Digital Marketing Tips, SEO Tricks - E-Marketing Guide Blog » Brand Management

A Guide to Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

Ankush Kohli — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:26:40 +0000

A common question I hear is ‘will my emails go into junk boxes?’

Well, if you fill them with junk then I’d hope so! Junk filters exist to make our lives easier, protect our computers and weed out malevolent or inappropriate content. However, sometimes perfectly innocent and relevant emails get caught up by the algorithms that decide what’s groovy and what’s not and it can be for all manner of unexpected reasons.

Here’s an example: Say you’ve created an email campaign about a brand new product, a product that’s taken years of development and significant investment to get to this stage. When you’re broadcasting the good news to your clients you NEED to be sure that they receive it without complication, so you do your best to keep the email tidy, succinct and clean. But it hits your junk box.

Ensuring Quality Bulk Email Marketing:

At this stage, there are a number of obvious things you can check for first including:

Profanity (even innocent words that can potentially be taken the wrong way)
Excessive use of exclamation points or other punctuation
Lots of different sizes and colours in your copy
Oversized or excessive numbers of images
Hyperlinks to suspicious sites
Suspect/’salesy’ subject lines

A single, strong instance of any one of the above could be the sole cause of your problem, and should be relatively easy to spot. Unfortunately, in the real world it’s the combined effect of minor SpamBugs here and there (which on their own wouldn’t cause any problems) that causes junking and which therefore makes the testing process ESSENTIAL.

A number of 3^rd party programs/services are available that can ‘rate’ your email for you, giving you an idea of how spammy it’s going to look to various different inboxes. These are fine, but should only be used as a starting point in my experience. We have a mantra here – “TEST, TEST and TEST again” – because there is no substitute. Best practice dictates that you take extra steps to ensure that you’ve done a good job, the right way. I advise you to spend a few minutes visiting major web based email services like Gmail and Hotmail and opening free ‘emailtest@’ accounts; you will find it makes a world of difference to your campaign creation process, and ultimately the results you might achieve.

Create the email
Send a test to multiple inboxes
Amend and repeat if necessary

Why Guest Blogging?

Ankush Kohli — Wed, 25 May 2011 11:24:23 +0000

This is answer to your questions “what’s? Or why’s?” to guest blogging. Let’s start with brief of guest blogging…

Guest blogging is done by bloggers to expose a way to network with other people within the blogosphere by exchange of content, grow interaction with other’s blog readers, and increase traffic for your own blogs. In simple words, authorize way to catch other bloggers traffic to your blog without harming their interest.

Few industry experts like: Kristi Hines did a comparison between Guest Blogging and Article Marketing and found Guest Blogging on a better side than Article Marketing.

You can start with guest blogging by following this link but before taking a step ahead have a look on some benefits which make you more clear on way to come with clear goals .

Some benefits to Guest blogging:

Exposes you to a new audience: Share your ideas to their audience and inspiring them by inviting. Make them aware with new ideas & specific topic.
Share Links: Guest blogging is a fairly easy way to get custom anchor-text, high quality one way backlinks to your website. If you want traffic from other blogs, you will get links & links control the web.
Get Branding: It will introduce you on the web, your name and your blog are your brand, and guest blogging helps you get them out there in your industry.
Increase Traffic: The basic fundamental of guest blogging is to get traffic one has a website which gets traffic. It’s that important, and guest blogging provides it.
Fill in a gap: From a long time if you can’t able to get new people on your site, invite other people to share on the blog in order to keep the frequency of posts up. By catching new people you fill the gap of new traffic.
Get Subscribers: The readers of a blog are more important than anything else, if you can get in front of an audience on another site; it’s likely that they’re going to subscribe to your feed. Subscribers are the life and soul of a blog.
Get Credit: When readers are used to reading posts written by a you , they sometimes assume that a guest post was written by you.

Guest blogging is a great situation for all parties involved. Blog owners win because they get excellent, free content for their site and bloggers win because they get more links and more subscribers on their blog.

