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Tag: marketing efforts

  • Email Marketing Evaluation: A Must!

    A promotional method

    Email marketing can be a very effective promotional method to reach target audiences around the world, despite the fact that in many cases, the marketing efforts of a business owner or promoter may not reach full potential unless s/he invests the necessary time, energy and money into evaluating the email marketing strategy which s/he has put into action.

    It is during such an evaluation that a business owner can determine whether or not email marketing is a method that can enable him/her to reach stated marketing objectives. The same evaluation can be used to determine if email marketing as a strategy is having an adverse affect the business productivity.

    Useful information

    That having been said, there are a few ideas pertaining to the importance of evaluating email marketing that we’d like to discuss in this article, and will also offer what we consider useful information on how to initiate and complete the email marketing evaluation process. To say such a process, done on a regular basis, is important would be an obvious understatement since frequent evaluation of any email marketing strategy is not only important, it is crucial to the success of the business or individual that puts it into effect.

    So it follows that one’s failure to evaluate his/her email marketing strategies can have adverse effects on finances and overall business objectives, including failure to produce results and loss of customers to his/her competitors.

    Avoid shortcuts

    Consider for a moment that an existing email marketing campaign is not effective because it does not reach members of the particular target audience. An evaluation will certainly reveal the reasons for this failure, one of which may very well be that the distribution list to which this campaign is being sent consists of recipients who have little or no interest in the being offered via the emails.

    Business owners who take shortcuts by purchasing large email lists, often find their shortcut did not pay off because the recipients of their marketing emails are simply not interested in any product(s) or service(s) they offer. In this scenario the email marketing is likely to generate very few sales or website visits. However, reevaluating the email distribution list to include recipients who are interested in the products or services being offered will likely result in significantly more sales and website visits.

    Remove ALL semblances of spam!

    Now consider a situation in which your email marketing is being construed as spam by recipients. If you have taken precautions to ensure your emails are reaching members of your target audience, but your emails seem like over the top sales pitches, the members of your email distribution list may view your emails as spam and not take your advertisements seriously. When this happens members of your email distribution list may be more likely to seek out a competitor when they are in need of products or services rather than making a purchase from you.

    In fact, one of the subtle ways you could use to remind yourself that any likeness to spam must be avoided at all costs, is getting in the habit of refer to your list as an “opt-in subscriber” list and not a distribution list. Think of this excercise in these terms:

    You can buy distribution lists. But you must create, build, and nurture subscriber listscreate, build, and nurture subscriber lists by offering interesting (compelling?), useful (valuable?) and free content on your website to attract and encourage visitors who become repeat readers and, ultimately valued subscribers. get the difference?

    Evaluating your email marketing efforts may be formal or informal in nature. If you have specific business goals in mind you might want to consider the path to meet this goal as an indication of whether or not the email marketing is working. If you’re interested in reading more about email marketing take a look at this recently published post – Alternatively, you can evaluate your email marketing efforts by soliciting customer feedback.

    Ask for customer feedback

    Asking customers for their opinions about your email marketing campaign and whether or not they were compelled to make a purchase because of the content, the advertising or some other element is a simple and straightforward way of getting direct and unvarnished answers from your target audience.

    Based on this information you should have a good indication of whether or not the email marketing strategy is effective. If it is not effective you should consider making changes to create more interest in your products or services. The changes you make should reflect any feedback you receive, and ensure you are not making changes that will cause even less interest from the members of your subscriber list.

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  • How Effective is Your Email Marketing?

    A question of effectiveness

    If you are a business owner who utilizes email marketing campaigns to promote your products or services and advertise your brand, the question of how effective your email marketing is might occupy a prominent place in your mind. In fact, questions regarding the effectiveness of any type of marketing effort should be entertained as frequently as deemed practical in order to ensure that such marketing efforts are producing desired results. Asking these questions on a regular basis and continually evaluating the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns will help to determine their effectiveness on an ongoing basis, especially in those instances when changes are made to the marketing strategy.

    In view of the above, this article will discuss the importance of frequently evaluating email marketing strategies, while also providing a few tips which we hope will be helpful to you in evaluating your email marketing strategy.

    First and foremost

    First and foremost, it is important to evaluate your email marketing strategy on a regular basis because failure to do so might very well result in a complete waste of your time, money and efforts; and although email marketing may be a cost effective way to advertise your business the activity doesn’t get done without input from you, the business owner/advertiser. There is still some time, money and energy involved in planning and executing email marketing campaigns. In other words, if an email marketing campaign is ineffective and nothing is done to attempt make more effective your business is wasting resources by continuing to invest in this type of marketing strategy when it is not generating profit for the business or even creating interest in your products or services.

    Second, and perhaps just as important, is the frequency with which a business owner or marketer evaluates the effectiveness of his/her email marketing strategy without setting goals before s/he begins the evaluation process. The importance of goal-setting is highlighted here because failure to do so might help to undermine the email marketing efforts of any business or marketer.

