious cycle of one one-upmanship in which the spam operators find ways around the spam filters and the spam filter providers continue to update their software to stop the newest tricks of the spam operators.
It has become a huge mess and the worst part about it is that you as a valid internet marketer of a valid product or service only want a reliable method to communicate with new and existing customers. Mass mailing seems like one way to do that. But when you decide to try your hand at sending a mass mailing email, you get in the middle of the spam war and you are then faced with dealing with sophisticated email delivery hindrance systems that are there to fight the problem of spam.
So what can we do about trying to build our online businesses with this huge battle causing serious disruptions to email deliverability? For one thing, abandon the use of mass mailings entirely. They don't work and they put you in the distasteful company of spammers and internet criminals.
There are far better ways to communicate with customers such as web site memberships, newsletters and contests that the customer can opt in on. Build your relationships with the customer from the customer out and you will be able to avoid the entire spam deliverability wars and side step the email deliverability issues as well.
That sounds pretty enticing doesn't it? That is the basic marketing strategy that many internet marketers have tried to use to build their online business. This is a methodology commonly called "Mass Mailings",. That is the polite word for this technique. The less complimentary term that email recipients use for mass marketing emails is simply "spam".
Mass mailing marketing has been big business on the internet. And it is unfair to say that it has been used exclusively by scam artists or pyramid scheme operators. Many legitimate business have tried mass mailings to build their internet business on the promise that the companies who offer these services have harvested tens of thousands of valid email addresses that they will send your marketing message to for a small fee.
Compared to the amount of emails that will go out, the fee seems fair. The marketing formula for success is also a reasonable one. Usually the fee for the mailing can be offset by a small number of sales, perhaps less than ten. And with 100,000 emails going out, the expectation that you might get a response of 100-1000 inquiries that could result in 10 sales is not unreasonable at all.
The problem is that for every 1000 customers who may have an interest in your product or service, you will have antagonized 99,000 others who see your email as nothing more than electronic junk mail otherwise known as spam. The spam epidemic has reached a level of crisis precisely because mass mailing services and software have made it possible for good business, scam artists and even virus producers to spread their bad emails to a vast audience if the spam is left untouched.
The result is that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to fight the spam epidemic. These companies sell software to you to fight spam emails by keeping up on the most up to date spamming methods and catching bad emails and sending them to your deleted box or a spam folder for future deletion. This sets in motion a vicious cycle of one one-upmanship in which the spam operators find ways around the spam filters and the spam filter providers continue to update their software to stop the newest tricks of the spam operators.
It has become a huge mess and the worst part about it is that you as a valid internet marketer of a valid product or service only want a reliable method to communicate with new and existing customers. Mass mailing seems like one way to do that. But when you decide to try your hand at sending a mass mailing email, you get in the middle of the spam war and you are then faced with dealing with sophisticated email delivery hindrance systems that are there to fight the problem of spam.
So what can we do about trying to build our online businesses with this huge battle causing serious disruptions to email deliverability? For one thing, abandon the use of mass mailings entirely. They don't work and they put you in the distasteful company of spammers and internet criminals.
There are far better ways to communicate with customers such as web site memberships, newsletters and contests that the customer can opt in on. Build your relationships with the customer from the customer out and you will be able to avoid the entire spam deliverability wars and side step the email deliverability issues as well.
Draw Customers to You Through Web Events
Email delivery problems has put an urgency to the priority of changing how we communicate with customers on the internet. At one time, you may have conducted virtually all of your marketing and customer interactions via email. Not that long ago, there was a time when email was so dominant as a form of communication that we all depended on it almost exclusively because it was the only thing that was truly interactive about the internet.
Two developments in how the internet works has changed that scenario significantly. From a negative point of view, email delivery has continued to grow as a bigger and bigger problem every year. That means that more and more online merchants have struggled with how undependable email communications has become. The problem, of course is that spam as relentlessly eroded how much anyone can depend on email except for private communications. So to avoid having to make email delivery a second career, many online merchants and retailers are looking for new and up to date modes of communication to replace email.
The second development is more positive and it is the WEB 2.0 evolution of the internet which has changed how the internet works. Whereas business web sites used to be nothing more than online brochures, all web sites are now migrating to the WEB 2.0 model which means web sites themselves are seats of customer communications which takes the emphasis off of email as a sole line of communication with customers.
These developments bode well for providing an escape for online merchants with the cumbersome overhead of trying to keep up with email delivery issues from month to month. But it doesn’t mean you will abandon email entirely. The one aspect of email that has yet to be totally replaced is its ability to remind a customer of your products and services. Just having a highly interactive web site is good but internet denizens are notoriously short in the memory department and they need a reason to come back to your web site from time to time.
