Online Marketing Tips - SEO Tricks, PPC, Email Marketing Tips Blog » Digital Media Marketing

10 Email Marketing Tips to Increase Sales

Pratibha Srinivas — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:42:17 +0000

Email marketing campaigns are a fast, efficient and affordable way to stay in contact with past clients, garner new sales and promote your business. Starting an effective email marketing campaign is easy with a few tested strategies that can open up a whole new base of clientele.

And email marketing is by far the BEST and CHEAPEST way to stay in touch with your customers and build rock-solid relationships with them — so they’ll buy from you again and again! (This is called the “lifetime value” of your customers, and it’s extremely profitable.)

Consider this: About 99% of your website visitors will leave without buying anything from you on their first visit. But by creating a great opt-in offer you can at least get their contact details — and then use email marketing to follow up, build relationships, and turn them into paying customers. Business 2.0 recently reported that permission-based marketing messages enjoy a response rate of 11.5%, compared to a mere 0.55% for banner click through’s.

If you’re stuck for ideas on how to use email marketing to ramp up your profits? Here you can start with 10 proven tactics:

Develop relationships & establish credibility by offering free information: Highlighting how you have helped past clients is an effective way to show what you can do.
Acknowledge the subscription of a user: Plainly put, you must give subscribers a choice. Subscribers must make a conscience decision that they wish to receive your email. Avoid stealth sign-up methods that collect addresses. Avoid pre-checked newsletter boxes that opt users in with little deference to their true desires. Confirmation of all subscriptions should be required.

To help you maintain an efficient operation, you can automate the acknowledgement process by setting up an auto responder to your subscription email. An auto responder feature allows you to create a customized message that will automatically be generated and sent to your list member to let him/her know that you have received a message. You can start out your acknowledgement email as “Thank you for subscribing to our weekly newsletter.”Keep a record of all requests for subscription to your newsletter or product offerings, even years afterward.
Allow users to unsubscribe from your list: Be respectful. Always include an opt out message at the bottom of the page. Include clear instructions and a link for opting out of future mailings. Not only will this save you the headache of dealing with people that really want off your list, it builds trust in clients that are actually reading your emails.

Keep your email list clean by removing faulty email addresses. ISPs monitor the volume of email sent as well as the failure rates. Large volumes of both are indicative of spam and could result in your domain being black listed. ISP’s make the assumption that you are a spammer & could block all emails from your domain.
Personalize: Response rates to email campaigns are said to increase with the personalization of emails. People are prone to respond more favorably to emails that start with their names, or personalized salutations such as “Dear Susan.” However, personalize your emails only if you have information on the first names of your subscribers or opt-in list. If you’ve incomplete data, never attempt to personalize your emails and have your emails start with “Dear Unknown.” There is nothing more irritating to an email recipient than being labeled as an “unknown.”
Subjects: Be honest with subject line. Make sure your subject line is relevant and capture the reader’s interest. If the first couple of sentences are not related to the subject line, you will lose your audience. Many email readers screen their email by simply deleting those topics they deem SPAM.
Offer electronic “loyalty coupons”: This is a great way to get your existing customers to buy from you again and again. Simply send each of your customers a coupon that they can print and bring with them into your store or use on your website. It is always a good idea to make your coupons valid for a limited time only to motivate your customers to make a purchase as soon as possible. Follow-up offers are one of the most powerful ways to build a profitable business because.
Clarify your Privacy Policy & Contact Info: Put your contact info in two places within the email. Bombard the text with ‘click here’ or repetitive plugs doesn’t usually do much but look like a hard sell. Two well placed and clickable contact links near the top and bottom of the email makes for easy and effective responses. Trust is essential in creating stronger customer relationship on the Internet. When a visitor subscribes to your newsletter and gives his or her contact information and other pertinent details, the person assumes that his/her information will be used only in-house, never shared, sold or rented so clearly articulating your policy. State on the registration forms what kind of information user may be willing to provide.
Test, Test and Test More: Create a test group, view formatting in an email client prior to sending any emails to your list! Test all the links contained within the email message and make sure they are properly formatted and work! Do a test mailing and send to a small population in your group to test your message. Conduct an A/B split test to determine the effectiveness of your message. Make sure that the sampling is a large enough that the results will be an accurate reflection of the messages effectiveness. Put your eye so that the same person doesn’t get more email at same time.
Respond promptly to email inquiries: The hallmark of good customer service on the Internet is the quick response time to email inquiries. Make sure that you respond to emails from your subscribers quickly to assure the person that you are taking care of his/her concerns. Offer to answer any additional questions they may have, and let them know that you are available to speak with them at their convenience. This can significantly increase your chances of closing a sale by providing your leads with extra information.
Track and analyze the results: As with any marketing campaign, tracking the results and optimizing performance over time is absolutely necessary. Thankfully, sophisticated email marketers can track insightful and actionable data that can be used to evaluate performance using Google Analytics & other softwares.. Important metrics to analyze are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. Marketers separate the click-through and conversion rates by original customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances. These metrics will alert a marketer to which offers and customers drive the highest ROI.

