The definition of all hat and no cattle is similar to all bark and no bite (or, a personal favorite of ours, all sizzle and no steak). All of these idioms mean the same thing - all talk and no action. Well, partner, it’s time to take action with some good ol’ email marketing.
Follow these marketing ABC’s to help grow your brand and your business by turning idle talk and wishes into some real cow tippin’ action.
A - Always get the email address While email addresses may seem a lot like phone numbers, they can be a far more powerful tool. Though you may have the ability to craft a message that connects consumer goals and objectives to your brand, it’s those email addresses that are the key to communication. Collecting them must be a priority, and there are many ways it can be done. Here are some:
Put your newsletter or mailer signup form on your Facebook fan page, website (with a link on every page), newsletter or other pieces (always remember to include a description of the benefits)
Offer a premium, email-only special or other incentive with signup
Point-of-sale collection
Send signup-solicitation postcards or other surface mailings
Enter your signees in a drawing
Include a signup link in the signature of your emails
Utilize your packages to solicit signups
Use capture cards at tradeshow booths and other appearances
Advertise for signups on all of your promotional materials, stationery, etc.
B - Be brand centric
Your brand is your promise – a link between your name and what it stands for. It will help your target consumers (current and potential clients/customers) distinguish your product/service from others.
Two factors are essential to an effective branding campaign:
It must have distinctive style and content in order to effectively describe and differentiate you.
It must be delivered in its many forms consistently and repeatedly over an extended time period (as in forever).
A good-looking, custom-branded email template will help add to your promise of commitment. We are now offering 50% off the $295 price! Check out our portfolio and get started on your custom email template today.
Click here to view our custom email template portfolio.
C – Content wins
Email marketing, the relevant type built upon reasons to buy, is most people’s preferred form for receiving information, and will usually induce prospects to visit your website or contact you directly.
An attractive, distinctive, custom-branded email template will establish your brand visually and help build a level of top-of-mind awareness that consumers will remember when it’s time for them to make a purchasing decision. Along with pertinent content, it makes for a winning combination.
At the core of any marketing strategy is developing a low-cost, high-impact marketing program that can be leveraged to get consumers to realize the value of products and services. Social media is a strong marketing medium that connects people to your products. Email marketing is a powerful feedback mechanism for social media.
Are you thinking what we are thinking?
At the core of any social media strategy is email marketing. The two were made for one another like chocolate is to peanut butter. FireDrum Internet Marketing is now offering Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing in a low-cost, high-impact marketing program.
With our Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing services combined, you will be able to drive greater conversions, enforce your brand, and turn social media into new customers and revenue.
We have done it! The new FireDrum 3.0 is officially hitting email marketing homeruns. So, with our updated service we have a great offer. Take a swing at email marketing with our new USE IT FREE program.
Our FREE program offers:
- FREE Accounts for Up to 750 Members
- No Credit Card or Contract Required to Start
- Easy to Use
- 100’s of FREE Templates
Sign up by May 31, 2010 and receive a $50.00 credit towards any email marketing service.
All you have to do is signup and enter in the promo code FDA10.
You can also upgrade your account and get access to:
- Customizable Templates for Your Business
- Hands-On Account Support
- Full Reporting and Google Analytics Integration
- Unlimited Campaigns and Categories
- Date-Triggered Auto Senders
- Birthday and Anniversary eCards
As an added bonus, we will help you move your data over from another provider at no charge! So, lets get started on that email marketing. You are just a few minutes away from email bliss.
Firedrum Internet Marketing, a leading provider of email marketing software and solutions for small to medium organizations, today announced immediate availability of the latest release of its popular email platform, Firedrum 3.0, with a free sign up program aligning the Scottsdale, AZ based company in direct competition with other email providers.
“The launch of our new email software platform places us in direct competition with our competitors and allows end users to email up to 750 members a month for free. A simplified email platform and robust reporting will effectively leverage any small businesses email marketing,” stated Mike Toll, Chief Operations Officer.
The key features of Firedrum’s latest software addition, Firedrum 3.0, include no credit card requirement, no contract and no trial period. “We wanted to provide a way for small businesses to immediately get started with their online marketing efforts”, added Toll. “Firedrum understands the small business owner’s need to test a no commitment email marketing program. We added hundreds of free quality templates to visually improve the email as well as complete access to full reporting and archiving to also improve the performance of an email marketing campaign.”
For more information about Firedrum’s free email account or other services, please visit www.firedrum.com.
About Firedrum Internet Marketing
With Firedrum Email Marketing, customers can quickly and easily create professional looking emails, manage email contact lists, measure email campaign results (including Google Analytics integration, click-throughs and open rates), and review who subscribed to an email list. Firedrum has incorporated these tools to help small to medium sized businesses, non-profits and private organizations across the country successfully launch their email marketing campaigns.
Firedrum Internet Marketing is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. Visit Firedrum at www.firedrum.com.
Has email marketing disappointed you? Have you felt cheated that the results you desired were not there?
Take a small bit of advice…
Do not give up!!
Like any good marketing program things take time and effort to gel and garner results. Building upon a good routine and plan is essential.
The First Step
Create highly relevant marketing messages which assign complementary products. Get creative and apply this idea to any product or service you are offering.
Connect with your Customer - Make Things Relevant
Email marketing represents an enormous opportunity to connect with customers, but remember to make things relevant.
For example, if you email your customers a special on running shows, offer them relevant content - a link to buy other running apparel from your store.
Ensure Strong Customer Response
Marketers, this is you, must also include any teams or other individuals early in the creative process to ensure that the email audience responds to these “cross-sold” products.
Google Buzz the latest addition to the search giant’s cadre of products promises to be an awesome entry into the sphere of sharing. I mean anytime you can release a new product with a 150 Million plus user base that is definitely going FTW.