A web event is a great way to create excitement and to make your customers want to come to your web site at a specified time to be part of the big event. A big sale, a special speaker, a musical performance or an interview with a notable celebrity from your field of expertise is just the thing to draw people to your web site to experience something new and interesting.
The more you can get away from using email reminders and communications, the more you get away from having to worry about deliverability issues. This is especially true with a web event. If you go to the effort and expense of scheduling a big event for your users, to have email deliverability problems stall or lose your reminders resulting in a failed event would be a disaster.
So to build your clientele for the big event, promote it interactively on your web site. You can use your blog, message boards or chat rooms for promotion and to create excitement. Then from each of those web site pages, take interested customers to a sign up page for the event and do an email verification of their sign up. That verification can be used to encourage those customers to add a specific email address to their preferred users list. Once that is in place, you have much more leverage to email your users about this and other events and drive your customers back to your web site for events, sales and for you to do your marketing dynamically and interactively, the WEB 2.0 way.
Two developments in how the internet works has changed that scenario significantly. From a negative point of view, email delivery has continued to grow as a bigger and bigger problem every year. That means that more and more online merchants have struggled with how undependable email communications has become. The problem, of course is that spam as relentlessly eroded how much anyone can depend on email except for private communications. So to avoid having to make email delivery a second career, many online merchants and retailers are looking for new and up to date modes of communication to replace email.
The second development is more positive and it is the WEB 2.0 evolution of the internet which has changed how the internet works. Whereas business web sites used to be nothing more than online brochures, all web sites are now migrating to the WEB 2.0 model which means web sites themselves are seats of customer communications which takes the emphasis off of email as a sole line of communication with customers.
These developments bode well for providing an escape for online merchants with the cumbersome overhead of trying to keep up with email delivery issues from month to month. But it doesn’t mean you will abandon email entirely. The one aspect of email that has yet to be totally replaced is its ability to remind a customer of your products and services. Just having a highly interactive web site is good but internet denizens are notoriously short in the memory department and they need a reason to come back to your web site from time to time.
A web event is a great way to create excitement and to make your customers want to come to your web site at a specified time to be part of the big event. A big sale, a special speaker, a musical performance or an interview with a notable celebrity from your field of expertise is just the thing to draw people to your web site to experience something new and interesting.
The more you can get away from using email reminders and communications, the more you get away from having to worry about deliverability issues. This is especially true with a web event. If you go to the effort and expense of scheduling a big event for your users, to have email deliverability problems stall or lose your reminders resulting in a failed event would be a disaster.
So to build your clientele for the big event, promote it interactively on your web site. You can use your blog, message boards or chat rooms for promotion and to create excitement. Then from each of those web site pages, take interested customers to a sign up page for the event and do an email verification of their sign up. That verification can be used to encourage those customers to add a specific email address to their preferred users list. Once that is in place, you have much more leverage to email your users about this and other events and drive your customers back to your web site for events, sales and for you to do your marketing dynamically and interactively, the WEB 2.0 way.
Don’t Look Like Spam
There is an art to email delivery that really is not that difficult to understand when you put your private email communications in context. Most of us encounter email delivery problems when we start using email for marketing purposes and we are sending out a lot of emails to many customers. You may have noticed that very rarely do you encounter email deliverability problems with your private emails to friends or even with business emails.
That is because spam filter software has become very adept at telling the difference between a professional email that could be spam and private communications. So naturally that tells us something important about how to go about avoiding email delivery problems when constructing marketing communications. You just have to work to make sure your marketing emails do not look like spam and look more like a private email so they fly right through spam filters and get to your customers.
In addition your marketing emails must act like private emails. That means if you have a well developed mailing list of perhaps several thousand of email addresses or more, do not manage that from your private email service. For a mailing of that size, it is best to utilize the services of a professional autoresponder service. The cost is nominal and could be by the mailing. They can send out your emails in such a way as to not draw the alarms of the spam filter software guardians. And they often offer additional services such as deliverability reports, retransmits of bounced emails and reports of bad email addresses that can save you a lot of time and make you more efficient as well.
One of the ways that spam filters often identify spam is by the level of graphics that is used in the marketing email. While very attractive emails do send a message of professionalism to the customer, they don’t send that message if they end up at the bottom of a spam quarantine folder. So avoid the use of graphics altogether. Just say what you have to say to your customer and then draw them to your web site with a link where they can see your professional graphics.