I hope by implementing these practical policies, you can increase sales + traffic to your site.

Mobile Website SEO Tips & Guide

Ankush Kohli — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:20:36 +0000

Mobile SEO is brilliant in terms of local businesses as people can call on this information in an emergency and find a local business so solve their problem. Finding a local car mechanics when your car has broken down, for example, must be easy to find on the mobile phone as people will need a quick fix. Mobile SEO can use localized SEO techniques, such as using Google Maps and other local SEO techniques to get up the rankings on Google. This will generate some very quick conversions as people need these sorts of services. Ecommerce solutions can also benefit from Mobile SEO with many people wanting to purchase things, such as theatre tickets, while they are out and about.

Google also took initiative into mobile industry when they allow you to start a Adowrds campaign on mobile devices. In this regard, it also launched “Mobile Keyword Tool” as well.

Google published “We are happy to let you know that the Keyword Tool now offers keyword suggestions for Mobile campaigns. Just access the Keyword Tool from within any mobile-only ad group and you’ll get shorter, mobile-device specific results. (Note that, at this time, mobile suggestions are not available in the standalone version of the tool so you’ll need to be logged into an account directly.)”

Factors that need to be care in Mobile Website SEO:

1. Apply general on-site optimization techniques: No doubt that SEO for mobile website is different than a general website but you can apply few basic techniques to your site. Use all the SEO “on-page optimization” practices that you know:

Title tag optimization
Metas Optimization
Uses of heading tags
URL optimization Anchor Optimization
Etc.

2. Ensure you key content is placed in the top part of the page as the users and bots will find it easy.

3. Your website should be crawl-able by Mobile search engines. Here’s the list of mobile search engines:

Google XHTML http://www.google.com/xhtml
Google Mobile http://www.google.com/mobile/
Yahoo Mobile http://mobile.yahoo.com/search
MSN/Bing http://home.mobile.live.com/Home.mvc
AOL Mobile http://mobile.aolsearch.com
ABPHONE http://www.abphone.com

4. Also you can submit your website to Yahoo Site Explorer Mobile Submit page. Here it’s:

5. See how your website is opening in mobile browser: http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN

6. CSS Tips:

Websites using tables for layout will not render well on mobile handsets. The site must use CSS for layout.
Use Valid XHTML Coding. WML is the specific language for mobile users however the more usable is XHTML so here are the tips for XHTML. Mobile search engines have more trouble in parsing the webpage if it’s having invalid code. So you can reduce the risk of not opening the website by validate the webpage. You can validate through W3C Validator.
Character encoding should be UTF-8
The most important information of your site must be right at the top of the page as it can be very time-consuming for browsers to read through.
You have very limited screen real estate. About 2×3 inches or so consider the size in mind.
if you are a more robust e-commerce site, consider creating an m-commerce site (mobile site) with:
- Mobile galleries
- Product catalogs and shopping basket
- Billing management
- Ease of use/login
- All images should be striped out, unless they are must.
- Remove all advertising as you already have limited screen space.
- If you don’t need it, hide it. Remove any Google Friend Connect, Facebook Fan Box or other third party services. Focus on your content.
- Remove Flash, Java and any plug-in content unless absolutely necessary.
- All in all, simplify.