    This is due to the fact that without goals it can be difficult to determine whether or not such email marketing efforts are effective. If, for example, you set a goal to increase the number of sales you make per month, then it will be rather simple to determine the results based on the number of monthly sales generated and therefore just as simple to evaluate the effectiveness of that particular email marketing campaign.

    Deciding on method

    Once you have determined how you intend to evaluate you progress you should be able to easily determine the effectiveness of your current email marketing strategy as long as this is the only marketing you are currently doing. Of course, if you have more than one marketing strategy in use simultaneously you cannot be sure which strategy is driving customers to make purchases, or attract visitors to your website.




    When you decide to evaluate your email marketing strategy according to specific goals you should take care to ensure you are not currently running other types of marketing in conjunction with your email marketing campaign(s). This will help to prevent confusion about which type of marketing is producing the desired results. It will also help to prevent business owners from mistakenly believing email marketing is producing a positive results when, in fact, it is another marketing strategy that is actually generating all the positive sales and traffic activity.

    Customer surveys

    While on the subject of evaluating effectiveness, one strategy that comes to mind is the use of customer surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Asking customers how they heard about your products or services have proven to be an excellent way to determine whether or not customers are making purchasing decisions based on one marketing strategy or another; so this strategy can also be utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

    Additionally, these surveys can be used to obtain more detailed information about email recipients’ reaction to a particular email marketing campaign. Customers can, and often does, provide valuable feedback about topics such as the layout and appearance of email and the ease and readability of content included in the email. This feedback and other customer-generated information can help a business owner determine how to design future emails designed to achieve the most positive results in a campaign. Armed with such information the business owner can design subsequent emails that might incorporate many of the qualities previous customers found to be useful, and avoid qualities that were viewed to be useless.

  • Avoiding Spam in Your Ad Campaigns

    A fine and distinct line

    At one time or another we have all seen statements pertaining to spam which are admonishing in nature but designed to make us aware of the negative effects spamming can have on our promotional and marketing efforts. Such statements often appear in the form of short, two-to-three word directives like, “Don’t Spam,” “Avoid Spamming” and “Advertise, Do Not Spam,” along with other similar cautionary phrases. What is often left unsaid is what spam is and the various ways in which it is defined and interpreted; so in this article we will try to provide some clarification.

    First and foremost it is necessary to point out that there is a fine line between advertising and spam, but unfortunately many business owners do not understand the things that distinguish one from the other, although understanding these distinctions is very important in the sense that a smart and well planned Web marketing campaign can help to attract new customers and keep existing customers loyal, spam will likely alienate potential customers as well as an existing customer base. Such alienation can be extremely damaging to profit margins for many business owners. So let’s begin by taking a look at three examples in which basic Web marketing activities – banner ads, email campaigns and message board posts – can quickly cross the line from smart advertising to spam and how it can occur in each instance.

    Banner ads

    Banner ads are some of the most popular ad placement strategies that can accompany a Web marketing plan. They usually appear at the top of websites, spanning the width of a standard website – which is how they originally earned the name ‘banner ads’ – but in today’s marketing environment banner ads can actually refer to ads of various different sizes and shapes (instead of the standard 468×60 and the larger leaderboard 728×90 versions) that appear in an array of different locations on websites throughout the Web. In many cases a business owner (merchant) might purchase advertising space on certain websites but the banner ad may also be placed as part of an exchange or an affiliate marketing campaign.

    Exchanges of banner ads occur when one business owner (say merchant A) posts a banner ad on his own website in exchange for his banner ad being placed on the website of another business owner (say merchant B). These agreements may be made individually between business owners with complimentary businesses or as part of exchanges facilitated by a third party (an affiliate of one or the other). In the case of affiliate marketing it is often the case that an affiliate will post advertisements for a given merchant on his/her affiliate site in exchange for compensation when the banner ad produces a desired effect such as, traffic to the business site or product purchases. The terms of these agreements are determined and agreed to beforehand and are generally based on a scale of pay per impression, per click or per sale/lead.

    Now that you have a better idea of what banner ads are it is just as important to understand how they can be overused and, as a result of such overuse, be interpreted as spam. For example, judiciously placing your banner ad on a few websites which are likely to attract an audience similar to your target audience is smart marketing; whereas placing your banner ad on any website that will display the ad regardless of the target audience can be construed as spam. Be assured that Internet users who think your banner ads are everywhere they turn regardless of the content they are pursuing will not likely take your business seriously, in which case they certainly will not purchase products or services promoted under that business name as a result of such pervasive distribution of banner ads.

    eMail marketing campaigns

    Email marketing campaigns can also be very useful tools in the industry of Web marketing as these campaigns may involve sending periodic eNewsletters filled with information as well as advertisements and short, informative email courses or discounts on product and service offerings. Loyal customers who opt into a marketer’s email list will likely not view these emails as spam and may purchase additional products and services from the marketer or merchant as a result of this marketing strategy.

