Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

Email Marketing is Not Dead, Part 1: Putting Together a Strategy

November 3rd, 2011 :: Monika Jansen

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series email marketing

Email is still a great way to keep in touch with your current and prospective clients – in fact, it is probably the best way to stay top of mind. No matter how social media-savvy your customers might be, email is really the only way to get in front of them on a regular basis.

Think about it: Will they see your tweet, one among probably hundreds they get every day? Will your status update show up in their Facebook news feed? Will they have time to read your latest blog post that comes through on their RSS feed?

With an email, they will have to at least glance at the subject line before deciding whether to read now, read later, save or delete. HubSpot published an eBook earlier this year called 7 Steps to Jump Start Your Email Marketing Strategy. They had some great information in there that I have used – as well as some information that was new to me.

In this three-part series on email marketing, we’ll take a look at building a list and creating content that will engage your target market – and keep them hungry for more. In part 1, we’ll start with strategy, including defining your goals and the different types of emails you should use.

Define your goals

As with any marketing program, you need to define where you are going before you even start down the road. Right now, I am working with a new client on putting together an email marketing campaign that will deliver results – and that is where you need to start too.

What results are you looking for? In other words, what are your goals? They could include, more leads, being a go-to source of industry information, enhancing your reputation, and/or more sales.

Choose a mix of messages

Keep it interesting by mixing up the types of messages you send out to your list. Here are some to choose from:

Product announcement – stress the benefits, not the features, of a new product or service you are offering. Link to a white paper that demonstrates the need for your new product or service, or a free demo on your website.
eNewsletter – Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry with informative articles that your target audience can use. It need not be long, just interesting, and it needs to be delivered on a consistent basis – your audience will end up expecting it. Be sure to include social media sharing icons, too, so they can spread the love.
Incentives – These emails seek to do one thing: boost sales. They can include coupons, special offers, sneak peeks at new products/services with special preview pricing, etc. Use discounts sparingly to avoid cheapening your brand.
Event invites – These are short and straightforward and can be used when exhibiting at a trade show, attending a conference, hosting a webinar, or speaking somewhere. Include the benefit to them of RSVPing.

Next up in this series: Building a List.

Image courtesy of creative design agency Arrae

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Tags: Branding, Email marketing, Marketing, strategy
Posted in Email Marketing, Marketing | No Comments »

Once, Twice, Three Times Trackable

December 29th, 2009 :: Michael Dougherty

Whether you’re creating a marketing piece/strategy, or getting into social media, you need to be conscious of how you will measure the success, or failure, of your endeavor. Like sending a package through UPS or FedEx, you’ll want to know your items were received and arrived. It could be the amount of emails you collected, the number of page views you hoped to achieve, the amount of sales you intend to make, or any number of reasons, but you need to be conscious, as you start your efforts, that you have a way to track your leads back to its source.

There are tons of ways you could to track your efforts. You could create specific urls to direct people back to a page on your website they could only reach by that marketing piece/effort, a phone number that is only used for that marketing piece/effort, or by the number of physical bodies that show up on the scheduled day. Whatever you choose, decide on what it will be before you get started. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked people how they determined the success of their piece only to hear “We didn’t think about that until after we printed it”.

I am not suggesting, in any way, that you should throw out everything you’ve created till now if you can’t track them. If there are pieces you have that don’t have a way to be tracked, find a creative way to make them so with the resources you have at your disposal. Here are a few creative ideas:

Use mailing labels on your brochures/postcards to update your information.
Call the places you’ve placed advertising with to see if you can alter the type in the next edition.
Place analytics tools, like Google Analytics, on your site to see where people visiting it are going.
Use sites like bit.ly to shorten, and track, the website links you put out in social media.

Once you’ve got the means in place to track the items, you need to determine what success means to your project, strategy, or piece. I’m going to ask you exercise some patience when it comes to tracking your success. Overnight success or an instant explosion of interest is not, and I repeat not, likely. It will take time, but you should determine what timeframe you are comfortable with or accepting of.

A little thought on how to figure out what success will look like. Please understand that it might take a few days for people to get a hold of your effort and that you can’t factor for people who many not be interested in your effort sharing it with others. There are multiple theories of success that you could use to determine your final outcome. One theory of success is the Pareto principle, often called the 80-20 rule, states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The 1 Percent Rule is another, and Wikipedia defines it as “the 1 percent rule or the 90-9-1 principle reflects a theory that more people will lurk in a virtual community than will participate. This term is often used as a euphemism for participation inequality in the context of the Internet.”

