We typically don’t use this blog to promote things. It’s bad form. So, please forgive us for it this one time.
On Thursday, June 2nd, there is a Social Media and E- Marketing Summit occurring in Marlboro, MA. We don’t feel bad promoting this one event on our blog, because it goes so hand in hand with what we talk about on here a couple of times a week, and if you are a local reader of our blog, this event will certainly be something worth visiting. It’s happening at the Marriot Courtyard at 75 Felton Street, in Marlboro, MA. Tickets are on sale, and you need to pre-register for this event NOW.
The topics being discussed are Social Media 101, the Power of Video, the Latest in Mobile Marketing, Understanding Website Analytics, Email Marketing, and Leveraging Social Media for your small business.
For those still on the fence, let me help make it even easier: It goes from 7:30 until 11:45, so it won’t take up your entire day. Basically, come in, learn, and go do it on your own.
While you’re there, if you have any additional questions about any of the information covered, our Senior Account Executive Mike Ivas will be available to schedule one-on-one consultant appointments, that will personalize all of this new material and help you custom tailor it to your specific business needs. So be sure to keep an eye out for him!
Thanks for reading while I shamelessly promote this event! We’ll get back to the practical advice for your advertising needs next post.
According to the latest comScore survey, around 20% of users are reading their email on their Smartphones. If your target market is the professional business user or the youth market, the numbers are skewed higher. Email marketing to this demographic requires additional thought. Follow these 9 steps, and your email has a much better chance of being read.
1. Include a plain text version of every message. It may not be pretty like HTML but it is at least clickable on some platforms and if that causes even one more conversion, it's worth it.
2. Don't overcrowd links, this will help them stand out from one another. With the size of the screen being so small, crowded links become lost links.
3. Don't use large images as links. On some devices, by the time that image has downloaded, the user has already moved on.
4. Use a good subject line to catch people’s attention. Battle of the inboxes happens on mobile too.
5. Use the right alt tags for your images. Some phones, while having the ability to display HTML, won't render images. When this happens, you want "alt" text to show -- giving the user some indication of what your message is.
6. Have a clear call to action. While this is important in all email messages, it's especially important on a mobile device where the screen real estate is limited.
7. Test mobile emails on different smartphones. While action alerts or appeals may look great on the IPhone it could look screwy on a Blackberry. Will HTML5 save the day? Maybe, but until then, test. Then test again. And one more time.
8. Include a mobile style sheet. This will help to increase the number of mobile devices capable of viewing your message.
9. Write good content. This isn't exactly mobile specific.
There have been diagrams and blogs written that chart the actual costs required to have an effective social media program in place, and yet I still hear businesses all the time say, “Social media is free! Facebook is free, Twitter is free, yay! We don’t need to spend money on stuff that’s free!”
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Websites are free, too. They are built with HTML, PHP, Javascript, CSS and other various types of code, and it’s all free. You can host it yourself, and all you’ll pay for is the internet connection and the computer it’s hosted on. You can even give your site a name for free through some services, so you don’t have to pay for the DNS, if you don’t mind having a less- than-flashy name. So don’t worry about buying a website, since it’s free. Just go learn some script, and you’ll be selling online in no time.
In fact, there are pages online that will teach you how to code in HTML, for free. There are lots of sites that will tell you how to build websites, and use all of these different styles of coding to create effective websites. They are written by web developers that are more than willing to share their knowledge, so that other web developers who become a little stuck at times can fix their problems.
Now that I’ve shared this little secret, am I worried about being out of a job? Um, no.
When you buy a website from a professional web designer, you aren’t paying for the materials. You are paying for the knowledge of how to create a visually pleasing, information-sharing site that can increase business for your company.
The same is true for social media. Although Facebook, Twitter, etc. are all free, there is still a knowledge base that is required to make these tools effective. There are websites and books written that attempt to teach readers how to effectively market to these channels. And, the same as your website, you can give it a go all by yourself, for free.
But I wouldn’t recommend it.
Social media requires a hands-on approach, and if you want to be successful with it, you need people that are devoted to it. If you want an employee or group of employees to be in charge of your social media programs, that’s a great way to go. I always believe that in-house monitoring of these types of channels is most effective. The caveat is that these staff members must be trained to be effective at their job. They need to be trained by someone who knows how to make the most of these tools.
