4 Ways to Get People to Open Your Emails

You put all of that work into your marketing emails, but your research gives you a disappointing percentage of emails that actually get opened. You may not be able to find out exactly how many people are reading your emails, but you can at least increase the number of people who open them and give them a chance. Believe it or not, you have a lot of control over whether or not people open your marketing emails. All it takes is a few tactical changes to the way you present and send your emails, and you will see the number of emails opened skyrocket.

Do Not Come On Too Strong

Too many email marketing companies think that the best way to get a potential customer to open a marketing email is to include a strong subject line that includes lots of exclamation points. Your message is designed to inform your potential customers about the benefits of doing business with your company, so that is how your email should come across. Avoid the barrage of exclamation points and strong language that so many others use and create an informative subject line that will pique your audience’s interest and get your message read.

Give People A Reason To Open Your Emails

In most cases, new information about your company is not going to entice too many people to click on your marketing email. However, an exclusive email offer that gives your customers a special discount is going to get plenty of attention. Instead of sending out what amount to boring emails, you should put something into your marketing emails that your customers will enjoy. If you give your audience a reason to open your emails, then they are more likely to want to look inside.

Limit Your Emails

Contrary to popular belief, good email marketing is not a numbers game. You do not want to send out countless messages to countless recipients and then hope for the best. Your target audience should be made up of customers you have already qualified, and your email schedule should be limited to avoid overwhelming your audience. If you send out too many emails, then your audience will simply start to ignore you. But if you send out targeted emails at reasonable intervals, then you will be better equipped to gain the interest of your audience.

Speak The Truth

If your subject line promises the secret of eternal youth in your marketing email, then that email better deliver. There is no faster way to lose an email marketing audience than to make claims in the subject lines of your emails that your emails cannot back up. Never over-promise in a subject line, and never use outrageous subject lines just to get the attention of the people you are marketing to.

Your email marketing campaign is only effective when you create messages that your audience will read. All of the work you put into creating effective messages is lost if you do not take the necessary steps to get people to actually open your emails. By attending to a few details, you can get people to open your emails and make your marketing campaign a success.

4 Ways To Increase Your Email Open Rate

There are a lot of hurdles you have to jump in an email marketing campaign just to get an email into the inbox of someone who might open it. First, you have to make sure that you have a valid email address. Then you need to find out if the person actually uses that email address, or if they use a different address. Once you have conquered all of the challenges involved with putting your email in front of the right target audience, then you have to start experimenting with your open rate to get the best possible results.

The open rate of an email campaign is the percentage of people who actually open the email when it is sent. If your target audience does not open your email, then all of the great content inside is pretty useless. There are some tactics you can use that will help you to increase your open rate, and drive more revenue with your email marketing campaign.

Try Sending Unopened Emails Again

Spam filters and lost connections can sometimes prevent your marketing emails from getting through when you start a new campaign. One way to help increase your open rate is to resend unopened emails and hope they get through the second time. Be sure to track your open rate with resent emails to see if resending unopened emails is a tactic you want to try on a regular basis.

Run Tests To Develop Better Delivery Times

You or your Internet marketing partner has software that can tell exactly when your marketing emails get opened, right down to the hour and minute. You should use that information to develop a database of the best times to send out your emails, and then use that database to increase your open rate. If you put your emails in front of your customers at times when those customers traditionally open emails, then you significantly increase your success rate.

Develop A Theme

As you send out marketing emails. keep track of the elements that appear to increase your open rate. If humor increases your open rate, then start to lean on humor more in your other email marketing campaigns. Keep track of everything from background colors to the way you present your message. Over time, you will start to see themes and trends that work in making sure that you have the highest possible open rates.

Avoid Spam Language

You already know that phrases such as “buy now” and “great free offer” trigger most spam filters and negatively affect your open rate. You need to keep track of the spam language that is getting your emails caught in spam filters and be sure to avoid that language in any of your email marketing pieces.

Email marketing is a science that needs to be constantly studied and altered to be successful. Each campaign is another chance to collect data that can make a huge difference on how successful future campaigns will be. The open rate of your marketing emails is an incredibly important number to monitor, and it is also important to find ways to positively affect your open rate as well. By watching your email marketing results, you can find ways to increase your open rate and get more engagement with your emails.

Four Fun Email Marketing Tactics That Work

When you work in Internet marketing, one of the first things you learn is that marketing has to be fun for the audience if it is going to work. If your marketing is boring or dull, then you won’t get nearly the response that you want. But when you take some time to make your marketing fun, you can get more responses, and you can get valuable input from clients as well.

