Tag Archives: email marketing

Place (Sales and Distribution)

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What does “place”refer to in a small business marketing model? If you need to learn that it means how your product or service reaches your customer, then this article from smallbusinessnotes.com is just for you! “Place” refers not only to how your make your sales, but also to your distribution system. This insightful article about a very practical side of running a business—product distribution—points out several questions to ask yourself about your sales approach, cycle length, product delivery capacity and more.

See all the questions to ask yourself in this article Place (Sales and Distribution) via www.smallbusinessnotes.com

 

Email Marketing Benchmarks: How Do You Stack Up?

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Using benchmarks in an email marketing campaign can easily improve the distribution of your site’s content. Linda Bustos (GetElastic) suggests, “If your open rate is significantly beneath even the average, you’re probably dealing with a largely inactive list. That could drive a decision to launch a re-engagement initiative or rethink your acquisition process.” To effectively launch your own email marketing campaign, use the industry standards (averages) as an indication of where you need to focus your efforts. Say your C-T-C rate (click-to-convert rate) is high, but your O-T-C rate (open-to-click rate) is low—as compared to industry standards. In that case, focus your attention on embedding more links into your email to increase the likelihood of a recipient to click a link after they’ve already opened the email itself.

To see the average click-through-rates in full, head over and read Bustos’s article, Email Marketing Benchmarks: How Do Your Stack Up?

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

6 Steps to Turn Your eNewsletter into a Sales and Lead Generation Machine

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Developing a newsletter for your company can lead to higher site sales. How and why? Gordon McCallum (groovecommerce) says, “It lets you shape how your brand is viewed and position your company as a thought leader, regardless of your industry or specialization.” The development of a newsletter takes your company out of its sales-shoes for just a moment, all in order to relate to a customer on a given topic or subject—and customers will appreciate that. In fact, they’ll appreciate it so much that they’ll be even more likely to click the checkout button on your site—customer conversion, accomplished. The strategy of a newsletter shouldn’t focus on the immediate sale, though. “Second only to creating quality content, this is where many newsletters too often go awry. If your “newsletter” is little more than a product ad, your readers will soon start ignoring future emails from you. The term “newsletter” implies content. News. Articles. Recipes. Stories.”

To read more visit, McCallum’s blog post, 6 Steps to Turn Your eNewsletter into a Sales and Lead Generation Machine.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

Click Rates, Explained

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Here’s how to understand click rates (and improve them):

In their most basic definition, click rates measure recipient engagement (i.e. whether or not an end user clicks on a link, either embedded in an email or on a website). To calculate the click rate of an email, divide the number of unique clicks in the email by the number of total recipients. This number is then expressed as a percentage.

Improving your click rates, however, requires a little more effort. The July 2012 Edition of Mailer Mailer has discovered that “emails with a greater number of links provide more opportunities for, and a greater variety of engagement. Emails with fewer links enable less, and more focused, interaction.” With this in mind, it’s nevertheless important to restrain yourself from overloading links into your email marketing campaign. Don’t go too crazy with links! The key to improving click rates, then, comes with testing your success ratio—testing the ratio of links that works best for your email campaigns. I personally expect the magic number to exist somewhere around 5. Note: images should include links as well.

For more information on click rates, head over to the July 2012 Edition of the Email Marketing Metrics Report.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

5 Ways to Freshen Up Your Email List

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When focusing on distributing your site’s content to customers and prospects, it’s crucial to monitor and manage your email contacts database at a continuous rate. If you’re confused as to what we mean, we’ll tell you! Carolyn Nye highlights 5 different ways to “freshen up” your email list, including “removing inactive subscribers” and “locating new subscribers.” The tips themselves might sound like “nothing out of the ordinary,” but they’re often taken for granted. “Depending on your customer lifecycle and the average time between purchases, determine a removal formula that makes sense for your business. This could be subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked in six months or have not purchased in over a year.” Maintaining a stagnant email database can easily lead to an ineffective marketing campaign, complete with a high bounce rate and extremely low click rates.

Visit Carolyn Nye’s article, 5 Ways to Freshen Up Your Email List, to begin strengthening your email marketing campaign!

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

A Personal Connection Improves Clickthrough Rates

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What’s the best strategy when launching an email marketing campaign? Here’s a quick piece of insight from theemarketingblog.com…

“The secret to a successful email strategy is to segment your list, personalize the message, keep it relevant and refrain from sending messages too frequently.” Instead of blasting out an email every few days (or, heaven forbid, every day), try and compartmentalize your contacts database. An email marketing campaign should, for simplicity, be subject- and contact-specific. Make it relevant to the end-user!

There’s more to an email marketing campaign, though. Head off to theemarketingblog.com and read their article, A Personal Connection Improves Clickthrough Rates.

-Christopher Lin, lexity.com