I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
Read, subscribe to my newsletter, enjoy!Tash
5 tips to support email marketing
Do you use email marketing for your business? Let’s face it, it can be highly effective and relatively cheap so is always worth considering.
No matter how great your email is, though, you need to support it on your website – and this is something many people forget so here are some tips for you:
- use the same branding and style in the email and the web page the email leads to. Sounds obvious but the obvious is often missed when we’re busy and caught in the middle of a project.
- match the message in the email and your website. For example, if your email is about a sale but links to your homepage which doesn’t mention a sale you will find a lot of people will just leave and those remaining will be annoyed at having to search for the information. If you have specific graphics in the email, they should be visible on the site too – or versions of them – so the connection is immediate
- Remember to link to relevant pages, not just your homepage – again, this saves people having to search your site and it can also help your search engine results (especially if a copy of your email is online)
- it is part of your branding, but to be crystal clear on this opint – keep the same tone in the email as on your website. If the friendly, young sounding email attracts someone, a formal, old-fashioned webpage will alienate and confuse them.
- ensure the contact details given in the email are correct and that someone is available to respond to them. An ad in a magazine may result in calls over a period of days or weeks, but the majority of responses to an email will come within hours of sending it out – it’s not a good look if you send out an email inviting calls and no one answers the phone or emails for a few days!
If you looked at your latest email campaign and the related web pages, would you see the connection or would they clash? Try the above tips as a testing process and see if you can’t improve the campaign for next time.
Enough naming but not too much
Have you heard about using keywords to help search engines find you online? And considered that your business and/or product name is a critical keyword to get noticed?
I have often read about including keywords and business names in articles, newsletter and blog posts, and sometimes it even tells you how many times to include such words*.
Instead of some ‘magic’ number of times to use a word, I suggest writing it so the article is interesting and worth reading. Overuse of a keyword becomes obvious as a ploy and the writing then looses some of its credibility as a source of information.
In particular, how often can you mention a company name before someone stops reading it? Continue reading
Free ads can still cost…
In my recent post about saving money in business, I noted that ineffective free ads could be too expensive to run.
While that may seem strange (a free ad costs nothing, right?) it is true.
By free ad I mean any advertising you do that doesn’t directly cost you anything so it may be a free directory listing, adding an email signature, using social media or having a banner in someone else’s newsletter. Free advertising is great for cashflow obviously, and has a number of advantages, but it isn’t always good for business or truly free.
So even free ads need to be reviewed and considered for their value. Consider these examples of how free ads can be much more costly than they first appear…
- social media is certainly free in that you don’t pay any fees to join or use those sites. However, you may pay for supporting software and you do pay in time – and the smaller expense of electricity, computer wear and tear, etc. If you are spending hours tweeting every week (and have done for months) and have never had a sale through Twitter, it is becoming an expensive, ineffective exercise
- directories that need regular updating but return nothing are probably not worth the effort, especially as many are only viewed by other business people updating their listings!
- notice what response the ad is generating – an ad that brings in a lot of queries but no sales is probably in the wrong place or missing the target. In this case the free ad is costing you in time to answer queries rather than giving you time for genuine customers. Try tweaking to ad or just stop using that free option
- ads in disreputable places may also not have a price to add them or take time to maintain, but if they are giving your business a bad image they are very expensive ads. Negative associations are hard to measure as you can’t see which people consciously didn’t come to your website. Just be careful where you are listed, and review sites every so often as they may change over time
Know who you are emailing
Writing an email (or letter) request may seem very simple, but it needs care and attention to get it right. A poorly written request is much less likely to get the results you want so the effort is worthwhile.
Probably the main thing is to do some research beforehand so that you know who you are writing to. This includes using the name of the person, and probably even their business. By knowing a bit about the person/business, you can save yourself from looking ignorant.
For example, many website owners receive emails saying something like “We would like to have a link to our website from yours and we will then add a link to your site on [our site]” However, they ignore the fact that the site only takes paid listings or does not have a links page.
Sometimes, these emails go further by asking for additional promotional activities from the business owner – again, not noticing whether these details are listed on the site or if the site even offers any sort of promotion to others.
The end result? The website owners disregard the email and the sender does not get any new links to their site.
And frankly, for the best results in a search engine, you should be selective about who you link with, rather than sending a standard email to every site you can think of in hope that some will accept your offer. But search engine rankings is a whole other subject!
Once you know a bit about the person/business you are writing to, you can aim the email directly to them.
To use the same example, asking for a website link exchange, a better request could be “We see you have a links page on your website. If you would like the benefits of another link to your site, we would like to suggest a link exchange.”
If you are writing a request email/letter, my tips on how to encourage someone to do something may also help.
* Image courtesy of 123RF
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