I am excited for the Buzz for a lot of reasons… Prominent Opponent to Facebook, Exciting Mobile Application opportunities (although not yet supported by Blackberry), Integration with yet fully explored and undefined Google Wave, existing Gmail integration, the list goes on…
To email marketing and social media optimization. It is too cool to anticipate how sharing links, posts, pictures and the like will integrate into some pretty amazing marketing possibilities. Of course with all of this sharing an engaged and trusted brand is going to get the most benefit out of the anticipated hybrid of Gmail, Wave, and now Buzz, but the opportunities are endless.
I have a lot of thoughts and anticipation around Buzz and will be sharing more in this space as I play with it more.
Check out my Google Profile here, and where you can hook up with me on Google Buzz
This morning I was listening to the Diane Rehm show after leaving an appointment. Her guest was John (Jack) Potter, U.S. Postmaster General.
Mr. Potter had the unfortunate task of defending to Diane and her listeners why the U.S. Postal Service was still relevant and how to fix the acute financial crisis that was affecting it.
While there is a very real financial crisis effecting the health of the postal service, it was a very in depth and extremely informative interview.
There was one interesting perception of Postmaster General Potter’s that really stayed with me.
Stayed with me so much I actually had to tweet about it.
Now I am not a big twitter-er when I am out and about. I primarily use it when I am behind the computer screen, to share stories and internet marketing thoughts.
But once again this really stuck with me. A Postmaster General who views the postal service as an advertising medium. Same as TV, radio, magazines, etc…
General Potter shared with us that 90% of all money spent with USPS is on business advertising. WOW.
So that got me thinking to the next logical step (at least for me). What is the return on that investment for those business that advertise through the post?
1%?
7%?
I am willing to bet it is not much higher that 12% and even still, how do you measure that return?
Email Marketing.
C’mon, its so simple! Direct Mail and Email Marketing, just like peanut butter and jelly. Well, kinda…
First things first you need to follow the same old direct mail song and dance. Which is:
Buy a direct mailing list
Create a campaign
Draft a compelling call to action
AH HA! Stop right there. When designing the compelling call to action, give them MANY actions to take. First of all you want them as a customer. So a direct sale would help solidify that hard ROI.
Secondly they call you. Maybe they are not ready to buy from you, but me hopes you are gathering their personal information to marketing back to them. Preferably an email address. (Email Marketing opportunity #1!)
Third, and most importantly, give them a landing page (www.yourcompany.com/directmail) that can help drive targeted traffic and truly give you a handle on how effective your direct mail campaign is. Go even further with that call to action and give them a special discount, deal, or offer when they sign up for your newsletter on that page. (Opportunity #2!)
Watch that marketing effectiveness skyrocket.
And now not only can you feel good about yourself for increasing your companies’ sales, just think of how good you will feel when the U.S. Postal Service DOES NOT ask for a bail out, because revenues have spiked!
On Tuesday night I completed the 2nd seminar hosted at Entrust Arizona, entitled Blogging for SEO. As per a seminar hosted by FireDrum a rousing discussion of the evening’s topics always takes place and is encouraged.
This discussion was wide a varied, and while we kicked around technical aspects of the blog, I was really interested in the how to mentally prepare for blogging and the biggest factor is to…
BE FEARLESS!
Being fearless when blogging can mean a lot of things:
Getting over that “Nobody wants to hear what you have to say”
Yea you are probably right, but no good author, Twain, Hemingway, HST, the list goes on was a read author right away. They built up creditability through writing, just like how you are going to have to do.
or how about this doozy “I don’t have anything to say”
Really, you have no passions, hobbies, or even enjoy your work? Most people who blog in business are the business owners themselves, and if you stick to what you know, servicing clients, service offerings, success stories, best practices, industry trends and news, then you will quickly find you do have A LOT to say.
Here is another favorite “What if someone doesn’t like what I have to say?”
This was the topic of discussion with the group for a nice chunk of the evening. The bomb lobbers, haters, keyboard warriors troupe…..
So frustrating, you as a blogger are out there meaningfully contributing to the conversation in your industry and some bully behind a keyboard comes by and drops some rain on your parade. Now grated unless you are writing about controversial topics you are not going to run into much resistance however if you do, we had some great suggestions, examples and discussions for what to do:
Ignore it
Respectfully comment back
Or Ignore it and let the crowd source it and rebuke the hater (Definitely the best)
And what not to do:
Retaliating with some equally heavy words either through a comment or a direct message
But really at the end of the day, the only way to blog success is to BE FEARLESS, well that and stick to a schedule, but you should have came to the seminar to hear about that…
Yea you read that headline correctly. Yours truly has spent last week and this upcoming week visiting family and doing some business development. As you can imagine Dubai is an amazing place. To bring everybody up to speed, Dubai is located in the United Arab Emirates and sits on the Persian Gulf. Dubai is a wonderful city, with world class hotels, abundant culture and caring people. I have been posting some pictures on my twitter feed that you can check out as well. I am going to post a few more updates about my trip, but I wanted to quickly talk about how great this internet thingy is.
Ah, I am just joking but I have been able to work all week in the states, while being able to reach out to new companies here in the UAE. Mostly what I have been learning is companies need Internet Marketing help. I have been able to provide many great solutions, and the one I have found the most interest in is our Enterprise Solutions.
I have been able to use my laptop to tie in back to my desktop in the states. I have also been extensively using Skype to make calls. I have also found Google Video while I have been out traveling and that is an awesome service.
Well, I am getting ready to go ice skating in the most giant mall I have ever seen. Ice skating in the desert! It doesn’t top snow skiing at Ski Dubai, but maybe some other time…