Have you ever scanned a full spam filter holding folder? If you have not, you should because it will tell you a lot about how spammers write. Just by scanning twenty or thirty of these spam messages, you can get a feel for the techniques used by spammers and you can avoid those methods in writing your own marketing emails. This falls under the "know thy enemy" category of doing battle with email delivery problems because it is the spammer that is the enemy here.
When writing an email that will go out to your customers or prospective customers, think of that customer as one person whom you are writing to as a friend. Be informal and avoid a lot of marketing "hype" and hyperbole. Spam filters are good at "listening" for the language of spam artists so if you write like a person writing to a person, it is very likely your email will go right on through because it will not be flagged as marketing at all. And the other benefit of writing like this to your customers is that it is a warm and personal style that will work well in communicating to customers.
Make a hobby of keeping up with how spam emailers work and how their messages change as they learn to get around spam filters. The spam filter businesses will be changing with them so be aware of any new trends in this stange part of cyberspace communication so you can alter how you create your marketing emails so you make sure your communications with your customers never look like spam.
That is because spam filter software has become very adept at telling the difference between a professional email that could be spam and private communications. So naturally that tells us something important about how to go about avoiding email delivery problems when constructing marketing communications. You just have to work to make sure your marketing emails do not look like spam and look more like a private email so they fly right through spam filters and get to your customers.
In addition your marketing emails must act like private emails. That means if you have a well developed mailing list of perhaps several thousand of email addresses or more, do not manage that from your private email service. For a mailing of that size, it is best to utilize the services of a professional autoresponder service. The cost is nominal and could be by the mailing. They can send out your emails in such a way as to not draw the alarms of the spam filter software guardians. And they often offer additional services such as deliverability reports, retransmits of bounced emails and reports of bad email addresses that can save you a lot of time and make you more efficient as well.
One of the ways that spam filters often identify spam is by the level of graphics that is used in the marketing email. While very attractive emails do send a message of professionalism to the customer, they don’t send that message if they end up at the bottom of a spam quarantine folder. So avoid the use of graphics altogether. Just say what you have to say to your customer and then draw them to your web site with a link where they can see your professional graphics.
Have you ever scanned a full spam filter holding folder? If you have not, you should because it will tell you a lot about how spammers write. Just by scanning twenty or thirty of these spam messages, you can get a feel for the techniques used by spammers and you can avoid those methods in writing your own marketing emails. This falls under the "know thy enemy" category of doing battle with email delivery problems because it is the spammer that is the enemy here.
When writing an email that will go out to your customers or prospective customers, think of that customer as one person whom you are writing to as a friend. Be informal and avoid a lot of marketing "hype" and hyperbole. Spam filters are good at "listening" for the language of spam artists so if you write like a person writing to a person, it is very likely your email will go right on through because it will not be flagged as marketing at all. And the other benefit of writing like this to your customers is that it is a warm and personal style that will work well in communicating to customers.
Make a hobby of keeping up with how spam emailers work and how their messages change as they learn to get around spam filters. The spam filter businesses will be changing with them so be aware of any new trends in this stange part of cyberspace communication so you can alter how you create your marketing emails so you make sure your communications with your customers never look like spam.
Customers and Their ISPs
Overcoming the spam filter problem so you can get a higher assurance of email deliverability to your customers is a tricky path to walk. It would be one thing if the end user customer was simply using Microsoft Outlook spam filtering. Under those circumstances, it is the end customer who is determining how to filter emails. And to put it bluntly, the Microsoft Outlook and other local email software spam filters are just not that good. Add to that the fact that your ordinary internet citizen is not interested in becoming a full time spam security artist and the local spam filtering issue comes apart pretty fast.
But there is another level of spam filtering that is really making email deliverability a much harder road to travel if you are using cold emails and mass mailings to large groups of customers. That is spam filtering at the ISP level. ISP providers have much greater resources and a much greater motivation to provide sophisticated spam filtering to their customers. The ability to control spam is a major marketing point for any ISP and if the ISP is unable to stop spam before it even reaches the customer, the customer can be easily lured away by a competitor who can get the job done.
When you are dealing with some of the biggest ISPs in the world, if you cannot enter into a relationship with that ISP to prove you are a valid internet service and to show that they should not allow their spam blocking software to block you too, you could see hundreds or thousands of your emails die before they even have a chance to go to the customer. So to protect their customer base who for many ISP represents a huge potential marketing audience for you, ISPs will authenticate vendors to weed out the spam artists and phony operators who just want to abuse the trust customers put in their email and internet providers.
The first step to getting to a relationship of trust with the major ISPs who control access to your customers is to prove to them that you are a valid internet business. They want to know that you are selling a bona fide product or service, that you have been in business a while and that you will be in business to support your customers after the sale. These are not unreasonable requirements to be allowed to use the email box of potentially thousands of email customers.