Email marketing is an important way to stay in touch with clients and deliver critical product information. When you incorporate some fun elements to your email marketing, you can make it even more effective and get better results.

Create An Exclusive Club

Your marketing emails become much more effective if you can create a situation where your customers look forward to getting your newest emails on a regular schedule. The easiest way to create demand for your emails is to create an exclusive club that gets promotional prices and inside information delivered in every email.

You need to create a program where only people who join your email list get special pricing deals, and get information on new products before those products are released. The promise of exclusive information and great pricing deals is always an effective way to improve your email marketing results.

Make Quality A Priority

Each and every one of your email marketing pieces should have great information, and look extremely professional. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is building a big list of marketing email addresses, and then putting out boring text emails that are very different than the emails used to attract that audience. When you make quality a priority for each email, you will find it easier to maintain your audience, and add new email addresses as well.

Use Cliffhangers

Movies and television shows use cliffhangers to get people to tune into the next episode or buy a ticket to the sequel whenever it comes out. Believe it or not, cliffhangers can work just as well in email marketing to get customers to eagerly anticipate your next email.

When you announce a new product early to customers on your email marketing list, then leave off the one big feature they will all want to read about and say you will announce that feature in the next email. Little cliffhangers in each email will create anticipation for your next email and get you better results.

Get Customers Involved

If a customer sends you a positive comment in response to your marketing email, then quote that comment in your next email. When customers see that their input matters, you will be able to turn part of your marketing emails into interactive events with clients.

Another great way to get customers involved in your emails is to list content winners in your emails and congratulate those winners. Once again, this allows customers to see that your contests are real, and it also gets customers a little excited that they could have their name featured in your next email.

The key to a good email marketing campaign is to have fun with it. When it looks like the company is having fun, then customers will respond in a positive way and help your emails to be much more effective and productive.

Five Marketing Strategies To Use Starting In 2016

As each new year approaches, business professionals tend to look back on the current year to consider correcting their failures and replicating their successes. The key to business success is to always look to the future, but use your experience as the foundation for making good decisions. With marketing, we can take what we learned in 2015 and apply it to more successful tactics for 2016 and beyond.

Update Your Elevator Speech And Use It In More Places

When was the last time you took out the written text of your elevator speech and updated it to match the changes that have occurred with your company in the last year? If you don’t have your elevator speech written out, then you should take the time to write it down and then update it.

When was the last time you put your elevator speech up on Twitter or any of the other social media platforms? Have you ever considered putting your elevator speech on the back of your business card? Your elevator speech should be the key to introducing your company to new customers, and you should use it more in 2016.

Update Your Company’s Brochure

If you have never had a general company brochure that you hand out to prospects and clients, then 2016 will be the year that you finally get one. If you do have a general company brochure, then work with your Internet marketing company to update the information in your brochure and make it more effective.

The simple fact is that handing out a color brochure to people who are interested in your company is more impressive than writing down a website address. People can read the brochure whenever they want, and there are no pop-up ads to take away from your brochure’s marketing impact.

Get New Business Cards

A new business card design for 2016 will invigorate your current customers and help impress your prospects. You will also have the chance to add important information to your business card such as your social media contact information and anything else that is currently not on the business cards you are using in 2015.

Clean Up Your Website

The start of a new year is the perfect time to hire a good Internet marketing company and have them clean up your website. No matter how effective you think you are as a webmaster, you are missing details that are frustrating your traffic and costing you precious rankings on the search engines. A professional Internet marketing company will clean up the coding on your site, get rid of dead links and make your site a hit in 2016.

Get To More Trade Shows

The only business resolution you need to make for 2016 is to participate in more trade shows with an improved trade show booth. Trade shows are great places to make new industry contacts, find new clients and network with the people who will make your business more successful. You already realize a positive return on the investment you make in the trade shows you participate in now, so it is time to increase that return by doing more shows.

In order to stay competitive in your marketplace, you need to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing. The more you do now to get ready for 2016, the more profit you will be able to add to your bottom line.

3 Myths About Video Marketing Dispelled

Any Internet marketing expert will tell you that there is significant value in adding video to your website, but there are those nagging doubts that pop up to prevent you from utilizing videos. Every marketing process has its myths and misconception, but few myths are more damaging than the myths about video marketing that prevent website owners from investing in it. There are three myths in particular that put the most doubt into website owner’s heads and those myths need to be dispelled immediately.

