Marketing

By Eric Spellmann

By Anissa Starnes, Director, National Organizations for Constant Contact

You work hard to build trust with your customer base and you value your relationships with your customers. Even so, you may be struggling with your emails being reported as spam along with so many other businesses. It’s frustrating when you spend time cultivating the right message for your audience, send your email, and are met with a handful of spam complaints in response. How can this be avoided?

The trouble is that many email users decide that your email is unwanted and automatically click to “report as spam.” Email spam reports are a matter of opinion, and laziness to unsubscribe causes many businesses to receive spam complaints. This makes it difficult to figure out what you’re doing wrong.

Although there is no guaranteed way to completely avoid spam reports, there are certainly actions that can be taken to lower your spam reports. Here are some bad email marketing practices to quit now and improve your spam reports:  (more…)

By Brooke Lipsitz

You’ve set up your first online store. You know your product is rock solid, and now, you’re on a mission to showcase your items.

You know great images make a big difference so you’ve made sure to include the best photos, but you still need a creative and unique description to tell the viewer what makes your product worth buying. This verbiage goes beyond the visual to describe your product’s features and benefits — and it’s critical to your e-commerce efforts.

Here are some helpful tips and tricks to make writing those product descriptions easier.

1. Personality and voice are key

Begin by determining your core audience and how to best speak to them. For example, if your product is meant to appeal to an engineer, your description of features and benefits, as well as your language, will be different than that of someone selling beauty supplies.

Educating an audience about a product or service may be helpful, but if your target audience is already aware of how the product functions, be sure to speak to their existing knowledge and add to it.

What about some personality? Absolutely! You can be fun and conversational with all types of buyers, but make sure your humor will be appreciated based on whom you are trying to target.

Some things to remember when injecting your personality into a description:  (more…)

By Eric Spellmann

According to LinkedIn, 8 out of 10 small businesses use social media to drive growth, which means you already know social media is a crucial tool for your business. Using social media incorrectly can harm your business, so we’ve cleared up a few social media myths for small businesses.

Myth: Social media is just for young people, not my customers.

Fact: The truth is, social media is for everyone; but you have to know where to look and how to talk to your audience. For example, adults over the age of 50 are the fastest-growing demographic online, with one in three seniors using social media on a regular basis. Don’t discount the influence the younger generation has on purchasing decisions, either. According to the Cassandra Report, 74% of parents who have children between the ages of 7 and 17 say their child’s opinion is influential when it comes to their family’s spending and household purchases.

Myth: The more followers I have, the more I know my social media is working.

Fact: You could have thousands of followers on a social network, but the numbers are meaningless if they don’t care about your brand. Five hundred engaged followers who found you by word-of-mouth recommendations are more valuable than 5,000 followers who won’t care about updates from your business. Don’t get bogged down with the numbers; instead focus on the value you provide to your audience.  (more…)