Yellow Jersey Web Design » Email Marketing Tips

Improve your search rankings and drive customers to your site

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:37:03 +0000

Here at Yellow Jersey we believe your website is never “done”. It is an organic thing that should grow and develop. This means a constant process of refreshing and adding content. This requires an investment of time, something small business owners are notoriously short of, but it is well worth it if done correctly.

Keeping your site current is important for a number of reasons:

Your website is often the first impression a customer will get of your business and we all know how important first impressions are! You want to create energy and vitality. A fresh, current site portrays a vibrant, thriving business.
Most businesses start off with 3-10 pages on their site. This is a good start but should definitely not be the end. The more relevant pages you have the better your chances of a good search ranking.
Keep people coming back for more. If your site is interesting enough and updated frequently you will get repeat visitors to your site or even subscribers to your rss feed or your newsletter

A newsletter is a great way of combining your marketing efforts. The content you create for your newsletter becomes the content for your site. And if you host the content on your site, readers of your newsletter will click through and so be driven onto your site.

If you have a content managed site or a knowledge of html this is easy to do. Write the text, put it on your site and create the links in your newsletter. (If you have an email marketing service like Constant Contact this is a simple process). And voila you have a double edged marketing tool.

If you don’t have either we can help. We can either create you a content managed site or we can upload your newsletter content to your site for a very affordable monthly charge.

Either way we can empower you to cost effectively grow your business.

Email Marketing Tips

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:46:43 +0000

Know Your Target Audience
Tailor your message according to your audience and your objective. Know what motivates your recipients and use it to determine how, and in what order, to describe the benefits of your offer.

Be Clear and Concise
Stick to simple words, short phrases and paragraphs consisting of 1-3 short sentences. Your recipients should not have to think too much, parse long sentences or read big sections of text. Check for words that can be eliminated. You will be surprised at how many you find and how much cleaner your writing is when you are finished.

Get to the Point
The first two sentences of your email should answer important questions for the recipient like, “Who are you? What do you want me to do? And what’s in it for me?” So state your offer up front, include benefits and make it easy for your audience to take the next step.

Include “Call to Action” Links
Know what action you want your recipients to take. Do you want them to read an article? Learn more about a product or service? Buy something? Then, place a link in the beginning, middle and end of the email, making it easy for the recipient to click whenever they are ready. People read, react, make decisions and take action differently. By sprinkling links throughout your email, you can be ready whenever they are.

Create a Sense of Urgency
Limit the offer to a specific time period or, for example, the first 50 customers. People don’t like to be at a disadvantage or left out. Try throwing in a bonus, for example, “Act now and also receive?” to sweeten the deal.

Proofread
Read your email copy aloud. If you stumble over words or phrases, rewriting is a very good idea. Check your spelling and grammar thoroughly. Errors not only make your email harder to read, they can make your company look unprofessional. Ask others who are not involved with your business to read your email. They will be able to tell you if it makes sense.

Punctuate Judiciously
Save exclamation points for when you really need them, use ALL CAPS carefully for emphasis and steer clear of emoticons . The benefits of the offer itself will motivate the recipient more effectively without reasonless clutter.

Improve your subject lines.
To put it most simply, a good subject line will get an email opened. Lead with a benefit that lets the receiver know what’s in it for him or her. Make it interesting, and try to pique the reader’s curiosity. You want the reader to feel compelled to find out more.

Check your “from” name.
Most emails that are quickly ignored or deleted are those with an unrecognizable “from” name or address. Is your “from” name easily recognizable? Do your list members know who they are receiving an email from? Put a name that your receivers are most familiar with in your “from” line.

Evaluate how often (and what) you send.
Sometimes the reason why people don’t open emails is because they simply get too many of them. Or, on the flip side, maybe you’re not sending often enough and recipients are losing interest in between the times when they do hear from you.

Beyond these general guidelines, it is experience that will help you improve your response. Define your objective, your audience and your offer, and then be creative!

These tips brought to you by our partners at Constant Contact

Should you use an email marketing service?