Guest Blogging Guidelines:

Guest blog post submission process is extremely simple and as long as you follow these guidelines, almost guaranteed:

Relevant Content – To maximize the benefits of your article, it has to be on one of the topics covered on the blog, to ensure good response. Simply look at the list of categories to decide what content should be submitted.
Useful Information – People read blogs because they assume they are going to get useful information from them. Therefore, your writing style must not be trying too hard to sell itself.
Unique and Exclusive Content – article has to be uniquely written and not published else after approval. Failure to follow this simple rule will get your article deleted from our database.
Up to 3 Links per Article – You can take benefit of up to 3 links with desired anchor tags (obviously relevant) from your article and it could be from the body of article and Author details. You choose where to place the link, as long as you confirm to the rule.
Only Relevant Product Reviews – Self or affiliate promotions will not be accepted be it your product or someone else’s. You can include a link to site where you do those type of promotions but not linked directly.
Author Byline – You can include you image, real name or your “nickname”. I recommend that at least one of the links from your byline should lead to a page where readers can learn more about you.
Formatting –Will reject any submissions that have un-formated text. Do cross check to make sure, formatting is correct.

Contact me to apply for guest blogging on this blog…

Videos – Must for E-commerce Industry in 2011

Ankush Kohli — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 12:00:11 +0000

Probably, this is my last post of 2010 and also the final post about 2011 best marketing predictions practices. This post is about videos, which really helps almost every product or services in the industry. The only goal behind marketing or business development is to increase the sales and video is the best way, which really helps to boost the sales figures.

I’m a big fan of reelseo and I also read their articles. Last year, they predict the video marketing and everyone can see the reaction. Now, they’re predicting video importance for each retailer in 2011. Here are the reasons, why:

Video will maintain Retail Prices:
Video galleries not only keep visitors on sites an average of two minutes longer than pages without video, they support inbound traffic efforts with powerful SEO juice. All these factors add up to more sales at a higher average price, helping reverse downward pressure on margins. Ecommerce video also provides retailers with flexibility to enhance the online shopping experience, raising the chances of engaging comparison shoppers.

Mobile users easily accustom to Video:
In 2011, iPad sales are projected to grow by 127% and consumers are likely to reach for their phones. As mobile devices become more popular for shopping so buyers want to see the demo / video and purchase products.

Video will expand Social Presence:
As the top flash-sales sites are expected to generate $900 million in revenue by the end of 2010 so video will naturally become a key component of social communities.

Multiple Business Objectives, boost with Video:
Videos fit not only on the product page, but on the category page as in video galleries, and in email campaigns. Businesses will also begin using video more actively for other purposes like: in customer service. Retailers that have tested and proven video and will begin larger deployments, while retailers who have been slower to adopt will face the problem of catching up quickly. In 2011, retailers take advantage of video’s flexibility by using it for additional purposes.

Videos response was excellent in the year 2010 and I’m sure it’ll be very helpful to retailers in 2011. To keep ahead in the race, you need to adopt the latest technology & their improvements otherwise you won’t be the winner of the game.

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.

Google Adsense Future

Ankush Kohli — Mon, 03 May 2010 05:49:49 +0000

Now-a-days, every online user knows about Google Adsense Program and wants to make full/part time earnings from it (such a popular product by Google). Today, I’ll discuss about Google Adsense future in my blog.

Recently, Google announced in their adsense blog of having more than “1 Million Adsense Publishers” (A huge list of publishers that Google have).

You also must hear about Adsense new ads layout though only some of you noticed it. Google is experimenting with it’s new adsense ads layout. Publishes, on whose networks, these new layout ads are running, earning a lot better because these ads more like website inside stuff instead of a ad of third party website.

I noticed a thread of WebMasterWorld about Adsense future. The next thing that arise in my mind what will be future of Google Adsense program in next 5 years? Will they capture the rest of publishers or it’ll be difficult to survive in the market?

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!

How to Plan Social Media Marketing Strategy

Ankush Kohli — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:39:39 +0000

Few of my friends, who were looking for job change, got many calls for interview. Most of time, interviewer’s main query was regarding “Social Media”. Below mentioned are the major questions they’ve asked for:

How to create social media marketing campaign?
What’s the plan & strategy behind social media?
What are the activities you’re going to do?
What the goals are?
How much time you’ll spend and time to display the results?
How you’ll measure the results and what will be the expected results?
And what are the risks behind Social Media?

So I thought to write my next post about “Designing Social Media Marketing Plan”. Here’s the post content, start with “Why” word:

Why Social Media:

The most effective way of getting users attention OR To reach online people.
People tend to take part in online conversations and are happy to communicate with brands.
The information found on the Social Web can be genuinely interesting and quite informative when applied to a business.

