We brought away some useful nuggets that Lake Communicators members may wish to employ in their online marketing strategies:
1. Cross Promotion
Place URLs to your social media pages and websites on physical, paper items your organization or business prints.
2. eNewsletters
Kleinman recommended MailChimp over Constant Contact, as Mailchimp allows you to test alternate subject lines. This allows you to see which subject lines have a higher click-through rate.
3. Convey Your Expertise
Today’s successful businesses need to be content publishers. We agree with this entirely, that businesses need to convey “thought leadership” in their field in order to be taken credibly. We recommend the book, “Trust Agents” by Chris Brogan for people who want more inspiration on this topic.
4. SEO
Kleinman gave a rough overview of two key considerations for SEO–title tags and incoming links.
We’d like to add that by making your content Web 2.0-friendly (so that it can tie in with Facebook or be shared, etc.), you create a larger web footprint for your site. When people share your content, it helps with incoming links and SEO.
5. Social Plugins
In mid-April, Facebook released Open Graph, which enables you to make your website or blog plug in to Facebook. One easy feature: you can place a “Like” button on your blog post, and when a user clicks “Like,” a link to your page shows up in their activity stream. We plan to post more on OpenGraph soon.
6. Marketing Gimmick
Another useful tidbit Kleinman shared: users like to read quantified, enumerated content, i.e. for your subject line of an eNewsletter, you could say “Five Tips for Better SEO.”
7. LinkedIn
One of the better uses of LinkedIn is to make your topical expertise known by answering questions on the Q&A section of LinkedIn. Also, if you use Microsoft Outlook, you can obtain contextual information about someone by installing a LinkedIn toolbar for Microsoft Outlook.
Lakenetwork
We will be offering an series of free tutorial sessions in our office for common business problems on the Internet. In our first session, we plan to help businesses create Facebook pages. Please contact us at 440-975-9580 for more information, or email contact@lakenetwork.net.
We are pleased to announce a new e-newsletter, the Lake Erie East Coastal Gazette. We designed this newsletter for the Lake County Visitors Bureau. The first couple of issues will focus on Lake and Ashtabula Counties, famous for beaches, fishing, B&Bs, wineries and more.
If you are interested in events in Lake and Ashtabula Counties, please feel free to subscribe to the newsletter here. New newsletter signups will be entered into a drawing for four free Lake County Captains tickets!
Lakenetwork.net provides professional e-newsletter design for businesses and organizations in the Northeast Ohio area and beyond.
Adding a nicely formatted signature to the bottom of your emails with some type of promotional message is fairly simple in email client programs such as Microsoft Outlook.
You can also add your company’s logo or additional images. But professionals should be aware that although it is possible to add logos and images, there are several issues:
1. Images might not appear in your clients’ email reading programs, so it’s possible that the signatures won’t appear as nicely as you expect them to if you use images.
2. Images can appear as attached files, even if you fully qualify the URLs, specifying that the image source lies on your web server or image server. Many users avoid opening emails that look like they have attachments.
Lakenetwork can design a professional email signature and/or email marketing newsletter campaign for your business or organization. Contact us at (440) 975-9580 for more information.
Are you relying on your Web site to do all your work for you? If that’s the case, you are probably pretty disappointed.
Some people have the idea that once a Web site is up, all they have to do is wait for the orders to roll in or the word-of-mouth to catch on. And then the Web site just sits there. And sits there.
And sits there.
If that’s the case, it’s time to go back to Marketing 101 and recall a few of the ways a business or organization can become known: through advertising, public relations, email marketing and community involvement. We at Lakenetwork use them all, and more.
Advertising
Try local advertising. We budget for advertising in the Lake County Business Journal, in a professional organization’s annual directory, and other places where we can be exposed to potential clients. We pay AT&T for an enhanced listing on YellowPages.com and in the phone book. Yes, people still use the phone book! A lot!
Public Relations
Send out press releases to online services, local newspapers and, if the announcement warrants it, national trade publications. Don’t neglect your small neighborhood paper, your professional organization’s newsletter, your Chamber of Commerce, your alumni newsletter. Make sure your press release has news value. News implies “change.” What has changed in your business lately? New hires or promotions, new clients, new technology, new products?
Email Marketing
Can you offer a monthly coupon or special? Do you have knowledge to impart about your specialty in an occasional tip sheet? Develop a system of sending regular (no more than once a month) messages to consumer or business acquaintances on your email list. We do email marketing by writing the e-newsletter you are reading now.
Public Involvement
Volunteer! Get involved! Give until it feels good! Offer your services to the local Chamber of Commerce, professional organization, church or other group. You will make new friends, widen your exposure and help the community. Just keep in mind that your primary purpose is to do good, not do business. No one wants your business interest shoved at them.
Some of these suggestions are high-dollar; others take more energy and time. There are many ways to get publicity, both traditional and off-the-wall. Visit the public library’s business section and take out a couple of primers on marketing. Find out what your peers are doing. Talk to a marketing professional—you can find a directory of local marketing people at www.lakecommunicators.com.