    Additionally, potential customers who have specifically requested more information on certain products and services will also find this type of marketing useful. However, email recipients who did not request information are likely to view such emails as spam. Similarly, harvesting email addresses in a deceptive manner and using these addresses to send out mass emails will most likely be always considered as spam. In fact sending unwanted commercial email to recipients who did not agree to receiving emails from the sender are considered one of the reasons for enactment of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, more of which are highlighted in the excerpt below.

    The CAN-SPAM Act was implemented in the United States on January 1st of 2004 as a means of protecting the privacy of consumers. CAN-SPAM is short for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act. The act prevents the use of misleading “to” and “from” headers in emails. The law requires marketers to include their physical address in the email as well as an “opt-out” link in every email designed to give consumers the ability to reach the marketer and tell them they no longer want to receive information from them after which the email sender must remove this email address from their data base within 10 business days. Any email that contains sexual content must be clearly labeled and identified before the recipient opens it. Marketers have to get permission from the consumer in order to sell their email address.

    Excerpt taken from Web Connections website. More about the legal aspect of spam can be obtained from, www.cauce.org.

    Message boards

    Message boards provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to obtain some free advertising where it will be noticed by members of a particular target audience; and if the products and services you or other business owners offer appeal to a specific niche, it is worthwhile to join message boards and online forums related to your industry of choice. Here you will find a large population of Internet users who may have an interest in your products.

    You might consider including a link to your marketing website in your signature or posting the link when it is applicable to the conversation. However, care should be taken to closely review the message board guidelines so you can avoid doing anything inappropriate while employing a technique which many consider to be smart marketing. Conversely, replying to every message with a link to your website when it is not relevant to the conversation is likely to be construed as spam by other members. Once they begin to view your posts as spam, they are not likely to visit your website via the links you post.

     

  • A Reason To Join The Inner Circle

    Joining a group could be inspiring

    One good reason for an individual to join a group is the camaraderie and common interests shared among the members. For Web marketers, more often than not, there is a third element which takes the form of supporting the marketing efforts of each other by way of increased Web traffic and activity to our respective websites, as well as honest and constructive criticisms of those sites.

    The Inner Circle is a group headed by Mark Call, the accomplished Author, Speaker and Marketing Coach who did the weekly webcast presentations for GVO. Our IC group consists of Web marketers with Web marketing expertise ranging from newbies (mere weeks of experience) to seasoned pros with several years in the business. From a strictly personal viewpoint, my reason for joining this group – or any other, for that matter – may have been established a very long time ago.

    The best from my inner self

    You see, during my childhood years I often heard my mother say that “birds of a feather flock together”. Little did I know that it would be translated (in today’s terms) to mean that I would join the inner circle group. Back then I didn’t grasp the full meaning of that old adage uttered by my mother, but it stayed somewhere in the back of my mind just laying dormant for many years until my understanding of the “power-in-numbers” truism really took hold. I joined GVO about 8 months ago and started the process of getting familiar with the company’s system.

    My training consisted of attending weekly Webcasts of the Overview Presentation as well as viewing the many video tutorials and attending live classes taught by knowledgeable and experienced instructors. In the process, I found there were two voices that were more prominent than any others. One was the voice of CEO Joel Therien and the other was that of Mark Call. I soon came to realize that Mark was a very important person within the organization and paid special attention to his words and counsel.

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    Success determined by social acquaintances?

    One thing that Mark said during his hosting of the Overview Presentation is, your income is the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. I know that’s not verbatim, but I understood it to mean that you are who you hang out with, and lo and behold (as my mother would say), those words spoken by my beloved mother so many years ago came back to me.

    Mark Call symbolizes success as measured by his accomplishments as an author, public speaker, Web Marketer and Web Conference host, as mentioned earlier. My decision to apply for membership in Mark’s Inner Circle was based on my mother’s ‘birds of a feather flock together’ philosophy which was paraphrased by Mark as a gauge of an individual’s level of success or failure.

    Find a few eagles to hang with!

    🙂

    I joined Mark’s Inner Circle flock where I expect to learn how to fly and then soar in the proverbial skies of the World Wide Web. There are other people in this circle (birds in this flock) that have had a positive effect on me and whose actions and kindness have enriched my person and enhance my web marketing activities. People like Claire Pooulton, Deb & Steph, Keith Carberry and others. Terry Anglin has had a very positive impact on my Web marketing efforts through his “Word Press/Blogging from the ground up” training.

    So you see, based on my mother’s old adage, one could hangout with birds of a positive flock or birds of a negative flock; But since it’s so “…hard to soar like an eagle when you hang out with turkeys”, I’d rather hang out with eagles knowing that one day I will be soaring among Web marketing’s high fliers. Thanks Mark for the invitation to join your Inner Circle! And thanks to all the circle’s members for helping to make it a positive experience!

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