One thing I see time and time again and that is someone trying to squeeze far too much sales into an email newsletter or promotional email. Now there are the rare types of businesses that can get away with this (amazon, dabs etc…), but generally most businesses should focus on one key message or product/service. People have short attention spans these days.
This may mean that you send out your email to a smaller list of customers or prospects that would be interested in it or you could hope that if they aren’t they will pass it along to someone else who is. Regardless try to target niche markets in your industry you should find it increases response rates and hopefully conversions as a consequence.
Bonus tip: Keep your email short and put the real detail on a separate sales page on your website, that way you can hook them in with a snappy quick to read email with only the main benefits to get them interested. This detail will also be picked up by search engines so you should benefit from that as well.
This is a simple little concept, look at other companies in your field that have been around for a while and are successful as they have spent lots of time testing the marketing for you. Now you won’t get all the juicy details, but you’ll have a great place to start from and save yourself some time and money.
One thing, make sure you don’t just outright copy them, put your own spin on things, also check that they haven’t trademarked or patented anything, you don’t want to get into a legal battle with a company that has a good and long standing reputation, you’ll only harm your own.
Bonus Tip: When you talk to people at networking events and they say oh I already have that, ask them where they got it and why they were happy to buy it from them. This should give you a great idea of what your customers expect to get from the product or service you offer as well.
Look at all your current customers, are there any that you’ve thought ‘I wish all my customers were like them?’ If you do then write down all their traits that make them a good customer then simply look for other businesses that share those same traits. Change all your marketing material in line with this new target after you have confirmed first on a small scale that it works.
If you don’t have one then think of what the ideal customer would be then try to target them.
Bonus Tip: Work out all the things you did for that ideal customer just in case your approach was different from how you normally deal with customers, you never know you may inadvertently have made them into your ideal customer!! How good would that be, the ability to turn average customers into ideal ones, isn’t that worth a day or two of your time and effort to work out??
Wired have done a really good round up of the last 10 years since the dotcom bust era. The article has lot’s of good information in it and lots of stats on before and after or horrible announcment mistakes from people believing they would rule the world.
Google have released public data to the world, it’s a marketers dream, but is also really handy for business users if you can spend the time sifting through the stats.
Now there is more US data than UK data at the moment – this should get better over time, but if you do sell internationally (especially US) you will be able to look into for example specific growth areas of employment.
Granted some of the data will be a little out of date, but any marketer knows that it’s rare to get up to the month data like this (unless you spend a lot of money!). Most times it’s a best experience and knowledge estimate on trends using previous data to extrapolate how to exploit a particular area of a market.
This is why having someone who knows traditional marketing (generally referred to as offline marketing) as well as new marketing (generally referred to as online marketing) like we do is vital in being able to ensure there is a market place for a new website.
A slight side note and something that has been bugging me when I talk to new clients, every single one of them only want to pay for online makreting and they ignore the obvious offline marketing strategies. In today’s world too many people concentrate only on online marketing, what about the foot fall for retail, pubs, restaurants, events etc… you can’t possibly just do only online marketing, well not if you want to be successful, ok so mini edu-rant over.
Anyway this looks like it will become a great resource for the future and I look forward to keeping an eye on the updates Google make to the system.
Ok this hasn’t been confirmed in any way, but if it was to be built do you think it has the legs to be a contender to the iPad? I would be very interested to hear your comments.
To be up front I’m doing a bit of market research here so I hope you all don’t mind and can help out by leaving a comment for us.
We have got recently got into developing specific applications that either run online or on the desktop for some new clients. In each of the cases I got talking to them about things that seemed to slow down their business or held things up.
For example one client received lots of emails from bands which were very big (Mp3s, videos, images biography’s) so this clogged up the email and their broadband line in the office as people tried to download them. This meant that sending or receiving other more important emails took longer and doing research for new bands was almost impossible.
Now they are about to send bands to a link with a form to fill in and everything is in a database for them. Not only that but they can now filter bands by category like style of music, band name, area they are based etc… so instead of digging through email they have the power to very quickly find a specific band.
So what I’m looking for is common problems you have in the day to day running of your business as next year we are going to be developing software applications to deal with these issues, some will be free some will have a reasonable cost attached to them.
So I was doing a bit of surfing and came across this story that Twitter are finally monitising their system. How well as the title suggests they will set up business specific accounts that you pay for.
So what do you get if you pay for twitter? Well you’ll get access to statistics, trend data and marketing tools. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it’s worth it or not.
If you want to read more here is the article I came across
I recently got talking to a potential client and during the discovery meeting over the telephone we talked about the fact that he wanted to be able to show a demo of his online software. Basically to show just how easy and useful it is to use and if we could do that for him. I of course told him that we can do that for him, but once we started to talk about budgets it became apparent that it might not be a possibility to do the video, even though it would be a great way to show off his product.
So we talked about various options for the project and I suggested that it might be something he could do himself, if he was willing to put in a little bit of time into learning the software and a little bit on what makes a good video.
Now it’s likely that we’ll be consulting on producing a script for the video so that it hit’s all the right customer buttons, but he can take care of the rest himself. The next step was software, what would he use, well I sent him this link which has many he can use and the great thing is that their free!
Now it may well be that later down the line he gets the video completely redone to be fully professional, but at least now he can put together something to test and see if it’s going to even be worth investing in later and all at a price that fits into his current budget. Now that’s a win win situation!
This is what we do with every client, try to find cost effective alternatives to test out marketing ideas, that will generate more revenue, which you can then re-invest to get more marketing done and make more profit for the company.
If you are about to consider getting your website redone, give us a call or an email, we think you’ll be happy you did as we always over deliver!
I came across this site during one of my research of new things on the internet and whilst this is not a new idea, it’s certainly got more of a Web 2.0 feel to it from most of the others I’ve used in the past.
What’s really good about this as well is how easy it is to use, honestly if you have a twitter or Facebook account login, choose a room name, invite people to it and blam! you’re good to go – couldn’t be easier! You can even share your desktop with people, so it’s like having a free webinar program at your finger tips and will cost nothing!
I’m going to try to schedule a chatroom session once every 1,2 or 4 weeks and give out web design advice, so basically a Q & A session, what could you do with it?
Before I do however I would like to guage how popular this would be so please leave a comment for me on this blog post, cheers.
I recently got talking to a potential client and during the discovery meeting over the telephone we talked about the fact that he wanted to be able to show a demo of his online software. Basically to show just how easy and useful it is to use and if we could do that for him. I of course told him that we can do that for him, but once we started to talk about budgets it became apparent that it might not be a possibility to do the video, even though it would be a great way to show off his product.
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