A couple of examples, just to drive my point home: If I give you some paint brushes, some paint, and a ladder, all for free, can you paint my ceiling to match the Sistine Chapel’s? Or if I give you a pile of wood, and some building materials, can you figure out how to build me a new house? It’s free!
You can pay to have someone else run your social media for your company. You can pay to be trained on how to best use social media for your company. Or you can continue to think it’s free, and SPEND several hours mismanaging a campaign that does not create any additional sales, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and brand awareness. No matter what, you’re paying.
A local business that I know of has more than 300 employees. They’ve had a Facebook page since around mid February. How many followers do you think they have?
Answer: 41.
I want you to think about that for a minute. Percentage wise, that means around 13% of their employees are fans of their own business. (It’s less than that, because I am one of the 41, so that I could write this article, and they have more than 300 employees, not exactly 300...)
I can guarantee that this company does not allow Facebook pages on their own network. I’m willing to bet that the company policies regarding Facebook are ironclad, and at least a page long. If handed a copy of their policy, I’m sure it has this phrase repeated several times throughout the communication: “Up to and including termination.”
So, you want to have a thriving social media presence, but threaten your employees with draw and quartering if they mention any detail on the page other than “We had great weather today”. The employees must do any commenting from home, since they cannot access the site at work, even during their scheduled break. You want the benefits that having a Facebook page can give, but you hamstring your employee participation with strong warnings and signed manifestos.
Does any of this look familiar to you? Could you be the company I am writing about? Is it time for a change?
Obviously, there are some safety concerns for Facebook. The last thing you need is for an employee to do something harmful to your company, or misrepresent the company in a way that opens you up to possible litigation. I wish it was all just fun and games. It isn’t. You need a policy that protects your company, and that protects your employees. However, the “Doomsday” policy is not going to work. The “Don’t even think about going online to Facebook at work (But please follow us in your personal time)” approach rarely works, either.
Once again, it all comes back to what you want to achieve, and how to get there. Start fresh. Figure out what you want Facebook to do for your company, and then figure out what you are going to need to get there. Throw away the “COMMENTS MAY RESULT IN INSTANT TERMINATION” style company policy, and build a new one that lets employees know what is acceptable and isn’t for your particular company profile.
The day and time you decide to launch your campaign can have an impact on the overall results of your email campaign. This detail may not be as important as the audience you select, the subject line, or the list you are using, but it is a factor. But if you are working to get the maximum results and put everything in your favor then these are commonly accepted as the BEST times to launch your campaign.
The best days (in no particular order):
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays
What’s wrong with the rest of the days?
Chances are, your readers are most likely to be away from their email on Saturday and Sunday.
On Monday, your recipients are recovering from the weekend and will not be in business mode yet. They may have a number of things to do on this day and are not quite interested in offers or solicitations.
On Friday, they are interested in wrapping things up. If someone starts something on a Friday, it may be forgotten over the weekend.
So we are left with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as the best days.
You will want to avoid holidays or any major vacation times.
Does Time of Day Matter?
You want your message to reach your audience at a time when they are going to be most receptive. Research shows that time of day can play a major role.
It's most important for your message to pop up while the recipient is at their computer. The typical email notification generally elicits a Pavlovian response in most to see what the message is. Recipients are immediately engaged and ready to see who is trying to contact them. This timing is ideal.
The key is to try to ensure that email is not just sitting stagnate in the recipient’s inbox first thing in the morning, especially after a holiday. The reason is simple. People tend to have a morning ritual of "cleaning" their inbox from any spam that arrived overnight. You don’t want them to see your message when they are in a deleting frenzy, trying to find anything they can "clean up."
Rather, you want your message to pop up while they are in the middle of a workday. This increases the chances that the recipient will stop and take a moment to read it.
What Are the Best Times to Send Email?
10:00 – 10:30 a.m.
and
1:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Please don't place too much emphasis on this area. It’s often very difficult to ensure the precise time your message goes out. And even if the message is launched at precisely 10 a.m. in one time zone, there are other time zones to consider.
Does Time of Year Matter?
You don’t want to catch someone just after a vacation when they have 200 waiting messages and are looking for stuff they can delete quickly. Most people seem to vacation during the summer months, especially July and August. Try to avoid that time.
Putting it in Perspective
Don’t wait for the perfect time or you will never launch your email campaign. As you’ve probably experienced there are times during the week, month or year when you are extremely busy and not as receptive to offers or messages. Do your best to pick a time when your clients will be most likely to act, but don’t obsess about the launch time.