“Videos Cost Too Much To Make”

When a website owner throws this statement at an Internet marketing expert you can almost see the marketing expert trying to stop themselves from biting their own lip so hard they bleed. Most of the videos that go viral and get millions of views are done by smartphones under horrible conditions. Does that mean that you should make smartphone videos for your website? No, it means that people care much more about the content of a video than the production.

Anyone can make a high definition video and edit it with software as simple as Microsoft’s Movie Maker to make something that can be posted on a website or on YouTube. You could make 30-second product videos that would double your sales and do quick YouTube commercials that will drive more traffic for the cost of one high definition video camera.

“I Need Actors To Make Good Videos”

We all want Morgan Freeman to narrate our corporate videos, but not every company can afford Morgan Freeman’s services. The truth is that you can make a series of successful videos without ever showing a human being. Product videos do not need any human interaction and you can use one of the many free animation sites to make animated videos that are funny and informative.

The other part of this myth that needs to be dispelled is that not every person in a corporate video needs to be a trained actor. Do you have employees that are enthusiastic and like to be the center of attention? If not, do you know people like that in your circle of friends or family members? While it would be nice to hire actors to make corporate videos, it is far from a necessity.

“I Have No Use For Videos”

This is another common myth that makes Internet marketing experts want to bite their lips to avoid saying something they will regret. If you have products to sell, then you have a use for videos. If you have a website that needs to bring in new traffic on a regular basis to remain successful, then videos can help your website to generate more revenue.

The evolution of technology has made it possible for anyone to make good videos and post them to their websites. Creative people can develop entire video marketing campaigns on what look like smartphone videos and get those videos to go viral. Internet users love videos and that means that your business has plenty of use for videos.

If you are not using every possible marketing tool to draw traffic to your website, then your business is getting left behind. Videos are not only a lot simpler to make and use than you think, but they can also be extremely powerful brand enhancement tools when they are utilized by a professional Internet marketing expert.

Why Offline Marketing Still Matters

For the average person, there is a myth that all young people (Millennials and younger) bypass the printed media and only use digital information. But in a 2013 report done by the Newspaper Association of America, approximately 68 percent of people ages 18 to 24 read printed newspaper advertisements. Not only do they read the printed newspaper advertisements, but they admit to taking action because of those advertisements as well. It would seem that the notion that offline marketing no longer matters is extremely premature.

A Matter Of Trust

If you read that NAA infographic even further, you see that six out of every 10 Millennials trusts the information that is printed in their local newspapers. That means that if you can get press releases about your business printed in the local newspapers of your target geographic audience, then you will increase the chances of getting more traffic to your website and increasing revenue.

Consumers usually only buy from companies they trust and it looks like local newspapers are good places to establish that trust. The truth is that local newspapers have been doing quite well in print and online and present themselves as a viable marketing option for any company. But it is still hard to ignore the impact that offline marketing in local newspapers has on an audience.

Not Just The Youngsters

The generations that grew up with newspapers and print media have not totally abandoned those mediums for the digital world. There is still that feeling of legitimacy that older consumers get when they see a print advertisement for a company and that can only help to enhance your digital marketing.

With the information given in the NAA infographic, we can then conclude that offline marketing still matters to a large portion of the consumer world. To ignore offline marketing because it may seem old fashioned is to go against what consumers are saying. To grow your business, you need to look to offline marketing to help enhance and even legitimize your online marketing efforts.

What About The Cost?

Many local newspapers offer package deals that give your company offline and online marketing options for a discounted price. The Poynter.org website points out that for the first time in decades, subscription revenue has outpaced advertising revenue for newspapers. That means that more people are paying to read then news than advertisers are paying to sell products. That is a significant shift that cannot be ignored, especially when 68 percent of Millennials are reacting to printed newspaper advertising.

The costs associated with offline marketing are being more than justified by the data and the results. More people than ever are paying to read the news in both printed and digital formats. That means that the money you invest in offline marketing is money well spent and will help to enhance whatever marketing you are doing online.

There may come a day, many decades from now, where digital marketing is the only way that publishers reach their audiences. But the data suggests that we are a long way off from that day and that print media is still very strong. If you want to have a well-rounded marketing program, then you need to utilize offline marketing to reach the people who are willing to look at your printed marketing and react to it immediately.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords And Why Do They Matter?