7. Maximum total page size recommended is 20 kilobytes.

8. Accessibility: In order for a site to work on a wireless handset, it must adhere strictly to website accessibility guidelines, as set out by the W3C http://www.w3.org/WAI/

9. Keep on Top of Mobile Technologies - The technology continues to improve and get better. Avoid using intensive presentation methods such as Flash and Ajax. Again keep the design simple. While we expect technologies to improve, you want to ensure that your mobile site will load fast and provide an output that is useful to the user.

10. Optimize for Local Search – ensuring that your site is well optimized for local search, will mean that people should be able to find you when they are looking for local resources. Update your profile and include links to your mobile site (if you have one) and make it easy for users to find your business and more importantly “reach out and touch your business”. It is not just about the Yellow Pages anymore.

Resources List:

1. Mobile Website Design Resources:

Mobile Awesomeness – www.mobileawesomeness.com
MobiSite Galore – www.mobisitegalore.com
Accuracast – http://mobile.accuracast.com

2. Some of the popular Mobile Analytics:

Amethon
Bango Analytics
GetMobile Analytics by Quattro Wireless
Mobilytics

3. W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 = http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/

4. WordPress Mobile Plugin: A tool that addresses issues with any type of handset: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/

iPhone & Android phones face less troubles in displaying the non-SEO WebPage.

Effective Website Branding Tips

Ankush Kohli — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:16:44 +0000

Click! Click! And your work is done online!

So, what is it that would differentiate your website from the others? It takes only a few minutes (in most cases, a few seconds) for a visitor to pass by your site before he gets what he wants on the internet.

In a world, where billions of websites are available, yours is just one of them. Branding is the key here to hit the dart. In other words, to be noticed amongst the many is an art in itself.

Last month, I wrote an article on “Why branding is an essential aspect of marketing” and now, these few tips would help you make a start to be that one in a million websites:

Emphasize on what you do and not on who you are – Your website content should clearly project the commodity that you offer and not what you are all about. Use appropriate and minimal words to define your products/services. However, this does not mean that you should not give out information regarding your company. Ensure that you have a separate page depicting the corporate identity and stating what your organization stands for.

Attractive Website – A visually attractive website can count on more visitors than that of a less appealing one. Make appropriate use of colors that is in – sync with your theme. This could be done with the help of pictorial descriptions that make it easier for the visitor to understand. However, make sure that you balance all the aspects appropriately to give the perfect output.

Logo – A logo would give a picture to your entity. It would define your commodity giving a glimpse into what you stand for. Devising an effective tagline along with your logo is an added advantage. This combined entity would form a memory which the visitor could remember and relate to, even after he has closed your website.

Blogs & Videos – An internal blog giving updates about your organization as well as the industry would be an asset. There are definitely a certain set of people who constantly look for the latest. Keeping your website updated with all the latest blog posts would definitely act as advantage. This way, your website would be renowned as a leader in its domain.

Additionally, make your presence felt in the external domains as well. These include contributing blogs, articles and press releases in other websites meant for this specific purpose. Also, share these posts within your network in the industry. Your frequency in constantly sharing information would determine your popularity. So, “the more the better”!

Incorporating videos wherever necessary would also do the trick! Time constraints might lead the visitor skip your page but now you can stop him with that video which would hardly take a few minutes to get an overview of the entire commodity or the concept.

Research – Any new initiative on your site should always be accompanied by thorough research in your field. You definitely would not want to attempt something that has been tried and tested a several times. Conduct online and offline surveys amongst your target audience to know what they are looking for. Although it is time consuming but the results would set you apart from competitors. Also, you can take expert opinion in this regard, if the need arises.

Controversy Sells – Controversy definitely grabs eyeballs. The purpose of making your website known would be achieved instantly with more number of hits than ever. However, ensure that it is for the right reason.

Search Engine & Social Media Optimization – Effective optimization of your site could take you to places. If you are not proficient in SEO, hire a specialist. It would be worth it. It would also help to generate more leads, thus enhancing your business further.

Active participation in various forums and groups would enhance your views and opinions, enabling you to see the broader picture. You would definitely gain an insight into what other professionals in the industry are working on and what they feel about it.

All in all, online branding is cost effective compared to offline branding (I hope you’re agree with me). Also, the reach is much wider within a minimal amount of time. So next time, work on the above lines till I update you through my next post!