Marketing

January is a time of introspection, reflection and goal setting for the year ahead. Want to get your email marketing on the right path for 2014? Here are 3 easy but essential email marketing resolutions to commit to now to ensure long-term success:

Eliminate your email bad habits

Reduce your content-related stress

Few email marketing tasks can cause a small business owner’s stress level to go up faster than creating email content. This is especially true if you consider yourself to be a less-than-perfect writer. Make a commitment to reducing your content-related stress, and break this frustrating cycle. (more…)

Did you know that companies that leverage email marketing estimate its overall return on investment at 119 percent?* That’s an impressive ROI! Without a doubt, a carefully considered email marketing campaign can reap high returns for savvy small business owners.

Email marketing is an opportunity to connect with existing customers and prospects in ways that other online marketing resources cannot. When done correctly, an email marketing campaign can boost brand awareness, pique interest in your products and services, communicate value to a targeted audience, and generate sales.

So, how do you do it right? Here are five tips for top-notch email marketing:

1. Only send email campaigns to people who have signed up for or requested them. Email campaign companies offer resources like opt-in buttons or sign-up forms to help build permission-based contact lists.

2. Craft the kind of content your contacts requested. You’ll build credibility and loyalty when you deliver what you promised. Get creative, but be sure to provide the type of information recipients signed up for. And remember to include at least one compelling call to action, such as “Call today to start saving!” (more…)

Looking for ways to grow your business online? Meet Friday 15.

In 15 minutes, you could check email, take a nap, dance to your favorite song…three times, or you could learn some new tips to help your business succeed on the web. Friday 15: Small Business Tips is a series from Google’s Get Your Business Online program designed to help small businesses like yours make the most of their online presence.

Friday 15 answers questions like: How should I choose the pictures on my website?  How can I monitor my business online? How should I handle a bad review?  And more.  Check out highlights from two Friday 15 lessons below. Enjoy!

Attract customers with clear page names and descriptions

One quick and easy way to help Google and other search engines understand your website is to add names and descriptions to your webpages. A page name, or page title, describes the content and context of the page. The more specific and informative the title, the better chance that page has to be displayed on a related search.  For example, use “Hours and Location,” instead of “About Us.” (more…)

Email marketing provides businesses with a cost-effective way to stay connected to their customers. In addition, companies can easily launch a program to meet many different objectives. Learn the best ways to increase sales with email marketing.

Email marketing programs

There are many different ways to use email marketing to connect to customers. Companies can launch campaigns with the objective of being promotional, informative, or to provide a company specific announcement. The type of campaign and frequency of emails will typically depend on the customer, company, and industry. For instance, a business targeting a previous retail customer may send promotional emails based on historical purchases and the time of day the open-rates perform best.

Important email marketing metrics

The open-rate measures the number of recipients that opened the email as ratio of the total email send list. Most marketers should expect an open-rate of 25% to 30% according to the recent 2013 industry statistics provided by marketing firm Epsilon. In addition, to open rates, marketers will want to pay attention to click through and bounce rates. Click through rates are typically shown as the number of links in the email that were clicked in relation to the total number of recipients that opened the email. (more…)

It’s no secret that small business owners are some of the most passionate and hard working people around. It’s one of the main reasons many customers decide to shop small, and it’s probably the reason why you were able to open your doors to begin with. That passion is a huge advantage to you as a small business, and can make a big impact when leveraged in the rights way… especially as part of your marketing efforts. When you infuse your passion into your marketing you can really stand out from the crowd. You can also help you develop more personal connections with the people who matter most—your customers.

Following are easy, effective ways that you a can use to fuel your New Year marketing with your passion:

Show your employees hard at work

Snap photos of your employees working to make your business a success. You can post those photos on Facebook, add them to your website, or even plug them into your next email newsletter. You can also try a tool like Instagram to create photos your customers will love and want to share, and create a Pinterest board to capture all of those photos. (more…)