Over the past several years, Google has been changing the rules associated with keyword and search results. When the Internet was young, search engines were not very sophisticated and a website could get a lot of traffic by cramming as many keywords as possible onto a page. When users started to complain about content quality, Google responded by banning keyword stuffing and altering keyword rules. When users still complained about content quality, Google decided it was time to demand quality content from a website that was pertinent to the website’s chosen theme.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are the words that users utilize in search engines when looking for websites in your industry. If you sell bowling balls, then putting keywords such as “ball” and “alley” in your content would improve where your website ranked in the search engine results. But as Internet marketing companies found ways to manipulate keywords and generate traffic without creating useful content, Google started to focus on long-tail keywords.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-tail keywords are phrases that are commonly used in content that is pertinent to your industry. With long-tail keywords, Google is not looking for an exact match when it comes to getting users the content they are looking for. Instead, Google searches your website’s content for words that fit into certain long-tail keywords that are common in your industry. When Google can match up significant portions of your content with the right long-tail keywords, then your content gets more exposure on the search engine results pages.

Why Do I Care About Long-Tail Keywords?

Instead of relying on lists of short primary and secondary keywords to determine the value of content on a website, Google has shifted to complex algorithms that are constantly generating and evaluating long-tail keywords. If your content is not finding its place among the long-tail keywords in your industry, then you are going to have a hard time getting good search results for your website.

So What Do I Do?

Utilizing long-tail keywords is something that is best left to Internet marketing professionals. The science behind Google algorithms would take a Ivy League graduate to figure out, but the way those algorithms work is the domain of the Internet marketing expert.

The primary purpose of long-tail keywords is to make sure that the content on your website has value to users. Google also uses long-tail keywords to make sure that your content is relevant to your business. If a baking website starts posting personal finance advice, then Google will know and Google will punish that website.

The challenge with long-tail keywords is that they are constantly changing and there is no real concrete rules about them just yet. Internet marketing experts spend hours each day analyzing content from various industries to determine what kind of content appeals to users the most and will click with Google’s search algorithms.

For website owners, it is important to focus on relevant and valuable content and start to forget about keywords. Google wants you to inform users and offer them information that they can use as opposed to manipulating keywords just to get traffic. Focus on quality content that is relevant to your industry and you will start to make some headway in the new world of long-tail keywords.

Four Marketing Elements That Must Be Instantly Recognizable

When you spend years wearing the same type of clothes and having the same haircut, people recognize you even when they do not see your face. If you are smart, then you use that high level of recognition to generate revenue in some way. But when you change your clothes and cut your hair, no one recognizes you anymore and the magic is gone.

Consumers like to be able to recognize the companies they use instantly and there are several things you can do that make your company instantly recognizable. Once you have achieved a high level of recognition, all of your marketing efforts become more productive and your revenue starts to go up.

Your Logo

The very best logos can be recognized almost instantly and immediately associated with their respective companies. Nike, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s all have logos that consumers can recognize immediately and that does wonders for increasing sales.

For example, when you and your family are on a long driving trip and you want to stop for lunch, if you see those Golden Arches, then you know you are stopping. A recognizable logo becomes something everyone can agree upon and something that brings in business all on its own.

Your Corporate Color Scheme

If you work in the computer industry and you see something in the colors of blue and white, then you instantly think of IBM. If you like drinking soft drinks and you see a cup with red and white on it, you automatically think of Coca-Cola. It does not matter if IBM or Coca-Cola have their logos in plain view. What matters is that these companies have worked hard to associate their organizations with those common color schemes in the minds of consumers.

Your Company Name

Kentucky Fried Chicken became so popular that two could be having a conversation and refer to Kentucky Fried Chicken as KFC and they would both know what restaurant each other was talking about. When your company becomes so popular that consumers start abbreviating your company name and making it part of conversational dialog, then you know that your marketing work is effective.

Your Product

You may have never heard of a company called Kimberly-Clark, but you probably use a product called Kleenex every day. The facial tissue known as Kleenex is so popular that most people do not realize that the product is actually called facial tissue. Most people call all facial tissue Kleenex and that makes Kimberly-Clark a very wealthy company.

A company has to make a lot of decisions when it comes to marketing. The right decisions could lead to a product becoming a household name, while a wrong decision could put a company out of business. The worst thing any company can do is cut its marketing budget, even when the economy takes a turn for the worse.

Good marketing creates images that are burned into consumers’ minds and result in ongoing sales. When your marketplace starts referring to generic products by your company’s brand name or when consumers shorten your company name into a nickname because they refer to your company so often, then you know that your marketing is effective. Take the time to develop the four most important parts of your company’s marketing image and you will see returns several times over for years to come.

