Internet Marketing

The next Marketing Association 2 day workshop in Practical Email Marketing kicks off next week - 28th & 29th August. I will be co-presenting this with Amanda Partington from Jericho.

There may be one or two places available - best to contact Amy here if you are keen to attend.

I have revised and updated the email acquisition and retention content areas. Plus we are now allowing attendees to take part in some “hot seat” sessions where for no extra charge they can harness the combined power of 30 marketing brains focused on their particular email marketing problems.

Text emails are not the most attractive of messages to send out but by ensuring they are 60 characters wide helps ensure they look half reasonable in your subscriber’s inbox.

Here’s a simple email message text formatter tool that I now have on my website marketing blog site to help get those text messages in shape.

Are your subscribers just waiting by their computers for your next email message to arrive? Here is a great case study from John Deere - via MarketingSherpa that is worth a look through (prior to Aug 27).

This is for those wanting a blend of information and support in one bite-sized chunk.

I have packaged up a couple of eBooks, a bunch of CD presentations and an hour’s worth of phone support and wrapped around it my usual 100% money back guarentee.

The page that tells more of the tale is here

I didn’t want to create another e-book to compete with the many out there. This is my go at cramming as much information I can into the one payment hit and with the phone support there I can bug you for a whole hour to make sure you do something different!!

Check it out if you dare……

Here’s a very simple interactive calculator I have produced to help you see the financial side of email marketing. Have fun.

Text and HTML which formats do you need to publish and how are they both delivered successfully?

This whirlwind whiteboard session explains in just over 2.5 mins how most email production systems deploy both and the way in which each manages to be viewed with a reasonable level of success by your subscribers. Have fun.

Improving your own email marketing is not always about the big changes you make. New tools, better designs and even a re-designed web site are all fine and dandy but these take time to implement.

It could, however, be just as easy as altering the lead in paragraph to your welcome message. Or maybe taking a bit more time developing the content you intend to send out in your next message. This great article on slow cooked success talks about musicians but the theory works well for those in online marketing.

Improving your efforts by just a percentage point each day can be much easier than working towards those big wins.

OK so I have asked Google if they have one spare Gmail account out there for me to try and promptly received a reply.

Nope, sorry but thanks for the enquiry.

Well if there is anyone out there with a spare invitation then there is some keen Kiwi ready to get their hands on one. (Just email me at keengmailkiwi@permission.co.nz .) I have read bits and pieces about how this will all work out in the new Gmail format but it would be good to see it all for myself.

Well within a day of this being posted I now have an account. Thanks again Brent.

Have fun

There are a very few email messages that make it to my printer. Usually the content is so good that it deserves some paper so that I can work my way through it while eating lunch at the café nearby. Out of the hundred I receive each month a handful are treated this way.

The ones that make it paper do so because they are packed with so much good content that they deserve the extra attention that paper provides.

This leaves the large majority to be skimmed and pulled apart visually on screen while I search for golden nuggets of content.

Too often I see email marketing that covers so much content that it needs paper to perform. And unfortunately as I believe that too few subscribers will take up this option, the bulky message misses its mark.

I wrote this article a while ago to help publishers concentrate their newsletter content down to some key points to impart via email. It’s still valid today and worth a read If you are struggling with too much rather than too little content for your own email marketing.

Have fun

Before coming to New Zealand I spent the first 21 years growing up in southern England. So it is with great delight that I can see email marketing is becoming a force to be reckoned with back home. This article on e-marketer reveals all with pie and bar charts, plus the occasional smattering of text.

Are we missing another metric from our analysis? How about click to open ratios? Learn more here. Subscribe to this newsletter if you are interested in looking forward with your own email marketing; the content is always worth a read.

There are just two key themes that I think make up good email marketing. The first is “skim readability” the other is the provision of content that provides mutual (you and your subscriber) value.

When all you have is 3 seconds of subscribe attention to convey your message a design that allows for the skimming eye is essential. Plus once the subscriber has read what you have on offer they should be willing to spend another 3 seconds on your next offering.

Are you placing too much content load on the 3 seconds you have on offer? One item pushed hard is so much better than three thoughts crammed together with neither working well

But which item should you choose to air in my messages? Well that’s where good planning comes into play. When you know where you want to lead your subscriber it is an easy choice to pick the content for your message.

Have fun

The DMA has gone a long way to define some common sense standards for online marketing. You can find their document here. It’s worth a peek, print and wade through if you are already or planning to venture online with your marketing spend.

Planning shouldn’t be an onerous task.

The other day I sat down with a customer team to plan out their email marketing activities. After just a few hours we had put together some great points that outlined the proposed outcomes, content, frequency and direction of their email messaging.

My four step methodology took us through the process and we were done and dusted in record time. Planning shouldn’t be a difficult task. Check out this document as a thought starter. Or if you would some more interaction, here’s a streaming ppt preso to kick some ideas around. Now how does it go? Something like fail to plan – plan to fail??? Have fun.

As a customer I like to hear from my suppliers on a reasonably regular basis. Once ever six weeks telling me how they are going and what more they can do for me would be fine. And of course email would be the easiest way for me to digest this information. But how many do this, NONE.

You don’t have to be brilliant to stand out from the crowd. Just do the basics of keeping in touch, that’s all.

If you don’t already why not start planning to keep in touch with your customers – you may be the first to stand out from the crowd.

Look at this case study on how one business stopped looking for new business and mined the existing business they had. It’s an insight.

Have you ever considered why SPAM has caused such a public backlash compared to the deafening silence from its unsolicited paper cousins of direct and junk mail? People seem to care a lot more about what enters their Inbox than their letterbox. And for the word “care” think about logical substitutes of “notice”, “read” and “respond”.

All this translates into campaign results that can surpass other forms of direct communication making it an ideal cost effective option for any small business owner.

And what’s more I believe that as a small business owner the odds are stacked in their favour to become budding email marketing superstars.

Let me explain why.

Firstly, it’s about personality. E-mail messages written in a personal style seem to work the best. Writing this way doesn’t seem to faze most small business owners. Usually their business shows more of their personality when dealing with customers than larger competitors so writing this way seems to be a natural option.

Secondly, a small business owner can understand what content that has a good chance of being read. With them working closely with customers they tend to understand what their customers want to know about and can easily translate this into articles and reports that will be read.

Thirdly, the time and cost efficient nature of email marketing ideally suits the busy small business owner. It can take the same amount of effort to create an email newsletter for 500 subscribers as it does 50,000. Plus the costs of an email production are a fraction of the alternative paper option.

For a small business owner a regular e-mail message can have as much personality and content to end up being the next best thing as a phone call from themselves, just more efficient and at a lot less costly to produce.

So there you have it, three reasons why small business owners can make it big in the Inbox. Have fun harnessing this great tool for your company.

Here’s something to make youre life a bit easier. I know what it’s like to sweat over the send key before you unleash thousands of messages out onto the Internet. In one of my lessons I cover what to check. Now, here’s the check list to help you work through a campaign launch process. Depending on the messaging tools you use and the styles of messages you send this list can be even more complex. Have fun.

OK, so you’ve written the text in trusty MS Word but when you copy and paste into your text area of your email marketing tool it ends up way to long. Now make it a bit easy and use this and make this web page take the strain.