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:16:33 +0000

Email marketing is an affordable and effective marketing technique that can help you grow your business while keeping costs low. (The value of Email Marketing)
But do you really need to pay for an email marketing service when you can just as easily send emails from your own email account? You might be surprised to see how many reasons there are to answer yes to this question.

The short answer is that regular email accounts are just not set up for mass email marketing.

We have compiled a simple list of reasons why this is the case, and why an email marketing service might be just what you need to jumpstart your online marketing efforts.

Reason 1:
There are serious potential restrictions from both the sending and receiving end when you use a regular email account.

Sending – Mass emails can be blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). Most ISPs have a limit to how many emails you can send in one day.
Receiving -Your emails can be blocked on the receiving end too if they are perceived as spam. With an email marketing service, while your customer sees your address as the “from” address, it is actually sent by the email marketing service. The email marketing service has relationships with the ISPs and therefore they recognize your email is not spam.

Reason 2:
Another potential issue you may run into, sending mass emails from your regular email account, is that there is no system set up to receive notification if your email generates spam complaints.

If your emails are perceived as spam you run the risk of having your entire corporate email server blocked

Reason 3:
There are strict rules for email marketing that you need to follow such as

A physical address on each email
An unsubscribe option that must be honored within 10 days
Email marketing services are required to be aware of all regulations regarding email marketing and are responsible for ensuring your email campaign meets these criteria.

Reason 4:
With an email marketing service you can get detailed, measurable results. This is one my favorite benefits of an email marketing service. If you are spending time and money on marketing it is important to get as detailed a measurement of your response as you possibly can. When you send out marketing, whether it be print or email, you will measure the number of responses to your marketing piece and if you have analytics on your website you can measure whether the hits on your site rose around the time of your marketing efforts. But there are a number of details that you cannot measure, and this can be incredibly frustrating. How many people did it actually reach? How many read it, how many discarded it without giving it much attention. What piqued their interest, where did you lose them?

Many email marketing services will answer all these questions for you by providing you with detailed reports regarding the effectiveness of your email campaign. Many services report the number of emails sent, opened, who opened, who clicked through and which links they clicked on. This enables you to get a much better feel for what appeals to your customer, allowing you to really fine tune your marketing efforts, and giving you a powerful competitive edge.
Reports also show new subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces and formal spam complaints.

Yellow Jersey Design partners with Constant Contact, a provider of an excellent email marketing service. They are affordable and provide a great package for small to medium size businesses. Jersey Design can create a branded template that ties into your website and gives your email campaign a professional polish that will greatly increase its effectiveness and reflect well on your company.

Click here to find out more about Constant Contact or contact us at Yellow Jersey Design

The value of email marketing

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:03:25 +0000

“The cost of acquiring a new customer can be as much as 5 times
the cost of keeping an old one.” (source: Peppers and Rogers)

“Permission e-mail campaigns are ten times more effective
than direct mail campaigns.”(source: IMT Strategies)

Email marketing can be a very cost effective and powerful tool in your marketing efforts. Companies are increasingly turning to online forms of marketing such as search engine optimization, banner ads, google ads and email marketing. Email marketing is the simplest, and most targeted of these options.

Email Marketing is:

Effective:
Sending out regular newsletter with information that is relevant and interesting to your client base is an excellent way to keep in communication with them, thereby increasing your chances of referrals and repeat business. If you can make your newsletter content valuable enough your newsletter may even become a value add that you provide for your customer, increasing your value from their perspective.

Targeted:
With permission based email marketing your message is going directly to people who are interested in your product. Whether they be existing or past clients, or potential clients who have signed up for your newsletter on your website, your audience is targeted and open to listening to your message.

Affordable:
Email marketing is incredibly cost effective. If you use an email marketing service (Should you use an email marketing service?) you can find packages for as low as $15 a month. For small businesses email marketing is a powerful tool and in this arena the playing field can be completely leveled. With a professional, branded and interesting email newsletter a small business can compete equally with a much larger business with a far greater marketing budget.

Green:
It’s great for the planet and this can also be an effective selling point to get email addresses from your clients and potential clients.