email marketing

Constant Contact: eMail Marketing [INTERNSHIP]

November 21, 2012 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Constant contact is an online marketing company that allows you to stay connected with your customers all around the world. With the world rapidly moving their marketing towards the web, constant contact is a great way to anticipate new customers. They offer their services primarily to small businesses, membership associations, and nonprofit organizations. Constant contact is known for their dependable email marketing. Their main goal is to help their customers find new customers, drive repeat business, and generate referrals.
Email marketing is basically sending email messages with a purpose of attracting new customers, or enhancing the relationships with current customers. Email marketing through constant contact is a great reliable way for your company to grow. With features that allow you to have a professional look, constant contact’s email marketing is more effective than regular email. No technical skills are required to create a professional looking email because constant contact offers over 400 templates to choose from. Creating newsletters are simple and fast so you can send them much more frequently than paper ones.
In order to effectively get your prospectors to respond, differentiate your data base and create smaller customer lists based on their shared interests. After you’ve done that, send them relevant information that pertains to them. This will get more of a chance for them to actually act upon your emails. The emails you send are easy to forward so if you target your audience and their interested, there’s no doubt they’ll click the forward button. This will get you referrals much more easily and allow your company to grow.
A cool feature constant contact’s email marketing offers is tracking and reporting. After you send an email you are able to see who read, clicked, or forwarded your email. This allows you to understand what the people you’re trying to contact are really interested about. You can then go back and tailor your content the best possible way for your targeted audience.
Besides the email templates constant contact offers, they also offer list management and free coaching. List management is a tool that allows you to organize and grow your contact list by combing multiple lists and segmenting them based on an audience with common interests. This is a much easier way to send out a mass email because the lists are already narrowed down to a targeted audience. If you’re having trouble with email marketing through constant contact, they offer free personal coaching and support at anytime. They present webinars, guides, and podcasts to go further in detail about email marketing and how it can boost your businesses customer service.
Constant contact is the new marketing success formula that helps create and grow customer relationships in today’s socially connected world. It’s an easy reliable way for your business to keep a strong communication line. If you use constant contact’s email marketing the right way, your customers will share your emails with their networks therefore making your business grow.
Sources:
http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp
http://landing.constantcontact.com/goog-grow-with-email-marketing-ad?utm_id=GOO-100846&cc=GOO-100846&gclid=CPXIgL3ZybMCFQOf4AodzQMA7A
http://www.constantcontact.com/email-marketing/what-is-email-marketing/index.jsp
http://www.constantcontact.com/about-constant-contact/index.jsp
The content in this article is part of Digital Ethos’s Digital Media Education in the Higher Education Internship Program, the content was created by @KaylaMarzo, a Student at Suffolk County Community college, intern at Digital Ethos.

What Can Business Owners Expect from Email Marketing?

May 3, 2012 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

If used effectively, Email marketing is never spam. It can be invaluable for small business owners by helping them attract new customers and generate sales quicker. It is also more affordable than other forms of direct marketing campaigns.

The success of a business’s email marketing campaign lies in a handful of factors. Among them, what you are offering, the quality of your email lists, your audience, your message, and more. Response to any efforts can also vary by industry. Get familiar with your own industries data and success rates but also understand that individual results may vary as well. As with other forms of marketing, it has its benefits in immediate as well as longer term effects.

Email Marketing Statistics

MarketingSherpa‘s recent email marketing benchmark guide reported some interesting statistics.

Business-to-Consumer emails achieve an average open rate of 20% and a click-through rate of 8%.
Business-to-Business had a slightly better response with average open rate of 20% and a click-through of 12%.

It is helpful to track your opens and click-throughs on each campaign individually and from month to month. Once you have gained a better understanding of the trends in your email responses, you can begin to establish more measurable results and goals, as well as exercising the ability to begin testing different subjects and content.

The common goal of course, is to persuade email recipients to open the email and check out your products and services. Some great ways to encourage your recipients to click into those emails are:

Get Your Brand Name in Your From Line

Make sure your brand name will be in the From line. This will help to ensure that recipients will recognize the source of the email. 64% of email respondents describe the From line as the most important factor motivating them to open the permission-based emails.