Social Media Marketing Plan Steps:

Start with the Goals
Do research to Design the Strategy
Take a Call on “Actual path”
Put into Practice
Result Measurements
Risks
KPI (Key Performance Indicators)

1. Start with the Goals:

Increase brand awareness
Build authority
Learn more about your target audience
Gain inbound links
Educate and inform customers
Improve customer service
Monitor brand reputation
Reach new channels of customers.
Customers Testimonials
Direct connection between customer & the company
Generate leads & drive sales.

2. Create a Strategy Based on Research:

Determining if your target audience is online
Examining the successes and failures of other social media campaigns
Creating realistic timelines
How to measure the results

3. Actual path:

Building Relationships
Creating a Schedule
Staying the Course
Measuring the Results
Making the Right Tweaks

Now, it’s time implement all the plans. In simple terms, you need to adapt below mentioned practical steps:

4. Put into Practices: Mix of content you intend to create, and build work flow around it.

a) Methods:

Write/Read a blog
Share a Photo, Video
Bookmark a WebPage
Post a Question OR Start a Poll
Give replies to asked questions OR participate into other’s Poll
Add a Comment
Write a review
Subscribe to a Website
Being everyone, not only in your own domain

b) Community:Most social media strategies have to address community and how you will embrace the people you seek to gather around your business.

c) Neighbors:Reach out to others in your community, comment, and share.

d) Attention:Build awareness and encourage relationships with the media you’re making.

e) Pay attention and participate in the networks whose audience matters to you in the context of your business objectives. Don’t waste time in the networks that fail either test.

5. Measurement:

Reader comments
RSS Subscribers
Twitter Followers
Facebook Fans
Click Throughs
Diggs
Stumbles
Podcast Subscribers
Search Results
Links
Impressions
And last but not the least Analytics.

6. Risks:

You might lose control.
People talk about you in a bad way.

7. KPI: To know the “performance metrics” in a simple way, I’ve named them as KPI and terms are:

Traffic
Links
& Branding.

I’m expecting huge comments like my other posts about this social plan, please feel free to post your queries, feedback & suggestions.

Read Twitter Marketing Plan, Strategy & Tips.

Protect your business with social media monitoring services from a trusted agency.

Branding – Essential Aspect of Marketing

Ankush Kohli — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:31:27 +0000

Branding is an important arena in marketing. With brand, comes loyalty. A brand name gives recognition to a particular product or company. It defines a company for what it stands for, it’s mission, vision and values. Based on the intentions of a particular organization, a brand strategy is devised. The concept of branding is essential for any organization to make themselves known among the consumers.

Facebook is the solid example of branding, Read Here…

It’s a niche area that is earned by a company over a period of time. The audience would get attracted to a product in a much better way only if a brand image is created. A brand is created when a product/service is appreciated and accepted by the target audience. With this comes the challenge of getting customer approval.

This involves getting a positive impression in customer minds at the very first attempt itself. This would require massive campaigning that would include advertising, hoarding and banners containing punch lines as well as other forms of Public Relations tools to make your label known far and wide.

The main aspect of any marketing project as well as branding is the right usage of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP).

Segmentation is important for selecting the geographic region as well as the people dwelling in that region based upon which you can strategise your branding campaign. After segmenting, you need to select your customers or the target audience from that specific geographical location. Now, based upon the above two components, your product or service should be introduced in such a manner that it captures the attention of the audience.

This is because a brand communication strategy varies to a large extent on the geographic, economic and cultural factors. Based on the social norms of a community/country/region where a product or a brand is being introduced, the strategy for branding is devised. For instance, the people in the Gulf countries have a totally different mind set from those living in the west. Hence, fashion would have a different meaning for both these regions. The west would have a greater scope of promoting and branding a fashion house as compared to the Gulf in the east.

Branding has many other components which include a brand logo, communication strategy, a tag line that defines the company etc. This gives a specific identification with which the consumers can relate to. Usually, it takes decades to create a brand out of a product. This is because the market is highly consumer driven and any product exists in the market only if it is approved by a consumer or the target audience.

Today, Internet being more of a utility than an innovation, branding taken a new turn altogether. Online branding has become a niche area in marketing. With many people hooked to the net, branding on the net is equally important along with the offline campaigning. Online branding would include viral marketing, e – mail marketing and the list goes. The options are numerous to choose from. Hence, based on your product, select a few that would enhance your marketing campaign.

All in all, branding is a niche aspect in marketing without which it would be difficult for any organization to compete and survive in the market. Reach out to media buyers to enhance your marketing and to improve your brand.

Digital Marketing Tips, SEO Tricks - E-Marketing Guide Blog » Brand Management

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