Five Ways To Dress Up Your Trade Show Booth

Trade shows represent a significant investment for any company that puts on a display, so it is imperative that each company get the maximum return for their dollar. By just doing the basics of setting up a table and displaying product, a company is only doing a fraction of the work necessary to maximize their trade show presence. There are several other elements that must be included if a company wants to bring home sales leads that will result in plenty of trade show revenue.

A Light Show

Yes, you need a light show to bring attention to your booth, but not something that is constantly shining lights to the ceiling of the display hall. A light show choreographed with some exciting music in anticipation of announcing the winner of a contest you were holding or some other significant event will definitely bring people to your booth.

A Negotiation Area

While the majority of trade show revenue is generated after the show is over, you will have people who want to buy products from you or discuss sales agreements during the show. You could wait until after the floor is closed for the day and hope that your prospect actually accepts your invitation to a dinner, or you could have a negotiation area set up in your booth where you can talk to prospects in relative privacy.

Large Banners

If you want to get traffic to visit your booth, then make the booth impossible to miss with large corporate banners. You want these banners to be large enough and displayed high enough that it would be impossible for anyone to not be able to find your booth. You should find out the rules for banners at the trade show before getting yours printed up because some trade shows have guidelines that you will need to follow.

A Popular Giveaway Item

People love getting free stress balls and pens at trade shows, but it is the company that gives away the quality, cloth carrying bag that actually gets all of the attention. Free giveaways that either look expensive or have an immediate practical application will always be popular at trade shows and you need to use those types of giveaways to spread your company name around and drive more traffic to your booth.

Celebrities

While not always financially possible, having a celebrity or two at your booth can help to significantly increase traffic. The most important thing about getting a celebrity to help your trade show booth is to make sure that the celebrity’s audience fits your target audience. An auto parts manufacturer would probably not benefit by having the most popular romance novel author in the world at their booth.

A trade show booth is a considerable investment for any company, but the investment needs to be a little higher if you really want to get a significant return. When people attend a trade show, they are usually not overwhelmed by the features in your latest products because your competition is probably offering very similar features. But if you can attract the foot traffic to your booth, then you have a much better chance of generating trade show revenue and getting the biggest return on your marketing investment.

The Synergy Between Your Print And Online Marketing

One of the things we always talk about is the need for online as well as offline marketing to promote your website. We could talk for hours about the need to maintain a consistent marketing look along your website and marketing pamphlets to help boost brand recognition. But what does all of that really mean? How does your print marketing work together with your online efforts to create a strong marketing approach?

Some People Still Need To See It In Print

Online marketing is not quite as prevalent as you may think and it often needs print marketing to prop it up and make it effective. We want to believe that the younger generation gets everything it needs off the Internet, but that is not the case. We also tend to believe that older generations shy away from the Internet when it comes to getting new information, but that would also be inaccurate.

The dynamic between generations and their reliance on information makes for an interesting study. We may look at that in detail later, but right now it helps to know that younger generations still look to their local newspapers and entertainment magazines to get a big portion of their information. The older generations tend to not trust online advertising that is not reinforced with offline efforts. So it is safe to say that some people need to see your advertising in print in order to find it effective.

Print Travels Better In Some Cases

A potential business client who is getting ready to board an airplane may spend more time reading a magazine than surfing the Internet on their phone or laptop. Magazines and newspapers are easier to carry and so are product pamphlets. When a potential client is looking for some fast and convenient reading, it is not unusual for print content to be their first choice.

Print Can Be Bigger

A big marketing message needs a big medium and with online marketing you are limited by the size of the screens your target audience is using. Even the largest tablets cannot compare to the visual impact of a full-page print ad in a national newspaper. It can sometimes be more effective to kick-off a marketing campaign with a huge, full-color ad in a newspaper or large-format magazine than to rely on someone else’s smartphone screen to get the impact you are looking for.

Always Use The Two Together

Our marketing experts can roll out a complete marketing plan for you that would include printed materials to compliment your online advertising. It has been our experience that a comprehensive marketing plan consisting of offline and online elements is exponentially more effective than relying solely on one or the other.

Of course, the ratio of offline to online content depends on your message and your audience. In some cases, you may not need the ratification of a print advertising campaign to bring legitimacy to your online efforts, but you will still need effective pamphlets for your trade shows. Let our experts review your marketing needs and prepare the perfect mix of print and online content to exceed your marketing expectations.

You are putting a lot of money and effort into your website and it is showing excellent results. But we know from experience that you can enhance those results by also including a strong offline campaign as well. Give us a call and let one of our experts explain the synergy between print and online marketing to help bring the maximum amount of attention to your advertising efforts.