Lastly, please don’t think I’m saying tracking your items is a quick thing to do. Tracking your efforts is a task unto itself. You’ll need to set aside some time to review your statistics and outcome as they come in. This could be day to day, month to month, or an accumulative total in a year. It’s best to take a step back and remember it’s not personal, but in these numbers you can find what works and what doesn’t.

The last thing you want to do is feel like any piece you’ve created was out there with no means for you to know it works. I hope this post has inspired some ideas of how you could begin to track the success of what is working and what doesn’t. This is me giving you a bit of permission to experiment with what works and what doesn’t, but always give each thing you choose to do a way to measure it’s success.

I would love your thoughts on today’s post here in the comments or you can reach me on Twitter by sending a message to @wickedjava, or on Facebook at facebook.com/mcdougherty.

As all ways, if you have been reading, thank you and stay wicked.

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Tags: analytics, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, expo, Generational Marketing, Grow Smart Business, Marketing, michael dougherty, small business, strategy, tracking
Posted in Marketing | 10 Comments »

The Beauty of Keeping It Simple…

December 22nd, 2009 :: Michael Dougherty

In my last post “What is this ROI thing” I posted that “…marketing really comes down to the simple questions we learned in school. Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.” Did I shock and offend a few people by simplifying that? More than likely I didn’t, but I have found that people who get easily offended by someone exposing the initial simplicity of something are ultimately trying to keep everyone else from knowing how simple it is as well.

There is no reason, in my opinion, that someone should just put a shingle on their door and expect customers to expect to know they are there and open. There are a laundry list of reasons that most businesses don’t make it past the two year mark and over all I see that as poor planning across the board. I have known more than my fair share of start-ups or small business owners that have forgone a marketing strategy in their first year or two because they have viewed it as too costly, confusing, or complicated. When in reality, that fear kept them from reaching a wider customer base or audience.

You need to know how you are going to get people to learn about your great new product/service/Whatchamacallit. Simply just creating the same marketing pieces that everyone has (a website, a business card, etc.) won’t have your phone ringing and email box filled with orders. I wish I could say it was that simple, but it’s not. You first need to think of those six simple questions as you go into the creation of your marketing piece/strategy.

The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How will vary depending on what you want to do. Here are some great examples of starter questions for your next marketing strategy/piece, but feel free to come up with your own:

Who –Who will want this? Who do we want to know about our latest product/service? Who is going to purchase our [insert item/service]? Who will carry our message for us?
What – What will we use to reach/tell people about? What will we use to measure who successful this is? What will separate us from all the other daily noise that our audience receives? What will we use to track it?
When – When will we be putting this out? When is the most effective time for us to launch this? When will use to track the success? When do we review on how well this is doing?
Where – Where are the people we want to reach with this? Where will be put this that people may not expect? Where will we announce the product/place/thing/event? Where do we want this to take our business?
Why – Why are we going to do this? Why will the audience we are trying to reach care? Why are we using X over Y? Why aren’t we using multiple opportunities for people to reach us?
How – How are we going to create this? How are we going to measure the success? How are we going to get this out to our chosen audience? How often are we going to try this to see if it is successful at different times of the year?

I know I’ve kept this extremely simple, but the biggest reason for that is that the resources for you to create your marketing plan are already available to you on this site. Steven Fisher wrote a great piece that I view as a strong follow up to this post, the Guide to Writing a Killer Marketing Plan.

I hope you at least come away from this post with a sense that your first marketing strategy doesn’t have to be scary or overly complicated. When you are in your first year or two of business your time is very valuable, but by asking simple questions up front you save yourself some time and be better prepared for when you hire a designer, marketing firm, or whomever to accomplish your goals.

I am interested in Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions you’ve come up with. Please leave them in the comments below or you can reach me on Twitter by sending a message to @wickedjava, or on Facebook at facebook.com/mcdougherty.

As all ways, if you have been reading, thank you and stay wicked.

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Tags: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, expo, Generational Marketing, Grow Smart Business, Marketing, michael dougherty, small business, strategy
Posted in Marketing, small business, Thought Leadership | No Comments »