Impressive Subject Line

Just as important as the From line, the Subject line must convince the viewer to become a respondent. Be honest and avoid anything misleading in your subject line. Keep it short and simple.

Send Emails at the Correct Time

How will you know what time is best for you to send out your email campaigns? Test it. Do not assume you have some data that tells you the optimal time. Check for yourself by sending them out at different time periods and monitoring the results.

How Do I Improve Click-Through Rates?

Use a simple message. You only have a few short seconds to get a viewers attention. The best way to do this is with a short, powerful message that explains exactly what you have to offer and a short list of great benefits.

A great deal can also be very compelling. Are you offering a good coupon deal? A 2-for-1 rate? Add something to your email offer that will trigger a purchase now. Feel free to use free trial offers as long as you are aware of the expenditure and how it could affect your budget.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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Ways to Build Up Your Email List Using Facebook

December 20, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Internet marketing is not what it used to be, experts like Guy Kawasaki say. If you were dealing with internet marketing before Facebook, you know it was all about emails. Obtaining prospects, finding the leads and hoping for conversions.

Email marketing, when done right, is personal and not stuffed with ads and commercial. It does help build followers and stay in touch with them. The White House, Barack Obama and Michele Obama, separately are using this method. It works not only in commerce.

But Internet Marketing is changing fast, as do our habits and ways we connect with friends, family and business associates. Today we are building groups – extended families, tribes if you will. And we are doing it on social media.

And it goes without saying that the most popular place to do so is Facebook. As of the end of 2011, Facebook has over 800 million active users with more than 50% of them logging on to Facebook every given day. The question is how to use this resource to build a great marketing campaign?

It can take a lot of time and money to build a big following (100,000+). It is not as easy as it sounds and even when you do manage to build a huge base, it will not necessarily increase your profits.

A savvy social media marketer knows how to transform his following into a very responsive email list.

Here are a few tricks of the trade:

Facebook Connect – Using it on a Squeeze Page is worth a test against traditional Squeeze Page. It’ll show you if Facebook is a faster and cheaper way to build your community. Most of the traffic you’ll get will be from social media sources or paid ad on Facebook. It might be easier to get personal information through Facebook and have more people you can email and your articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos or webinars.

Like Button – Put a “Like” button on your Facebook ads, and the ‘call for action’ would be to press that button. This way, when they click on the picture in your new ad, you already have the Like.

One Time Offer – Drive people to your website page by posting a link to it instead of posting the video directly on Facebook. Give them a one-time offer that is really worth their while. Why? Because this way you have the “Like” and you have their name and email address. The deal you gave will pay for itself with the new customers you just got. Apply it to any special report or newsletter. After they opt in, explain they will be receiving an email very shortly and subsequent email with links to new videos or special reports.

Ads for followers – Making an ad to your Facebook ‘friends’ is very cheap. You should do it often. You’ll get more info very inexpensively compared with other systems.

The Blurred Method – Create something entertaining for your fans, a special – just for them for joining your Facebook page. Create a fan page for this purpose only. Blur out parts of the video, unless they input their information. Put a Like button with the content and a direct responder. When they press the Like button it will reveal a way to get access to the content, with an opt-in. That is how you get their contact info. After that, show them your content. Use Facebook to post information about what you have created. You can also create a Facebook ad for this purpose.

Autoresponder – You have to have a built-in auto responder for at least 30 days. Find out what you are most interested in; videos, blog posts, other Facebook groups or other created content. Be consistent. Write emails every day for 30 days and drop that into the autoresponder sequence. Add p.s. to your emails with your site’s address for services or products.

Direct Response Blog – Create a loop between social media, email, and Facebook. Your social activity will grow your email, the emails will drive revenue. But if you have a blog to tie it all in, you give them a whole new aspect of the business – it’s all about you. If you prove to be a source they like, a leader in your field, they will bring others into the group. More email addresses, more leads to turn into buyers.

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