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.
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