Make sure your URL (Web address) is in all of your communications—email, advertising, public relations, public involvement. And watch your Web site activity grow.
E-mail campaigns: Best practices for the best response
Want to increase readership of your e-mails? Using the same tactics as you would use for direct mail will help increase readership of your e-mail copy, according to an article by Pat Friesen in Target Marketing magazine’s July ’08 issue.
Here are some basic rules to live, or write, by:
Use Hot Spots – Put important benefits in copy hot spots such as subject and “from” lines, headlines, sidebars, bulleted copy and in a P.S. (30 percent of readers read the P.S. first!)
Write (and Design) for the Scanner – Rarely will anyone read every word you write. Think about your own habits. Do you?
Briefer is Better – Use short sentences (one and a half lines) and short paragraphs (six lines or less).
You, You, You, NOT Me, Me, Me – Use the word “you” twice as often as “I” or “we” to increase reader involvement and create rapport.
Be Specific – Use exact numbers and numerals (469) instead of spelling out numbers like four hundred and sixty-nine.
FREE! – In today’s world of “if it’s free it’s for me,” the most powerful word is “free,” not “complimentary.”
Call to Action – Tell e-mail recipients what you want them to do and how you want them to do it. Repeat the directive in each e-mail and on each Web page.
No Pulitzer – The job of direct response copywriter is to generate a response – either immediate or delayed – not to win awards.
Direct mail and e-mail are eternally linked. What’s good for one is most likely good for the other, with the same basic practices working for both on- and offline copy.
Lake County Portal:
Lakecountyoh.net, designed and developed by Lakenetwork, is a directory for businesses and people who want information about Lake County, Ohio.
Lake County provides a wealth of prime development property, business and economic resources, skilled laborers, abundant energy, a diverse housing market, excellent education opportunities, attractive landscapes and countless recreation choices, including all that Lake Erie has to offer.
What avenues do your peers plan to use in their direct marketing efforts in 2007?
According to a poll conducted by Target Marketing magazine, more direct marketers plan to increase spending for online methods. E-mail leads the pack of most-used media with 52 percent of marketers expecting to increase their spending. Next is direct mail (41 percent expect to spend more), search engine marketing otherwise known as paid search (40 percent), search engine optimization (37 percent) and direct response space advertising (24 percent).
Other interesting results from Target Marketing’s poll:
Direct mail was reported to be their best return-on-investment generator of new customers (32 percent), e-mail is second (22 percent) and catalogs are third (10 percent).
For customer retention, on the other hand, 35 percent of the marketers polled say e-mail marketing has a better ROI, followed closely by direct mail (31 percent) and outbound telE-marketing (10 percent).
Target Marketing conducted this survey in January by e-mailing its questionnaire to 19,000 of the magazine’s print subscribers who have opted in to receive e-mail messages from the magazine. The article is available as a pdf on their Web site, http://www.targetmarketingmag.com.
E-mail marketing may seem like the simplest, most cost-effective way to promote your products or services, but is it? Or is direct mail better?
Return Path, an e-mail performance management company, tracked e-mail delivery rates since 2004 and found that as much as 22 percent of subscriber-based e-mail was not sent by Internet service providers. Why?
Anti-spam filters intercept them before they are sent. If you’re not reading this e-marketing minute right now, that could be why. Up to 99 percent of printed mail gets delivered. E-mail marketing alone has been shown to be not as effective as e-mail combined with print.
Mix that with an effective Web site, one that can change as often as your ideas do with little or no extra cost, and you’ve got it made. On your site, you can introduce new services, talk about your people, your mission, you name it.
Your Web site is the most cost-effective promotion tool you have. But make sure you don’t neglect other forms of marketing. A good mix of direct mail, advertising and public relations will support each other in helping you reach your target markets.
And on everything you print and e-mail business cards, letterhead, envelopes, your signature at the end of each e-mail be sure to direct recipients to your Web site, or even better, to a specific URL on your site.
You may be opening this e-mail on a Friday or even on a Sunday. If so, it’s by design. According to ExactTarget, an on-demand e-mail software solution company for permission-based e-mail marketing, e-mails sent on Friday had the highest average open rate in 2005, according to the company’s 2005 Response Rate Study.
More e-mails are sent midweek than any other time thus making for more competition in the inbox. The previous year’s study stated there is no such thing as a universal best day to send e-mail and ExactTarget still holds to that. The company suggests organizations conduct their own tests to determine which day of the week works best for them.
The highest average click-through rate, or number of times someone clicked on a link in the e-mail, was Sunday. Sunday was a consistently low performer for open rates. Since the number of e-mails sent on Friday is lower than other weekdays, the odds of getting your subscribers’ attention are higher.
The ExactTarget study shows e-mail is seasonal as well. E-mail click-through rates showed low performance in summer months and strong response in winter months.
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