The second level of authentication that each ISP will require has to do with your integrity in the use of email as a marketing tool. It doesn’t take a lot of examples to demonstrate that email marketing is one of the most abused forms of business communications since the carnival barker. ISPs want to know you are not going to run scams through email to its customers and that you are going to treat customers with respect in regards to how you use your marketing privileges if they are granted.
The process of gaining approval is one you can learn about by entering into a dialog with one of the major ISPs through whom you hope to send marketing emails. In general, the process will be the same for most ISPs after that. So once you have walked through the process with one ISP, not only will you know the ropes but you will have the approval of that first internet business entity to show to the rest and your reputation will begin to grow with subsequent applications. So be patient and give this process proper care and attention because the payoffs of gaining the trust of the major ISPs in the industry can be huge.
But there is another level of spam filtering that is really making email deliverability a much harder road to travel if you are using cold emails and mass mailings to large groups of customers. That is spam filtering at the ISP level. ISP providers have much greater resources and a much greater motivation to provide sophisticated spam filtering to their customers. The ability to control spam is a major marketing point for any ISP and if the ISP is unable to stop spam before it even reaches the customer, the customer can be easily lured away by a competitor who can get the job done.
When you are dealing with some of the biggest ISPs in the world, if you cannot enter into a relationship with that ISP to prove you are a valid internet service and to show that they should not allow their spam blocking software to block you too, you could see hundreds or thousands of your emails die before they even have a chance to go to the customer. So to protect their customer base who for many ISP represents a huge potential marketing audience for you, ISPs will authenticate vendors to weed out the spam artists and phony operators who just want to abuse the trust customers put in their email and internet providers.
The first step to getting to a relationship of trust with the major ISPs who control access to your customers is to prove to them that you are a valid internet business. They want to know that you are selling a bona fide product or service, that you have been in business a while and that you will be in business to support your customers after the sale. These are not unreasonable requirements to be allowed to use the email box of potentially thousands of email customers.
The second level of authentication that each ISP will require has to do with your integrity in the use of email as a marketing tool. It doesn’t take a lot of examples to demonstrate that email marketing is one of the most abused forms of business communications since the carnival barker. ISPs want to know you are not going to run scams through email to its customers and that you are going to treat customers with respect in regards to how you use your marketing privileges if they are granted.
The process of gaining approval is one you can learn about by entering into a dialog with one of the major ISPs through whom you hope to send marketing emails. In general, the process will be the same for most ISPs after that. So once you have walked through the process with one ISP, not only will you know the ropes but you will have the approval of that first internet business entity to show to the rest and your reputation will begin to grow with subsequent applications. So be patient and give this process proper care and attention because the payoffs of gaining the trust of the major ISPs in the industry can be huge.
Bringing the Customers to You with a Contest
Internet citizens and anyone who has used email for any length of time knows that they have to be on the alert for unwanted emails. This suspicion is one of the reasons it is difficult to use unsolicited emails for internet marketing any more. Instead a far more effective method is to create excitement in customers you already know is through some promotion that they want to hear about in their email box. And when they are excited to see your emails arrive, they will be sure to add your business email address to their favored email contacts list and you will have circumvented the spam software problem that has been the cause of your email delivery problems all along.
There are many ways to generate excitement in your customer base but perhaps no other one is so additive for your customers as a contest. For the cost of a small prize, people will work tirelessly to satisfy the terms of the contest. And by structuring the contest so the customers must get their clues via email, you are opening that door of email communications for future promotions and marketing. That alone might be worth the price of the prize.
The great thing about creating a contest is you can structure how it works to take the customers to your web site or have them collect clues that are directly related to y our products or services and the contest itself can become a big marketing "commercial" that the customers want to be part of. A contest, along with the obvious value of helping to resolve your email deliverability problems, can serve to generate web site traffic and energize a sluggish site or a function on your web site that you want to see get more attention.
Do you have a blog that isn't getting enough traffic? Hide a clue on it and challenge the contestants to come and search for that clue. Want to see a banner ad get more clicks, let the contestants know the next clue is hidden behind that banner ad and then put the clue on your affiliates page. The clicks to that banner or affiliate link will skyrocket. You can often cover the costs of the promotion and the prize through the increased traffic to your web site entirely.
An online contest can also help drive business to a brick and mortar retail operation that you may be using your web presence to support. This is a wonderful way to meet your online customers face to face by using the contest to take the customers to your store to look for a clue. As they move through the aisles of the store, in addition to eagerly looking for the next step of the contest, they will be shopping and very often, buying things which is exactly what you are looking for.