Decide how many lists you want. For example, you might want a “News- letters” list, but also a separate “Press & Media Relations” list. Some people set up “Weekly Specials” lists and “Internal Employee Newsletter” lists. The basic idea is that you don’t want to send your weekly specials to someone on your list who might have just been expecting an occasional newsletter.
Decide on your content and frequency. Will you send email newsletters every single month? Do you truly have the time to do that? What will the newsletter be about? Why would anybody want to subscribe to it? What will recipients gain from it?
Get permission. Ask the customers in your database for permission to send them email newsletters, offers and promotions.
Get your privacy policy in order. In particular, issues like “tracking personally identifiable information” or “marketing to children under 13.”
Set up email addresses that you can use as the “Reply-to:” for your campaigns. You might use sales@ or email@. Whatever. Just be sure it works, and be sure a human checks that account. If you use jenny@yourcompany.com, what happens when Jenny leaves the company? You’ll need to change names to the new guy, but spam filters will have already been trained to receive emails from Jenny.
Set up an abuse@ email account. No matter how clean you keep your list, you’ll always get complaints. It’s inevitable.
Set up test email accounts with Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL.
Design your HTML email template. If you’re sending different kinds of communications (sales promotions vs. monthly newsletters vs. how-to’s and tips), you might set up multiple templates for each occasion.
Insert real content into your test campaigns. Don’t just use “lorem ipsum dummy text” when you test campaigns. It’s not accurate, plus spam filters often throw away emails with garbled, nonsensical words in them. Build your plain-text alternative email. Plain-text email has its own pecu- liarities, so you’ll want to get a template for it refined from the beginning. Don’t let plain-text be an afterthought.
Test your templates. And we mean really test them like you’ve never tested before. Send them to friends, family and colleagues. Try the templates in as many different email applications you can. Open your own emails, and click them like crazy. Now go check your reports. Make sure all the tracking works like it should. Click reply and see if you get replies to your account. You want to uncover any embarrassing mistakes before sending to your real customers.
Set up a test list. If you’re like most people, you probably have about three or four email addresses. Why not set up a test list, and send your full campaign to that list?
Make sure you’re subscribed to your own list. Seems obvious, but people often forget. Prepare your website and landing pages for delivery. Before you send, get everything in order. Did you create a copy/archive of the email for your website? Make sure that’s all in place.
Deliver the campaign. Finally!
View stats after sending. You can virtually watch the opens and clicks as they happen. It’s always shock- ing to see how many people open and click in the first few minutes after you send. Then it trails off, but you’ll still get opens and clicks weeks after.
Review performance. After a few days, go back and analyze your reports. How many opens? How many clicks? Compare it to your web traffic logs, and most importantly, to sales. Did the email generate leads or sales? What was the ROI on that campaign?
Plan the next campaign. Use your campaign reports to understand what people clicked and what they didn’t. That should serve as the founda- tion for your next campaign. Maybe you’ll split up your list and segment next time around, or test different subject lines or delivery schedules. Get scientific.
Let’s have some fun today. This blog is concerned with the distinct stages of events. For example, we’ll use: - Skydiving.
- Planning stage: Before you jump, make sure you know how to pull the release, and the secondary release. Make sure you have a parachute strapped to your back. Make sure you know the correct way of landing to avoid injury.
- Action stage: COUNT TO 10, PULL CORD.
- Running with the bulls.
- Planning stage: Picking out routes, making sure your sneakers fit appropriately, and knowledge of how to jump over a barrier in case of emergency should all be covered previously to the start of the event. I'd recommend finding someone slower than you to run next to, so you have a measuring tool as to how you are doing...
- Action stage: RUN.
For both of these activities, I also recommend knowing all of your prayers, having your will completed, and letting your family know that you love them, just in case. With both of these examples, there is a point in which you can change your mind. When you are planning, you can decide, “This isn’t really a good idea. You know what? Forget it.” You can look at what you want to accomplish, what your goal is, and weigh out whether the plan of attack is going to work. Once you commit to action, the time for planning is over.
When a bull is bearing down on you, it’s a bad time to think, “Maybe I should wear something other than my red windbreaker…”
With any important decision, there are three distinct stages. The first is the planning. The second is the action, and the third is the debriefing, or evaluation. They are separate entities, and blending them is a recipe for failure. It’s a little too late to still be planning when you are falling from 10,000 feet. It is also too soon to be evaluating how the jump went when still in midair. If your chute doesn’t open, and you’re already calling the jump a success, I think your evaluation system is a little flawed.
Another frequently occurring problem is over planning. There are people that have gone online, read blogs about skydiving, read articles on the best equipment to use, and where the best places are in the world to see the greatest scenery. They may be able to tell you what the ideal plane is for jumping, how to maneuver in the air before releasing your chute, or how to brace for impact in the case of an emergency. They are virtual experts. I say “Virtual” because they have never actually jumped out of a plane, and probably never will, since they are collecting “all of the information” before they act.
People who know everything about a subject without actually doing said subject are not experts; they are researchers.
To bring it back into our world of expertise, make sure you are not blending the stages in your marketing in the same manner. Plan out your marketing. Then do it. Then evaluate. The time for second guessing is before you take action. The time for evaluating is after the event has had enough time for some real answers. Make sure you do things in the right order, and commit to each step completely. The alternative is jumping out of a plane, and hoping that everything just works out.
We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about marketing strategies. Many of these are in relation to technology, like QR codes. We’ve discussed different social media tools that businesses should use to forward their brand awareness and increase customer loyalty. Texting, web design, and branding are all popular themes on this site. All of these are important aspects that you need to think about, frequently. However, there could be something hurting your business every day that you walk right by, and never think about.
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Alright, hopefully that’s an overstatement. Let’s face it, perception is reality, and if your business appears to be out-dated, there’s a good chance it’s hurting your bottom line. Let’s pretend a traveler’s car breaks down in a town he’s never been in. He’s going to have to stay a couple of nights while waiting for it to be fixed, and he’s trying to pick out a hotel. There are two within walking distance of the automotive dealer fixing his vehicle. Which one is he going to pick, based on looks alone?
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The example above may seem a little extreme, but in reality we do this every day. There are stores that you have never gone in, because their display or signage from the street does not look appealing to you. In these stores you may be missing the deals of a lifetime, and you will never know because they look closed due to horrible signage. Even if a friend stated that there were great deals to be had, some people would still avoid a location due to the effect on their own self image that shopping at a place that looks close to condemned would have on them.
If I accidentally posted your sign as one of my examples, please call us today, so we can schedule a sit down and discuss the drastic overhaul you need!
You only get a few moments to make a good impression. When a potential customer visits your website, the usability is important, or they will leave and find a better website. On top of this, many users will be turned off by how outdated your site seems. No one visits a website, and says, “Oh, they must be busy selling/servicing their customers, and don’t have time to stay on top of updates. This is where I want to go!” More often, potential customers think, “They can’t even update their website? How good can they be?”
There are five things you need to remain vigilant about, in order for your website to not seem out of date.
1. THE DATE. Seems like kind of a no brainer, right? But how many websites do you visit, and the copyright date is not current. This potential flaw highlights to your customer that you miss the little details. You can come across as a “Big Picture Only” place. On top of that, the new information you published yesterday automatically seems it could be years old.
2. The images. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? The last thing you want is for your pictures to be screaming “Out of Date!!!” You can’t call it “Cutting edge” if the person using your product is wearing clothes from 1992. You can’t say that the car for sale “Won’t last long at this price” when there’s a pile of snow near the tire, and it’s May.
3. The Company History. “About us” is a great tab, as it can provide potential customers a wealth of information to sway their purchasing decision towards your company. It can also give the impression that a company exploded onto the scene, and then screeched to a halt. If your “About Us” section lists impressive details from a couple years ago, and hasn’t changed since, you could be creating the illusion that you haven’t done anything of note recently. Be wary of inadvertently giving the impression that your company stopped growing.
4. Your “Specials” page. If you can’t keep this current, remove it from your menu. There is nothing worse than showing the great deals someone could have received if they shopped a month ago. No one is impressed by your old sale. Having a running archive of your deals from days past does not show your future customers how good your sales in the future will be.
5. Customer Testimonials. If your site has these, make sure they are still relevant and recent. There is nothing worse than seeing how great your company was 10 years ago, when your last glowing review was posted. You also probably don't want too many great reviews for products or services you no longer offer. Having a historical testimonial is great, as long as you also have current ones that show you are still a good company to work with!
There’s a reason why the term “yesterday’s news” has a negative connotation. No one wants to read it, just like your site, if you fail to remain vigilant on these 5 steps.
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