A contest that you set off via email is also a powerful viral marketing tool. Your customers will naturally tell their friends and relatives about the contest. And as more people hear about the contest, you may see a surge of requests to join in on the fun coming through your online message services. Just be sure to take those customers to an email registration so you can harvest their email addresses and get your business email placed on their favored contacts list too. In that way you cleverly expand your marketing base while drawing new customers to your web site.
You may find that once you get started having contests via email and contests that incorporate every aspect of your online presence, it might become a habit you want to repeat often. The increased traffic, sales and expansion of your customer base can be so lively that there is no reason not to use this marketing tool often.
There are many ways to generate excitement in your customer base but perhaps no other one is so additive for your customers as a contest. For the cost of a small prize, people will work tirelessly to satisfy the terms of the contest. And by structuring the contest so the customers must get their clues via email, you are opening that door of email communications for future promotions and marketing. That alone might be worth the price of the prize.
The great thing about creating a contest is you can structure how it works to take the customers to your web site or have them collect clues that are directly related to y our products or services and the contest itself can become a big marketing "commercial" that the customers want to be part of. A contest, along with the obvious value of helping to resolve your email deliverability problems, can serve to generate web site traffic and energize a sluggish site or a function on your web site that you want to see get more attention.
Do you have a blog that isn't getting enough traffic? Hide a clue on it and challenge the contestants to come and search for that clue. Want to see a banner ad get more clicks, let the contestants know the next clue is hidden behind that banner ad and then put the clue on your affiliates page. The clicks to that banner or affiliate link will skyrocket. You can often cover the costs of the promotion and the prize through the increased traffic to your web site entirely.
An online contest can also help drive business to a brick and mortar retail operation that you may be using your web presence to support. This is a wonderful way to meet your online customers face to face by using the contest to take the customers to your store to look for a clue. As they move through the aisles of the store, in addition to eagerly looking for the next step of the contest, they will be shopping and very often, buying things which is exactly what you are looking for.
A contest that you set off via email is also a powerful viral marketing tool. Your customers will naturally tell their friends and relatives about the contest. And as more people hear about the contest, you may see a surge of requests to join in on the fun coming through your online message services. Just be sure to take those customers to an email registration so you can harvest their email addresses and get your business email placed on their favored contacts list too. In that way you cleverly expand your marketing base while drawing new customers to your web site.
You may find that once you get started having contests via email and contests that incorporate every aspect of your online presence, it might become a habit you want to repeat often. The increased traffic, sales and expansion of your customer base can be so lively that there is no reason not to use this marketing tool often.
A Good Mailing List for a Bad One.
If you have ever used a mass mailing email marketing campaign, you know how they promote their services. The appeal is that, in theory, the service has collected a large amount of valid email addresses that they guarantee will go to real potential internet customers. For a fee, they will take your marketing message and broadcast it to that large customer base and the outcome will be that you will see a percentage of those customers visit your web site or respond to the email and from that percentage, a smaller percentage will become paying customers of yours.
There are two problems with this marketing model. The first one is that no matter how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming a spammer. Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers. But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person.
Life has gotten harder for us because of spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted. So because of this fresh problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place. Ironic, isn't it?
The second problem with that marketing model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of dubious value. For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails. The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer email are very low. You have low confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.
A large mailing list is not a good mailing list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales. This is why a new marketing model is called for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.
That new marketing model calls for you to look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you. This approach to building your email list starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are looking for and it builds out from there.
You can use that solid customer base to then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will return solid sales to you for your efforts. Through referrals, viral marketing, contests and give aways, you can excite your customer base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high quality mailing list as well. Then you repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.
This process results in a much smaller mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your emails. Whereas working with a mass marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you know they will come back again and again to buy from you.
There are two problems with this marketing model. The first one is that no matter how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming a spammer. Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers. But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person.
Life has gotten harder for us because of spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted. So because of this fresh problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place. Ironic, isn't it?
The second problem with that marketing model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of dubious value. For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails. The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer email are very low. You have low confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.
A large mailing list is not a good mailing list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales. This is why a new marketing model is called for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.
That new marketing model calls for you to look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you. This approach to building your email list starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are looking for and it builds out from there.
You can use that solid customer base to then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will return solid sales to you for your efforts. Through referrals, viral marketing, contests and give aways, you can excite your customer base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high quality mailing list as well. Then you repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.
This process results in a much smaller mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your emails. Whereas working with a mass marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you know they will come back again and again to buy from you.
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